Dina Meza: a journalist living dangerously in Honduras
Dina Meza: a journalist living dangerously in Honduras
Death threats fail to deter Dina Meza and other Honduran investigative reporters from exposing abuses in the world's most perilous land.
By: Oakland Ross Feature Writer, Published on Tue Mar 25 2014
To hear Dina Meza tell it, not a single honest state institution survives in her native land, the Central American republic of Honduras. “You must be dreaming,” she says over the phone. “We have to clean everything up. We have to start from zero because everything is corrupt.”
It is not just state agencies that have been compromised, either. Privately run organizations ranging from security firms to mining companies to associations of landowners have also been infected by a viral epidemic of impunity and lawlessness that goes back at least five years, to a coup in 2009, and probably a good deal further. The resulting chaos represents a lethal peril for all of Honduras’s 8 million citizens, but it poses special hazards for Honduran journalists.
Dina Meza is a Honduran journalist. “Journalists who carry out investigations receive threats from all sides,” she says.
The 51-year-old mother of three should know. She has received more than her share of death threats — typically promising plenty of sexual violence first — and she is in Washington, D.C., this week to present her assessment of the dire outlook for journalists in Honduras before a session of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. Meza’s appearance in Washington follows the recent publication of a Canadian report on attacks against the press in Honduras.
More:
http://www.thestar.com/news/world/2014/03/25/dina_meza_a_journalist_living_dangerously_in_honduras.html
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March 24, 2014 6:34 PM
Canadian report documenting murdered journalists and impunity in Honduras to be presented in Washington, D.C.
TORONTO, March 24, 2014 /CNW/ - In February 2012, Honduran journalist Dina Meza received two text messages that threatened her with sexual violence and death. The messages were signed Commando Alvarez Martinez, a pseudonym that is often used in Honduras to threaten human rights activists and journalists with torture, rape and death. The obvious intent was to move her to stop her investigative reporting in Honduras. Ever since the 2009 coup, 32 journalists in the country have been murdered and many more, like Meza, continue to work in the face of such threats. According to a recent report by PEN Canada, PEN International, and the University of Toronto, Faculty of Law's International Human Rights Program, titled Honduras: Journalism in the Shadow of Impunity, much of this violence is wrought by the state itself, and its corrupt police force. These messages were not the only threats that Meza has received and she and her three children are regularly harassed, living in constant fear of retribution for Meza's work.
Now this week, thanks to the work of Canadians, Dina Meza will tell her story and publicly testify in Washington D.C. about the impunity and violence journalists like her face in Honduras.
PEN and the University of Toronto Faculty of Law's International Human Rights Program, have been granted a public hearing before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in Washington D.C. on Tuesday, March 25. This is the first time that the Commission has agreed to hear such a matter raised by the Canadian chapter of the freedom of expression organization and the report's key points will be read into the official record. Also, representatives of the Honduran government will be present and will have the opportunity to publicly respond to the report.
http://www.newswire.ca/en/story/1327745/canadian-report-documenting-murdered-journalists-and-impunity-in-honduras-to-be-presented-in-washington-d-c
