By Ingrid Bachmann
Editors of Ecuador’s Vanguardia magazine have petitioned a court to order the return of 40 computers confiscated during a police raid on the magazine’s Quito headquarters. See reports in English by the Inter American Press Association and the local NGO Fundamedios.
Some 15 police agents raided the magazine’s offices last Friday, claiming to have orders based on the magazine’s alleged failure to pay rent. But Vanguardia's executives claim the government ordered the raid in retaliation for the magazine’s critical editorial stance, IAPA notes. President Rafael Correa has had a conflicted relationship with the press.
“Vanguardia had certainly done enough to raise the president’s ire,” The Economist’s Americas View blog adds. “The magazine has detailed the involvement of Correa’s associates with government publicity contracts and gambling operations, and recently published records of transfers from their bank accounts. It also hired a new editor, Juan Carlos Calderón, who previously led an investigative team that that exposed multi-million-dollar government contracts with one of the president’s brothers.”
See the Spanish version of this post for more details.
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.
