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.
In a hearing before the Inter-American Commission for Human Rights (IACHR), a group of Venezuelan journalists, union members, and local NGOs have firmly denounced ongoing censorship of the press in Venezuela.
Argentine police have raided radio station and news website La Brújula 24 and confiscated journalistic materials. According to reports from the city of Bahía Blanca, in the Buenos Aires province, local police arrived at the news office with a court order signed by Federal Judge Santiago Ulipano Martinez.
When the North American missionary Dorothy Mae Stang was killed in 2005, the Amazon region, its people and its conflicts, briefly dominated the front pages of newspapers across the country. Before the crime, the project Dorothy had been developing since the 1970s to defend the forest and communities of Anapu in the southwestern region of the Pará state, had never made it into mainstream media.
The Inter-American Press Association (IAPA) and the Peruvian Press Council (CPP) have held a press conference to condemn the killing of the wife of journalist Gerson Fabián Cuba, Gloria Lima Calle, who was killed in an attack of the Radio Rumba office in the Pichanaki district of the Chanchamayo province, Junín.