Trial opens of alleged killers of journalist Carlos Quispe Quispe (Bolivia)

[Judi Lynn]

18 June 2008

Trial opens of alleged killers of journalist Carlos Quispe Quispe

The trial opened on 18 June of the alleged killers of Carlos Quispe Quispe, a journalist on Radio Municipal Pucarani, who died in the city of the same name in La Paz department, western Bolivia on 29 March after being beaten up by opponents of the mayor.

The six defendants, charged with “homicide” and “membership of a criminal gang”, were all in court for the opening. Four municipal councillors - Edwin Huampo Espinoza, Basilio Poma Poma, Rufina Zerna Flores and Nicolaza Cruz Quispe - and Julio Quisberth Quispe and Efraín Ticonipa, two leaders of the Pucarani municipal ‘vigilance committee’, a body that oversees council activities. The parents of the murder victim and Jorge Borda, legal advisor to the mayor, who is a civil party in the case, will all be giving evidence. According to statements made by Borda to Reporters Without Borders, the journalist was beaten up by members of the vigilance committee, incited by the accused municipal councillors.

Reporters Without Borders welcomes the opening of the trial as a first step in the fight against impunity and hopes that the court in Pucarani will determine the individual and collective responsibilities in the journalist’s murder.

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“Quispe is the first journalist to lose his life to the extreme political tension to which both state and privately-owned media - pro-government and pro-opposition - are now hostage,” Reporters Without Borders said. “The attack on Radio Municipal Pucarani that resulted in Quispe’s death was followed by attacks on two state-owned media in Sucre by radical groups hostile to the government.”

http://www.rsf.org/article.php3?id_article=26491