Despite the comments of a senior Peruvian police official who said the killing of 22-year-old Lima reporter Fernando Raymondi was not motivated by his coverage of organized crime, drug trafficking and corruption, local journalists and international press freedom advocates continue to call for a thorough investigation of the shooting.
Impunity in the murder of journalists is not new in Latin America. In the last decade, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) reported 72 instances of journalists killed for their work. About 78 percent of these cases faced complete or partial impunity. But in Mexico, Colombia and Brazil, levels of impunity have surpassed those of any other Latin American country, according to CPJ’s 2014 Global Impunity Index.
Argentine police have raided radio station and news website La Brújula 24 and confiscated journalistic materials. According to reports from the city of Bahía Blanca, in the Buenos Aires province, local police arrived at the news office with a court order signed by Federal Judge Santiago Ulipano Martinez.
The Inter-American Press Association (IAPA) and the Peruvian Press Council (CPP) have held a press conference to condemn the killing of the wife of journalist Gerson Fabián Cuba, Gloria Lima Calle, who was killed in an attack of the Radio Rumba office in the Pichanaki district of the Chanchamayo province, Junín.
Paraguayan journalist Pablo Medina Velázquez, murdered in the northeastern Canindeyú department while working on assignment, is the third journalist to be killed in the country this year and the latest in a series of journalists to be killed in the region in recent years. His death underscores the dangerous and deteriorating conditions for journalists working along the Brazilian border.
When a group of men entered the Silao offices of El Heraldo de Leon in September and threatened and beat reporter Karla Silva, the case became a rallying point for the passage of a protection law for journalists in the state of Guanajuato.
Mexican activist Atilano Román Tirado was killed on Monday while giving a live radio broadcast in Mazatlan in the state of Sinaloa. Listeners of Román Tirado’s weekly radio show reported hearing gunshots after intruders entered the station and broke into the studio where the community leader was broadcasting.
The criminal investigation of Peru’s Minister of the Interior for the death of a journalist in 1988 serves as a reminder that the Andean nation still lives and deals with the effects of an internal war that ravaged the country in the late twentieth century.
Three Mexican journalists in the states of Oaxaca, Veracruz and Guanajuato have been killed in the span of a week.
Mexican journalists in Veracruz and other groups marched on Monday, April 28, to commemorate reporter Regina Martínez, who was killed two years ago on the same day, according to Proceso magazine.
In their presentation before the Organization of American States (OAS), the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) condemned that most of the 18 killings of journalists committed in 2013 continue to go unpunished.
A bomb planted by unknown men detonated in front of a home belonging to Peruvian journalist Yofré López Sifuentes in the early hours of Tuesday April 22, according to the daily La República.