FEMINIST INTERNATIONAL RADIO ENDEAVOUR JULY 2009 |
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WOMEN'S RADIO PROGRAMS
SILENCED WITH
15 July 2009
CAWN
-- Central American Women's Network
Women’s radio programmes silenced The Honduran women’s organization Feminists in Resistance reported on Monday 13 July that the radio programme Bullaranga produced by CAWN’s partner organization in Honduras, the Honduran Women’s Studies Centre (CEM-H), and the regular radio programme of the Honduran Women’s Rights Centre, Tiempo de hablar, were blocked a few minutes after beginning transmission on the morning of Saturday 11 July. The slot allocated to these programmes transmitted by Radio Cadena Voces was still silent on Monday. Technicians at the radio station said they ‘did not know’ what had caused the gap in transmission.
Foreign journalists detained in Honduras
Also on
Saturday 11 July, police operatives of the de facto government arrested
a number of television journalists from the Venezuelan state television
VTV and the news channel Telesur.
Telesur’s
special correspondent in Honduras, Madeleine García, reported that a
group of police, following orders from the de facto government, entered
the Tegucigalpa hotel where the journalists were staying on Saturday
night, arrested them and transferred them without explanation to a
police station, where their documents were closely scrutinized.
The
journalists were released after diplomatic intervention by the
Venezuelan government, but were warned by the police that they should
leave the country and that ‘there’s nothing for you to do here’. ‘You’ve
got your President Chávez to thanks for this,’ they were told, according
to VTV reporter Eduardo Silvera; ‘get out of this country, it’s going to
turn nasty.’ On the morning of Sunday 12 July their hotel was still
surrounded by police, and the journalists only allowed to leave it under
police guard. They were later deported to Venezuela.
This is
the second time Telesur reporters have been arrested: on 29 June
soldiers forcibly detained a Telesur team which was covering army and
police repression of a peaceful demonstration the day after the coup.
Other attacks on freedom of the press
Another
human rights violation against a journalist was the arrest on 28 June of
the Honduran cartoonist Allan McDonald. Soldiers broke into his home
just outside Tegucigalpa and arrested him together with his small
daughter, Abril, aged 17 months. They were released the following day,
after international pressure.
Allan
McDonald was a regular contributor to the Honduran daily El Heraldo
and other media, and had expressed his support for President
Zelaya’s opinion poll scheduled for 28 June. According to a phone call
he was able to make from the hotel in which he was detained, the
soldiers ransacked his house and made a bonfire of his cartoons and art
equipment.
Two other Honduran
journalists, Eduardo Maldonado y Esdras Amado López, were arrested at
about the same time, and two women journalists from Spain and Chile were
detained in the hotel to which McDonald was taken.
Telesur
says that it and VTV are the only channels to be transmitting live
coverage of the coup and the protests against it. The privately owned
television and radio stations in Honduras are not transmitting any
information about the coup. This lack of coverage of the coup by the
mainstream national media also affects international reporting of the
coup, which has on the whole been sparse and has not focused on the
impact of the coup on Honduran citizens. You can find out more about the impact of the coup on Honduran women and their active and courageous resistance to it on CAWN’s website, www.cawn.org.
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