Hardly seven months have gone by and 2011 is already the most "tragic year in the last two decades for the Latin American press."
The junior soccer team Atlético Tubarão, located in the Brazilian state of Santa Catarina, attacked journalist Eduardo Ventura who was covering a game for Rádio Santa Catarina and channel Unisul TV, reported Diário Sul.
Brazil’s Senate president, José Sarney, blocked an attempt to censure Senator Robert Requião, who forcefully took a journalists tape recorder, erased what was on it, and threatened to hit the media worker during an April interview, G1 reports.
Journalist Jaime Quispe, the director of Jornada newspaper in Ayacucho, Peru, received a death threat the same day he published an article about political pressure to release a regional politician’s imprisoned brother, whom he accused of being a member of a blackmail gang, the Press and Society Institute (IPYS) reports.
Political journalist Auro Ida, 53, was shot to death the morning of July 22 in front of his girlfriend’s house in Cuiabá, Mato Grosso, G1 reports.
Two journalists from Canal 36, an affiliate of Cholusat Sur, received text message death threats after reporting on evidence of alleged misconduct by the Catholic Church in Honduras, El Libertador reports.
Journalist Cristina Guimarães, who, along with Tim Lopes, won the Esso Journalism Prize for the series "Drug Fair," accused Brazil's TV Globo of not adequately protecting Lopes, who was killed in 2002 after receiving threats from drug traffickers in Río de Janeiro, reported the newspaper Jornal do Brasil.
Emilio Gutiérrez, a Mexican journalist seeking asylum in the United States after fleeing the drug-related violence in the northern region of the country, has petitioned the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACHR) of the Organization of American States (OAS) to investigate and rule on the inability of the Mexican government to protect the rights of journalists who have been threatened by the military since President Felipe Calderón began his anti-drug war in 2006, reported El Diario in El Paso, Texas.
The slaying of Argentine folk singer Facundo Cabral after a June 9 concert in Guatemala put the country in the international spotlight. Authorities have reported increasing levels of violence in Guatemala, where the murder rate is more than double that in Mexico, where fights between rival drug trafficking gangs and security forces have left more than 35,000 dead since 2006.
Antuérpio Pettersen Filho, blogger in the Brazilian state of Espírito Santo and editor of digital newspaper Grito Cidadão, received death threats after publishing a report accusing a police official of being part of a militia, reported the blog Vi o Mundo.