Paper Alleges Harassment by Puerto Rico

At first, the newspaper and the politician were reasonably friendly. The newspaper dutifully described the politician’s game plan, outlined all his innovations. The government paid millions of dollars for legal ads in the paper.

Then, one day, the newspaper started writing articles that the politician did not like. The government pulled out the ads, saying they were too expensive. It made trouble for a business run by the newspaper’s owners, saying they did not have proper licenses and permits. And it began a tax audit of the newspaper company.

So on Tuesday, the newspaper--El Nuevo Dia, the largest daily in Puerto Rico--filed a lawsuit against the politician and his government, Puerto Rico Gov. Pedro Rossello and seven members of his administration.

The lawsuit, filed in San Juan and coordinated with press conferences in New York and Puerto Rico, charges that Rossello violated the paper’s constitutional protections under the 1st Amendment by “a systematic campaign of harassment and punishment” of the newspaper, its owners and its reporters.

The newspaper also charges that Rossello’s government has engaged in an “abuse of governmental power” by not releasing public documents to the paper’s reporters and by trying to damage the newspaper economically by canceling government ads and disrupting plans of a cement company owned by the some of the same people who control the daily.

The governor and his aides have denied that they are targeting the paper and have said that the ads were pulled as a matter of “cost and effectiveness.” A rival editor, whose newspaper has gained more advertising from the government, also said that the increase in ad costs had prompted the governor’s actions.

But Luis Alberto Ferre Rangel, a co-editor of El Nuevo Dia, argued that this is a clear case of government harassment designed to stop the paper from writing critical stories.

“We’re filing a suit to protect the editorial independence of our newspaper,” Ferre said.

Ferre said that the paper, with a circulation of 220,000 daily, wrote few negative articles about Rossello’s first term because “his agenda was so innovative. . . . “ Shortly after Rossello was reelected, however, the paper printed a detailed assessment of Rossello’s reforms, including stories about nepotism, corruption and fraud in the government.

When the Inter-American Press Assn. announced it planned to investigate charges of intimidation of the newspaper, Rossello’s chief of staff, Angel Morey, told the Associated Press that he welcomed “the benefit of showing the other side of the coin.”

“I have never seen in Puerto Rico a situation of abuse and persecution toward the government by a [news] medium such as what we are experiencing here,” he said.