By Alejandro Martínez
Guatemala's central taxation agency will begin next week an audit on newspaper elPeriódico, the daily reported on Wednesday. ElPeriódico called it "fiscal persecution" and the most recent government aggression against it.
The newspaper reported that Guatemala's Superintendence for Tax Administration (SAT) will start the audit next Monday and is asking for documents in 24 areas, including financial statements, sale receipts, monthly statements on sales taxes, and employees' salaries and bonuses, among others.
The audit will include the period between Jan. 1 and Dec. 31, 2012. The SAT ordered the newspaper to turn in the required documents within three work days starting on Tuesday, when elPeriódico was notified of the audit. Failure to comply would constitute resistance to SAT's audit, the order warned.
Last year, elPeriódico was the target of several cyber-attacks, lawsuits, the withdrawal of government advertising from its pages and a commercial boycott that the newspaper says has been promoted by public officials.
In December, both Guatemala's President Otto Pérez Molina and Vice President Roxanna Baldetti filed two separate criminal complaints against elPeriódico's director, José Rubén Zamora. Pérez Molina sued him for blackmail and contempt while Baldetti accused him of crimes against women for his constant criticisms of her.
On Jan. 10, Pérez Molina and Baldetti said they would take back their criminal complaints and move them to a Tribunal of Honor, which deals with freedom of expression issues. However, it's unclear if Pérez Molina and Baldetti have already withdrawn their lawsuits against Zamora.
Note from the editor: This story was originally published by the Knight Center’s blog Journalism in the Americas, the predecessor of LatAm Journalism Review.
