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| | IWMF Wire Newsletter, October IWMFWire: Press Freedom in Guatemala |
 | | Since January, there have been 60 attacks or threats against Guatemalan journalists and media organizations who report on the corrupt practices of the country’s government officials and the Guatemalan Republican Front (FRG), its ruling party, according to Journalists Against Corruption, a regional project of El Salvador-based PROBIDAD, a non-profit anti-corruption and free press organization. |
 | | Guatemalan President Alfonso Portillo has complained about media investigations into several scandals in which he was involved, and conservative Guatemalans have turned against the media, incited by media owners who use their broadcast channels and newspapers to verbally attack journalists who report on corruption, according to reports by Paris-based Reporters Sans Frontieres. |
 | | On July 24, at a demonstration of conservatives demanding that former military dictator General Efrain Rios Montt be allowed to run in the upcoming November 9 elections, protesters beat several journalists with clubs, and doused others with gasoline and threatened to set them on fire. |
| www.iwmf.org /ewire/7755/7756/ch-7763 (763 words) |
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