Journalist Marino Zapete revealed that his TV program, El Jarabe, was taken off the air due to pressure by Attorney General Jean Alain Rodríguez after the claims of irregularities in government contracting he presented on 25 September 2019.
When interviewed on the El Dia TV show by Huchi Lora and Javier Cabreja, Zapete said that Luis Garcia, the owner of Teleradio América, had written to him saying that the Attorney General of the Republic had called him and said that his sister, Maybeth, was going to sue Zapete. Garcia also told him that the Attorney General said that the TV station was included in the lawsuit, but because they were friends, he [Jean Alain Rodriguez] had told his sister to take the station out of the lawsuit.
Zapete’s lawyer, Jorge Luis Polanco, said the only thing that Zapete did on his El Jarabe talk show was to share evidence of irregularities he had obtained using the Law for Access to Public Information. During the El Dia TV program, Polanco confirmed claims made by his client were all backed by certificates made by the government departments themselves.
Zapete revealed that Gonzalo Castillo, when he was at the Ministry of Public Works (MOPC), had given three contracts to one company, Asimra, SRL, owned by the sister of the Attorney General, Maybeth Virginia Rodríguez Sánchez, from June 2013 to November 2020. The contracts are worth around US$15 million.
Maybeth Rodríguez has not presented evidence that the claims made by Zapete on the irregularities in government contracting between former Public Works Minister Gonzalo Mejía and Asimra SRL are untruthful.
News commentator Marino Zapete said on El Dia: “The Public Prosecutor’s Office is supposed to investigate if a complaint is made, but no, what they ask is that I retract myself, when what they should have done is to submit me to Justice… It is the prosecutors who should eventually investigate to see if there is merit in what is being presented. What they do is persecute the journalist who denounces it, and they get to the point of condemning the journalist,” he said.
He reached this conclusion after reading a tweet Rosalba Ramos, National District prosecutor, who stated: “Freedom of expression has a limit: the truth”. “In other words, they already investigated and determined that what I said is a lie,” he remarked.
Castillo is presently running for the presidential candidacy on the ruling Dominican Liberation Party (PLD) ticket.
Zapete is known as a muckraking journalist. When President Hipólito Mejía was in office, he ordered Zapete to be jailed for an investigative journalistic report he had carried out.
Marino Zapete’s daily “El Jarabe” show continues on his YouTube channel. This is not the first investigative reporter who has been suspended from a TV or radio show. In an earlier case, Edith Febles (now on YouTube as Edith Febles, La Cosa Como Es) was removed for denouncing irregularities in the procedures carried out by the Attorney General Office to overhaul all the prosecutors in the country. Another journalist removed from their TV or radio shows for denouncing administrative corruption in the Medina administration was Altagracia Salazar (now on YouTube as Altagracia Salazar Sin Maquillaje) who has also established her YouTube channel.
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1 October 2019