Well-known Argentine journalist Jorge Lanata was detained for eight hours and barred from entering Venezuela ahead of a controversial vote for a Constituent Assembly that will write a new constitution for the country.
Ecuador’s citizens went to the polls on Feb. 19 to elect a new president who will face a variety of challenges, not least among them, the reduction of a steep fiscal deficit.
Just days before Ecuador elects a new president, journalist Janet Hinostroza received an explosive device at her workplace.
When Ecuadorians head to the polls on Feb. 19, 2017, they will have eight candidates to choose from as a replacement for current President Rafael Correa, who will leave that office after 10 years.
The 2016 election season in Brazil put Ctrl+X, a platform created to monitor lawsuits that demand the removal of content from the internet, to the test. The site found that “electoral lawsuits,” one of the subsets of legal proceedings tracked by the site, increased 33 percent in recent municipal elections in 2016 when compared to the elections of 2012. In many of these cases, politicians and parties go through designated electoral courts to sue journalists and get information removed from the internet.
For journalist Iván Flores Poveda, the presidential elections that will take place in Ecuador in February 2017 represent “a democratic transition.” After 10 years in power, President Rafael Correa decided not to put his hat in the ring for the position. However, according to Flores, the president has become a kind of campaign manager for the ticket of Lenín Moreno and Jorge Glass, the former and current vice presidents under Correa.
For Borja Echevarria, vice president and digital editor-in-chief at Univision, the way forward at the legacy media company involves collaboration and diversity.
Journalist César Lévano, director of the Peruvian newspaper Diario Uno (formerly newspaper La Primera), and journalist Javier Soto of the same media outlet, were sentenced to pay 50,000 soles (about USD $15,000) as civil reparation for the former advisor of the National Council of the Judiciary Luz Marina Guzmán, for alleged "moral damage" caused by one of their reports, according to the blog LaMula.
Voters of 5,570 Brazilian municipalities will go to the polls this year to choose the future leaders and legislators of their cities. A journalism institute has just released an online manual to help the local journalist whose job it is to inform these citizens ahead of municipal elections.
In order to ensure a more transparent electoral process, on June 5, the Peruvian data journalism portal Convoca decided to carry out a project to provide readers, in real-time and from its own website, the results of the second round of elections for the country’s presidency. The news site also created a social media campaign where people could report irregularities in the voting process.
Journalists in Haiti and the Dominican Republic urged the current Haitian President Michel Martelly to give them all guarantees necessary to properly cover the electoral process, which, they say, is taking place in the midst of attacks on freedom of expression by the outgoing government.
Covering parliamentary elections occuring on Dec. 6 in Venezuela has become a major challenge for national and international journalists.