'To persecute any critical voice': Jailed Guatemalan journalist Zamora's son on his father's arrest
By Dánae Vílchez on October 12, 2022 10:44 AM EDT
When Guatemalan police arrested José Rubén Zamora in July 2022, it marked the latest salvo in a decades-long campaign of harassment against the pioneering Guatemalan investigative journalist, who won CPJ’s International Press Freedom Award in 1995.
Zamora, who founded elPeriódico in 1996 and still serves as president of the newspaper, was arrested on July 29. He remains in pre-trial detention in the Mariscal Zavala prison in Guatemala City, as prosecutors conduct a criminal investigation on charges of money laundering, blackmail, and influence peddling.
Zamora, his family, and his colleagues have claimed that the case is retaliation for elPeriódico’s reporting on alleged corruption involving Guatemalan President Alejandro Giammattei and Attorney General Consuelo Porras.
Zamora’s son, José Zamora, who is also a journalist and currently works at Exile Content Studio, a Spanish-language entertainment and media firm, in Miami, spoke to CPJ in a video interview about his father’s case and the current state of press freedom and democracy in Guatemala.
. . .
In 2008, they tried again to kill my dad. They kidnapped him coming out of a restaurant, took him away, beat him, injected him with something to kill him, and then left him. Luckily that place was so cold that he got hypothermia. And hypothermia was, in the end, what saved him. Firefighters brought him in, thinking he was a corpse, and when they began to prepare for the autopsy, they realized that he had vital signs [and treated him].
More:
https://cpj.org/2022/10/to-persecute-any-critical-voice-jailed-guatemalan-journalist-zamoras-son-on-his-fathers-arrest/
José Rubén Zamora
Guatemalan President Alejandro Giammattei