The Inter American Press Association (IAPA) has expressed concern at Nicaragua's commutation of sentences in the cases of the convicted murderers of journalists María José Bravo and Carlos Guadamuz, a development that it claimed "adds to the climate of impunity surrounding freedom of the press in Latin America."
According to a report in the Nicaraguan newspaper La Prensa this week, justices of the Nicaraguan Supreme Court, apparently motivated by political interests, were allegedly seeking to commute the prison term of Eugenio Hernández González, a former mayor sentenced in January 2005 to 25 years for the November 9, 2004 murder of María José Bravo. Bravo was the correspondent of the newspapers La Prensa and Hoy in Juigalpa, Chontales province, to the southeast of Managua.
The chairman of the IAPA's Committee on Freedom of the Press and Information, Gonzalo Marroquín, declared, "We will be closely watching developments in this matter in Nicaragua and we trust the courts will fully uphold the verdicts."
Marroquín, editor of the Guatemala City, Guatemala, newspaper Prensa Libre, added, "The application of independent justice, of effective trials and sentences for crimes committed against journalists is the only way that we can rely on being able to do away with impunity and break the circle of violence unleashed against news men and women and the public's right to know."
Nicaragua Criminal Court Chief Judge Armengol Cuadra confirmed the La Prensa report and suspended hearing of the appeal of sentence under way in his court. He accused his colleagues of intending to reduce the charge against Hernández from that of murder, on which he was convicted and which carries a 15-to 20-year prison sentence, to that of manslaughter, which is subject to a lesser sentence and would enable him to be freed from prison shortly.
Meanwhile, last week, for health reasons, the Interior Ministry explained, parole was granted to William Hurtado García, sentenced in April 2004 to 21 years' imprisonment for the murder on February 10 that year of Carlos Guadamuz, host of the programme 'Dardos al Centro' (Darts to the Bullseye) broadcast by the Managua television station Canal 23.
Public discussion of the issue in the Central American country comes just days after IAPA announced its concern at the sentence reductions already granted to numerous criminals after conducting a review of the legal proceedings in 84 cases of journalists' murders.
IAPA's work, which is posted on the website http://www.impunidad.com, shows that 27 defendants convicted in journalists' murders have had their prison terms reduced substantially or have served under house arrest, among other benefits.
While such actions may be within current law, IAPA has been complaining about the leniency that some judges have taken—an issue highlighted at the organization's Hemisphere Conference on The Judiciary, The Press and Impunity held in the Dominican Republic last year and attended by representatives of the majority of the judiciaries of the Americas. As examples, IAPA cited the cases of the murder of Colombian journalists Guillermo Cano and Orlando Sierra and Argentine journalist José Luis Cabezas.
