Journalist Juan Carlos Simo, member of the Argentine Journalism Forum (Fopea), sat down with the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas and talked about transparency in his country and other issues during the 11th annual Austin Forum
Journalists in Argentina are calling for a law that grants them true access to public information and ensures that state agencies comply with information requests, said Juan Carlos Simo, a member of the Argentine Journalist’s Forum (FOPEA)
Chilean journalist Claudia Urquieta from the online newspaper El Mostrador highlighted the importance of Chile’s transparency law as an investigative tool during the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas’ 11th Austin Forum
The biggest obstacles to transparency in Latin America and the Caribbean are the region’s enduring culture of secrecy, the infrequent use of right-to-information laws and the lack of training on how to use them effectively
For Bolivian investigative journalist Raúl Peñaranda, a columnist and former director of the independent newspaper Página Siete, access to information in his country is extremely limited.
After decades of a culture of virtually impenetrable secrecy within the Mexican government, in 2002 Mexico passed the Federal Access to Information and Personal Data Protection Act. Since then, it has become an often-cited model of how other governments should draft their own transparency laws.
It’s been almost 40 years since Tom Blanton filed his first public information request. Since then, Blanton, the current director of the nonprofit National Security Archive, has become a leading authority in access to information and been directly involved in the release of tens of thousands of documents declassified by the U.S. government.
So far this year, there have been 71 cases of censorship of journalists and media in Venezuela, meaning 87 percent more cases than there were over the same period last year, according to Venezuelan organizations that defend freedom of expression and information access that spoke about the situation in their country on Oct. 31 before the Inter American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) during its 149th session.
In late 2012 Chilean journalist Miguel Paz, an ICFJ Knight International Journalism fellow, launched with a group of colleagues a data journalism platform called Poderopedia, which helps reveal the network of relationships between business and government elites in Chile.
The President of Peru, Ollanta Humala, enacted the Computer Crimes Act last week, which criminalizes the unauthorized creation and use of electronic databases, among other things, with up to five years in prison. Several lawyers and journalism organizations have criticized the law, saying it will endanger Peruvians' right to freedom of expression and information.
Reporters without Borders (RSF) condemned the intimidation and censorship against the journalists of indigenous media during the national mobilization of several regional groups in Colombia.
Of the 124,394 applications received during the first 18 months since Brazil’s new Law of Access to Information (LAI) went into effect, 5.15 percent came from journalists, according to Brazil’s Inspector General Jorge Hage.