62nd
General Assembly
Mexico City, Mexico
September 29 to October 3, 2006
Camino Real Hotel
Reports and Resolutions
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NICARAGUA
Report to the Midyear Meeting
Quito, Ecuador
Press freedom
in Nicaragua has been compromised by a number of attacks on journalists in the
past six months.
Responding to media reports implicating him in the embezzlement of $609,000
in seized drug money, Supreme Court Justice Rogers Camilo Argüello verbally
attacked journalist Eloísa Ibarra of El Nuevo Diario and her family.
When approached by reporters, Justice Argüello made no attempt to refute
the accusations and instead launched into a verbal tirade against Ibarra and
Mirna Velásquez, a reporter for La Prensa.
Ibarra filed a criminal complaint against Justice Argüello for slander.
Argüello later sent a letter to the National Assembly—then on its
end-of-year recess—in which he waived his right to immunity and also apologized
to Ibarra in a public letter.
Leyla Bucargo, from whom the alleged drug money had been seized, and Julissa
Bonilla, a judge suspended by the Supreme Court for the scandal involving the
$609,000, lodged separate complaints for libel against Ibarra in a move considered
by the media to be an orchestrated attack on the reporter.
In other developments, some 250 supporters of Alvaro Chamorro Mora, the Sandinista
mayor of the city of Granada (about 45 kilometers outside Managua), went to
the nation’s capital on February 23 and blocked the entrance to the offices
of La Prensa. They demanded a meeting with newspaper executives and called on
the paper to stop running stories on alleged irregularities in the Granada city
government.
Journalists were again subjected to verbal and physical attacks designed to
disrupt their work when reporter Arlen Cerda and photographer Guillermo Flores
went to cover a meeting of the Granada City Council. A number of people who
were surrounding the mayor—presumably in his employ—hurled insults
at Cerda and tried to assault Flores as he was filming them.
José Garth, a correspondent for La Prensa in Siuna, located in the North
Atlantic Autonomous Region, has also been harassed for articles in which he
accused city officials and judges of corruption.
The Justice Committee of the National
Assembly has not taken up the Freedom of Information Act as it had promised
last year that it would.
Still pending before the
Supreme Court is an appeal asking that Law 372 be ruled unconstitutional. This
law would create the Colegio de Periodistas de Nicaragua (Nicaraguan Journalists
Association). The president of the Colegio said many journalists had failed
to register but will have the chance to do so during a second registration period.
 questions
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