Attempt by Ecuadre:or's government to silence investigative journalism
Reporters Without Borders (RSF)
28 February 2023
2 minute read
President Guillermo Lasso's threat of ‘war’ against journalists doing investigative reporting is a desperate attempt to silence them.
This statement was originally published on rsf.org on 23 February 2023.
Reporters Without Borders (RSF) condemns Ecuadorean President Guillermo Lasso’s violent diatribes against the independent news website La Posta and calls on the government to respect investigative reporting by journalists, who are already threatened by Ecuador’s increasingly violent gang warfare.
“A price has been put on my head by criminal organisations,” La Posta’s Venezuelan founder, Andersson Boscán, told RSF, adding that he had learned this from a police source. “But the worst of the threats is the one by the president on the national TV channel, the threat of waging a war against those who want to abuse freedom of expression,” added one of the website’s investigative reporters, Jefferson Sanguña.
Sanguña was referring to President Lasso’s televised address on 14 February, when he referred to La Posta’s investigative reporters as “media terrorists” and accused them of being linked to drug trafficking.
The attacks were prompted by La Posta’s publication of an investigative report entitled “The Big Godfather” on 9 January about a network of corruption, which led parliament to set up a commission of enquiry. The fruit of six months of investigations by seven La Posta reporters, the report revealed alleged influence peddling within state-owned companies involving the president’s brother-in-law, and claimed that the Albanian mafia funded Lasso’s presidential election campaign.
More:
https://ifex.org/attempt-by-ecuadors-government-to-silence-investigative-journalism/
