Peru

The number of journalists in jail in Peru rose to two when Paul Garay Ramírez, a programme producer for Visión 47 TV and a correspondent for Radio La Exitosa, was sentenced to three years in prison by a court in the east-central region of Ucayali on April 19 for allegedly defaming a prosecutor. The other journalist currently detained is Oswaldo Pereyra Moreno of Radio Macarena, who was sentenced...

The Committee to Protect Journalists has condemned the attack on the Peruvian news daily Voces, which was hit with homemade explosive devices on Saturday. The daily's editor recently received threats following critical reporting on a national congressional candidate, he told CPJ. According to CPJ interviews and local press freedom groups, around 3:30 a.m. on Saturday, three unknown assailants on...

The Peruvian journalist deported by the United States to Russia in a spy swap last year says she never spied for Moscow — and that her husband hid his espionage from her until the couple's arrest, the Associated Press (AP) has reported. Vicky Pelaez says she also intends to return to her native country. "I might never forgive him," Pelaez said of her Russian husband, Mikhail Vasenkov, according to...

Carlos Flores Borja, the manager of Amazonian radio station La Voz de Bagua, travelled all the way to Lima last week because he had been given an appointment with transport and communications minister Enrique Cornejo on August 11 to discuss the reopening of the station, which the government closed 14 months ago. But in the end, Flores was received by deputy minister Jorge Cuba Hidalgo, who told...

The Peruvian Supreme Court on Friday ordered the release of Alejandro Carrascal Carrasco, editor of weekly newspaper Nor Oriente, who was sentenced on January 12 to one year in prison on defamation charges. Peru’s Supreme Court overturned a ruling by a court in Bagua, Utcubamba province, the local press said. Carrascal was convicted in January over a series of articles he wrote in 2005 alleging...

Radio journalist Oswaldo Pereyra Moreno was on Wednesday sentenced to one year in prison on criminal defamation charges in San Lorenzo, northern Peru, according to Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). The charges against Pereyra, host of the show 'Hora 13' on Radio Macarena, stemmed from a September 2009 broadcast about an illegal abortion allegedly given to an unnamed 14-year-old girl in a...

Luis Valdez Villacorta, the former mayor of Pucallpa (the capital of the east-central region of Ucayali), has been acquitted for the second time of masterminding the murder of radio Frecuencia Oriental journalist Alberto Rivera Fernández in Pucallpa on April 21, 2004, according to Reporters sans Frontières (RSF). Valdez was acquitted on February 8 by a Lima criminal court at the end of a...

Reporters Without Borders today condemned as an act of political revenge the cancellation of a television station’s licence, seven months after the same action was taken against radio La Voz de Bagua Grande, also in the Amazonas region. Televisión Oriente, based in Yurimaguas in the north-east Peru, lost its broadcast licence on January 15 on the order of the Transport and Communications Ministry...

The editor of a Peruvian weekly newspaper in the Amazonian city of Bagua, Utcubamba province, was sentenced on Tuesday to one year in jail on defamation charges, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has reported quoting local news reports. Alejandro Carrascal Carrasco, editor of the Bagua-based weekly Nor Oriente, was convicted of charges that stemmed from a series of articles he wrote in...

Peru's Ministry of Transport and Communications (MTC) has maintained its arbitrary ban on Radio La Voz de Bagua, a station based in the country's northern Amazonas region, refusing on September 15 to allow it to resume broadcasting. The station has been stripped of its licence since June 6. Radio La Voz de Bagua was accused of inciting violence in June during an outbreak of protests and rioting by...