The government of Alan García backtracked and re-instituted the operating license for La Voz de Bagua (The Voice of Bagua), the small radio station closed more than a year ago after the violent unrest in this province of the Peruvian Amazon, reported La República and EFE.
Alleged members of the organized crime group Los Zetas directly threatened the editors of La Jornada Zacatecas, Imagen, and El Diario NTR– all based in the state of Zacatecas– and demanded they put a letter denouncing the Mexican military on the front page of their newspapers, La Jornada reports.
The three top candidates heading into the country’s Oct. 3 election, Dilma Rousseff, José Serra, and Marina Silva, have signed onto the Chapultepec Declaration — an international charter, first signed in 1994 in México, that protects freedom of expression and information — at this week’s Brazilian Newspaper Association (ANJ) congress in Rio de Janeiro.
The president of Brazil's National Association of Newspapers (ANJ), Judith Brito, announced that the organization is creating a board for self-regulation, reported iG. The board could begin to function as soon as the end of this year. The announcement was made during the opening of the 8th Brazilian Congress of Newspapers, in Rio de Janeiro.
A Venezuelan court has partially revoked an earlier ruling that put a 30-day ban on photos depicting violence from being published in all newspapers, reported the Wall Street Journal and EFE.
The government announced it revoked the license of Fibertel, an internet service provider owned by Grupo Clarín, the parent company of Clarín newspaper, Bloomberg reports. “Fibertel doesn’t exist anymore,” said Planning Minister Julio De Vido.
The Rapporteur for Freedom of Expression at the Organization of American States (OAS), Carolina Botero, outlined 13 aspects of the proposed Communication Law that need to be changed or clarified, Hoy reports. Last week, Human Rights Watch also said the bill was in need of several changes.
During the wave of violence in Kenya in 2008, that stemmed from conflicts among rival political factions, a group of friends created a system in which persons in various locations could send and share, via the Internet, news about attacks and killings. The Ushahidi (witness in Swahili) online platform became a model of success for participative coverage of news worldwide. Now the system has come to Brazil, with Voter 2010, an unprecedented election monitoring tool for citizens.
The dispute between the Clarín Group, Argentina's largest media conglomerate, and the federal government over Papel Prensa, the largest newsprint factory in the country, has intensified in recent days, with complaints, death threats, and accusations of human rights violations during the dictatorship (1976-1983).
In light of the investigation into the publication of a photo of dead bodies in a Caracas morgue, a Venezuelan court banned for a month the national press from publishing "violent, bloody, or grotesque images, whether of crime or not," that can affect children and adolescents, reported The Wall Street Journal and The Associated Press
The release of various political prisoners does not mean Cuban authorities are tolerating any type of free expression on the island. Luis Felipe Rojas was arrested for publishing a "horror report" about abuses committed against dissidents in the eastern provinces of Cuba, reported Radio Martí and EcoDiario.
Mary Cuddehe, a U.S. journalist, was offered $20,000 to spy on plaintiffs in one of the biggest environmental lawsuits in Ecuador's history, Cuddehe revealed in a first-person account published in the Atlantic.