Central America

Reporters Without Borders is deeply saddened by the news that radio journalist Jean Liphète Nelson was gunned down yesterday in Cité Soleil, the poorest neighbourhood of the capital, Port-au-Prince.

Dramatic improvements in water and sanitation services are needed to eliminate cholera in Haiti and the Dominican Republic, health experts who took part in a UN-organized briefing to outline concrete steps to stem the spread of the disease in the region stressed.

Geneva – Two years after the devastating earthquake that flattened Haiti, the country remains “a fragile State, beset by chronic poverty and under-development. Its weak institutions leave children vulnerable to shocks and the impact of disaster”.

New York – Two years have elapsed since the devastating earthquake destroyed a whole country—Haiti, killing over 200,000 people. Still, three quarters of the population earn less than two dollars a day, 70 per cent do not have stable jobs, more than half of children do not go to school, and the great majority –70 to 80 per cent– had no access to electricity.

Reporters Without Borders condemns the violence used by police and soldiers to disperse yesterday’s demonstration by journalists – mostly women – outside the presidential palace in Tegucigalpa to demand justice for the 24 journalists killed since 2003, 17 of them since the June 2009 coup d’état. The latest journalist to be murdered, last week, was a woman.

Reporters Without Borders is astonished to learn that Marco Joel Álvarez Barahona, also known as El Unicornio” (The Unicorn), was acquitted by a court in the northern city of La Ceiba on 31 October of being the main perpetrator of last year’s murder of radio journalist David Meza Montesinos.

The concern that Reporters Without Borders expressed about Honduras’ readmission to the Organization of American States is as relevant as ever after the emergence of new media cases involving two TV journalists – Mario Castro Rodríguez and Edgardo Antonio Escoto Amador – who opposed the June 2009 coup and who have information about it.

The Dominican police have named the people they think masterminded and carried out the 2 August abduction and murder of journalist José Agustín Silvestre de los Santos and say the motive was an article by Silvestre linking the alleged mastermind to a recent murder.

Forty years after the Stonewall riots, when a group of homosexuals stood up to police to fight a raid on a New York City bar, a milestone for the gay movement, that day Honduras saw the Americas’ first coup d’état of the 21st century. In the aftermath, a slew of human rights violations occurred, many of them violence against Honduras’ gay community.

Reporters Without Borders condemns yesterday’s murder of TV presenter José Agustín Silvestre de los Santos, who was kidnapped in the eastern city of La Romana and was later found dead in El Peñon, on the road from La Romana to San Pedro de Macorís. He had been shot three times.