One month after the brutal murders of Veracruz journalist Rubén Espinosa, activist Nadia Vera and three other women in a Mexico City apartment, activists and journalists continue to fight against impunity and for freedom expression.
Ecuadoran journalist Martín Pallares said that for some time, executives at the daily newspaper El Comercio had been nervous about comments he made through his personal Twitter account. Yet, he never thought the situation would end with his dismissal. That day came on August 17.
Celebrating its 15th anniversary this August, the Protection Program for Journalists in Colombia (the oldest mechanism of its kind in Latin America) is at a “critical moment,” according to organizations defending freedom of expression. Among the main problems affecting the stability of the program are internal corruption scandals and the lack of financial resources.
Brazilian courts have sentenced a man to almost 30 years in prison for the 2013 murders of two journalists in Minas Gerais, but press advocates urge authorities to look for the masterminds behind the crimes.
Latin American journalists now have a tool that allows them to discover the best published journalistic research and articles in the region. The tool is known in Spanish as the Banco de Investigaciones Periodísticas (BIPYS), a database of journalistic investigations created by the Press and Society Institute (IPYS for its acronym in Spanish), which has been open for public access since July 6 through a paid subscription.
As part of the campaign ‘Journalism at Risk’ (‘Periodismo en Riesgo’), the Free Press Foundation (FLIP for its acronym in Spanish) has launched the J-Pro project, which seeks to explain and evaluate the policies established by the governments of Colombia and Mexico for protection of journalists at risk.
When Miguel Ángel López Solana received the news on August 1 that fellow journalist Rubén Espinosa had been murdered in Mexico City, the entire nightmare that had forced him to escape from Veracruz four years earlier came back to him.
The murder of photojournalist Rubén Espinosa on 31 July in Mexico City was without a doubt a turning point in matters of security for Mexican journalists. For this reason, his colleagues are demanding that the crime does not go unpunished and that the Mexican state provide protection for journalists.
Update (August 24, 2015): From the Quito International Airport on August 21, Brazilian journalist Manuela Picq announced she had decided to leave Ecuador due to the "legal limbo" in which she found herself after the Ecuadoran courts failed to reactivate her visa, reported newspaper El Universo.
The free flow of information regarding an active volcano currently erupting about 30 miles south of Quito, Ecuador may be threatened now that President Rafael Correa has declared a state of emergency in that country.
Mexico was the second country in the region to implement a protection mechanism. However, after three years of its existence, its effectiveness continues to be questioned as the numbers of journalists murdered grow. This is the first of a series of posts about special protection mechanisms for journalists created by governments in Latin America.
Brazilian journalist Gleydson Carvalho died Thursday after two men fatally shot him at his radio studio while he was on air.