Through death threats and scare tactics, Honduran reporter perseveres
FEBRUARY 6, 2018
REPORTING BY
Sasha Chavkin
Through death threats and scare tactics, Honduran reporter ‘perseveres’
Lourdes Ramirez, an ICIJ member and reporter in Honduras who focuses on human rights issues, has had the same away message on her Skype account for the past few years: “Perseverando.”
The message means “persevering.” For Ramirez, reporting on topics from a rash of unsolved murders of women to conditions in garment factories to Honduras’ powerful organized crime networks has been an act of constant perseverance, as well as considerable bravery.
. . .
She has also been warned off stories by hooded men who bundled her into a vehicle to threaten her life and, years later, forced to flee Honduras after receiving another wave of death threats. Although she could have applied for asylum in the United States, she returned to the country and continued reporting.
In 2014, she worked with ICIJ on the Evicted & Abandoned investigation of forced displacement caused by development projects financed by the World Bank, joining an on-the-ground reporting trip in the violence-racked Honduran province of Bajo Aguan.
More:
https://www.icij.org/blog/2018/02/death-threats-scare-tactics-honduran-reporter-perseveres/
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For Reporting The Truth, A Hit Man Told Her He Could Have Her Killed For $25
KAELYN FORDE
13 JANUARY 2016, 11:30
In July 2014, Lourdes Ramirez and her television crew had arrived at the public hospital in San Pedro Sula, the second largest city in Honduras. Outside, gang members were charging patients' families a bribe to visit their relatives. The hospital's security guards, claiming they had not been paid in months, stood by, enforcing the bribes. Inside, the story was even worse: medicine stolen and sold on the black market, criminals hastening the deaths of patients so they could charge families a commission on their coffins.
But Ramirez and her team found the most gruesome case in the emergency room. A man who had been tortured by the gangs lay in a bed with a wound so infected "there were literally worms coming out of his neck," Ramirez said. The camera rolled, and that night, Hondurans across the country could see the painful truth: Drug gangs had taken over the public hospital, and the police and military were doing nothing to stop it. Two days later, the man in the emergency room was dead.
For that story, and many others that she reported in the country that has become the murder capital of the world, Ramirez — who was awarded the International Women's Media Foundation Courage In Journalism Award last fall — received serious death threats, both from gangs and the security forces. She shared her powerful and inspiring story with Refinery29 while in New York to accept the award.
. . .
"The women were saying that they were working under a lot of stress, that they had to produce more than 500 pieces of clothes a day, that they didn’t have time to go to the bathroom, and that they had urinary infections. They had all kinds of injuries, these young women, after six months working in a maquila.
More:
http://www.refinery29.uk/2016/01/104329/honduran-journalist-death-threats-murder-capital-of-world
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