Americas

Centro de Reportes Informativos sobre Guatemala (CERIGUA) has warned of several incidents that the organisation has taken note of that could be part of a plan to undermine freedom of expression in the country. CERIGUA's director, Ileana Alamilla, said in a statement that in the beginning of February 2009, the CERIGUA website was hacked into, though personnel within the organisation were able to...

More than a year-and-a-half after the murder of Oakland Post reporter Chauncey Bailey, new evidence incriminating Yusuf Bey IV, the former head of Your Black Muslim Bakery, has come to light. Suspected of being the crime's mastermind, he has nonetheless not been charged yet. On March 4, a confidential informant implicated Yusuf Bey IV in the killing of the veteran journalist in August 2007. The...

The Inter American Press Association (IAPA) has censured the setback for press freedom and free speech in Mexico contained in new proposals made public by the federal Chamber of Deputies' Judicial Committee, chaired by Congressman César Camacho. According to the committee's bill shown to representatives of the IAPA recently, work carried out for years by the Chamber of Deputies' Special Commission...

Brazil's Federal Supreme Court (STF) has made a "preliminary" decision to extend a suspension of 22 clauses—including 20 articles—of the draconian February 9, 1967 press law. The clauses at issue that allow prison sentences for offences of "defamation", "denigration" and "insult", were suspended for the first time for a period of six months, by the country's highest jurisdiction on February 27...

Guatemalan newspaper elPeriódico newspaper recently accused the government of Álvaro Colom of censoring the press by using government advertising funds in a discriminatory fashion to punish or reward media outlets. As a result, the newspaper has asked the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights's (IACHR) Office of the Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Expression to intervene in the situation. On...

Police arrests of two Jamaican journalists in one week were an abuse of power, Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has said, and called for a full investigation of the two cases. Those arrested by police in Kingston were: Julian Richardson, financial journalist for the daily Jamaica Observer and Ricardo Makyn, a photographer for the daily the Gleaner. Richardson was arrested and threatened with death...

San Francisco may become the largest US city to lose its main daily newspaper after Hearst Corp threatened to sell or close the San Francisco Chronicle unless it can push through more job cuts, Bllomberg News has reported. The publisher, already trying to sell the Seattle Post- Intelligencer, said Tuesday that it would seek voluntary buyouts for a “significant” number of its 1,500 employees after...

Mexican radio reporter Luis Daniel Méndez Hernández’s was murdered on February 23 while he was attending the carnival in Huayacocotla, in the southeastern state of Veracruz. The correspondent of “Enlaces Noticias,” a news programme broadcast on several frequencies by the Radiorama Tuxpan news agency, Méndez was shot four times in the back, according to Reporters sans Frontières (RSF). “There are...

Progress has been made in the investigation into last month’s murder of Venezuelan journalist Orel Zambrano, the editor of the political weekly ABC, in Valencia, in the central state of Carabobo. One of the two suspected killers, former Carabobo state policeman Rafael Segundo Pérez, was arrested on February 17, Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has reported. Zambrano, 62, was gunned down at around 3...

Agents of Administrative Department of Security (DAS), the national intelligence service of Colombia, had spied on critical reporters, Supreme Court judges, opposition politicians, and officials in President Alvaro Uribe's administration, leading newsweekly Semana has reported. Citing five unnamed DAS agents, the magazine said that rogue intelligence officials had monitored and intercepted...