Julie López writes in El Faro English about the case of José Rubén Zamora, the founder and head of El Periódico, one of Guatemala’s premier news outlets.
The president and director of Guatemalan newspaper elPeriódico, José Rubén Zamora Marroquín, and assistant attorney Samari Carolina Gómez Díaz will spend at least three months in pre-trial detention on the basis of a single testimony and supposed evidence that Rafael Curruchiche, the head of the Special Prosecutor’s Office against Impunity (FECI), told El Faro were collected in just 72 hours between July 26 and 29.
The FECI chief told El Faro that he met key witness Ronald Giovanni García Navarijo, a former executive of the Workers’ Bank (Bantrab), in person on the first day of evidence collection. Authorities claim that in the three ensuing days they verified the former banker’s word and audio and text messages that he submitted to prepare, in the afternoon on Friday, July 29, to execute a raid of Zamora’s home and the offices of elPeriódico, where they detained eight employees for 16 hours and prevented them from contacting anyone.
At the time of the raids the Public Prosecutor’s Office froze the newspaper’s bank accounts, only to release them days later after discovering that they contained the equivalent of just $500. Despite the raid of the workplace and the frozen accounts, Curruchiche has insisted in public statements that Zamora’s detention has to do with “his activity as a businessman, and not with his journalistic work.”
You can read the full piece, with links, photos, and an audio version, here, The Case against Journalist José Rubén Zamora Was Built in 72 Hours.
Categories: Audio, Corruption, Criminalisation, Guatemala, Human Rights, Impunity, Justice
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