Honduras

A Honduran appeals court has forbidden journalist Julio Ernesto Alvarado from practicing journalism for 16 months as part of a criminal defamation conviction, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). Alvarado hosts the daily news programme "Mi Nación" (My Nation) on Globo TV. "The decision to ban Julio Ernesto Alvarado from his profession for 16 months is outrageous," said Carlos...

Honduran opposition broadcaster Julio Ernesto Alvarado is again subject to a 16-month ban on working as a journalist. After originally taking effect in February as part of a sentence for a criminal defamation, the ban was suspended in April but an appeal court reimposed it on September 24. The case stems from a case by Belinda Flores, the former economics faculty dean at the Autonomous University...

Journalist Nery Francisco Soto Torres was shot dead by gunmen waiting outside his home in the town of Olanchito in Yoro state of Honduras on Thursday, according to news reports. Soto had returned home early from Canal 23, where he hosted a news programme, because of a power outage, according to news reports. Soto was also the co-producer of the programme "Cuarto Poder" (Fourth Estate) on Radio...

Radio Progreso marketing manager Carlos Mejía Orellana was found murdered in his home in the northern city of El Progreso on the night of April 11. He was stabbed several times in the chest. Mejía had worked for the past 13 years for El Progreso-based Radio Progreso, one of the many Honduran media that criticised the 2009 coup d’état. According to he station’s manager, Jesuit priest Ismael...

Globo TV programme host Julio Ernesto Alvarado will now be able to avoid serving a 16-month jail sentence by paying a fine of 10 lempiras a day (for a total of 246 US dollars) but the Supreme Court of Justice could still ban him from working as a journalist during the 16-month period. The court imposed the sentence on Alvarado last December after finding him guilty of criminally defaming Belinda...

Reporters Without Borders has welcomed the conviction of three men for the murder of Alfredo Villatoro, a journalist who hosted a show on radio HRN and coordinated its programming. He was found dead near Tegucigalpa on May 15, 2012, six days after being kidnapped from his home. A Tegucigalpa criminal court convicted Marvin Alonso Gómez and two brothers, Osman Fernando and Edgar Francisco Osorio...

Nery Jeremías Orellana, 26, the manager of Radio Joconguera in the town of Candelaria, in the western department of Lempira, was gunned down July 14 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, according to Paris-based press...

Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has condemned local TV reporter Adan Benítez’s murder in the northern port city of La Ceiba (the capital of Atlántida department) on July 4. Employed by two local stations, 45TV and Teleceiba Canal 7, he was the second journalist to be murdered in Honduras in the past two months. “Investigators should not rule out the possibility that...

Héctor Francisco Medina Polanco, 35, the host of a news programme on provincial TV station Omega Visión, died in a hospital in the northern city of San Pedro Sula on May 11 from the gunshot injuries he had received the day before, Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has reported. Medina was shot twice in the chest and once in the arm by two men on a motorcycle who...

Radio Victoria and the rural community that operates it, located in the northern Salvadorian department of Cabañas, have been the victim of threats and harassment for the past five years and it is time this stopped, Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has said. A new wave of warnings and death threats were received by four of the community radio station’s journalists –...