Five years after a 7.0 magnitude earthquake struck Haiti, the country's journalists face threats, harassment, and silencing by government supporters and, on occasion, the president himself. While journalism had an urgent and imperative role in the aftermath of the earthquake, Haitian journalists have maintained a steady criticism of reconstruction efforts and, as a result, have been vilified by authorities.
The body of journalist José Moisés Sánchez Cerezo was found in the early hours of January 24, according to the Office of the Attorney General (PGJ) in the Mexican state of Veracruz. The journalist had disappeared on January 2, when armed and unidentified individuals pulled him from his house, located in Medellín de Bravo.
After more than a century in the hands of the Mantilla family, one of Ecuador's oldest and most traditional newspapers – El Comercio – has been sold to Latin American media mogul Remigio Ángel González, a Mexican who launched his TV empire in Guatemala and is known for avoiding editorial conflict with governments.
Paraguay, Brazil and Mexico placed in the top 20 deadliest countries for journalists in 2014, according to a special year-end report by the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ).
In Brazil and Mexico, ranked seventh and eleventh by the Committee to Protect Journalists as the countries with the highest levels of impunity in the murder of journalists, two advocacy groups are mapping these attacks in an effort to increase their security.
After being sentenced to seven months in prison for writing a fictional essay, journalist Cristian Góes has been ordered to pay 30 thousand Brazilian Reals (US$11,300) in compensation for moral damages to judge Edson Ulisses, vice president of the Sergipe Justice Tribunal.
Honduras has defied the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) and decided to uphold an order to ban journalist Julio Ernesto Alvarado from work for 16 months.
The newly launched Sin Etiquetas, or “No Labels,” is a website dedicated to promoting homophobia-free journalism across Latin America.
The Argentine Journalism Forum (FOPEA) has announced the launch of an annual series of prizes for investigative journalism in Argentina amidst what the organization has described as an “unbearable climate of threats, persecutions, and poor working conditions weighing on the profession.”
Despite the comments of a senior Peruvian police official who said the killing of 22-year-old Lima reporter Fernando Raymondi was not motivated by his coverage of organized crime, drug trafficking and corruption, local journalists and international press freedom advocates continue to call for a thorough investigation of the shooting.
Impunity in the murder of journalists is not new in Latin America. In the last decade, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) reported 72 instances of journalists killed for their work. About 78 percent of these cases faced complete or partial impunity. But in Mexico, Colombia and Brazil, levels of impunity have surpassed those of any other Latin American country, according to CPJ’s 2014 Global Impunity Index.
An upcoming vote that could alter the laws governing mass media in Ecuador has stoked fears in the Andean nation that the end of a free press in near.