Amendments approved this month by Cuba's National Assembly, which hinder foreign funding and imprison anyone who slanders public officials, provide the Cuban regime with legal tools to justify its attacks on independent press coverage.
Chilean journalist Francisca Sandoval died days after being shot in the head while covering violent May 1 Workers' Day demonstrations in the country. The Chilean public prosecutor’s office detained three suspects, and announced that an investigation had also been opened into the police.
Although Uruguay has been considered a benchmark for freedom of expression, the eighth monitoring report by the Center for Archives and Access to Public Information (Cainfo) recorded a 40 percent increase over the previous year in cases of threats and restrictions on journalists. There has been an increase in the number of cases for the third consecutive year and regressive legal reforms in terms of human rights and freedom of expression.
Billing itself as a "platform for journalism in the Americas," CONNECTAS emerged in 2012. It has since fulfilled its purpose through providing editorial and financial support for journalistic investigations, teaching courses and providing tools for journalists. With almost 800 investigations published in ten years, CONNECTAS intends to continue strengthening the community of Latin American journalists investigating abuses of power in a collaborative way.
A team of professionals from La Nación, Ojo Público, CLIP, and MuckRock developed a prototype tool that seeks to facilitate the use of machine learning and natural language processing for the analysis and classification of documents for journalists without extensive programming knowledge.
“It is an attack on freedom of expression and information,” journalist Rubens Valente said. The Superior Court of Justice and the Supreme Federal Court of Brazil ruled that Valente has to compensate Supreme Court Justice Gilmar Mendes because of information contained in Valente’s book “Operação Banqueiro.”
The Northeast region is the second most populous in Brazil, but has the lowest GDP per capita. Despite the economic limitations, independent journalistic initiatives are multiplying in the nine states of the Northeast and are capable of having an impact even with restricted resources.
Family members, colleagues and national and international organizations demand justice and guarantees for a journalism free of violence in Mexico, after the murders of journalists Yesenia Mollinedo and Johana García on May 9, and of columnist Luis Enrique Ramírez, on May 5, all in the same month.
The Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas announces the dates for next year’s 24th International Symposium on Online Journalism (ISOJ) as April 14 - 15, 2023.
In 2018, the Association of Journalists of El Salvador presented a draft bill for the protection of journalists. After almost three years, the effort was cut short. The initiative was archived when the ruling Nuevas Ideas party took control of the Legislative Assembly. The parties that resumed the discussion at the last minute hold each other responsible for the lack of approval.
Journalists in Colombia warned that declining working conditions for the press could become more pronounced in 2022, an election year. The Federation of Colombian Journalists (Fecolper, by its Spanish acronym), released a report title “Unprotected on Feb. 9, the Day of the Journalist in Colombia, assessing the state of journalism and the challenges Colombian journalists face.
The Political Misogynistic Discourse Monitor, developed by journalists from AzMina, Data Crítica, La Nación, and CLIP, detects hate speech against women on the internet in Spanish and Portuguese through a Natural Language Processing model.