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Solidarity with the Prensa Comunitaria in Guatemala
From the moment it began operating, the Guatemalan digital media outlet Prensa Comunitaria focused on exposing the illegal and unjust situations experienced by communities under threat from companies and agents of the State, providing timely information on the dispossession and the forms of organization set up to oppose them.
For this reason, defamation, persecution and threats from those who saw their impunity exposed have been part of the history of Prensa Comunitaria, attacks that would later also be suffered by its sister publication, the feminist magazine Ruda Ruda.
Throughout more than ten years of work, several journalists from these media outlets have suffered criminal persecution, have been imprisoned, beaten and have even lost their lives in the exercise of journalism. Some have had to leave their homes and even the country for doing their job, for showing society the ways in which “development” and “democracy” are experienced in their communities.
When what was known in Guatemala as the “Pact of the Corrupt” took shape, Prensa Comunitaria continued its mission by providing timely information on the actions of this group that, through the Attorney General of the Public Prosecutor's Office, Consuelo Porras, have perverted justice and the rule of law in Guatemala, turning them into a bargaining chip for the highest bidder and crushing anyone who stood in their way.
In recent years, the number of legal practitioners, journalists and human rights defenders who have suffered spurious legal proceedings, unjust imprisonment and dehumanising exile has risen scandalously.
The attitude, professionalism, rigour and capacity to generate information of Prensa Comunitaria and Ruda have made them irreplaceable media for understanding the whole current process of the hijacking of democracy in the different territories of Guatemala.
From the fraudulent elections in the USAC to the current continuous destabilization maneuvers, including the elections of 2023 and the resolute popular action against the attempted electoral theft, everything that has happened has been narrated, analyzed, commented on, and documented by the team of these media outlets.
For this reason, the teams of Prensa Comunitaria and Ruda have been in the crosshairs of those who use power for their own benefit, twisting the law to silence criticism, and the persecution has grown in recent months, culminating in a direct threat from an anonymous source who tends to anticipate the spurious and punitive actions of the Public Prosecutor's Office.
The image of Nelton Rivera together with that of José Rubén Zamora behind bars is no coincidence: it suggests a similarity between the imprisonment of the owner of El Periódico and that of Nelton, one of the founders of Prensa Comunitaria. This constitutes a clear threat to silence our colleague and, what is more, the media outlet.
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