A Guatemalan choose orders the return to jail of the journalist José Rubén Zamora | EUROtoday

Guatemalan journalist José Rubén Zamora, founder and president of the previous each day The PERIÓTICO, He will return to jail after the choose answerable for his case fulfilled the order of a superior judicial courtroom that ordered the home arrest to withdraw.

The journalist was arrested in July 2022 accused of cash laundering and spent greater than 800 days within the Mariscal Zavala navy jail, in Guatemala City, the place he denounced remedy much like torture and the place he left with a substitute measure in October final yr. The choose answerable for the case, Erick García, mentioned Monday that the decision of the Chamber left him “unable” to know the request for coercion measures offered by the protection of Zamora.

He additionally defined that the order contains with out effecting every part acted on October 18, 2024, when he granted him the home jail, so the journalist needed to return to preventive detention. Judge García denounced that he and his workers have been victims of threats and intimidation by unknown individuals, with out giving extra particulars.

“Mr. Judge had no options. Arbitrarily, the room ordered this. Despite his convictions, they left him in a dead end, ”Zamora mentioned on the finish of the viewers.

On Monday morning, the president of Guatemala, Bernardo Arévalo, mentioned in a press convention that this case is “absolutely spurious”, that “it reveals the worst of the crisis” within the judicial system and reveals the criminalization methods which might be being adopted from the Public Ministry.

“It is not just José Rubén Zamora exclusively who is affected, they are not only journalists, who are being intimidated and threatened. It is the people of Guatemala who suffers from a continuation of manipulation and criminalization of the justice apparatus, ”mentioned Arévalo.

Zamora was sentenced in 2023 to 6 years in jail for cash laundering, however an appeals courtroom annulled the conviction and ordered a brand new trial for 2025. Now it will likely be time to attend for the continuity of his course of once more in the identical jail during which he was already held.