By El Latino Newsroom
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When Guatemalan journalist José Rubén Zamora returned to his home after more than two years in prison without a conviction, he found it empty.
He said it smelled of abandonment after his family fled the country, fearing they would face his same fate.
On Monday, one week after his release, Zamora discussed his own uncertain future in an interview with The Associated Press under the shadow of efforts to keep him behind bars and his concern for other journalists that do the kind of investigative work he did.
Thrust into the spotlight, the 68-year-old journalist is shy, not keen to be the target of news.
He said he can still feel the aftermath of imprisonment in his bones, and also in his day-to-day life after funding his legal defense forced him to sell his belongings, only skating by through support from his children.
“Frankly, the feeling of not having any money, that is mine, is complicated and I don’t have the means to get around,” he said.
The interview comes after a long journey for Zamora, who has spent the past three decades working as a journalist, 24 of those years were as president of El Periódico, the news organization he founded to investigate corruption in Guatemala.
It’s a dangerous topic to investigate in a country like Guatemala, where the Attorney General’s Office raided electoral facilities, seized and opened ballot boxes and targeted the Seed Movement party of now-President Bernardo Arévalo in an effort to keep him from taking office.
To this day, Zamora believes it was his paper’s investigative work that led him to be targeted by prosecutors.
In particular, it was his pointed criticism of former President Alejandro Giammattei and his ally, current Attorney General Consuelo Porras, who was sanctioned by the United States for allegedly obstructing corruption investigations.
Porras’ agents raided Zamora’s house in July 2022 and arrested him, accusing him of money laundering after he asked a friend to deposit $38,000 that Zamora said was a donation to his news organization.
Zamora said he did not put the money in the bank himself because the person who made the donation feared being retaliated against for supporting the media outlet.
He was initially convicted and sentenced to six years, a ruling that was annulled due to procedural failures, then he was later accused of falsifying documents and faced a second trial for allegedly lying in the first case against him.
In late October, he was finally set free, after a judge cited that two years of pre-trial detention violated national and international human rights law.
Upon his release, one of his first visitors was President Arévalo.
“I explained to him that in Guatemala, there have never been institutions dedicated to control or rigorous oversight,” Zamora said. “That is why the press is so important: There is no prosecution or punishment for the corrupt, rather there are walls of impunity.”
EL SALVADOR
More than 2,000 soldiers and 500 police officers surrounded a populous neighborhood on the outskirts of El Salvador’s capital on Monday in an effort to quash the remnants of gangs the president said were trying to set up shop in the area.
“There is a group of gang members in hiding. We have established a security fence throughout the neighborhood… to extract every last gang member in the area,” wrote Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele in a post on X.
Police surrounded the San Marcos neighborhood with a military fence, setting up checkpoints to prevent gang members from escaping, said Defense Minister René Francis Merino Monroy.
The fence was the third of its kind to be installed in parts of San Salvador intended to find and arrest gang members still operating in the country. In March, Bukele ordered similar barricades to be put up in a northern part of the country, which he said was to dismantle a faction of the Barrio 18 gang.
The blockade is the latest in the populist leader’s war on gangs, announced by Bukele following a surge of violence in March 2022.
Bukele’s government called for a “state of emergency” and waived constitutional rights to arrest more than 1% of El Salvador’s population with little evidence.
The crackdown has fueled sharp criticism from human rights groups, raising alarm about prison conditions and saying many of those arrested were innocent or only had loose ties to gangs.
Other measures he’s taken, like seeking re-election despite a constitutional ban of presidents serving two consecutive terms, have raised other democratic alarms.
But the war on gangs also dealt a strong blow to the Barrio 18 and MS-13 gangs that have long sowed terror in much of the country, extorting money, murdering those who didn’t pay and trafficking drugs.
The measures resulted in a sharp dip in homicides and spurred a populist fervor for Bukele.
Despite effectively declaring victory in his war, the president has continued to extend the ”state of emergency” for over two years now, claiming that such measures are needed to take out the remains of El Salvador’s gangs.
MEXICO
A bus tipped over in central Mexico after colliding with a trailer that detached from a truck transporting corn, killing 24 people and injuring five, Mexican authorities said Saturday.
The crash happened at midnight Friday when the bus was leaving Tepic in the western Mexico state of Nayarit bound for Ciudad Juarez in northern Mexico. The injured were being treated at a hospital in Zacatecas.
Juan Manríquez Moreno, coordinator of the National Guard in Zacatecas, said in a video statement shared on social media that the truck trailer detached on a highway. The passenger bus collided with the trailer and tipped over on its right side.
Rodrigo Reyes Mugüerza, secretary general of the government in Zacatecas, also shared a statement from the scene of the accident. “We send our solidarity and condolences to all the families and people who have lost a loved one in this unfortunate accident,” he said.
He added that the highway where the crash happened was closed as officials secured the area. Authorities said they will soon release the name of the injured for families to locate them.
