After the shutdown of two community radio stations in Mexico during the past two weeks, the World Association of Community Radio Broadcasters (AMARC) is calling on Mexican authorities to stop "criminalizing" community stations, reported Púlsar, the information agency for AMARC of Latin America and the Caribbean.
Nearly 50 Mexican media organizations signed an agreement Thursday about coverage of drug trafficking. The pact seeks to prevent excessive publication of violent images and stories and to guarantee the safety of journalists who expose themselves daily to the growing violence of organized crime, which has left more than 34,000 deaths in four years. See stories in English by the Associated Press and Reuters.
Monday, primetime in Cuba. While state television broadcast a new episode of a series of allegations against the opposition, "The Reasons of Cuba,” this time about independent bloggers, the movement's leader, Yoani Sánchez, broadcast her own talk program with dissident journalists, in which she defended the right to access and use Internet on the island, Radio Martí reports.
While President Rafael Correa’s March 18 announcement that he was suing a pair of journalists is still the talk of the town, the leader announced another lawsuit – this time against an editorial writer and the directors of El Universo newspaper, Vistazo.com reports.
The Carabobo state division of Venezuela’s National Journalism Guild (CNP) announced plans to protest the decision by the national telecom agency (CONATEL) to close Carabobo Stereo radio station last week.
President Rafael Correa has initiated a lawsuit against two journalists who published a book alleging corrupt dealings that benefited the leader’s older brother, El Diario reports. According to La Hora, the suit is for $10 million.
A provincial prosecutor in Peru wants four years in prison for Aurora Burgos, the owner of the award-winning, low frequency radio station La Voz de Bagua, for “aggravated theft of the radio spectrum,” the Press and Society Institute (IPYS) reports via IFEX.
Former President Jimmy Carter, met in Havana Wednesday, March 30, with independent bloggers and other Cuban dissidents during the third and final day of his visit to the island in an effort to help to improve decades of tense relations between the United States and Cuba, the BBC and Reuters report.
Mario Caro, a reporter for Radio Kollasuyo, told Bolivia’s National Press Association (ANP) that the Potosí city prosecutor has charged him for allegedly libeling local authorities in his stories, ANP reports via IFEX.
A panel of three Mexican judges lifted a ban on the film "Presumed Guilty," a widely popular yet controversial documentary that exposes faults in the country’s justice system, the BBC said last week.
The Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Expression at the Organization of American States (OAS), Catalina Botero, said she was concerned with critics of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez in the press facing libel suits, license suspensions, and broad “stigmatization,” El Universal reports.
Human rights organizations and freedom of expression groups celebrated Cuba’s release of one of the last jailed dissident journalists. Pedro Argüelles, who was sentenced to 20 years in prison in 2003, was freed last week, according to the Latin American Herald Tribune.