2010 was a year plagued by setbacks for press freedom and threats to journalists worldwide, according to Reporters without Borders’ (RSF) Spanish-language report titled “Freedom of the Press Report Worldwide in 2010.”
The document was launched Feb. 22 in Madrid and highlighted Mexico and Honduras as “especially serious cases...where violence led to dozens of deaths, arrests, kidnappings, and threats of all kinds against press freedom.”
“Journalists are a deliberate target of dictatorships, soldiers, kidnappers, and all types of organized crime, which are predators against whom it is increasingly difficult to fight,” said the vice-president of the Spanish offices of RSF, Malén Aznárez, quoted by El Universal. Over the last year, the report counts 150 jailed journalists and another 51 who were kidnapped, 116 internet users who were arrested (the majority of which were bloggers or social media users), and 504 different media outlets that were censored worldwide, Televisión Española reports.
The report puts Mexico and Honduras as the 136th and 143rd ranking countries out of 178, respectively, in its press freedom index. It also highlighted the deteriorating situation for journalists in Colombia, where threats against journalists are increasing and organizations count up to seven reporters who were killed last year, at least two of which RSF says were targeted for their journalistic work.
“In the Dominican Republic, it is best not to talk about corruption and drug trafficking. The situation has become critical in Andean countries. Bolivia and Ecuador have regressed due to violence, intimidation, and conflicts that exist in an intense context of political media polarization. The situation affects both public and private media,” writes Benoît Hervieu, RSF’s Americas chief, quoted by Radio Netherlands International. The report says the situation in Venezuela “continues to be dramatic” and denounces the increase in attacks and censorship in Peru.
The situation in the United States is mixed. While the report highlights that the current context is “clearly more favorable” than during the government of George W. Bush, it says President Barrack Obama’s administration’s performance “was well below the expectations of citizens” in terms of information access, Infolatam summarizes.
Not all the news is negative, however. The report highlights a positive trend in Guatemala, which passed the year without a journalist being killed, and action by the authorities after the murder of reporter Christian Poveda in 2009, which led to 33 arrests, “something very rare in a region that is frequently ruled by impunity.” Similarly, the report notes “favorable legislative advances in terms of information access and editorial freedom” in Brazil, in spite of severe problems with censorship.
For Cuba, RSF praised the government’s decision to free political prisoners, while warning that the country was still far from friendly towards press freedom.
See the full RSF report (in Spanish) here.
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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.
