The identification of two of three suspects in the assassination of Mexican journalist Miroslava Breach Velducea have been confirmed, said César Augusto Peniche, district attorney general of the state of Chihuahua, according to the Mexican newspaper La Jornada.
Journalist Miroslava Breach Velducea, 54, was killed on the morning of March 23 after receiving at least four shots to the head. The journalist was leaving her home in the capital city of Chihuahua state and getting into her vehicle when a group of strangers approached her and began shooting, according to newspaper Norte in Ciudad Juárez.
Another journalist has been killed in Veracruz, Mexico.
Peruvian journalist and audiovisual producer José Yactayo, who disappeared on Feb. 25, was killed and dismembered, the Peruvian National Police said on March 2 after confirming the identity of human remains found in a rural area on the outskirts of Lima.
After a weeklong hearing, a court in Oaxaca found former police commander Jorge Armando Santiago Martínez guilty of the 2016 murder of journalist Marcos Hernández Bautista, according to a March 4 release from the Oaxaca Attorney General. He was sentenced to 30 years in prison and ordered to pay 178,000 pesos in damages (about $9,077). A motive was not mentioned.
Colombian journalist Jineth Bedoya Lima has testified 11 times before the authorities in her country about the crimes against her, including kidnapping, torture and sexual assault, in May 2000.
Although the number of murders of Brazilian journalists has dropped to only two cases in 2016, violations against the press have manifested in other ways. The annual report from the Brazilian Association of Radio and Television Broadcasters (Abert) reported that, compared to 2015, last year saw a 65.5 percent increase in cases of violations to freedom of expression.
A radio announcer and the director of a radio station in the Dominican Republic were killed on the morning of Feb. 14 in the city of San Pedro de Macorís. According to EFE, an armed man entered the location and began firing several times. However, local media pointed out that there could have been two male attackers.
A Guatemalan congressman was named by the country’s authorities as the alleged mastermind of the March 10, 2015 murder of journalist Danilo Efraín Zapón López, according to the International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG for its acronym in Spanish).
After having undergone the first surgery to save the vision of his left eye, the doctors at the Bascom Palmer Eye Institute of Miami have given Marco “Atoq” Ramón, a Peruvian photographer with newspaper Perú.21, a hopeful prognosis.
Early in the morning of May 6, 1996, Gustavo Díaz, a merchant in the port of Turbo, in Urabá, Colombia, lost everything. His wife and two of his daughters were murdered and burned along with his grocery store at the hands of guerrillas of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), in one of more than 2,000 massacres that have occurred in that country since 1982.
Igor Abisaí Padilla Chávez, a well-known Honduran journalist, was killed in San Pedro Sula on Jan. 17.