By Joseph Vavrus
The Press and Society Institute (IPYS) issued two alerts for journalists who were attacked and threatened on university campuses in Peru and Venezuela.
On June 13, 2011, a group of armed university demonstrators attacked De Frente newspaper reporters Naiyelis Garcés and Jesús Bastidas, who were covering a protest in Barinas state in Venezuela, IPYS-Venezuela reports via IFEX. Bastidas was taking photographs and Garcés was filming with her cell phone as the group entered a public campus, prompting the demonstrators to hit Garcés, steal the phone, try to delete the photographs, and threaten to burn down De Frente if any images of the attack were published.
In an unrelated incident June 15, three university student in Cajamarca, Peru confronted TV host Ángel Montenegro Guanilo as he was leaving the campus of Universidad Privada del Norte, where he is also a student, IPYS reports via IFEX. The students reportedly hit Montenegro and threatened to retaliate if he continued criticizing student protesters.
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.
