For experts, as long as there is no comprehensive policy focused on prevention, protection and prosecution of crimes against journalists, it will be difficult for the panorama to change. But the support of society is also needed: It needs to understand and defend freedom of the press as a collective right.
The Committee to Protect Journalists published the Global Impunity Index that lists the top 12 countries where perpetrators of crimes against journalists go free. Mexico and Brazil are the Latin American countries that made the ranking.
Colombia’s FLIP denounced that the organization in charge of protecting journalist Claudia Julieta Duque collected sensitive data from the reporter through detailed monitoring from the GPS installed in her vehicle given as part of a protection scheme.
In a move celebrated by journalists and press freedom advocates, Mexican officials announced the arrest of a former mayor in the 2017 murder of journalist Miroslava Breach.
One of the main missions of site Reporteros de Investigación of Honduras is to investigate the murders of its colleagues, as well as obstacles to press freedom in the country.
Mexico has witnessed an increase in violence against media in just 10 days. Three journalists were killed in different states, one more is missing and in videos spread on the internet, it’s possible to hear shots ring out during coverage of a protest against femicides.
Special reports reveal Mexico as not only the deadliest country in Latin America for journalists, but a global leader in that undesirable category. Along with Brazil, it is also one of the worst countries in the world for convictions of murderers of journalists.
With three new initiatives, the Inter-American Press Association seeks to innovate its work on combating impunity in crimes against journalists, monitoring the state of freedom of expression in the region and supporting its partner media in the digital transformation of the journalism industry.
The journalist and humorist Jaime Garzón Forero was murdered in the early hours of Aug. 13, 1999, in an alliance between agents of the State and groups outside the law. The country continues to demand for justice.
Between 2014 and 2018, UNESCO recorded 495 murders of journalists around the world, and Latin America and the Caribbean was the second most lethal region for media professionals: 127 of these deaths occurred here, a quarter of the total.