Guatemala City/Prensa Latina
Guatemalan President Bernardo Arévalo on Wednesday called out the Public Prosecutor’s Office (MP) for abusing its power against renowned journalist José Rubén Zamora, who last Monday completed two years in prison.
In a message on the social network X, the president said that the day before he met with the reporter’s son, José Carlos, and stressed that the imprisonment of the latter’s father is an example of the corruption that prevails in the Attorney General’s Office.
The MP “insists on criminalizing him (the founder of El Periódico) and maintaining a process full of inconsistencies,” the head of state added.
“The repression and censorship of journalists is a direct attack on democracy,” said the 67-year-old politician, a supporter of the Movimiento Semilla party.
The reform of the Organic Law of the MP is the path to ending injustice, persecution and criminalization against journalists and human rights defenders, insisted the sociologist by profession and former deputy.
In a recent letter, Zamora warned that the cases against him by the Special Prosecutor’s Office against Corruption and Impunity of the MP are spurious and have no legal basis, emphasized the communicator, who was awarded the 2024 Gabo Award for Excellence in mid-May.
For several months he has been waiting for a retrial of the case that resulted in his conviction on June 14, 2023, to six years of non-commutable imprisonment.
He also faces two other investigations in which he is accused of conspiracy to obstruct justice and using falsified documents.
The reporter claimed that it was a persecution sponsored by the three branches of government against elPeriódico, one of the most critical media outlets not only against the government of Alejandro Giammattei (2020-2024), but also before that of Otto Pérez Molina (2016-2020).
At the end of February, the president of this Central American territory expressed his confidence that Zamora could be released soon and criticized the “almost torture-like” conditions he was suffering in prison.
He said that the journalist “is an example of the type of abuses that are generated when justice institutions are co-opted” by “political-criminal networks.”
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