At an indigenous mass wedding attended by Bolivian President Evo Morales and several of his ministers, police forcefully expelled a journalist covering the May 7 event in La Paz, Opinión reports.
María Galindo, the director of Deseo FM and head of the Mujeres Creando (“Women Creating”) community group, was interviewing Idón Chivi, the former vice minister of Decolonization, when she was grabbed by the police, carried out of the building, and left in the middle of the street, La Razón explains.
“I just managed to hold on to my tape recorder and shout ‘I haven’t done anything,’” she told Erbol.
While a police representative apologized for the incident, FM Bolivia reports that Galindo is planning to file a complaint with the government ombudsman.
The journalist said that, as a media worker and a representative of a women’s group, her violent expulsion from the wedding is a “a violation of freedom of expression…and a violation of my human rights as a woman,” Bolivia’s National Press Association reports via IFEX. “I don’t know where the authorization to expel me and humiliate me like that came from, but what is clear is that they took me out with my legs spread, and the photographs are evidence of this fact,” she said.
See the front page of the Mujeres Creando website for photos of the incident.
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.
