It is a sad end to 2013 for the global press freedom community. With the sudden death of CPJ Mexico Representative Mike O’Connor, 67, on Sunday, Mexican journalists have lost one of their most formidable advocates. Mike will be remembered as someone who was on the forefront of the struggle for press freedom. His superb…
Carlos Lauría’s testimony starts at 1:10 in the video. Carlos Lauría, CPJ’s Americas senior program coordinator, provided testimony before the Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere of US House of Representatives on Tuesday. Lauría emphasized that violence and government harassment are the main emerging trends that illustrate the major challenges facing the press in the Western…
New York, September 6, 2013–The Committee to Protect Journalists is outraged by the decision of a Mexican judge to dismiss charges against Marco Arturo Quiñones Sánchez, one of the gunmen implicated in the 1997 assassination attempt against J. Jesús Blancornelas, founder and former editor of the Tijuana-based weekly magazine Zeta. The editors of Zeta told…
Organized crime capos and corrupt politicians have been getting away with murdering journalists in Mexico for so long that there isn’t a reliable count on the number of the dead or a useful way to measure the crushing effects on a democracy when a country’s press is afraid to tell the truth. CPJ research shows…
Mexico City, July 18, 2013–Mexican authorities should conduct an open and thorough investigation into the murder of a crime reporter whose body was found on Wednesday in Oaxaca City, the capital of Oaxaca state, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today. Alberto López Bello had been badly beaten and shot, government officials told CPJ.
Somalis, Syrians flee violence; Iran crackdown deepens Fifty-five journalists fled their homes in the past year with help from the Committee to Protect Journalists. The most common reason to go into exile was the threat of violence, such as in Somalia and Syria, two of the most deadly countries in the world for the profession.…
A fellow newspaper photographer phoned him and said he had to get right over to his parents’ home because something very bad had happened. When Miguel Angel López remembers seeing when he got there was “just blood. You can’t understand that much hatred.” He was talking about the murders of his mother, his father–a senior…
The Durango state governor was on his way to meet with reporters. Before he arrived, the reporters huddled to decide the question of the moment. It seemed obvious: Why had a former mayor been arrested the day before in what clearly seemed to be a political move? “That was the only question,” a reporter said…