About IFEX:

News by region:

IFEX Campaigns and Advocacy:

IFEX Email Products:

Opportunities and assistance:

Alert

Community radio station bombed

(AMARC/IFEX) - Puerto Casado-based radio station Quebracho Poty was almost completely burned down after several bombs exploded in its studios at dawn on 2 August 2005.

According to information provided to AMARC, unidentified individuals entered the San Ramón Nonato parish church where the radio station's studios are located, broke the security lock on the back door and planted some homemade bombs. The station is the only media outlet in the area.

"The assailants have damaged almost the entire station, and right now it cannot broadcast and the population is therefore incommunicado. We are dismayed by this event and ask for members of Paraguay's Journalists' Union to take an interest in the problem, given that it is an attack on freedom of expression," Nélida Otazú, a journalist with Radio Paí Puku, in El Chaco, told FM Trinidad, a community radio station based in Asunción, the capital.

Some sources consulted by the Jakueke news agency (Agencia Jakueke) are holding the World Unification Church, a sect founded by Korean businessman Sun Myung Moon, responsible for the bombing, saying that the sect was retaliating for the radio station's active support for the community's request that the government expropriate 52,000 hectares of land currently controlled by the Moon sect and return it to its owners.

AMARC's Latin America and Caribbean section (AMARC-ALC) repudiated the bombing, and demanded that the government make every effort to guarantee that the right to communication can be freely exercised. In a communiqué sent to the Paraguayan authorities, AMARC-ALC coordinator Ernesto Lamas said "community radios are legitimate media outlets and spaces for the community to express itself. Attacks such as this impact not only on Radio Quebracho Poty, but on the community as a whole, and constitute direct attacks on the right to communication and freedom of expression."