A former member of the secret police during the dictatorship has brought charges against Luiz Claudio Cunha for "moral harm" after being mentioned in the journalist’s book Operation Condor: The kidnapping of the Uruguayans, EFE reports (Spanish).
Twitter users in Mexico City have angered authorities by tweeting the locations of roadside Breathalyzer checkpoints, and kidnappers and drug traffickers are using Facebook and MySpace to communicate. Federal lawmakers have responded by proposing a bill to restrict social networking sites and to create a police force to monitor them, GlobalPost reports.
Latin American newspapers will only survive with help from the state, but not by continuing to rely on the government for placing ads, longtime media observer Eduardo Bertoni writes for the Huffington Post.
Adding to a litany of recent attacks on press freedom, the Ministry of Communications and Information plans to ask prosecutors to punish Tal Cual for an editorial describing a Venezuela without President Hugo Chávez, ABC.es reports.
Members of the National Revolutionary Police arrested Juan Carlos Reyes Ocaña near his home in Holguín on charges of insult, disobedience, and illicit economic activity, EFE and Reporters without Borders (RSF) report. Reyes works for the Holguín Press news agency.
Argentine journalist and writer Tomás Eloy Martínez, who died of cancer Sunday at 75, was one of the most accomplished writers of New Journalism, fusing journalistic storytelling with literary techniques, La Voz de Argentina recalls (Spanish). See the Buenos Aires Herald's obituary (in English).
Jorge Ochoa Martinez, editor in chief of El Sol de La Costa newspaper, was assassinated with a gunshot to the face, becoming the third journalist killed in Mexico this year. His body was found in a car parked close to City Hall in Ayutla de los Libres, Guerrero, the Latin American Herald Tribune reports. Read this report by the Committee to Protect Journalists.
U.S. soldiers had been in Haiti 11 days before they got the first copies of Stars and Stripes, the newspaper that operates independently within the military structure and follows troops to war fronts. Editor & Publisher and The New York Times both report on the logistics of getting Stars and Stripes into the hands of military women and men who are deployed overseas.
The vehicle of Adriana Aguirre San Millán was set ablaze outside the radio chain's offices in in Los Mochis, Sinaloa, and a message left beside it warned that the same will happen to all other journalists, La Jornada and El Universal report. Aguirre owns the radio chain Organización Impulsora de Radio (OIR).
Jose Luis Romero, a reporter for the Línea Directa radio station who was known for his broadcasts on drug trafficking, was found shot to death Saturday on a highway a few miles from Los Mochis, Sinaloa, where he was kidnapped two weeks ago. The Committee to Protect Journalists, Reuters and the Associated Press have stories in English, and many sources have stories in Spanish.
The rash of attacks on Mexican journalists has resulted in the first assassination this year. Two reporters from the newspaper Zócalo Saltillo were kidnapped Thursday night, and one of them, Valentín Valdés Espinosa, was found dead outside a motel this morning (Jan. 8) with a warning note on his chest, the newspaper reports. The message's contents were not revealed.
Chile's Law of Transparency and Access to Public information, which took effect last April, is helping national and international organizations that are seeking information about people who disappeared during the military dictatorship. Those people include U.S. citizen Boris Weisfeiler, Inter Press Service reports (in Spanish).