The role of journalists as guardians of democracy faces more dangers each and every day due to an increase in organized crime and government repression and corruption in the Western Hemisphere, said Carlos Lauría, the Senior Americas Program Coordinator for the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), in front of the US House of Representatives Thursday.
In April, CPJ applauded the approval of a law in Mexico that gives authorities federal jurisdiction over crimes committed against freedom of expression as an advance in the fight against impunity. It is hoped that with this new law, Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto will show more political willpower to enforce justice.
On a global scale, the local journalist is the one that pays the highest price. According to a CPJ report, 9 out of 10 journalists die investigating topics within their own community.
Lauría also cited the case of Honduras, a country that has the largest homicide index in the world, according to a United Nations statistical report. Since July 2009, 16 Honduran journalists have died, three of them in direct retaliation for their investigative work.
According to Lauría, Brazil is another one of the most unsafe places for journalists and ranks tenth in CPJ's 2013 Impunity Index, with four dead reporters so far in 2013. Ten reporters died last year, nine of which reported about government corruption and other crimes in their provinces, according to CPJ.
Colombia continues to be one of the most dangerous nations for journalism worldwide, with a total of 44 assassinated journalists since 1992. Although the number of assassinated journalists has decreased, the number of threats have increased. A CPJ report shows that Ricardo Calderón, the editor-in-chief of an investigation unit of the magazine Semana, suffered an assassination attempt last May.
Lauría added that the disdain many governments have toward democratic institutions and their quest to control the flow of information, essentially defining journalists as unelected opposition, increases government officials' intolerance towards the media outlets that investigate them.
For example, Venezuela is one of the most prominent cases of a country that demonstrates an intolerance for diversity of opinion in the Americas. A CPJ study shows that in the last 14 years, Venezuela has used different laws, regulations and judicial decisions to gradually wipe out the private and independent press.
Ecuador's Organic Law on Communications, which passed in June, also represents a serious setback for freedom of expression in the country, according to CPJ and other regional and international organizations that keep a vigil over freedom of the press.
Lauría concluded his testimony highlighting recent events in the United States, such as the aggressive persecution of informants that leaked classified documents about national security to the press, and the massive and indiscriminate government surveillance on communications that was revealed by former National Security Agency analyst Edward Snowden.
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.
