Elizabeth Ballantine, president of the Inter American Press Association, on Monday landed in Lima, Peru, amid a roiling, politically sensitive dispute that has pit the country’s president against some of its most powerful newspapers.
Ballantine is there leading the Inter American Press Association’s three-day exploratory mission into the controversy that’s convulsed Peru since 2013, when El Grupo Comercio, Peru’s premier newspaper company, spent $17 million acquiring a majority stake in Empresa Periodistica Nacional S.A., increasing El Grupo Comercio’s share of Peru’s media market from 50 percent of newspaper sales to 70 percent.
The acquisition prompted a flurry of criticism. In a televised interview, Peru’s President Ollanta Humala called on Peru’s Congress to debate, and possibly legislate, ownership of the country’s media, calling it too concentrated and “dangerous.”
“It is an embarrassment that we have a group that practically owns all of the media,” he said.
In the ensuing months, El Grupo Comercio has mounted a passionate counterargument, accusing the president of trying to limit press freedoms, stifle political criticism of the president’s administration and thwart readers’ access to dissenting opinions.
Meanwhile, El Grupo Comercio’s main rival, the media company Grupo La República Publicaciones S.A., has filed a lawsuit against El Grupo Comercio in Peruvian courts alleging the larger company is guilty of monopolistic practices.
Shortly after landing in Lima on Monday, Ballantine, a shareholder and director of Ballantine Communications Inc. (the company that owns The Durango Herald), joined the Chief Justice of Peru’s Supreme Court, Enrique Javier Mendoza Ramirez at a news conference regarding her organization’s efforts to learn more about the standoff.
Later in the afternoon, she met with Humala to discuss the situation.
The Inter American Press Association, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the defense and promotion of press freedom in the Americas, decided to investigate the feud on the ground in Peru at the organization’s Midyear Meeting in Barbados.
Ballantine was voted president of the Inter American Press Association in October 2013, just as Humala’s dispute with Peru’s most powerful press entered full swing.
According to a news release, the goal of the group’s exploratory mission “is to gather information and better understand the discussion over the purchase by the Grupo El Comercio of the Grupo Editorial Epensa.”
cmcallister@durangoherald.com
