(IAPA/IFEX) – The following is a 22 May 2003 IAPA press release: IAPA moves ahead on crimes against journalists in Colombia, Brazil MIAMI, Florida (May 22, 2003) – Within the framework of its Unpunished Crimes Against Journalists project, the Inter American Press Association (IAPA) today hailed as a positive step the conviction by a Colombian […]
(IAPA/IFEX) – The following is a 22 May 2003 IAPA press release:
IAPA moves ahead on crimes against journalists in Colombia, Brazil
MIAMI, Florida (May 22, 2003) – Within the framework of its Unpunished Crimes Against Journalists project, the Inter American Press Association (IAPA) today hailed as a positive step the conviction by a Colombian court of two defendants charged with the murder of a journalist. At the same time, the organization submitted its findings to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) in a new investigation into the thus far unpunished murder of a Brazilian journalist 12 years ago.
On May 19, the Valledupar, Colombia High Court sentenced Jorge Eliécer Espinal Vásquez and Rodolfo Nelson Rosado Hernández to 472 months (39 years) in prison for carrying out the murder of journalist Guzmán Quintero Torres on September 16, 1999, in Valledupar, a city in the northeastern province of Cesar.
The two had been acquitted by a lower criminal court in Valledupar in January 2002. Two months after the ruling, after holding its own inquiries into the case, the IAPA called on the Colombian Attorney General’s Office to look into the verdict. The organisation asked the public prosecutor to appeal the acquittal. This resulted in the new hearing and subsequent conviction.
Quintero was managing editor of the daily newspaper El Pilón. Shortly before his death, he had been exposing alleged murders and other criminal acts carried out by members of the Colombian Army.
In another bid to counteract the impunity surrounding the majority of crimes against journalists, today the IAPA sent to the IACHR the results of an investigation it carried out into the April 22, 1991, murder of Ivan Rocha in the city of Teixeira de Freitas, at the southern tip of Bahia state, Brazil.
The IAPA submitted the case to the IACHR on the grounds that all local legal recourses had been exhausted, the murder continues to go unpunished and the official investigation into the case has been mired in irregularities.
Rocha hosted the talk show “A Voz de Ivan Rocha” (Ivan Rocha’s Voice), broadcast by radio station Alvorada AM, in which he exposed organized crime and the alleged complicity of local authorities in death squads in Bahia state. He was killed because of what he wrote and said.
The IAPA has submitted 16 other cases to the IACHR, achieving noteworthy progress in the inter-American system of justice and human rights.
For more details of the Quintero case in Colombia and the Rocha case in Brazil, visit the Web site: http://www.impunidad.org
