A policeman on horseback struck photographer Víctor Salas several times with a metal riding crop while he was covering a protest Wednesday in Valparaíso, a city to the west of Santiago, Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has reported. Salas, who works for the Spanish news agency EFE, has been hospitalised and risks using the use of his right eye as a result of the blows.
“Unfortunately this is not the first time that the Chilean security forces have used violence against the news media while maintaining order,” Paris-based RSF said. “We support the call by EFE’s Santiago bureau for the policeman who hit Salas to be identified and punished. How could a law enforcement officer have behaved with such lack of judgment? The investigation should seek the answer to this question.”
The incident occurred while political and union activists, students and health workers were staging a march near the national assembly building in Valparaíso during a visit by President Michelle Bachelet to address parliamentarians. Gen Jaime Vasconcelos, the head of the local mounted police unit, was quoted in press reports as saying the clashes took place when demonstrators tried to get through security barriers. Three people were injured in the course of the police operation and around 100 arrests were made.
Salas, who was photographing the events, was hit in the eye and over the eye by a riding crop during a mounted police charge. He was rushed to a hospital in the nearby town of Viña del Mar where doctors diagnosed “severe bruising to the right eye, with risk of functional and organic loss, and uncertain prognosis.”
EFE bureau chief Manuel Fuentes said he would bring an legal action against the police. The high command of the mounted police promised to carry out an internal investigation.
Eight journalists were injured, some of them seriously, when the police used violence to disperse student demonstrators outside the La Moneda presidential palace in Santiago on May 30, 2006. Six months later, journalists were physically attacked by supporters of former dictator Augusto Pinochet in the wake of his death on December 10, 2006. President Bachelet condemned these attacks and called for the culprits to be prosecuted.
Salas was last year’s winner of the national prize for news photography, awarded annually by the Chilean Association of Photographers and Visual Reporters.
