The Valledupar, Colombia, High Court on May 19 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 last year. But after holding its own inquiries into the case, the IAPA two months later, called on the Colombian Attorney General’s Office to look into the court’s ruling and 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, in which 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, the IAPA today sent to the IACHR the results of an investigation it had 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 other 16 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 that of Rocha in Brazil,
visit the Web site www.impunidad.org.
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