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 to a year in prison on a similar charge in June 2010 and is due to be released soon.
The prosecution case against Garay was highly questionable. He was accused of defaming prosecutor Agustín López by criticising a decision to shelve two corruption cases on the air. The only evidence produced in court was a short recording of a radio station broadcast but Garay denied that the voice in the recording was his and said he did not work for the station at that time.
Aside from flimsy nature of the evidence against Garay, it is outrageous that such a long jail sentence has been imposed for a press offence. Contrary to the trend in most Latin American countries, jail sentences for defamation have become more frequent in Peru in recent years. It violates Inter-American legal standards and encourages the media to censor themselves, Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) said.
In response to this unjust conviction and sentence, RSF appealed to each of the two candidates in the June 5 second round of Peru’s presidential election – Ollanta Humala et Keiko Fujimori – to give a solemn undertaking to decriminalize press offences if they win the election.
Garay has often covered sensitive stories in the past and made enemies within the local judiciary and political class when he criticised the failure to convict the presumed masterminds of journalist Alberto Rivera Fernández’s 2004 murder in Pucallpa, the capital of Ucayali.
Garay was one of the first journalists to expose the involvement of Pucallpa’s former mayor, Luis Valdez Villacorta, who was eventually acquitted. RSF hoped that Garay’s conviction will be overturned and meanwhile called for his immediate release.
