Sport reporter Juan Pastén was arrested July 14 in Santa Cruz, Bolivia over a year-old defamation suit brought against the journalist by the president of the National Football Association (ANF), Jorge Justiniano, Los Tiempos reports.
The director of the Honduran station Radio Joconguera, Nery Orellana, was shot to death Thursday, July 14, on a road in the Honduran town of Candelaria, on the border with El Salvador, reported La Prensa. Orellana, 26 years old, is the fourth journalist killed in Honduras this year, after the killings of journalists Adán Benítez, Francisco Medina Polanco, and Luis Mendoza, owner of television station Canal 24.
Article 19, the freedom of expression defense organization, decried the cyber attack on three digital newspapers in Mexico that not only were temporarily forced offline, but also had personal information, contacts and reporters' notes stolen from the server, in the case of Expediente Quintana Roo.
The president of Ecuador, Rafael Correa, has announced that Congress will consider a new media regulation law that will help fight "ink assassins," as he refers to opposition journalists, and that will be the "best legacy" of his administration, reported Fundamedios.
The Supreme Court of Peru sent a bill to Congress that would imprison those who distribute recordings of private conversations obtained by illegal telephone wiretaps, Perú21 reports. Freedom of expression groups said the bill was an attempt to restrict press freedom and weaken the tools used to watchdog the authorities, Diario Ya explains.
The National Association of Journalists (CNP in Spanish) in Venezuela accused state media of spreading "hate" messages and urged authorities to take action to curb this practice with the same speed they normally investigate and punish private media, alluding to the recent complaint filed against opposition television station Globovisión, reported El Universal.
Emilio Gutiérrez, a Mexican journalist seeking asylum in the United States after fleeing the drug-related violence in the northern region of the country, has petitioned the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACHR) of the Organization of American States (OAS) to investigate and rule on the inability of the Mexican government to protect the rights of journalists who have been threatened by the military since President Felipe Calderón began his anti-drug war in 2006, reported El Diario in El Paso, Texas.
The slaying of Argentine folk singer Facundo Cabral after a June 9 concert in Guatemala put the country in the international spotlight. Authorities have reported increasing levels of violence in Guatemala, where the murder rate is more than double that in Mexico, where fights between rival drug trafficking gangs and security forces have left more than 35,000 dead since 2006.
Peruvian journalist Hans Francisco Andrade Chávez, ex-host of a news program on the local affiliate channel of América TV in Chepén, in northern Perú, was sentenced to two years in prison for defamation, according to the Press and Society Institute (IPYS in Spanish). Andrade is the most recent journalist in Peru to be convicted of libel. In April, journalist Paul Garay was sentenced to three years in jail for defamation of a prosecutor.
Journalist Emilio Palacio, in an effort to protect his newspaper from an $80 million libel suit by Ecuadoran President Rafael Correan, has resigned from his position as opinion editor at El Universo, Terra reports.