By Mark Fitzgerald
Published: October 17, 2007 11:00 AM ET
MIAMI Organized crime, unpunished assassinations of journalists, and an
increasing number of national leaders hostile to the press are muzzling
freedom of expression throughout the hemisphere, the Inter American
Press Association declared Tuesday.
In a concluding statement for its annual meeting, IAPA accused
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez as committing the "worst abuses"
against press freedom in the six months since the group last met. IAPA
condemned Chavez specifically for closing the independent Radio Caracas
Television station, and confiscating its 48 repeater stations and
transmitters to establish a government-run channel.
IAPA noted that in the last six months nine journalists -- including
Oakland (Calif.) Post Editor Chauncey Bailey -- were murdered because of
their work. Three circulation workers for a newspaper in Oaxaca, Mexico,
were also slaughtered, apparently by a local drug trafficking gang
angered by the paper's reporting.
"There are still obstacles to freedom of the press, of information, and
of expression in many hemispheric countries," said the statement adopted
at the General Assembly. "Journalists experience physical and
psychological violence, government harassment, and all kinds of legal
attacks that induce them to censor themselves."
IAPA singled out Mexico as a nation where killers of journalists are
able to act with near-complete impunity.
The Miami-based press freedom group also expressed alarm at the growing
practice of using the allocation of government advertising to punish or
reward newspapers. "The governments of Argentina, Aruba, Ecuador,
Guyana, Mexico, Nicaragua, Uruguay, and Venezuela all use government
advertising as a way to pressure the media," it said.
The IAPA declaration also condemned Cuba, where it notes that 27
independent journalists remain in jail because of their work, several of
them "gravely ill."
"The situation in Cuba is still alarming after 48 years of dictatorship
with no signs of a democratic transition," IAPA said.
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