Journalist Clara Fernández died after being shot in the head on Feb. 23 in the northern city of Valencia, Canal de Noticia reports.
Attackers fired on a truck carrying an Associated Press correspondent and a publicist for Radio Fórmula in the city of Cuernavaca, a favorite vacation destination for Mexico City residents that has become prime ground for battles between rival drug gangs, El Universal and Radio Fórmula report.
Lourival Rodrigues Moraes, a former city councilman of Pontes e Lacerda, in the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso, was sentenced to one year in prison for threatening a journalist last June, according to TV Centro América.
2010 was a year plagued by setbacks for press freedom and threats to journalists worldwide, according to Reporters without Borders’ (RSF) Spanish-language report titled “Freedom of the Press Report Worldwide in 2010.”
Organized crime, whether drug cartels, mafias or paramilitary forces, poses the greatest threat to journalists today, according to a new report released Thursday, Feb. 24, from Reporters Without Borders. In the last 10 years, 141 journalists have been killed for reporting on organized crime, the report said.
In the midst of a wave of violence against the media following the 2009 Honduran coup, which includes the death of 10 journalists, the government said it will create a special unit to investigate crimes against journalists, La Tribuna reports.
El Diario de Juárez, a major newspaper in the Mexican city of Ciudad Juárez – one of the world’s most violent cities – won the 2011 award for journalistic excellence, organized by the Mexico branch of PEN International.
Radio Rama journalist Gildardo Mota was shot in the leg while covering a confrontation between police and professors who were protesting Mexican President Felipe Calderón’s visit to the southern city of Oaxaca, the Associated Press reports.
An armed group attacked the facilities of two media outlets and shot to death a worker on Feb. 9 in the city of Torreón, in the northern Mexican state of Coahuila, one of the regions most affected by drug trafficking violence in the country, reported the local press.
Ten people in Colombia, including three journalists, have been threatened in a pamphlet allegedly signed by the paramilitary group United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, according to the Freedom of the Press Foundation (FLIP in Spanish), which condemned the death threats.
Haitian journalist Jean Richard Louis Charles was shot to death on the street in the Haitian capital city of Port-au-Prince, The Associated Press reports.
Televisa cameraman Juan César Martínez was hit in the face and had his equipment taken by members of the federal police as he was covering a confrontation between the authorities and armed gang members in the northern city of of Monterrey, Vanguardia reports.