After fracturing her jaw with a single stroke, Susana Morazán’s aggressors made a threat: “stop talking bad about the government.” The event took place on Jan. 19, when two men riding motorcycles intercepted the TV Azteca Guatemala host while she was driving her car, according to Prensa Libre.
On September 13, the Guatemalan government posted photographs of an unpublished article planned to run three days later on the newspaper elPeriódico, raising questions as to whether or not the government had been spying on the newsroom.
Forty-six percent of Guatemala's government institutions bound under the country's Access to Public Information Law (LAIP in Spanish) did not present their annual reports on how they responded to public information requests received during 2013, news website Plaza Pública reported.
After his rupture with the Guatemalan university that has housed for three years the innovative digital publication Plaza Pública, its founder, journalist Martín Rodríguez Pellecer, is getting ready to launch a new site this summer.
Several journalism organizations in Guatemala called President Otto Pérez to push for legal mechanisms to guarantee the safety conditions necessary to allow journalists to perform their duties. The demand comes after four journalists have been killed and 60 assaulted and threatened in the last 15 months.
Guatemala's central taxation agency will begin next week an audit on newspaper elPeriódico, the daily reported on Wednesday. ElPeriódico called it "fiscal persecution" and the most recent government aggression against it.
This past weekend, Guatemala’s highest elected officials, President Otto Pérez Molina and Vice President Roxana Baldetti withdrew two criminal complaints they filed in December – one for blackmail and contempt, the other for violence against women – against José Rubén Zamora, editor of the newspaper elPeriódico.
A court ordered Guatemalan journalist and director of newspaper elPeriódico José Rubén Zamora Marroquín not to leave the country. His bank accounts were also frozen.
Guatemalan President Otto Pérez Molina and Vice President Roxana Baldetti announced last week the launch of a plan to ensure the protection of journalists in the country, according to Europa Press.
Guatemalan journalist César Pérez Méndez, director of newspaper El Quetzalteco, has received several death threats through phone calls and text messages in the last few days after his publication began investigating corruption cases that involve local authorities in the city of Quetzaltenango
Guatemalan journalist César Pérez Méndez, director of newspaper El Quetzalteco, has received several death threats through phone calls and text messages in the last few days after his publication began investigating corruption cases that involve local authorities in the city of Quetzaltenango
Media outlets in Guatemala protested against authorities for the pepper spray attacks that 28 journalists suffered in two occasions while trying to interview Roberto Barreda -- the son of former Chief Justice Beatriz de León -- who is accused of the disappearance and murder of his wife Cristina Siekavizza in 2011, Cerigua reported.