A private investigation carried out by Zamora himself into a raid on his home last June 24 pointed to the participation of State Security agents. In the incident, 11 unidentified persons burst into his house, handcuffed and beat him and threatened his wife, children and three servants.
“The identification of the assailants leads us to believe that public officials and politicians from the prior regime were involved, and we therefore urge the current government to carry out an impartial investigation to determine responsibility under the law in order to prevent a culture of violence, state terrorism and impunity from taking precedence over freedom of expression,” said Rafael Molina, chairman of the IAPA’s Committee on Freedom of the Press and Information.
Zamora gave local news media the names of a number of people he said were among his assailants – Presidential Guard (EMP) Sergeant Major Eduviges Funes Valásquez; former EMP member Belter Armando Alvarez Castillo; chief of the Public Prosecutor’s Office Erick Alexander Johnston Barrera, and National Civil Police counter-intelligence agent Iris Edith Soto López – all belonging to state agencies.
The newspaper of which Zamora is editor is well known in Guatemala for its exposures of corruption, human rights violations and drug-trafficking, and it was because of this that from the outset the attack was believed to have meant to be a warning to him, although the attorney general sought to promote the theory that it was a self-staged event.
Given the demonstrated lack of interest by the Public Prosecutor’s Office in investigating the incident, Zamora carried out his own inquiries into it, the findings being corroborated by those of a foreign private investigator, an investigative reporting effort and the official probe ordered by then President Alfonso Portillo.
“We trust that the government will conduct an exhaustive and independent investigation into the case so as to identify all those who carried out the raid and were behind it and bring them to justice,” declared Molina, editor of the Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, news magazine Ahora.
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