Independent journalists from Nicaragua, Venezuela and El Salvador denounced, in the framework of the IX Summit of the Americas, the repressive actions perpetrated by the governments of those nations.
Despite the fact that the dictators of Nicaragua and Venezuela, Daniel Ortega and Nicolás Maduro respectively; were not invited to the Summit, journalists and communicators from both nations attended Los Angeles, United States, with the aim of exposing the harassment, persecution, aggressions and other repressive acts against their union to the leaders of the region.
In the case of Nicaragua, the journalistic exercise under the Ortega administration means harassment, beatings, exile, confiscation, destruction, jail and even death.
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In the forum «The challenges of journalism in the face of dictatorships in America»which took place on June 9, parallel to the IX Summit of the Americas, Nicaraguan journalists Luis Galeano, Lucía Pineda Ubau and Cindy Regidor recounted the repressive actions perpetrated by Ortega against independent journalism.
Galeano, director of the Café con Voz program, which is broadcast from Miami, assured that “we are breaking the wall of censorship, and it is a victory every day.”
“What would this Summit be without journalists? If we journalists don’t cover, if we journalists don’t report, the world is completely disconnected », he stressed.
The journalist and former political prisoner of Ortega, Lucía Pineda Ubau, remarked that “Nicaraguan women are brave”; and she pointed out that the colleagues who continue inside Nicaragua “have chosen to do what is called catacomb journalism, almost secretly.”
The also director of 100% Noticias denounced that both the buildings of her media outlet and those of La Prensa, and Confidencial “continue to be assaulted, confiscated by the Daniel Ortega regime and operating entirely from abroad.”
For her part, Cindy Regidor, a journalist from Confidencial, encouraged Nicaraguans to continue denouncing the situation of repression and siege that continues in Nicaragua.
“The media cannot exist without you. We need them and not just as a passive audience, but that they look for us, that they trust us, that we look for ways to continue reporting in a way that is safe for our sources,” Regidor said.
According to the Inter-American Press Association (IAPA), around 70 Nicaraguan journalists have been forced into exile due to the political persecution that the Daniel Ortega administration has exercised against the independent press.
