Guatemalan President Otto Pérez Molina signed the document establishing the Program to Protect Journalists, which will be preventative in nature and follows similar examples in Mexico and Colombia.
On April 8, El Periódico, one of the principal independent newspapers in Guatemala, published an extensive and unflattering portrait of Vice President Roxana Baldetti.
Guatemalan journalist Luis Alberto Lemus Ruano was shot dead on Sunday, April 7, in the department of Jutiapa, near the Salvadoran border, reported the Guatemalan Information Centre.
A Guatemalan reporter has been summoned to reveal her source before the International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG) and the Public Prosecutor’s Office, said the newspaper La Hora.
A journalist in Guatemala was gunned down and killed in the south of the country, AFP reported. Unknown men shot Jaime Jarquín, correspondent for newspaper Nuestro Diario, while he chatted with three friends at a store in the city of Pedro de Álvaro, near the border with El Salvador
Guatemalan journalist Héctor Cordero is known for three things: for being the only full-time journalist covering the department of El Quiché for a national TV newscast, for his relentless reports on corruption and abuse of authority, and for regularly angering public officials in the region. In the current struggle over political power in El Quiché, Cordero has become an extremely bothersome figure for the department's ruling class.
The president of Guatemala, Otto Pérez Molina, approved the reform to the General Telecommunications law, which extends leases on the current broadcast spectrum for another 20 years and weakens indigenous groups' access to radio frequencies, according to the newspaper Prensa Libre on Wednesday, Dec. 5.
Journalists from the Center for Independent Media in Guatemala claimed they were threatened by employees of the mining company Exmingua, a subsidiary of the Canadian company Radious Gold Group in association with the U.S.-based KCA.
"Maras" and criminal gangs exerted the greatest censorship against the Guatemalan press between July and September 2012, according to a trimester report from the Journalists Observatory of the Center of Informative Reports on Guatemala (CERIGUA in Spanish).
Organization of American States (OAS) Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Expression Catalina Botero came out against proposed reforms that would limit the power and function of the Inter-American Human Rights System and would affect the defense of freedom of expression in the region, according to the Guatemalan organization Cerigua.