“My hands and fingers are crippled from the frequent use of handcuffs, but they won’t beat me,” says the president and founder of the now-defunct El Periódico, José Rubén Zamora, from his cell in the Mariscal Zavala military prison in Guatemala City. Saturday is serving one year in jail, after he was arrested on July 29, 2022 at his home, after a raid by dozens of prosecutors and agents of the National Civil Police at the headquarters of this newspaper that in 2021 received the Rey Award from Spain to the Outstanding Media of Ibero-America.

The Public Ministry’s Special Prosecutor Against Impunity requested a 40-year prison sentence against him for the crimes of money laundering and other assets (20 years), influence peddling (12) and blackmail (8), although ultimately, The Eighth Criminal Sentencing Court of Guatemala sentenced him only on June 14 to six uncommutable years in prison for money laundering and other assets, while it acquitted him of the other two crimes considering that they had not been accredited by the Prosecutor’s Office .

Specifically, the Court considers proven the accusation of the Prosecutor’s Office in the sense that Zamora took actions so that the former director of the Banco de los Trabajadores Ronald García Navarijo received 300,000 quetzales (37,500 euros) and, in turn, he obtained a check for the same economic amount to deposit it in an Aldea Global, S.A. account. of which the owner of El Periódico was the legal representative “and thus be able to dispose of that money whose origin is illegal.” The intention, as argued by one of the judges of the Eighth Court, was to give the money an “appearance of legality to hide its illegal origin,” which was an offense “against the national economy and the stability and solidity of the Guatemalan financial system.” For his part, Zamora maintains that this money comes from the sale of a work of art and even showed the media a photo of it to justify the origin of the 300,000 quetzales.

The Prosecutor’s Office was not satisfied with this sentence, for which reason it has filed an appeal, in order to increase the prison sentence against Zamora to 40 years, insisting that his investigation “has no relation to his quality as a journalist, but with money laundering in his capacity as a businessman”.

For its part, Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has launched a campaign to demand the “immediate release” of the man who founded El Periódico in 1996 and which published its last edition on May 15. This organization denounces that Zamora, who is in “undignified conditions”, was sentenced “without a fair trial” after being “victim of judicial harassment that intensified under the Presidency of Alejandro Giammattei” in Guatemala. It so happened that during the process, the journalist had to change lawyers up to nine times, after several of his lawyers were also criminalized and even imprisoned, while others went into exile to avoid being arrested.

RSF recalls that El Periódico was always characterized by its “shocking investigations into the corruption of the elites in power”, which affected the current Giammattei administration. It also points out that Zamora himself revealed last May to a joint mission of RSF and other organizations in defense of press freedom in Guatemala who were able to visit him that he is a “victim of psychological torture.”

For RSF, the sentencing of Zamora, which occurred just 10 days before the first round of the Guatemalan elections, held on June 25, “had the objective of sowing terror and dissuading journalists from publishing information that was upsetting to the power “. Likewise, it recalls that the same Prosecutor’s Office that requested 40 years in prison against the founder of El Periódico, requested on July 12 the suspension of the legal personality of the Semilla political party, which was the second most voted force in the elections and whose candidate, Bernardo Arévalo de León, aspires to the Presidency of Guatemala in the second round of August 20.

“Journalism is in danger in Guatemala,” warns RSF, which is why it urges the population to urgently sign the petition urging the Guatemalan authorities to “immediately release” José Rubén Zamora and drop all charges against him, taking into account He says that he faces two other criminal proceedings for an alleged conspiracy to obstruct justice and an alleged use of false documents.

From his cell, Zamora, at 66, continues to write a blog in which he points out that “even if their fiercest enemies advise them, I will be here waiting for the moment of justice and truth.” The journalist recounts his routine in the isolation module where he is in the same prison where the protagonists of his investigative reports are held, including former Guatemalan president Otto Pérez Molina, who has been incarcerated since September 2015 for various cases of corruption.

“In the refrigerated mausoleum where I live or perhaps rather die without pause, subject, in winter and summer, to four daily tsunamis of dense dust that relentlessly enter through the high rectangular vents on the front wall of my sumptuous tomb, they have dried and burned my eyes and flooded my ears, nose, pores and lungs and that once introduced they cannot be removed from the body”, he laments.

Thus, he denounces that, as a whole, this “new reality of 12 months has damaged my eyesight, my voice has almost disappeared, caused reflux and perennial allergies.” Zamora goes on to say that “at certain times of the day, the dense and suffocating dust resembles a static cloud, to a large extent because air does not flow and only the cold is a constant due to the fact that the sun enters through high and elevated vents. rectangular between 4:30 p.m. and 5:15 p.m. depending on the time of year.

Despite all this, he stresses that “not everything is bad”, because for an hour a day he goes for a walk on a 12.5-meter sidewalk, “locked in a kind of hermetic chicken coop with large padlocks, watched over by four high-resolution cameras and guarded by six well-armed guards 24 hours a day and finally surrounded by a metal wall about 2.8 to 3 meters high, topped by coiled barbed wire.”

Zamora’s defense has already filed a special appeal against the sentence to request the acquittal of the crime for which he was convicted and order his release. The day Zamora was sentenced, he compared the Guatemalan justice system to the “inquisition” by accusing him without evidence and denounced that the Central American country has become a “dictatorship” in which all his rights to defense and due process have been “violated”. . The journalist also announced that he will appeal to the Court

Inter-American Commission on Human Rights to obtain the justice that, in his opinion, he has not achieved in Guatemala.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project