Juan Manuel Martínez Moreno, a grass-roots activist who had been wrongly held for the past year as a suspect in the 2006 murder of US cameraman Brad Will of the Indymedia agency in the southern city Oaxaca, was finally released yesterday for lack of evidence.

Martínez participated in a series protests that the Popular Assembly of Oaxaca Peoples (APPO) staged against Oaxaca governor Ulises Ruiz Ortiz in 2006. Will sympathised with the protests and was filming a major one when he was shot on 27 October 2006.

“I was unjustly deprived of my freedom,” Martínez told local journalists yesterday. “There is evidence that shows who did this murder, but those who did it are being protected by Ulises Ruiz's administration.”

The Will family lawyer, Miguel Ángel de los Santos, told Reporters Without Borders: “We are now waiting for the investigation to resume, but this time in an objective manner.” De los Santos never thought Martínez had anything to do with Will's murder and nor did Reporters Without Borders. Martínez was scapegoat. To protect the governor's bodyguards, the Oaxaca authorities used the local judicial authorities to try to pin the murder on the APPO.

This episode has highlighted the incompetence or complicity of both the local and federal authorities at a time when press freedom is seriously threatened in Mexico, now the hemisphere's most dangerous country for journalists. A recent study by Article 19 and the National Centre for Social Communication (Cencos), a Mexican NGO, blamed 65 per cent of the attacks on the press on the authorities, and only 6.15 per cent on organised crime. Read also our report.

A new prosecutor, Gustavo Salas Chávez, took over at the head of the FEADP on 15 February. What resources does he plan to deploy to solve all the cases that have gone nowhere? What changes need to be made to the FEADP so that it could do the job it is supposed to do? We put these questions to Yolanda Valencia Vales, the head of the Chamber of Deputies' Special Commission for Monitoring Attacks on Journalists and Media, in a letter on 22 January. She has not yet replied.

Since the start of the year, three journalists have been murdered in Mexico, which is ranked 137th out of 175 countries in the 2009 Reporters Without Borders press freedom index. A total of 61 journalists have been killed in Mexico since 2000, and nine have disappeared.

Photo : The Indypendent

A newspaper editor's murder has brought the total of journalists killed in Mexico in the space of a month to three. Jorge Ochoa Martínez, the editor of the local daily El sol de la Costa and the weekly El Oportuno, was shot dead in Ayutla de los Libres, in the southern state of Guerrero, on 29 January. He was 55.

According to the police, Ochoa was shot several times with 38 calibre firearm. The authorities have not so far suggested any motive but his family told Reporters Without Borders they did not rule out the possibility that he was killed in connection with his work. The press freedom organisation therefore urges the authority to actively explore this hypothesis.

The family said it received several calls on the night of 29 January, including one from the police, saying Ochoa had been shot. One his sons told Reporters Without Borders: “I could not believe it. I thought it was a joke. I called my father several times but he did not pick up. Then I went to Ayutla and found his body.”

Although Ochoa's death confirms that Mexico continues to be the hemisphere's most dangerous country for the media, the authorities are failing to respond adequately to a wave of threats against media personnel by presumed drug traffickers and, in some cases, by local officials.

Juan Aparicio, the editor of El Observador, a magazine based in the southern state of Chiapas, was threatened by a member of the state's border police, Pedro León Toro Peña, on 20 January while covering a raid on a house where a kidnapping had taken place.

Armando Suárez, a reporter for Puerto Viejo, a magazine based in La Paz, in the northwestern state of Baja California, was threatened by Loreto mayor Yuan Yee Cunningham and was hit by local officials on 21 January.

The torching of a car outside the studios of a radio station in Los Mochis, in the northwestern state of Sinaloa, on 27 January was accompanied by a message that read: “This will happen to journalists. They are going to be burned. With best wishes, La Mochomera.”

A total of 61 journalists have been murdered since 2000 and nine others have gone missing since 2003 in Mexico, which was ranked 137th out of 175 countries in the 2009 Reporters Without Borders press freedom index.

(Photo : DR)

Reporters Without Borders and the Canadian media group Quebecor are in the process of installing an emergency centre of operations for Haitian journalists in the Port-au-Prince neighbourhood of Canapé-Vert. Located on Cheriez Street, the centre will have communications equipment provided by Quebecor. A second equipment convoy is due to arrive today from the Dominican Republic.

The centre's priority aim is to provide journalists who have not been able to work since the earthquake with essential means of communication. It is also intended to facilitate contact between media representatives and to provide government officials, politicians and NGOs with a a way to communicate with the Haitian media.

The Canapé-Vert centre also aims to provide a service to international news media seeking to understand Haitian reality, and could eventually produce and disseminate news and information in its own right by, for example, employing journalists with Haitian print media whose distribution has been suspended as a result of the earthquake.

Up to 20 journalists will be able to work in the centre at any one time. It also has a news conference room that can hold 40 people and a terrace that can hold 60 people. It will have broadband Internet, telephone lines, an audio and video conference system, a satellite TV link and printers, as well as facilities for journalists in distress.

The centre is meant to relay Haitian journalists' requests to the international community and to help evaluate the reconstruction needs of Haitian news media and the assistance needs of individual journalists and their families.

To be able to continue operating in the medium term, the centre will need technical and financial assistance from other NGOs, international bodies and foreign media. We would like to draw this need to the particular attention of the governments of the five countries with especially close links with Haiti: Canada, France, Brazil, Mexico and the United States, as well the spanish presidency of the EU.

We reiterate our appeal for donations and technical assistance. Help us to help Haitian journalists.