A crew for RBS TV, an affiliate of TV Globo in the southern state of Santa Catarina, was attacked and threatened Jan. 6 in the city of Indaial, while investigating charges against five business people accused of boycotting wholesalers in the neighboring city of Brusque, Globo reports.
Via YouTube, the Inter American Press Association (IAPA) has released a series of videos about the impact of violence and the risks journalists confront in the so-called "triple frontier" region between Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay.
The president of the government-run National Human Rights Commission (CNDH), Raúl Plascencia, said killings, disappearances, and kidnappings of media workers and activists will be a priority for the agency in 2011, Milenio reports.
President Porfirio Lobo’s government has asked for the help of the United States, Colombia, and Spain to help investigate the killings of ten Honduran journalists who died in 2010, El Heraldo reports.
This year, Honduras was added to the list of most dangerous countries for journalists and the killing of HRN radio correspondent Henry Suazo the morning of Dec. 28 was one more on a growing list of crimes against journalists that remain unpunished.
Journalist José Luis Galdámez and his family deserve protection by Honduran authorities, according to an order from the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, reported the Associated Press.
Pakistan became the most deadly country for journalists in 2010, with eight colleagues killed during the year in connection with their work. In a year when 42 journalists were killed worldwide, Honduras, Mexico and Iraq also ranked high, the Committee to Protect Journalists says in a year-end analysis. See more world news coverage of CPJ’s report.
Journalists always live in a state of tension with their work. To uncover the truth, journalists must develop not only a broad understanding of issues of public interest, but they must also have the good journalistic sense to be at the right place at the right time to cover a story. However, for journalists who work in zones of conflict, such journalistic competence can mean death.
Reuters photographer Jorge Silva was attacked and arrested by United Nations security and Mexican federal police when covering a protest of environmentalists at the United Nations Climate CHange Conference, COP-16, in Cancun, Mexico, reported El Diario de Yucatán and El Universal.
The Argentine Journalism Forum (FOPEA) released a statement calling on the authorities to guarantee the safety of press workers who are covering the recent conflicts in the Parque Indoamericano (American Indian Park) in Buenos Aires, which is currently occupied by at least 5,000 homeless squatters, many of them immigrants. FOPEA also asked media companies to prioritize the safety of their employees.
Between 1995 and August 2010, 258 journalists were killed — or kidnapped and assumed killed — in Latin America, but only 59 of those cases have been successfully prosecuted. These numbers from the Inter American Press Association (IAPA) back up a new analysis from journalist Tyler Bridges who in his report referred to the “worst wave of violence against journalists ever in Latin America." This is the setting which prompted IAPA to develop the Impunity Project.
The Mexican government, media outlets on both sides of the border, and press organizations must do more to end danger faced by the press on Mexico’s northern border from drug-trafficking violence and impunity.