A photographer had to flee from Nicaragua, the head of a newspaper in Guatemala is in prison and a portal in El Salvador, prosecuted. All after publishing uncomfortable information for their governments in Central America, where independent journalism is going through difficult days.
the press
After a year of police occupation, last week the premises of the newspaper La Prensa in Nicaragua were taken over by the government of Daniel Ortega, who accused Juan Lorenzo Holmann, manager of the nearly centennial newspaper and critic of his management, of laundering money.
Holmann has been in prison since 2021 and in April he was sentenced to nine years in prison.
It is the same crime that the Guatemalan prosecutor’s office, backed by President Alejandro Giammattei, charges against the head of El Periódico, José Rubén Zamora, imprisoned a month ago. “Money laundering is an increasingly frequent accusation in Central America” ​​to prosecute journalists, warned Carlos Dada, director of the Salvadoran portal El Faro, also accused of money laundering.
El Faro has denounced secret negotiations of the Nayib Bukele government with the gangs, on which the president later declared war. “The concentration of power in the hands of authoritarian regimes is increasingly managing to silence their critics and the independent press (…) the harassment is increasing,” Dada told AFP.
The defendants claim that these are fabricated cases to silence them. In Nicaragua and El Salvador, the rulers maintain that these media outlets are financed from abroad to destabilize the country and consider them to be in opposition.
Central America, a region that was affected by decades of civil wars and dictatorships, has young democracies that are still hit by poverty, violence and corruption.
I drown the press
“The strategy of suffocating the independent press, which was installed in Cuba decades ago and which was promoted in Venezuela and other countries in the region, was perfected in recent times by the regime” of Ortega, Carlos Jornet said in a recent forum , president of the Committee on Freedom of the Press of the Inter-American Press Association (IAPA).
And it is expanding. During the electoral process, the president of Costa Rica, Rodrigo Chaves, attacked the media that published the sanctions he received for sexual harassment when he was a World Bank official, and that now report on alleged irregularities in the financing of his campaign.
Exile
In July, Oscar Navarrete, a photographer for La Prensa, covered the expulsion from Nicaragua of nuns from the Association of Missionaries of Charity, from the Mother Teresa of Calcutta congregation, which the government outlawed along with 1,500 other organizations.
He accompanied the transfer of the nuns by road to Costa Rica, a fact that the government tried to keep secret.
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The Savior.
As part of its crackdown on criminal groups, El Salvador passed a law that punishes those who reproduce gang messages with up to 15 years in prison.