Arbitrary detentions and the cancellation and withholding of passports belonging to two high-profile Venezuelan journalists helped to mark September as another month in a long period of aggressions against the press in the country.
Data verification, or fact-checking, of facts of public interest and declarations of public figures has become a worldwide trend. This practice goes back to one of the basic principles of journalism, like the contrasting of sources.
Venezuelan journalists work in an environment often characterized by threats, economic precariousness, limited resources and few job opportunities
Guatemalan newspaper elPeriódico has been shutdown by a new wave of cyberattacks. The site reported attacks to its server since the early morning hours of Aug. 29 in what it says is the 15th such assault on its site.
Since Miguel Díaz-Canel became President of Cuba in April 2018, “repression against journalists is greater,” José Antonio Fornaris, president of Cuba’s Pro Press Freedom Association (APLP, for its initials in Spanish), told the Knight Center.
Mexican journalist Abraham Torres reported he was denied entry at Simon Bolivar International Airport while on his way to a journalism festival hosted by digital news site Efecto Cocuyo.
In 2018 several Latin American countries will see presidential elections, and with them, the risk of widespread misinformation caused by fraudulent news. In Brazil, concern about the problem has moved public authorities, and within four months of the election, the Superior Electoral Court has made its first decision regarding the fight against fraudulent news in the electoral context.
Five years after its implementation, UNESCO's project to train judges, prosecutors and other judicial operators in Latin America on freedom of expression and access to information has become the most ambitious judicial training program in the region and has led to concrete results in the courts
Two suspects in the murder of Nicaraguan journalist Ángel Gahona were sent to prison on May 8 after an initial hearing before a district judge in Managua, the country’s capital, La Prensa reported. However, the journalist’s family as well as the detainees and other civil society organizations, are protesting the accusation made by the public prosecutor’s office, saying it is a strategy of the authorities to avoid accusing the real perpetrators.
As they have every year since 1993, when UNESCO proclaimed May 3 as World Press Freedom Day, journalists and freedom of expression advocates in Latin America and around the world gathered at conferences and rallied online to discuss the importance of press freedom and ways to the threats it faces.