About IFEX:

News by region:

IFEX Campaigns and Advocacy:

IFEX Email Products:

Opportunities and assistance:

Alert

Radio Sonora producer shot dead in national capital

(CERIGUA/IFEX) - On 3 May 2007, World Press Freedom Day, journalist Mario Rolando López Sánchez, the 64-year-old general producer for Radio Sonora radio station, was shot dead by unidentified individuals in a building in the Nimajuyú neighbourhood of the capital, Guatemala City.

López Sánchez was the radio station's general producer for 14 years, and was co-producer of the critical daily political programme "Casos y cosas de la Vida Nacional".

Arnulfo Agustín Guzmán, manager of Radio Sonora, was emphatic in stating that López Sánchez's killing was not an act of common criminals, as nothing was stolen from him - not money, his identification, or even his late-model car, which was parked metres from the site of his murder.

Guzmán said he hopes that the killing is not intended as a warning to the radio station as a whole, as it might be, since López Sánchez was not involved in anything other than his work.