As part of its International Day to End Impunity 2013 campaign, freedom of expression organization IFEX included petitions to rally support for five persons from different countries who have been persecuted, threatened, intimidated tortured and/or imprisoned for exercising their right to express themselves freely.
Ecuadorian journalist Martín Pallares is among them.
Pallares, a journalist with newspaper El Comercio who has reported about corruption in Ecuador's government, has received death threats through Twitter and has been personally discredited by President Rafael Correa, IFEX's campaign points out. His case has also been documented by other organizations like Fundamedios, which noted in a recent report the numerous attacks that Correa has made against Pallares during his televised addresses.
Cases like Pallares' are not isolated and impunity continues to be an endemic problem across Latin America. Brazil, Colombia and Mexico are the countries in the continent with the highest indexes of impunity.
According to IFEX, impunity is the biggest threat against freedom of expression. This is the third year the organization puts together its International Day Against Impunity Campaign, which began on Nov. 1 and will finish on Nov. 23.
Through several activities each one of these days, the campaign seeks to raise awareness regarding the culture of impunity suffocating freedom of expression and exacerbating human rights violations.
In the last 20 years, more than 670 journalists have been killed, and nine out of ten of these were committed with complete impunity. In Latin America and the Caribbean, almost all crimes against freedom of expression remain unsolved.
In Brazil, more than 66 percent of all cases of violence against journalists committed during the mass protests of last June were attributed to the Military Police. Of the 27 cases of murdered journalists since 1992, 21 remain unsolved. The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) invited Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff to discuss the topic on Nov. 23.
In Colombia, IFEX applauded the work of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, FLIP, which helped take the case of journalist Jineth Bedoya Lima to the Inter American Commission for Human Rights after she was raped, tortured and raped for her work as a journalist.
However, IFEX underscored that the crimes committed before 2010 run the risk of going unpunished forever due to the country's statutes of limitations, which place a 20-year deadline for crimes to be resolved. The infographic “Gone with the Violence” highlighted the case of journalist Julio Daniel Chaparro, who was killed on April 24, 1991; his case expired in 2011.
The situation in Mexico was not encouraging, either. Since 2000, there have been 82 journalists killed, 16 who disappeared and 28 attacks against media outlets. Of these cases, only 19 percent have been investigated and only 7 percent have led to prison sentences.
Through its campaign "Impunity Kills," journalism organization Article 19 has called on Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto to reform the federal special prosecutor's office for crimes against journalists and find those responsible for the crimes.
IFEX, which has the support of more than 80 organizations in 60 countries, has conducted its campaign against impunity on Nov. 23 for a third year in a row. IFEX chose the date to commemorate the anniversary of the Ampatuan massacre in the Phillipines, where 46 persons -- among them 32 journalists and media workers -- were massacred in 2009.
“IFEX Members feel that an international day calling for the end to impunity is a way to recognize the seriousness of the issue and address specific cases in a coordinated and effective way,” said IFEX executive director Annie Game.
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.
