MIAMI, Florida (Jan. 8)-The Inter American Press Association (IAPA) today called on Paraguayan President Luis González Macchi to order an investigation into the murder of a journalist and the beating up of another, both of which the hemisphere organization called violations of free speech and press freedom in the South American country.
Salvador Medina, a reporter and chairman of the board of directors of the community radio station Ñemity in Capibary, 180 miles northwest of the Paraguayan capital of Asunción, was murdered on January 5. He was shot as he rode on a motorcycle driven by his brother.
Medinas family said he had been receiving a number of threats just prior to his death following exposures he had made in his radio broadcasts. One theory was that he was killed not for what he himself wrote but because of what another brother - the local correspondent of the national daily newspaper ABC Color - had been reporting.
In a separate incident on December 19, Mauri Konig, a reporter for the Brazilian daily O Estado do Paraná, was badly beaten up by three men wielding sticks and chains.
He said that one of the assailants wore Paraguayan police uniform. Konig at the time was investigating reports that a number of young Brazilian men were unlawfully serving in the Paraguayan Army and National Police force. Shortly before, he had written about Brazilian child prostitution in Paraguay.
The IAPA announced that it was sending its Rapid Response Unit to Paraguay to carry out its own investigations into the incidents.
IAPA President Danilo Arbilla said that such ongoing violence against journalists "justifies the creation of our Journalists at Risk project, which we will be launching this year with a hemisphere conference and a series of seminars with the principal objective of warning reporters not to take undue risks in their newsgathering."
