Press freedom is being strangled to death in Central America, where the governments of Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua have launched against independent media outlets that have criticized their efforts.
Guatemala is the most recent case of deadly attacks reported by a media outlet. elPeriódico, a medium specializing in investigations, announced its final closure this Friday because it failed to survive the onslaught of the Guatemalan government, as announced by the directors of the journalistic company, whose president and founder is imprisoned on money laundering charges.
And it is that the strategy seems to be a script applied by totalitarian governments or with such borders, such as that of Guatemala, with Alejandro Giammattei at the head; of El Salvador, with Nayib Bukele and the one that has been most aggressive against the independent press, Nicaragua, with the dictator Daniel Ortega at the helm.
The crisis facing freedom of the press and expression in Central America is alarming. Now it was elPeriódico, in Guatemala, which will stop publishing “any type of information” on May 15.
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The Inter-American Press Association (SIP) in a statement released this Friday, after learning of the closure of the Guatemalan outlet, regretted the situation and considered that it is “a step back for democracy in Guatemala”
The IAPA adds that “it is an essential task of the independent press to oversee public powers.” However, it is precisely this action that bothers governments that apply the same strategy to try to strangle freedom of the press and expression: judicial persecution, economic suffocation and force communicators into exile.
elPeriódico directly accuses the Guatemalan ruler of having orchestrated “a setup” to imprison the founding director of the outlet, José Rubén Zamora, and then blocking any possibility of accessing advertising. Giammattei is “allergic to the control of the media,” he confirmed to Article 66 journalist Julia Corado, editor of elPeriódico.
But that same script applies to Bukele in El Salvador. Uncomfortable by the accusations of poor government action, especially from the investigative outlet El Faro, Bukele launched his government apparatus on the outlet.
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In September 2020, the Salvadoran president announced on national television that his Ministry of Finance would initiate an investigation for money laundering against El Faro. Since then, the attacks against this and other media outlets, which have dared to control the Bukele administration, have intensified.
There have even been reports of cases of espionage against journalists in El Salvador, although Bukele has denied it. Amnesty International released a report that lists “35 cases of journalists and members of civil society” who were allegedly spied on with the Pegasus program, contracted by the Salvadoran government.
Nothing different has happened in Nicaragua, only that, in this country, the dictator Ortega has not concealed anything. The Ortega regime attacked the television channel 100% Noticia, the magazine Confidencial, the program Esta Semana, and La Prensa, which it confiscated. He also attacked Radio Darío, Channel 12 and all the independent media outlets that dared to delve into the Government and its bad actions.
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The attack of the dictator Daniel Ortega against the independent press was such that currently all the media that did not submit to him are in exile. Ortega is considered by the Reporter Without Borders organization as one of the most notorious predators of freedom of expression in the world.
In addition, according to Carlos Jornet, president of the IAPA’s Committee on Freedom of Expression, in an interview with France 24, “in terms of press freedom, Nicaragua is not limited to being the worst student in the region: it is also its best teacher. It is putting together a precise manual to implement the silencing of the press that other governments seem to follow”, that is a concern for the organization that defends freedom of the press.
