Anibal Barrow

In June 2013 he was kidnapped and murdered in San Pedro Sula, with the newspaper La Prensa described Barrow's murder as “the most ruthless crime against a communicator (journalist) in the annals of Honduran history.” He was the 36th journalist in Honduras to have been killed in a decade, and the 26th to have been killed since the June 2009 coup d’état.

Barrow was kidnapped on June 24, 2013, on the outskirts of San Pedro Sula, Honduras, while traveling in a car with a driver and members of his family. At the time of the abduction, his blue Honda CRV was reportedly sitting still in traffic that was caused by an accident. Authorities said that he was abducted by at least ten armed assailants who had been seen in a white Mitsubishi without license plates. One source reported that three family members were abducted with him but were released unharmed; another source said he was travelling at the time with his daughter-in-law and grandson, in addition to a driver, and that these three persons were taken with him but released unharmed. Barrow's captors drove him to Las Cañeras, an area in the Department of Cortes between San Pedro Sula and the municipality of San Manuel.

No ransom request was ever made. Later the same day, Barrow's vehicle was found behind a sugar-cane refinery in Las Cañeras. There was a bullet hole in one door and there were traces of blood inside the vehicle. One of the perpetrators, who eventually came into the custody of authorities and was held as a protected witness, told the police where Barrow's body was located, At around 9:00 on the morning of July 9, 2013, Barrow's burned and dismembered torso, from which the arms, legs, and head had been removed, was found by the Siboney lagoon in the Dos Caminos district of Villanueva, about 20 kilometers from San Pedro Sula. Authorities believed that Barrow had been killed on the day of his abduction. His head and limbs were found later on July 9. Police discovered Barrow's clothing and bankbook in the vicinity of his body. The remains were identified by means of forensic tests.

Barrow's own Facebook postings indicate that as of 2011 was the moderator of a regular evening program called “Theories and Realities” on Hondored and was also the host of the morning talk and commentary series, “Aníbal and Nothing More,” which at that point was airing from 6 to 8 am on both Hondured and TVH.

At the time of his death he was also regularly hosting a radio program on Radio Norte, “Two to Eleven,” (Dos a las once) with his colleague Jorge Oseguera. They had been working together on the program since 2011.

“Ideologies distract us like a circus,” he wrote on Facebook in 2011. “Journalists should contribute with the truth and leave the media show aside.”

News reports dating to 2009 indicate that as of that year, Barrow was associated with Hondured. In July 2009, at the time of the Honduran coup, he and three other journalists, Patricia Arias of Canal 8, Allan McDonald of the El Heraldo, and Esdras Amado López, owner of the Canal 36 television station, were feared missing, but it turned out that they, along with other journalists, had “decided to lay low because of the ongoing political crisis.” Contemporaneous reports on this matter identified Barrow as an associate of Hondured.

Barrow was convicted of libel in 2006 in a lawsuit brought by another journalist, Roxana Guevara. He was sentenced to two years and eight months in prison for saying, on programs broadcast on December 21 and 26, 2001, that Guevara had stolen videos of Hurricane Mitch that were part of reports for which Guevara had won a prize.

During the administrations of Carlos Roberto Reina (1994-1998) and Carlos Roberto Flores (1998-2002), Barrow served as regional director of the Institute for Professional Training (Instituto de Formación Profesional, INFOP).

In La Ceiba, Barrow worked in the radio. He then moved to San Pedro Sula, where he began working in journalism. From 1992 to 1996, according to one source, he worked at Vica TV on “Starting Early” (Desde Temprano), an early-morning news program that was broadcast on national television. (Another account of his career states that Barrow worked on “Starting Early” until 2010.)

Barrow's son Anibal was born in 1985, attended the Instituto Experimental La Salle and UNICAH, the Catholic University of Honduras. He won a seat representing the Department of Cortes in the Honduran Congress in the November 2013 elections.

Barrow married Leda Maradiaga in 1983. They had three children: Anibal, Fernando, and Astrid. After his death they described him as very loving and supportive in every way.

In addition to his journalistic work, Barrow was a longtime professor of mathematics. He began working as an educator at the University Center of the Atlantic Coast (CURLA) in the 1980s. In 1996 he transferred to the Department of Mathematics at UNAH-VS, where he taught a class in quantitative methods from 5:00 pm to 7:00 pm.

Aníbal Barrow (September 15, 1948 in San Pedro Sula – June 24, 2013) was a Honduran journalist and news anchor who had a television show on Globo TV from 05:30–07:30 from Monday to Friday. He was also a trained agronomist who at the time of his death was a professor of mathematics at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Honduras.