Given the recent increase in attacks and harassment of journalists in the Central American country, Prensa Contra la Censura intends to raise awareness among Guatemalans as to the importance of defending independent journalism.
A Peruvian court has sentenced Alberto Fujimori's former presidential adviser, Vladimiro Montesinos, to 17 years in prison for the abduction of Peruvian journalist Gustavo Gorriti in April 1992. The journalist said that, although he believes the sentence to be fair, it ended up being a very long process.
Members of the press have faced extrajudicial house arrests, summons with authorities, suspension of services, withdrawal of accreditations and the presence of security agents near their homes since days before the 15-N protests.
Guatemalan journalist José Rubén Zamora, director and founder of elPeriódico, publicly denounced what he said are actions of judicial harassment by the government against him and his media outlet due to their critical editorial line.
Latin America and the Caribbean recorded 123 homicides of journalists in the last five years. Mexico is the country with the most murdered communicators in the region and in the world, with 61 registered cases.
The Committee to Protect Journalists published the Global Impunity Index that lists the top 12 countries where perpetrators of crimes against journalists go free. Mexico and Brazil are the Latin American countries that made the ranking.
The Inter-American Court of Human Rights found that Colombia is responsible for the violation of several human rights of journalist Jineth Bedoya Lima as a result of the crime of which she was a victim in 2000.
Peruvian journalists from two media outlets are harassed and threatened online by supporters of radical ultra-right and anti-vaccine groups.
Professors Celeste González de Bustamante and Jeannine E. Relly, both from the University of Arizona School of Journalism, have spent the past ten years doing field research, traveling through Mexico and interviewing more than 100 people to analyze violence against the press.
A study by the NGO Reporters without Borders (RSF) and the Technology and Society Institute of Rio (ITS-Rio) shows that social media has become a hostile territory for the press in Brazil. In a three-month period, between March 14 and June 13, 2021, the researchers identified 498,693 attacks on journalists and the press in general in Brazil. A fifth of the total attacks came from accounts with a high probability of automated behavior, i.e., robots.