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.
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.
Viltor García, a bodyguard for cable channel director Karen Rottman, had just finished his shift on Oct. 19 when he was shot and killed by attackers in a vehicle with tinted glass windows in Guatemala City, informed Reporters without Borders (RSF). Rottman is the director of Vea Canal, an independent cable channel critical of the nation's administration.
The press corps in Guatemala denounced new acts of agression against reporters in the country. The daily newspaper Siglo 21 claimed that indigenous reporter Lucrecia Mateo was assaulted on Sunday, Aug. 25, when she tried to cover a meeting about the installation of a hydroelectric dam in the Guatemalan department of Huehuetango. A group of opposition protesters beat the reporter and robbed her camera equipment, according to the news agency AFP.