“In 2024, journalism in Latin America faced one of its most hostile environments in decades.” That’s the conclusion of the annual report from Voces del Sur, a coalition of 17 groups from across Latin America that promote freedom of expression and the protection of journalists.
The 2024 Shadow Report, which monitors the 17 countries represented by these organizations, details how the region’s press is living through a “lethal combination” of state repression, criminal violence, and a lack of institutional guarantees.
For 2024, the report recorded 3,766 alerts for press violations, of which 1,562 corresponded to assaults and attacks. And although these numbers show a slight decrease – 3,827 alerts and 1,680 assaults and attacks the previous year – the analysis does not see this as an improvement but rather as “a change in mechanisms or the consolidation of some of them in an attempt to limit press freedom,” César Mendoza, a consultant for Voces del Sur, told LatAm Journalism Review (LJR).
One of the main findings of the report is precisely that governments continue to be the main aggressors against the press. In nearly half of the alerts (49.3%), the perpetrators were state actors.
Given a press increasingly under attack and a state that continues to stand out as its main aggressor, how can solutions that require political will be achieved?
The role of civil society is vital in achieving concrete actions from governments, Mendoza said. Beyond effectively pressuring governments to deliver results, the ultimate goal should be to achieve a “deeper change” in how Latin American states are designed, he said.
Said Mendoza: “It’s important to ask ourselves as citizens and civil society: do our governments have the will to help build democracies based on respect for human rights?”
It’s not only concerning that states remain the main aggressors of the press, but also that their absence in key situations demonstrates institutional incapacity, Mendoza said.
“This has led organized crime groups and other interest groups to have greater capacity to attack the press without real consequences,” he said.
One example is Brazil, where the state’s stigmatizing discourse has ended, but assaults by groups of civilians – typically aligned with the far right – have increased, Mendoza explained.
According to the report, Brazil saw a 34.6% decrease in press freedom violations compared with 2023. The transition from Jair Bolsonaro’s government to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s brought about “a significant change” in terms of who was responsible for attacks on the press. The participation of state actors in such attacks fell by 30.2% in 2024 compared with 2023.
“This decrease was particularly noticeable in stigmatizing speech, where those made by state officials dropped 54 percentage points in one year, from 72.1% in 2023 to 18.1% in 2024,” the report says.
However, this did not translate into an improvement for the country’s press. According to the report, other forms of violence “intensified,” and the battleground for attacks shifted toward the digital sphere: in 2024, of the 94 recorded assaults, 31.9% corresponded to digital threats and cyberattacks. Non-state aggressors accounted for 41.7% of the total documented alerts. At least 20 of those alerts involved supporters of former President Bolsonaro or candidates from his party.
The report explains the decrease in assaults as the result of other phenomena, such as the “reconfiguration of aggressions” and the consolidation of self-censorship, news deserts, and the forced exile of journalists.
Exile is one of the phenomena that has spread across the region. Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela have expelled the most journalists as a result of assaults, harassment, death threats, and imprisonment, Mendoza said.
The recent report Displaced Voices: X-ray of Latin American Journalistic Exile found that 913 journalists from 15 Latin American countries were forced to relocate from 2018 to 2024. The report found these professionals fled to protect their lives and security, as well as that of their families, and often abandoned the profession.
One of the countries that has seen exile grow in recent years is Ecuador. From 2023 to 2024, the Articulation Table for the Protection of Journalists (MAPP) recorded the exile of 14 journalists due to violence from organized crime, César Ricaurte, executive director of Fundamedios, told LJR.
The role of organized crime is one of the key findings in Ecuador’s case. Of the 194 reported alerts, six out of 10 corresponded to assaults and attacks (60.3%, or 117 alerts). Of these, nearly 20% were carried out by organized crime.
In fact, as Ricaurte explained, President Daniel Noboa’s term began with a violent event: the takeover of the TC Televisión station by a group that held workers hostage, and threatened them at gunpoint during a live broadcast. The incident left psychological scars on the journalists, especially José Luis Calderón, who went into exile.
For Ricaurte, the infiltration of organized crime is one of the gravest concerns because it makes it difficult to determine the origin of the attacks. He said organized crime permeates the state, “capturing judges, prosecutors, and security forces,” as well as actors outside of it, such as businesspeople and even journalists.
The state’s absence, Ricaurte said, is evident in these situations. MAPP, made up of civil society organizations and media outlets, managed to help those 14 journalists leave the country without any government help.
The protection of journalists amid rising violence has also not been a government priority, Ricaurte said. Although in 2022 Ecuador institutionalized the Mechanism for the Prevention and Protection of Journalistic Work through reforms to the Communication Law, its performance has been poor.
“It’s going very badly,” Ricaurte said. “In all these years, the state has not provided a single cent to fund the mechanism. And we also see that there are serious design flaws in it.” For example, he said, the mechanism lacks independence from the executive branch.
The role of governments in guaranteeing freedom of expression is clear even in the region’s most stable democracies, such as Chile, Costa Rica, and Uruguay, Mendoza said. Costa Rica “shows that despite its democratic advances as a country, the figure of the head of government is crucial in either strengthening or undermining freedom of expression and of the press,” he said.
In 2024, the state’s role as an aggressor against the Costa Rican press became institutionalized. The participation of state actors increased “steadily”: from 54.5% in 2022 to 75% in 2023, reaching 82.4% in 2024, according to the report. In other words, the number of alerts tripled in two years.
“Our hope is that the attacks on the press in Costa Rica will end with the conclusion of the current populist government, which has not tolerated criticism or investigations by the independent and serious press,” Raúl Silesky, president of the Press and Freedom of Expression Institute (IPLEX), told LJR.
In Costa Rica, restrictions on access to information accounted for 35% of alerts, making it one of the main forms of harassment against news media, according to the report. It was only in November 2024 that the country approved its access to information law. Silesky said the Constitutional Chamber has repeatedly urged the state to provide information.
This situation, Silesky said, requires the international community to support national organizations, independent media, and investigative journalism.
Ricaurte made a similar call. For him, the reduction in international funding has had a severe impact on journalism and its protection. One example is the issue of exile: temporary relocation or evacuation from a country is impossible without those resources.
Mendoza said that finding solutions also requires self-criticism from civil society regarding its connection to the public – how much it listens to people’s needs while communicating the importance of human rights.
“It’s important to ask whether our societies understand the role of journalism and organizations in helping them make informed decisions,” Mendoza said. “If society doesn’t know its rights or the work of the media and organizations, then I think there’s a broken bridge that we must rebuild.”
This article was translated with the assistance of AI and reviewed by LJR staff.
