El Salvador

Alfredo Hurtado, 45, a cameraman employed by the privately-owned TV station Canal 33, was gunned down in bus in the town of Ilopango, near the capital, Monday evening as he was on his way to work. The motive is not yet known. Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) expressed its support for Hurtado’s family and colleagues and the entire Salvadoran media, now in mourning...

There have been mixed feelings about the guilty verdicts and sentences ranging from 4 to 30 years in prison that a court in San Salvador passed Wednesdat on 11 of the 31 people, mainly gang members, who were tried for the September 2009 murder of Franco-Spanish documentary filmmaker and journalist Christian Poveda. “The sequence of events and the immediate motive seem clear but was a two-day trial...

The Salvadoran Congress ratified the Public Information Access Law on Thursday, March 3, after accepting some of the changes proposed by President Mauricio Funes, reported news agency EFE, according to the Knight Centre for Journalism in the Americas. The details: [ Link] However while the law will go into effect until 30 days after its official publication, Salvadorans will have to wait a year...

ARTICLE 19 has welcomed the approval of the Access to Public Information Law by El Salvador's Legislative Assembly on December 2, and urged President Mauricio Funes to immediately sign and implement the legislation. The law marks a new era for freedom of information in the country. "The adoption of the Access to Public Information Law by the Legislative Assembly is an important step forward in the...

A year has gone by since Christian Poveda, a French photojournalist, documentary filmmaker and politically-committed observer, was shot dead in a San Salvador suburb on September 2, 2009, probably by members of a local gang. His death has deprived his profession of one of its best-informed specialists in Central America, a region often ignored by the international press. After covering the civil