On Monday April 23, as its mid-year meeting came to a close, the Inter American Press Association (IAPA) concluded that the main difficulties confronting the press in the Americas are “crimes against journalists, and arbitrary and intolerant governments.”
A district attorney investigating the killing of Peruvian journalist Pedro Flores Silva in 2011 was shot to death on Monday, April 16, reported the Press and Society Institute.
Mexico, Colombia, and Brazil -- three of the 12 countries worldwide with five or more unsolved cases of journalists killed for their work -- again find themselves on the Committee to Protect Journalists' (CPJ) annual Impunity Index.
On the afternoon of Saturday, April 14, a military police officer investigating the killing of a journalist was shot to death by two people on a motorcycle in the city of Ponta Porã in the state of Mato Grosso do Sul on the border with Paraguay.
An editorial published in the newspaper El Diario de Ciudad Juárez criticized Mexican authorities for leaving unpunished the killing of a journalist committed in 2008.
The Inter-American Court of Human Rights has ruled that the Dominican Republic violated the human rights of journalist Narciso González Medina, who was the victim of a forced disappearance on May 26, 1994.
After seven years of not knowing the whereabouts of Mexican journalist Alfredo Jiménez Mota, of the newspaper El Imparcial, his family and the editors of the newspaper have asked the Mexican authorities to reopen his case for investigation.
The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) of the Organization of American States (OAS), opened an official inquiry into Brazil's failure to investigate the circumstances of the death of journalist Vladimir Herzog.
Brazilian journalists and international journalism organizations are dismayed that Brazil, along with Cuba, Venezuela, India and Pakistan, decided to block a U.N. plan that would have promoted journalists' safety.
In 2011, 172 attacks against the Mexican press were registered, and nine of these were killings. That's up from the 155 attacks recorded in 2010, according to a report from the organization Article 19 released Tuesday, March 20. The report, Forced Silence: The State Complicit in Violence Against the Press, shows that public officials were responsible for more than half of these attacks, according to the magazine Proceso.
On Monday, March, 19, a car bomb exploded in front of the offices of a Mexican newspaper in Ciudad Victoria, capital of the northern state of Tamaulipas, reported the BBC. This makes the 25th armed attack with explosives against news media outlets in Mexico in the last three years -- none of which have been investigated by authorities, according to an upcoming report from the press freedom organization Article 19 that will be released on Tuesday, March 20.
A Honduran Catholic Church official accused of assaulting a journalist will be tried by the supreme court, the highest court of justice, due to his church status, reported the organization C-Libre.