Nobel Prize winner Mario Vargas Llosa canceled his column in the Peruvian newspaper El Comercio in protest of its "information manipulation" during the ongoing presidential election campaign, according to the news agency EFE. The protest is part of various critiques against the newspaper for supporting candidate Keiko Fujimori and for its impartial election coverage.
In a letter sent to the newspaper's director, Francisco Miró Quesada, and disseminated to various media in Lima, Vargas Llosa announced he had asked the Spanish newspaper El País, which has the rights to his Sunday column "Touchstone", to prevent the Peruvian newspaper from publishing his articles.
"The newspaper has become a propaganda machine for candidate Keiko Fujimori and, in its effort to prevent by any means the victory of Ollanta Humala, the newspaper violates the most basic notions of objectivity and journalistic ethics," the writer said.
According to Vargas Llosa, El Comercio "silences and manipulates information" and "opens its pages to lies."
Various national and international media outlets have published the letter, but as of yet El Comercio has not responded to the writer's accusations.
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.
