Despite the comments of a senior Peruvian police official who said the killing of 22-year-old Lima reporter Fernando Raymondi was not motivated by his coverage of organized crime, drug trafficking and corruption, local journalists and international press freedom advocates continue to call for a thorough investigation of the shooting.
Impunity in the murder of journalists is not new in Latin America. In the last decade, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) reported 72 instances of journalists killed for their work. About 78 percent of these cases faced complete or partial impunity. But in Mexico, Colombia and Brazil, levels of impunity have surpassed those of any other Latin American country, according to CPJ’s 2014 Global Impunity Index.
The recent murder of María del Rosario Fuentes Rubio, a physician and citizen journalist known on Twitter for her reports of cartel activity in northern Mexico, has sent shock waves through the state of Tamaulipas and shaken journalists working in citizen news networks across the region.
Paraguayan journalist Pablo Medina Velázquez, murdered in the northeastern Canindeyú department while working on assignment, is the third journalist to be killed in the country this year and the latest in a series of journalists to be killed in the region in recent years. His death underscores the dangerous and deteriorating conditions for journalists working along the Brazilian border.
The criminal investigation of Peru’s Minister of the Interior for the death of a journalist in 1988 serves as a reminder that the Andean nation still lives and deals with the effects of an internal war that ravaged the country in the late twentieth century.
When a TV journalist was shot to death recently in Tegucigalpa, the police were quick to say the motive had nothing to do with his reporting work. Some publications say he was the 37th a journalist murdered in Honduras since 2003, while others say he was the 45th reporter killed during that same period.
Three Mexican journalists in the states of Oaxaca, Veracruz and Guanajuato have been killed in the span of a week.
A Paraguayan radio host was shot and killed in his home on June 19, just over one month after another radio reporter was killed on the same region, near the border with Brazil. Édgar Fernández Fleitas was a known critic of the local justice system and could have been killed in retribution for criticisms he made of local officials, according to newspaper ABC Color.
Paraguayan journalist Fausto Gabriel Alcaraz was shot and killed on Friday May 16 in the city of Pedro Juan Caballero, on the border with Brazil, several local media outlets reported.
Mexican journalists in Veracruz and other groups marched on Monday, April 28, to commemorate reporter Regina Martínez, who was killed two years ago on the same day, according to Proceso magazine.
In their presentation before the Organization of American States (OAS), the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) condemned that most of the 18 killings of journalists committed in 2013 continue to go unpunished.
The Inter American Press Association (IAPA) renewed its call for justice on the 16th anniversary of the murder of Colombian journalist Nelson Carvajal. IAPA once again insisted that authorities investigate and prosecute the crime, a request the organization has made since the case was opened in 2001.