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El Salvador
March 10, 2011
IAPA welcomes conviction of gang members in El Salvador


MIAMI, Florida (March 10, 2011)—The Inter American Press Association (IAPA) today welcomed a decision by courts in El Salvador to sentence 11 gang members as perpetrators and accomplices in the September 2, 2009 murder of Franco-Spanish news photographer Christian Poveda.

Poveda had produced a documentary titled “La vida loca” (The Mad Life) depicting the activities of gangs, with one of which he lived and worked closely with in making the documentary. A year and a half after it being filmed the gang members heard a former police officer claim that Poveda was an informer and they decided to kill him.

The Specialized Criminal Court convicted Luis Vásquez and José Alejandro Melara and sentenced them to 30 years in prison on charges of aggravated homicide and conspiracy to commit homicide. It also sentenced accomplice Keyri Geraldina Mayorga to 20 years, while eight other defendants, including former police officer Juan Napoleón Espinoza, were given four-year prison sentences. The case involved a total of 31 gang members. All the others are currently serving jail terms for various offenses, including unlawful assembly.

“We regard this conviction as sending an important message for gangsters not to go on murdering or assaulting journalists, something that is happening in the countries of Central America,” commented IAPA President Gonzalo Marroquín, president of the Guatemala City, Guatemala, newspaper Siglo 21.

In November 2009 among the resolutions issued during the IAPA’s General Assembly held in Buenos Aires, Argentina, the organization had expressed concern and called for justice to be done in the case of the murder of the 52-year-old Poveda, committed two months earlier on the outskirts of the El Salvador capital, San Salvador.

For his part, Claudio Paolillo, editor of the Uruguayan weekly news magazine Búsqueda and co-chairman of the IAPA’s Committee on Freedom of the Press and Information, stressed the organization’s pleasure on learning of the court convictions in El Salvador, which raised the number of persons imprisoned for having committed crimes against journalists. “Since we began our effective campaign against such crimes going unpunished there are now 137 of those who have carried them out serving time behind bars around the Americas,” Paolillo said.

The IAPA is a not-for-profit organization dedicated to the defense and promotion of freedom of the press and of expression in the Americas. It is made up of more than 1,300 print publications from throughout the Western Hemisphere and is based in Miami, Florida. The IAPA Impunity Project is funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and has the mission of combating violence against journalists and lessening the impunity surrounding the majority of such crimes. http://www.impunidad.com



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