Héctor Camero, a representative of Radio Tierra y Libertad, a community radio station based in a poor neighbourhood of Monterrey (in the northeastern state of Nuevo León), was told on November 3 that he has been sentenced to two years in prison and a fine of 15,000 pesos (900 euros) on a charge of “using, developing and exploiting radio frequencies without a licence.”
The sentence deals another setback to Mexico’s community radio stations and comes just three weeks after police raided and dismantled Radio Proletaria, a community radio station in Tuxtla Gutiérrez, in the southeastern state of Chiapas on October 12, Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) said.
The sentence is clearly absurd and dangerous. "Why convict Camero on this charge now, when Radio Tierra y Libertad was given a broadcasting licence in a legal manner in 2009, after a seven-year wait?" RSF asked.
The prosecution of Camera has its origins in a raid by 120 Federal Preventive Police who broke their way into the radio station and seized equipment on June 6, 2008. Initially regarded as a witness of police abuses during the raid, Camera suddenly found that prosecutors were treating him as a suspect.
A Nuevo León state criminal court has now used article 150 of the Law on National Patrimony to sentence him to imprisonment, contravening article 6 of the federal constitution, which guarantees freedom of expression, and contravening provisions of the American Convention on Human Rights regarding pluralism and minority media.
If the sentence is enforced, Camero will become the second journalist currently detained in Mexico. The other is Jesús Lemus Barajas, the editor of the daily El Tiempo in the state of Michoacán, who has been held since May 15, 2008 on a questionable drug-trafficking charge that has not been brought to trial. Reporters Without Borders calls for Lemus’s release in the absence of any serious evidence and in view of the investigation’s many irregularities.
