Juan Pablo Suárez

Juan Pablo Suárez is an Argentinian journalist who is the editor of the news website Última Hora. His wife, Sandra Wede, is the owner of Ultima Hora. He was arrested while covering a public protest on 9 December 2013 and charged with sedition under an anti-terrorism law.

Career He began working in 2007 for Última Hora, which is based in the city of Santiago del Estero, the capital of the province of the same name. Sandra Wede later said that Villagrán had been peacefully protesting when he was “attacked” by a group of policemen who arrested him and pushed him into a police car. Villagrán had reportedly spent a week in prison the previous year for saying that there were irregularities in police funds.

After filming Villagrán's arrest, Suárez returned directly to the offices of Última Hora, where he posted a video of the arrest on the newspaper's website. Only minutes later, at about 10 p.m., approximately 30 police officers wearing hoods entered the newspaper's offices and handled him brutally. They took him into custody without having any arrest warrant or detention order, although they told him they had oral permission from Judge Rosa Falco to arrest him. He did not resist arrest. “They did not respect the chain of custody of seized items,” Suárez later maintained. “They took my notebook, a CPU and a cellphone with all my sources," Suárez said, accusing them of “violating professional confidentiality.” Other charges included “inciting collective violence” and “terrorizing the population.”

At the meeting with national legislators, Suárez said of the charges against him: “This is not a message for me, but for all of independent journalism.” He maintained that his arrest and prosecution were connected to the fact that he had questioned the conduct of the provincial governor Zamora and Zamora's wife, Claudia Ledesma Abdala, provisional president of the Senate. Suárez described the news media in Santiago del Estero as being divided between those who fear the government and those that have deals with the government. He was detained with five criminals in a cell barely more than one square meter in size. He was in detention for ten days, during which was hospitalized for dehydration after beginning a hunger strike to protest his treatment.