Honduras: Killing Free Expression
Posted: 08/05/2012 22:50
Erick Martínez Ávila, a 32-year old Honduran journalist and gay rights activist, was found dead and dumped in a ditch in Guasculile on 7 May 2012. His killers strangled him, and in doing so, brought the total number of journalists murdered in Honduras since 2007 to twenty-seven.
Martínez was a well-known spokesman for the lesbian and gay rights group Kuculnan and was politically active in Libertad y Refundación, the party of Manuel Zelaya, the former Honduran president who was deposed by a military coup in 2009.
The motive for Martínez' killing is unknown. But as a journalist critical of the current Honduran government, and as a Zelaya-supporter, Martínez was doubly vulnerable in a country where the rate of attacks on members of the press and the political opposition is accelerating. He is the seventeenth journalist to be murdered in Honduras in the last two years. Many more have suffered beatings and death threats, with government officials - including the army and the police - regularly implicated in these attacks.
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The coup of 2009 produced an illegal regime that ruled by force, suppressed opposition and censored the press. It was eventually succeeded in 2010 by President Porfirio Lobo Sosa's government - still unrecognized by some countries - which immediately offered an amnesty to all those involved in the coup.
More:
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/cathal-sheerin/honduras-killing-free-exp_b_1501260.html