With their campaigns against independent media, the governments of several Latin American countries are beginning to threaten press freedom. Can Nicolás Maduro and Daniel Ortega's extreme of media blockages and closures be replicated?
Independent Venezuelan media outlets Efecto Cocuyo and Crónica Uno gave life to Mirador Electoral, a journalistic project that seeks to be a space for discussion on politics and elections before citizens vote on the next president. The initiative is made of TikTok videos, interviews on YouTube and a series of articles.
According to recent research from Ecuador, journalism in Latin America is a profession with invisible psychosocial risk factors, a situation that was aggravated by the COVID-19 pandemic. The main researcher and four journalists explain how to face this reality in daily work.
After an investigation, three Venezuelan journalists realized the best way to help journalism in Venezuela's Amazon region would be through a network that promotes collaboration and produces coverage that is conscious of both the environment and human rights.
The fact-checking coalition C-Informa of Venezuela won the Journalistic Excellence Award of the Inter American Press Association, in its category of data journalism, for revealing the social media disinformation strategy of Nicolás Maduro's regime. Learn more about the winning work in this article.
Following its line of innovation, Venezuelan independent news outlet Efecto Cocuyo launches a collection of NFTs, an element of blockchain technology, to raise funds and denounce the digital censorship suffered in Venezuela. The collection contains 489 images that represent the days that the news outlet has been blocked in their country.
Considering the media crisis in Venezuela, Academia Prodavinci, the educational division of the investigative journalism organization, launched a journalist training program this year. It seeks to train journalists and students in topics such as health, economics and gender inequality in order to contribute to the development of a more solid, contextualized and analytical journalism.
In a panel at UT Austin, four Venezuelan journalists recounted their experiences of persecution and survival during two and a half decades in a country that is no longer a democracy, where print newspapers are lacking and the official media have become hegemonic.
Venezuelan journalist Ronna Rísquez, who specializes in violence and organized crime, spoke with LatAm Journalism Review about the publication of her first book 'El Tren de Aragua: The gang that revolutionized organized crime in Latin America,' about this criminal organization that has a presence throughout the region.
Venezuela has a favorable climate for disinformation and its government has taken advantage of the reach of social media to spread false information. A group of media and digital rights organizations have created the fact-checking network C-Informa to show how disinformation works in that country.
Using satellite imagery and geo-referencing, following the trail of trafficking networks and taking care for the safety of journalist and sources are techniques that journalists Yvette Sierra of Mongabay, Joseph Poliszuk of Armando.Info and freelancer Hyury Potter have applied in their investigations of illegal mining in Latin America.
During the LATAM Festival of Digital Media and Journalism, journalists from Cuba, Guatemala, Mexico, and Venezuela shared how they go around the opacity and hostility of their governments. They agreed that the lack of transparency and access to information can cost human lives.