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Honduran Newspapers Deliver Photo Images of Resistance Participants to Police
by Belén Fernández, NarcoNews (reposted)
Monday Nov 2nd, 2009 6:34 AM
Saturday, October 31, 2009 As if the ethical nature of the photographic practices of pro-coup Honduran newspapers has not already been sufficiently negated by the use of Photoshop to erase blood from anti-coup victims of military and police repression, evidence of even more incriminating tactics has now emerged. According to a source with intimate knowledge of the goings-on at one of the leading Tegucigalpa dailies – who spoke on condition of anonymity in the interest of personal safety – Honduran papers have also responded to the June 28 coup against President Mel Zelaya by delivering photos of Resistance marchers to the police.
Andrés Pavón, president of the Committee for the Defense of Human Rights in Honduras (CODEH), confirmed that the presence at marches of photographers from the daily El Heraldo had not resulted in extensive photographic coverage of the events in the paper itself, causing him to question the real purpose of the images. Speaking at the Burger King outside the Brazilian embassy in Tegucigalpa where Zelaya continues to be confined, Pavón defined newspaper contributions to police archives as journalistic terrorism – a different take on the media terrorism that coup president Roberto Micheletti had accused Channel 36 of on September 21 for reporting that Zelaya was in Tegucigalpa and not in a Managua hotel.

El Heraldo, La Prensa, and La Tribuna – essentially interchangeable mouthpieces for the Honduran coup government – appear on the list of members of the Miami-based Inter American Press Association (IAPA), whose mission according to the organization’s website includes “defend[ing] press freedom wherever it comes under threat in the Americas.” Ricardo Trotti – Press Freedom Director for the organization representing newspaper owners throughout the hemisphere – responded over the phone to a request for the definition of “press freedom” utilized by the IAPA, his first response being that he did not understand the question; his second was that the Declaration of Chapultepec, adopted by the Hemispheric Conference on Freedom of Expression in Mexico City in 1994, provided some aspects of the definition but that press freedom was an abstract rather than a concrete concept

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