Over the first six months of this year, the region has passed Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa, as the area with the most journalists killed, the International Press Institute announced in its Six-Month Death Watch report.
The "bloodshed" continues, said Reporters Without Borders (RSF) after the killing in Mexico of Marco Aurelio Martínez Tijerina, in the state of Nuevo León, and Guillermo Alcaraz Trejo, of Chihuahua, in the northern part of the country. Their deaths bring the number of media workers killed in Mexico this year to at least 10, according to RSF.
Judge Jesús Fernández arrived Saturday, July 10, in Honduras for a special mission to help the government of Porfirio Lobo in its investigation into the deaths of at least seven journalists this year, reported El Heraldo.
The investigation into the 1986 death of the publisher and editor-in-chief of the newspaper El Espectador, Guillermo Cano, will have no statute of limitations as the prosecution declared the killing, still unsolved, as a crime against humanity, reported El Espectador and El Colombiano.
Hugo Olivera Cartas was killed Tuesday morning after being shot three times. The body was found in a pickup truck on a road between the cities of Tepalcatepec and Aguililla in the western state of Michoacán, reports the news agency Quadratín, where the journalist worked. (See this Associated Press article in English.)
Not only paramilitaries, but also government agents were involved in the 1999 killing of prominent journalist and humorist Jaime Garzón. El Heraldo reported that Colombian prosecutors ordered José Miguel Narváez, the ex-deputy director of the Administrative Department of Security (DAS, or Colombia's intelligence agency), be held for ordering Garzón's death.
The Inter American Press Association (IAPA) asked the Brazilian government and legislators to approve a proposed Constitutional amendment that would allow killings and attempted killings of journalists to be judged at the federal level. IAPA issued a declaration and sent to President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Congress members a letter signed by newspaper readers from across the continent.
Radio sports reporter Clóvis Silva Aguiar, 48 years old, was murdered Thursday night, June 24, in the city of Imperatriz, in the western part of Maranhão in Brazil, reported the newspaper Jornal Pequeno. He was in the door of his mother's house when two men on a motorcycle drove by and shot at him three times, the newspaper said.
Two unidentified, armed assailants went to the home of journalist Juan Francisco Rodríguez Ríos and his wife María Elvira Hernández Galeana, where they ran an Internet cafe in Coyuca de Benítez, in the southern state of Guerrero, and shot them to death, reported El Universal.
One year after President Manuel Zelaya was ousted from office, Honduras has become one of the most dangerous countries in the world for journalists, according to the International Press Institute. The article includes a timeline of the murders of Honduran journalists in 2010.
The Inter American Press Association is kicking off a workshop about how to diminish journalists' risks with the debut of a documentary commemorating the assassination of journalist Francisco Ortiz Franco in Tijuana, Mexico, on June 22, 2004, according to the newspaper El Universal.
TV Globo photographer Márcio Alexandre de Souza, 36 years old, was shot and killed Sunday morning, June 20, in São Cristóvão, in the northern zone of Rio de Janeiro, reported the newspaper O Globo.