MIAMI, Florida (Jan. 15, 20001).- The Inter American Press Association (IAPA) today dispatched members of its Rapid Response Unit to Haiti and Paraguay to investigate the recent murder of journalists there. It also announced its findings in other cases where the guilty have so far gone unpunished.
IAPA President Danilo Arbilla said the Rapid Response Unit role was to determine whether the journalists were killed because of what they reported, the findings would be taken up by the hemisphere free-press organizations Executive Committee at its meeting next Friday (January 19) at the IAPA headquarters in Miami.
"Such a serious situation as this is a curtailment of press freedom and of the freedoms and civil rights of society at large," Arbilla said. "That is why it is important to persevere and get right to the bottom of the matter in investigations into crimes against journalists."
He announced that member of the Rapid Response Unit was already in Haiti investing the murders of Jean Leopold Dominique, owner and director of Radio Haiti, and Gerard Denoze, sports reporter for Radio Plus, killed last April 3 and December 15, respectively. Meanwhile another member of the unit was in Paraguay looking into the circumstances surrounding the January 5 murder of Salvador Medina, a teacher and reporter for the Ñemity community radio.
Arbilla, editor of the Montevideo, Uruguay, news weekly Búsqueda, said that that as a result of the investigations carried out by the Rapid Response Unit since its launch in January last year murder cases in which the guilty remained at large were reactivated in Brazil and Colombia and the general public had been made aware of the significance of killing a journalist.
He added that the government of Guatemala in August last year had acknowledged its responsibility in cases of human rights violations, among them the abduction and presumed murder of local journalist Irma Flaquer on October 16, 1980 - which was investigated by the IAPA in 1996 - and now the organization planned to meet in Washington, D.C., with Guatemalan government representatives to discuss details of a "friendly solution" designed to clear Flaquers name."
From 1995 to date, the IAPA has investigated - in its Unpunished Crimes Against Journalists project and the Rapid Response Unit, funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation - a total of 35 journalist murder cases, the findings in 15 of them being submitted to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.
For details of investigations visit us on www.impunidad.com.
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