Central America

New York – Two years have elapsed since the devastating earthquake destroyed a whole country—Haiti, killing over 200,000 people. Still, three quarters of the population earn less than two dollars a day, 70 per cent do not have stable jobs, more than half of children do not go to school, and the great majority –70 to 80 per cent– had no access to electricity.

Reporters Without Borders condemns the violence used by police and soldiers to disperse yesterday’s demonstration by journalists – mostly women – outside the presidential palace in Tegucigalpa to demand justice for the 24 journalists killed since 2003, 17 of them since the June 2009 coup d’état. The latest journalist to be murdered, last week, was a woman.

Reporters Without Borders is astonished to learn that Marco Joel Álvarez Barahona, also known as El Unicornio” (The Unicorn), was acquitted by a court in the northern city of La Ceiba on 31 October of being the main perpetrator of last year’s murder of radio journalist David Meza Montesinos.

The concern that Reporters Without Borders expressed about Honduras’ readmission to the Organization of American States is as relevant as ever after the emergence of new media cases involving two TV journalists – Mario Castro Rodríguez and Edgardo Antonio Escoto Amador – who opposed the June 2009 coup and who have information about it.

The Dominican police have named the people they think masterminded and carried out the 2 August abduction and murder of journalist José Agustín Silvestre de los Santos and say the motive was an article by Silvestre linking the alleged mastermind to a recent murder.

Forty years after the Stonewall riots, when a group of homosexuals stood up to police to fight a raid on a New York City bar, a milestone for the gay movement, that day Honduras saw the Americas’ first coup d’état of the 21st century. In the aftermath, a slew of human rights violations occurred, many of them violence against Honduras’ gay community.

Reporters Without Borders condemns yesterday’s murder of TV presenter José Agustín Silvestre de los Santos, who was kidnapped in the eastern city of La Romana and was later found dead in El Peñon, on the road from La Romana to San Pedro de Macorís. He had been shot three times.

Cuban President Raul Castro announced at the 7th period of sessions of the seventh legislature of the National Assembly of People’s Power that Cuba is working on updating the current immigration policy, by reformulating and drawing up a group of regulatory measures in that sector based on the current and foreseeable future conditions.

Academics and activists in Bolivia and Mexico in July took steps to preserve indigenous languages whose survival is threatened of dying out with more use of Spanish. The Autonomous University of Mexico has launched an audio library of the 300 indigenous languages and dialects spoken in Mexico. The library has 800 audio language samples so far.

Nery Jeremías Orellana, 26, the manager of Radio Joconguera in the town of Candelaria, in the western department of Lempira, was gunned down yesterday morning, bringing the number of Honduran journalists killed since the start of the year to three. A total of 12 journalists have been killed in the past 18 months in Honduras without any of their murders being solved.