Only 19 percent of all registered cases of journalists’ homicides and disappearances have been heard by a judge and only 10 percent of those have ended in a sentencing, leaving Mexico’s impunity index at 89 percent, according to the National Human Rights Commission (CNDH) in a press release on April 20.
On a typically hot and rainy night in the southwestern part of Guerrero, several gunmen briskly walked inside an Internet cafe owned and operated by a married couple who both practiced journalism.
Reporters Without Borders denounced that Colombian investigative journalist, Claudia Julieta Duque, continues to receive threats as her court case advances against the agents of the country's Department of Security (DAS) who, in the last 10 years, have followed, psychologically tortured and kidnapped her.
Carlos Mejía Orellana, an employee with Honduran radio station Radio Progreso, was stabbed and killed in the municipality of El Progreso on April 11, Reporters Without Borders informed.
Three Latin American countries were listed in the latest edition of the Committee to Protect Journalists’ (CPJ) Global Impunity Index. Mexico, Colombia and Brazil occupied, respectively, the seventh, eighth and eleventh place on the list.
Mexico's Secretary of Interior Miguel Ángel Osorio Chong called the country's Mechanism to Protect Journalists a “failure” that will require restructuring to carry out its responsibilities as established by the law, Proceso magazine reported.
Venezuelan journalist and Globovisión newsroom editor Nairobi Pinto was kidnapped by three masked and armed men on Sunday April, 5 news agency Venezuela Al Día reported.
The Foundation for Press Freedom (FLIP) in Colombia reported two recent aggressions against a journalist and a photographer by national police agents. These were added to the 57 attacks against the press registered during the first few months of 2014, of which 13, or 23 percent, were committed by police.
On Wednesday, March 26, four weeks after being kidnapped, beaten and threatened as a result of content published in a magazine he directed, Mexican journalist Gilberto Moreno Fontes took his own life in his home in Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas, according to news agency Proceso.
Ten days after the sudden resignation of the head of Mexico's Mechanism to Protect Journalists Juan Carlos Gutiérrez Contreras, members of the federal agency's independent advisory group revealed that more than half of the cases of threats and attacks against journalists that the Mechanism has received in the last two years haven't been reviewed yet, Animal Político reported.