Journalist Daysi Lizeth Mina Huamán Still Missing in Peru

HAVANA TIMES – Peruvian authorities must do everything possible to locate journalist Daysi Lizeth Mina Huamán and conduct a full and transparent investigation into her disappearance, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today.

Mina, a reporter for the television broadcaster Cable VRAEM in the central Peruvian city of Ayacucho, has been missing since January 26, according to news reports.

On the day she disappeared, Mina voted in Peru’s congressional elections in the nearby town of Santa Rosa and filed a report on the elections that day at about 3:30 p.m., according to a statement by the National Association of Peruvian Journalists, a local industry group. She was last seen at a Santa Rosa bus station, where she planned to take a bus to the town of San Francisco to meet her boyfriend, who reported to authorities the next day that she was missing, the statement said.

“Peruvian authorities must employ all resources at their disposal to conduct a thorough search for journalist Daysi Lizeth Mina Huamán and ensure her safety,” said CPJ Central and South America Program Coordinator Natalie Southwick in New York. “Authorities should investigate whether her disappearance was tied to her reporting on elections or other work she has done as a journalist.”

About a week after her disappearance, the journalist’s family members found Mina’s identity card and other personal documents along the side of a road between Santa Rosa and San Francisco, according to a report by the Institute for Press and Society, a Lima-based press freedom group.

That report said that Mina, 21, was a recent university graduate and had started working for Cable VRAEM just two weeks before she disappeared.

In a phone interview, a member of the Santa Rosa police department, who would not give his name, said there was no further information about Mina’s disappearance and that the case remains under investigation.