"Maras" and criminal gangs exerted the greatest censorship against the Guatemalan press between July and September 2012, according to a trimester report from the Journalists Observatory of the Center of Informative Reports on Guatemala (CERIGUA in Spanish).
In July, intimidation from gangs in Chimaltenango quashed coverage of protests against extortion in the city market by criminal groups, reported CERIGUA. That same month, police did not intervene while family members of Josué Domingo Culajay, the alleged leader of a gang of rapists, threw rocks and water on reporters to impede coverage of his arrest, according to Prensa Libre.
Recently, two columnists for the Guatemalan newspaper Prensa Libre received anonymous threats after publishing about child sex abuse at a farm and the possible sale of a Pepsi distributor, according to Reporters Without Borders. "We’ll hack your family to pieces and send them to you in a cotton sack," one threat said.
The CERIGUA report noted that freedom of expression violations have decreased in Guatemala but between July and September there were four physical attacks against press workers covering social protests, an attempted bribery and an arbitrary detention.
Note from the editor: This story was originally published by the Knight Center’s blog Journalism in the Americas, the predecessor of LatAm Journalism Review.
