A journalist was killed on Tuesday 20 April in the northern Honduras city of San Pedro Sula, taking the total number of reporters killed in the country in the past six weeks to seven.
According to local media sources, Jorge Alberto Orellana, host of the program ‘En Vivo con Georgino’ at private local television station Televison de Honduras, was leaving his office after his show when he was shot once in the head by an unidentified gunman, who then fled on foot.
It is unclear whether Orellana, whose reporting was mostly focused on city and cultural issues, was killed as a result of his work as a journalist.
According to a Honduran press freedom organisation, the Comité por la Libre Expresión, Honduran Security Minister Oscar Alvarez told reporters in the capital yesterday that Orellana’s murder did not appear to be connected to organized crime, and seemed to be a “personal situation” because the attacker acted alone and escaped the scene of the crime on foot.
However, in light of the growing climate of violence in Honduras, the International Press Institute calls for a thorough investigation of the murder and its possible connection to the victim’s profession.
Orellana is the seventh journalist to be killed in the Honduras in the past six weeks.
On April 13, Luis Antonio Chévez Hernández, a presenter with Radio W105, was murdered in the same city. Hernandez was reportedly ambushed by a number of unidentified persons in a car as he was leaving a nightclub with his cousin and some friends.
On 26 March, radio journalists Jose Bayardo Mairena, 52, and Manuel Juarez, 55, were driving from the city of Catacamas after hosting a radio programme when their vehicle was ambushed by unidentified gunmen near Juticalpa in the eastern province of Olancho. The gunmen reportedly sprayed the car with bullets, and then shot the journalists at close range.
On 14 March, Nahúm Palacios Arteaga, 36, the news director for television channel Canal 5 in Aguán and host of a news programme on Radio Tocoa, was shot dead in Tocoa, Colón, in northern Honduras.
On 11 March, David Meza Montesinos, a reporter at radio station El Patio for more than 30 years, was killed while driving home in the Honduran coastal city of La Ceiba. His car was shot at from another vehicle, causing Meza, 51, to lose control and crash into a house, near his own home.
According to local sources, Meza had received death threats three weeks before the shooting, over his coverage of drug traffickers.
On 1 March, Joseph Hernández Ochoa, 24, a journalism student at the University of Honduras, and a former entertainment presenter on the privately-owned Canal 51 TV station, was travelling with fellow journalist Karol Cabrera when their car was fired on 36 times by men in another vehicle on an unlit road.
None of these cases has resulted in any convictions, although Honduran Security Minister Alvarez claimed that the authorities had “solved 90%” of the “five” murders of journalists in March 2010, according to the Comité por la Libre Expresión. Speaking to the press yesterday, Minister Alvarez advised journalists to “be careful” and “to not go to dark and remote places,” the press freedom organisation said.
“The rising numbers of journalists’ murders in Honduras points to growing systemic violence against the media, along with a climate of rampant impunity,” said IPI Press Freedom Manager Anthony Mills. “The government of Honduras has a responsibility to bring the perpetrators of these crimes to justice, and to demonstrate that these acts of violence against journalists will not be tolerated.”
Honduras remains in the grip of a political crisis that began with the ousting of President Manuel Zelaya in June last year, coupled with rising rates of crime tied to drug cartels and organized crime. On April 13, the Associated Press reported that the administration of President Lobo had announced that it would deploy troops in the streets to counter the rising crime rate.
