By Kendall Ivie*
A group of farm workers in the Paraguayan town of Capiíbary, in the central department of San Pedro, briefly held and tortured journalist Alberto Núñez earlier this month in the most recent violent attack against him.
On Jan. 13 Núñez, a regional correspondent for newspaper La Nación, went to Capiíbary to cover the latest developments in a land dispute over a 12,000 acre ranch, Panambí Estates, which has been invaded by around 400 farm workers for the last year and a half.
Núñez said an armed group of workers met and attacked him. He was tortured with machetes and took several blows, he said. According to La Nación, an officer on the scene was also attacked and had to flee along with Núñez.
The farm workers say the land belongs to the agrarian organization Indert but the Supreme Court has ruled that the land belongs to attorney Gustavo de Gasperi. According to La Nación, the workers have ties to the guerrilla group Paraguayan People’s Army (EPP).
This was not Núñez’s first run-in with violence. According to news site Paraguay.com, on Jan. 1, 2010, Núñez was attacked near Capiíbary while covering a disturbance at a gas station. Prior to the attack, Núñez said he received several death threats after reporting on the illegal trafficking of timber in the area. Despite notifying the authorities about the threats, Núñez did not receive police protection.
And in 2008, the United States State Department reported that Núñez had been attacked two times in the previous year.
Attacks on the media are of rising concern in Paraguay. According to Freedom House, Paraguay’s press status went from “Partly Free” to “Not Free” in 2013 due to “negative effects on the media environment after the parliament’s controversial ouster of President Fernando Lugo in June 2012.”
In April, Paraguayan journalist Carlos Manuel Artaza was shot and killed near the border with Brazil.
*Kendall Ivie is a student in the class "Journalism in Latin America" at the University of Texas at Austin.
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.
