MIAMI, Florida (November 11, 2014)—The Inter American Press Association (IAPA) today called on the authorities of Peru to carry out a full and prompt investigation into the murder of journalism student and intern with the magazine Caretas Fernando Raymondi, to determine who was responsible and whether or not the crime was due to the investigative work he was conducting.
Raymondi, 22, was killed on Saturday (November 8) in the city of San Vicente de Cañete, at a shop owned by his family. He was with his father when two assailants entered the store with the apparent intent to rob. According to local news media Raymondi recognized one of the intruders, who immediately shot him twice. The men fled without taking anything.
IAPA President Gustavo Mohme, editor of the Lima, Peru, newspaper La República, said that given the confusing details publicly known about the murder “we demand an exhaustive investigation to determine the motive for the crime and bring those responsible to justice.”
The young man was in his final year as a journalism student at the San Martín de Porres University, and for the past eight months had been working as a reporter at the Caretas investigative unit. According to his colleagues he was investigating corruption and petty crime.
As a message to the attackers and in solidarity with other murdered and injured journalists in the country, Mohme declared that “the press should dig into the investigations that Raymondi was carrying out at Caretas, as a way of shedding additional light on something that some wanted to keep silent.”
For his part the chairman of the IAPA’s Committee on Freedom of the Press and Information, Claudio Paolillo, editor of the Montevideo, Uruguay, weekly Búsqueda, recalled that the Declaration of Pucallpa – a response that the IAPA and the Peruvian Press Council gave in 2005 to the murder of Peruvian journalist Alberto Rivera Fernández – urged the Peruvian press to “form a specialized team of investigative reporters … to add weight to the denunciations made by victimized journalists” with the objective of its findings being published simultaneously in the participating media.
The IAPA is a not-for-profit organization dedicated to the defense and promotion of freedom of the press and of expression in the Americas. It is made up of more than 1,300 print publications from throughout the Western Hemisphere and is based in Miami, Florida. For more information please go to http://www.sipiapa.org.
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