A report presented at the 78th General Assembly of the Inter American Press Association (IAPA) –which takes place in Madrid, Spain– points out that the government of peter castle “It has become an enemy of freedom of expression and of the press.”
“Not only does it stigmatize and insult the media and individual journalists, but it also obstructs their work, especially investigations into alleged cases of corruption,” says the document that reviews a series of events that would corroborate this assessment.
In this context, for example, the report specifies that “due to journalistic investigations into acts of corruption, President Pedro Castillo has threatened to sue journalists and prevented them from entering public events and press conferences.”
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“In May, after a complaint that he had plagiarized his master’s thesis, President Castillo said that the press lends itself to ‘private and anti-democratic interests,’ seeks to ‘generate political instability,’ and belongs to a ‘conspiracy of certain power groups. and coup sectors’. Few weeks later, The Executive Branch sent a bill to Congress to create the crime of disclosing confidential information in criminal investigations. The aggrieved, accused, lawyers, representatives, judges, prosecutors and/or police officers who disseminate –before the oral trial– information reserved for ‘unlegitimized persons’ may be punished with up to four years in prison”, he indicates.
Likewise, it mentions that Prime Minister Aníbal Torres accused that “the majority of the press, especially the capital, misinforms, takes information out of context. He has adopted the mechanism that Mussolini used in Italy, fascism; that Hitler used in Germany, Nazism. They have adopted the policy of these two characters: to use lies as the best instrument to destroy the adversary”.
“During his presidential message, a year after taking office, the president attacked the press again, accusing it of seeking instability in his government. He also pointed out that the media ‘only tells lies and spreads false news’, referring to the television program Panorama who reported on acts of government corruption”, it is stated.
It should be noted, however, that the report presented to the IAPA also refers to situations involving other powers and institutions. He cites, for example, the impediment for journalists to enter the Legislative Palace.
“The Office of the Attorney General and the National Police have intensified their aggression against journalists and the media. The first tried to access anonymous sources; the second retained several journalists”, adds the report.
NEGATIVE BALANCE
The executive director of Peruvian Press CouncilRodrigo Salazar, declared to Peru21 In addition to this, in the Chapultepec Index, which measures the factors that negatively and positively influence press freedom in 22 countries, Peru has fallen four places compared to 2021.
“In fact, we have gone from the list of countries with low restrictions on freedom of expression to the list of countries with partial restrictions; We did not reach the highest scale because that implies assassinations of journalists, as in Mexico, or imprisonment as in Nicaragua, ”he specified.
