A judge in Mexico City ruled that Contralínea magazine be fined for publishing stories about contracts awarded by state-owned oil giant Pemex to private companies, stating the matter “is not of public interest,” SDP Noticias reports.
Residents of Posadas, capital of Misiones province (NE Argentina), demonstrated over the weekend in favor of freedom of expression, responding to last week’s closure of Channel 4. Ten military police officers went to the station Jan. 12 to enforce a court order to suspend its broadcasts. (See other stories here, in Spanish.)
Peruvian writer and journalist Mario Vargas Llosa, the 2010 Nobel Laureate in Literature, defended the importance of “free journalism” and stressed the role of the Latin American press in helping diminish the “horrors of the authoritarian past” and supporting the consolidation of democracy, AFP and El Nuevo Diario report.
Following the Jan. 12 explosion of a home-made bomb at the headquarters of Channel 9 in Asunción, the capital of Paraguay, authorities now are investigating the origin of a letter threatening local media that was attributed to the armed group Paraguayan People's Army (EPP), reported the news agency EFE.
The government-run Cuban website Cubadebate denounced Google for closing its YouTube channel for a supposed copyright “infraction” in a video related to the trial of anti-Castro militant Luis Posada Carriles.
A controversial bill that included up to four years of prison for those who “insult” the president or other elected officials was withdrawn by the president of Panama’s National Assembly, José Muñoz, EFE and Terra report.
The Inter-American Human Rights Commission on Jan. 11 condemned the harassment against community radio stations in Honduras by police and government officials, reported Univisión.
In a Jan. 9 column, the ombudsman for the Brazilian daily Folha de S. Paulo said the paper’s case against the Falha de S. Paulo (São Paulo Failure) parody blog was more harmful than the blog itself.
While in a boat covering former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s vacation in the coastal city of Guarujá, two reporters for Folha de S. Paulo newspaper were stopped by a government-run security team and had their equipment confiscated, Folha reports.
Two of Panama's government-allied deputies have announced a draft law that would jail those who “offend, insult, or vilify” the president or other government officials, prompting criticism from members of the opposition, journalists, and the Panamanian ombudsman, Telemetro and AFP reports.
Maritânia Forlin, a TV journalist in the southern Brazilian state of Paraná, was arrested for allegedly passing information about police operations to criminals in exchange for exclusive stories, RPC TV reports.
Bolivia has approved the final rules governing the “Law to Fight against Racism and All Forms of Discrimination,” which was passed by Congress and signed by President Evo Morales in October, Bolpress reports. Many media organizations criticized the bill for articles in it that they say violate freedom of expression.