The Inter American Press Association (SIP) today expressed his rejection of the campaign to smear the president Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador against Mexican journalists.
The president of the SIPJorge Canahuati, condemned “the stigmatizing, discrediting and disqualifying attitude of President López Obrador against journalists and the media.”
Canahuati, executive president of Grupo Opsa, from Honduras, added that “this abusive practice from the Executive Power is extremely dangerous, which puts at risk the safety of those who carry out investigative and critical journalism that can make them uncomfortable.”
The case that is currently in the spotlight is the revelation, by López Obrador, of the journalist’s alleged income Carlos Loret de Mola, who has been a critic of his administration. The revelation came after Loret de Mola published a report, at the end of January, about the expensive home in which a son of the president lived for a time in Houston, Texas.
The residence was then owned by an executive of the Baker Hughes oil services company, which has millionaire contracts with the state-owned company Petróleos Mexicanos (Pemex).
The chairman of the IAPA’s Committee on Freedom of the Press and Information, Carlos Jornet, said that “the case of Loret Mola is an example of the president’s vengeful stance, who used confidential tax information to attack the journalist.” Jornet, journalistic director of La Voz del interior, from Argentina, considered that “the escalation of personal attacks on the media and journalists who question their management in government and disseminate information that they consider negative for their administration is an invitation to exercise more violence and is contrary to the tolerance that should prevail in a democracy”.
Both Canahuati and Jornet reiterated to President López Obrador the exhortation to “immediately suspend this harmful practice, precisely in a country where violence continues to be the greatest threat to press freedom.”
In a letter sent to the president of Mexico on February 4, Canahuati and Jornet stated that “denigrating the press from the top of power is not a dialectical game… even less so in dark hours like those that Mexico is experiencing due to this wave of violence”. The IAPA recalled that in the first weeks of 2022 alone, five journalists have been murdered in Mexico.
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