Prosecutors have charged two people in the kidnapping of Luis Gerardo Núñez, a reporter for the Globovisión TV network who was rescued in Caracas Friday night by police after a ransom was paid, Globovisión and El Carabobeño report. He was abducted for at least 48 hours.
The Argentine Journalism Forum (FOPEA) has published on its website an interactive map that counts 147 cases of aggression against journalists and threats to freedom of expression in the country in 2009.
José Carlos Stachowiak, host of a police program on cable TV in Ponta Grossa, Paraná, made grave threats on the air against a journalism student who wrote a blog post criticizing his work. See the video in this post Querido Leitor (Dear Reader), by local journalist Rosana Hermann.
José Alemán, a correspondent for Tiempo newspaper and Radio América, decided to leave the country after two armed men broke into his home and fired their guns in his bedroom last Sunday in the town of San Marcos, Ocotepeque, the Committee to Protect Journalists reports.
Twenty-six reporters—12 from Mexico and 14 from the United States— participated March 26-27 in the McCormick Foundation's Specialized Reporting Institute: Cross-border Coverage of U.S.–Mexico Drug Trafficking. The seminar took place in Austin and was organized by the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas.
Héctor Cordero, a correspondent for TV Guatevisión in Quiché department (northwest of Guatemala City), says he has received phone calls threatening to kill him and warning that his family would pay the consequences for his work, Prensa Libre reports.
The 16-year-old son of TV and radio host Eduardo Maldonado was released 27 days after he was kidnapped from his home in Tegucigalpa, EFE reports.
Guatemalan investigative journalist Marvin del Cid Acevedo, who works for the newspaper elPeriódico, has received several death threats recently, after writing about official corruption and serving as a witness in a murder trial against security forces, reported Amnesty International.
U.S. soldiers had been in Haiti 11 days before they got the first copies of Stars and Stripes, the newspaper that operates independently within the military structure and follows troops to war fronts. Editor & Publisher and The New York Times both report on the logistics of getting Stars and Stripes into the hands of military women and men who are deployed overseas.
The vehicle of Adriana Aguirre San Millán was set ablaze outside the radio chain's offices in in Los Mochis, Sinaloa, and a message left beside it warned that the same will happen to all other journalists, La Jornada and El Universal report. Aguirre owns the radio chain Organización Impulsora de Radio (OIR).
Some 40 reporters held a vigil outside the attorney general's office in Los Mochis, Sinaloa (NW Mexico), insisting that authorities quicken their response to the abduction of José Luis Romero, crime reporter for the Línea Directa radio station. A state official acknowledged there were no advances in the case, Línea Directa and La Jornada report.
The mayor of Rio de Janeiro, Marcelo Crivella, severed city hall’s relations with newspaper O Globo, the largest in the city and edited by Grupo Globo, the largest communication group in the country. As a practical effect, on Dec. 3, two journalists from the outlet were prevented from attending a press conference about the city's New Year's Eve party, which annually attracts millions of tourists from Brazil and around the world.