IN A COUNTRY WHERE THE GOVERNMENT DOMINATES THE MEDIA, the year ended with two contradictory developments. After winning a four-year court battle, the island’s first independent radio station was expected to start broadcasting soon. However, the High Court restrained a weekly newspaper from further coverage of a medical benefits scandal that the paper exposed in…
IN A FRUSTRATING YEAR FOR PRESS FREEDOM in Argentina, a proposed bill that would have eliminated criminal penalties for defamation cases involving public officials foundered after local journalists implicated members of the Senate in a major bribery scandal. Senators who had supported the proposed bill quickly withdrew their support. The long battle to reform Argentina’s…
ALTHOUGH THE BOLIVIAN PRESS IS PLURALISTIC and freedom of the press is generally respected, structural barriers as well as a tense political situation continued to impede independent reporting. In April, President Hugo Banzer imposed a state of emergency that lasted for nearly two weeks after violent protests against an increase in water rates broke out…
WHILE REPORTERS IN BRAZIL’S MAJOR CITIES UNEARTHED various political scandals, their colleagues in the provinces faced violent reprisal from politicians and local landowners because of their reporting. One provincial journalist was murdered. In July, the aggressive urban press reignited a lingering scandal involving a 169 million real (US$90 million) embezzlement scheme tied to the construction…
PRESS FREEDOM IS GENERALLY RESPECTED IN CANADA, and CPJ does not routinely monitor press conditions in the country. However, CPJ was greatly alarmed by the September 13 shooting of Michel Auger, a veteran crime reporter with the French-language daily Le Journal de Montréal, and sent a letter to Florent Gagné, general director of the Quebec…
THE CRIMINAL INVESTIGATION OF FORMER DICTATOR GEN. AUGUSTO PINOCHET and other military officers severely tested the independence of the Chilean judiciary at a time when the courts were being used to harass journalists investigating official corruption. After narrowly defeating rightist candidate Joaquín Lavín in a January 16 run-off election, Ricardo Lagos took office on March…
IN A DEVASTATING YEAR FOR COLOMBIA, journalists were murdered, assaulted, threatened, and kidnapped. Many fled into exile. With the peace process that began in 1999 largely moribund, a nearly four-decade conflict that pits two major leftist guerrilla groups against the army and right-wing paramilitary forces continued to escalate throughout the year. All the warring factions…
EVEN AS COSTA RICAN JOURNALISTS BATTLED A FLURRY of defamation lawsuits, a proposed bill that would have greatly enhanced press freedom in the country failed to win legislative approval. On February 15, the Legislative Assembly’s judiciary committee rejected a bill, drafted by several leading journalists and endorsed by President Miguel Angel Rodríguez, that would have…
IN A COUNTRY WHOSE CONSTITUTION AND PENAL CODE specifically disallow press freedom, independent journalists continued to face repression from the Cuban government last year. Yet their ranks have grown steadily, and there are now about 20 independent news agencies in the country. In early 2001, a particularly courageous independent journalist saw the outside of a…
THE DOMINICAN REPUBLIC’S VIBRANT PRESS WAS TARNISHED by accusations of biased coverage during the May 16 presidential election. The year also saw a landmark conviction in the murder of a journalist, and a proposed bill to enhance freedom of the press. The ruling Dominican Liberation Party (PLD) lost a three-way race between its own candidate,…