The Press and Society Institute (IPYS in Spanish) said that the first months of 2013 have been "disastrous" for freedom of information in Peru, according to a report published by the organization on its website.
One week after the Mexican newspaper El Siglo de Torreón became the target of three armed attacks in a week, its editorial director Javier Garza considers that the protection measures employed to safeguard media outlets and journalists, which include the deployment of police forces, should be re-evaluated since they can be counterproductive.
The National Press Association of Bolivia, or ANP, described new rules in the country's law against human trafficking as an "attack" on freedom of expression and the "confiscation" of media outlets' financial resources, news portal Los Tiempos reported.
Ecuadorian newspaper El Diario reported that unknown men impeded the circulation of their Feb. 25 edition in the cantons of Pedernales and Jama, in the northeastern province of Manabí.
The Attorney General of Peru has asked a journalist to reveal the source for his latest story, said the website Crónica Viva. Carlos Ampuero Ferrerira, from the newspaper La Región, received the request from the Attorney General of the province of Maynas, added the website.
In Brazil defamation currently carries a minimum sentence of only three months, but that could change to two years if a penal code reform project currently being discussed in the Senate is approved.
Jaime Guadalupe Domínguez, the director of a news site in the Mexican city of Ojinaga -- in the Northern state of Chihuahua -- was killed in the afternoon of March 3 by a group of armed men, reported the newspaper Diario de Chihuahua.
The Andean Foundation for Social Observation and Media Studies, Fundamedios, said that its Twitter account had been suspended for six days “without warning and without explanation.” Although the account has already been reactivated, the organization said that the closing was still worrying because of its “arbitrariness,” it said on its website.
Are media blackouts effective—or even ethical—when a journalist has been kidnapped? That’s the question Frank Smyth, a senior adviser for journalist security with the Committee to Protect Journalists, explored in a recent blog post on the organization’s website on Tuesday, Feb. 26.
Renowned Mexican reporters Marcela Turati and Javier Valdez, as well as Chilean narrative journalist Cristian Alarcón, will discuss on Feb. 28 their work and the need to forge a bridge between journalists and academics during a forum hosted at the University of Texas at Austin.
In what has become a historic decision, the Council of State of Colombia ordered the National Police to correct a statement given in 1996 that affected two businessmen, said the newspaper El Tiempo. The Director of the Police will have to give a press conference and correct the information given to a television news program as an “exclusive” that linked two businessmen with a drug cartel, said the paper.
The Brazilian media company UH News was sentenced to pay over $7,500 in moral damages, according to the court's website.