Journalists from violent Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, and from Managua, Nicaragua, report being attacked by police while performing their journalistic duties.
The newspaper El Diario de Juárez accused police of intensifying attacks on its journalists. In the last three years the paper has lost two reporters to violence by organized crime. Last September, it published an editorial seeking a truce with drug cartels after one of its photographers was killed by gunmen.
El Diario said federal police this weekend “shoved and threatened” a photographer who was covering a homicide. A few hours later, agents from the same department insulted and snatched the cell phone from a reporter who was covering another crime.
Meanwhile, in Nicaragua, El Nuevo Diario claimed that its reporters as well as those of the weekly Confidencial were forcibly removed by police while covering a protest against President Daniel Ortega.
Reporter Rodrigo Rodríguez of Confidencial was arrested by agents and loaded into a police bus where he was forced to erase the digital images he had taken of the protest.
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.
