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.
The Paraguayan Congress has ratified a controversial bill that imposes restrictions on community radio stations, rejecting President Fernando Lugo's veto, according to the news agency EFE.
The open tension between Ecuadoran President Rafael Correa and the press intensified in recent days amid accusations of corruption and conspiracy among the media and allegations of government censorship and freedom of expression violations, reported the local press.
A top official in the Social Defense Secretariat in the Brazilian state of Pernambuco, Colonel Elías Augusto Siqueira de Souza, was fired last week after pressuring a local journalist to reveal his sources, Folha de Pernambuco reports.