By Maira Magro
The police confiscated 850 copies of the weekly newspaper Impacto Campo Grande, based out of the capital of Mato Grosso do Sul, for criticizing the state’s incumbent gubernatorial candidate André Puccinelli (PMDB), Midiamax and the paper’s blog report.
The paper’s distributor, the journalist Mário Pinto, was arrested by the police and held for seven hours, Midiamax explains. The journalist said there was an injunction prohibiting the paper from publishing the name Puccinelli, but he argued that “what we reported was practically a reworking of the articles written by the state press.” Pinto also told Midiamax that the two police officers that arrested him did not have a court order to size the newspapers.
Impacto Campo Grande called the confiscation a “sad way of hiding the maneuverings that occur during an election from the population.”
Note from the editor: This story was originally published by the Knight Center’s blog Journalism in the Americas, the predecessor of LatAm Journalism Review.
