Concentrated in the São Paulo – Rio de Janeiro – Brasilia axis, a majority of the Brazilian media ultimately informs the entire population of the country about what happens in these places. But how are people who live in small and medium-sized cities informed about what is happening in their regions?
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In the week since Revista Factum published a report about the alleged existence of a death squad inside the Salvadoran police, they have received death threats, been targeted by smear campaigns and received attacks trying to take down their website. Independent news site El Faro, which has also reported on alleged extrajudicial killings by the police, has also recently received threats.
"Mom, I can’t take this war anymore," a 10-year-old girl said in an audio interview published by newspaper Extra from Rio de Janeiro. The child is a resident of Manguinhos, a favela in the North Zone of the city with daily armed confrontations.
A series of initiatives that have emerged in Brazil in recent years have sought to increase the presence of women and experts of color as journalistic sources. The intention is to bring more diversity into the public debate and to transform the representation of these social groups in media, which mostly choose white men to be specialists and voices of authority in their stories.
Many of the writers at Argentine digital news site The Bubble have spent time helping to fill the pages of the 140-year-old Buenos Aires Herald, Latin America’s oldest English-language newspaper. In recent years, both publications, The Bubble and The Herald, have worked from Buenos Aires to inform the country’s English-speaking community about politics, culture and the economy. But that’s where the similarities end.
Access to public information in Venezuela is a guarantee established in the country’s Constitution. However, in reality, if a journalist or citizen wants to know the salary of a public official or the amount of money spent during an electoral campaign, for example, the response in many cases will range from “we don’t know” to “we cannot respond.”
During a two-day public hearing, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights based in Costa Rica heard the case against the Colombian State for the murder of journalist Nelson Carvajal Carvajal on April 16, 1998.
Venezuela’s National Telecommunications Commission (Conatel for its acronym in Spanish) has kicked two Colombian networks off the air.
Honduran journalists Johnny Lagos and Lurbin Yadira Cerrato of El Libertador newspaper were shot on Aug. 24 in the capital of Tegucigalpa.
Mexican journalist Cándido Ríos Vázquez was killed in southern Veracruz on Aug. 22, 2017 despite being under the federal government program to protect journalists.
Update (Aug. 25): Journalist and activist Carlos Julio Rojas was freed from a Venezuelan military prison on Aug. 24 after spending more than seven weeks in detention. At an Aug. 23 press conference, human rights defenders, journalists and civil society organizations called for international organizations to be allowed to monitor the conditions of political prisoners and specifically mentioned Rojas' case.