After the shutdown of two community radio stations in Mexico during the past two weeks, the World Association of Community Radio Broadcasters (AMARC) is calling on Mexican authorities to stop "criminalizing" community stations, reported Púlsar, the information agency for AMARC of Latin America and the Caribbean.
Nearly 50 Mexican media organizations signed an agreement Thursday about coverage of drug trafficking. The pact seeks to prevent excessive publication of violent images and stories and to guarantee the safety of journalists who expose themselves daily to the growing violence of organized crime, which has left more than 34,000 deaths in four years. See stories in English by the Associated Press and Reuters.
The killing of journalist Francisco Javier Ortiz Franco, editor general of Zeta weekly, was allegedly ordered by Javier Arellano Félix, then leader of the Tijuana Cartel, the gang that controls the drug trade between the Mexican border city of the same name and the United States, the Committee Protect Journalists (CPJ) reports.
Amidst the “information blackout” generated by drug trafficking violence along the U.S.-Mexican border, social network sites have transformed into a fundamental information source for citizens, but they cannot replace Mexican journalism, said veteran Mexican journalist Jacinto Rodríguez, who spoke recently at the University of Texas at Austin about journalism and violence.
A group of civil society organizations is demanding greater safety and protection for journalists and human rights activists in Mexico, especially in the eastern and northern regions of the country where the most aggression occurs, reported the newspaper La Jornada.
A panel of three Mexican judges lifted a ban on the film "Presumed Guilty," a widely popular yet controversial documentary that exposes faults in the country’s justice system, the BBC said last week.
Gabino Cue, governor for the Mexican state of Oaxaca, has created a special prosecutor's office to re-open the investigations into the deaths of 26 people -- including New York journalist Bradley Will -- who were killed during protests against the government in 2006, reported Milenio and the Associated Press.
With Rosalía Orozco, former director of the journalism program at the University of Guadalajara in Mexico, taking over as the new director of the university’s Digital Journalism Training Center, the center is planning new courses and redesigning its website, according to the university and the News Entrepeneurs blog.
Just two days after the release of a report on the state of press freedom in Mexico that denounced increasing police and military aggression against reporters, a photographer for the Televisa station was arrested and beaten by security agents in the northern Mexican state of Coahuila on Friday, March 4, reported local press.
The documentary “Presumed Guilty,” about judicial mistakes and corruption in Mexico, may become a victim of the system it criticizes, La Crónica de Hoy reports. Last week, a federal judge issued a temporary injunction after a witness in a trial, which led to the ultimately overturned conviction of Antonio Zuniga for murder, said he never gave permission to be filmed, the Los Angeles Times explains.
At least 139 journalists and 21 media outlets in Mexico suffered violence related to their work in 2010, a year in which violence against them media grew and drug traffickers were not the only perpetrators, says the Center for Journalism and Public Ethics (CEPET) in its annual report.
El Imparcial newspaper reports that one of its photographers, Julián Ortega, was threatened and assaulted by officers searching for shooters who had killed a pair of police moments earlier.