‘I will always keep fighting,’ José Rubén Zamora tells CPJ before court orders him back to jail
Less than a month after being moved to house arrest, a Guatemalan appeals court ordered journalist José Rubén Zamora back to jail on November 15, 2024. Zamora remains in house arrest while his lawyers and the Attorney General’s Office have appealed the motion, his son told CPJ. The decision is a new blow to press freedom in Guatemala. Zamora,…
Ahead of the US election, we delivered safety training to over 700 journalists. Here’s what the press must know to keep safe.
The November 2024 U.S. presidential election will take place after years of an increasingly polarized political climate in the country. This election comes after two previous contentious presidential election cycles, amid high levels of distrust in the media and a recent history of journalists being arrested, assaulted, and attacked in-person and online, including at protests….
A ‘culture of silence’ threatens press freedom under El Salvador President Bukele
Nearly 80,000 people have been detained, and up to 200 may have died in state custody, since El Salvador President Nayib Bukele’s declared a state of emergency in March 2022, temporarily suspending constitutional rights and civil liberties in the country in the name of fighting gang violence. Local journalists and human rights organizations have raised concerns that Bukele, who…
In post-election Venezuela, journalist jailings reach record high, media goes underground
Shortly after Venezuela’s disputed presidential election in July, security agents arrested journalist Ana Carolina Guaita and then contacted her family to make a deal. They offered to release Guaita if her mother, Xiomara Barreto, who worked on the opposition campaign to defeat President Nicolás Maduro, turned herself in. Barreto, who is in hiding, rejected the…
Cyberattackers use easily available tools to target media sites, threaten press freedom
When exiled Russian news website Meduza was hit with a flood of internet traffic in mid-April, it set off alarm bells among the staff as the deluge blocked publishing for more than four hours and briefly rendered the site inaccessible for some readers. It was the largest distributed denial of service attack (DDoS) attack in…
Haitian press face ‘existential crisis’ with no end to gang violence
Le Nouvelliste, Haiti’s oldest independent daily newspaper, has been around for 126 years, and the outlet’s owners are proud to have maintained its operations through the country’s intensifying challenges — from foreign occupation and devastating earthquakes to coups. But now Le Nouvelliste’s survival — and that of more independent media outlets in the country —…
In Venezuela, restrictions and self-censorship limit coverage of opposition ahead of election
Antonio Di Giampaolo has hosted his popular radio news program En el Aire, Spanish for “On the Air,” for nearly 40 years. On May 17, Di Giampaolo planned to broadcast an interview with opposition presidential candidate Edmundo González, but executives at the station Éxitos 93.1 FM in the western city of Maracay nixed the plan with no explanation, according to the journalist. “I had…
Drug-related violence fuels an exodus of Ecuador’s press
On the only radio station in the remote Ecuadorian town of Baeza, morning show host Juan Carlos Tito updates listeners on the weather, recent power outages, and repairs to a bridge spanning a nearby river. For the last 24 years, Tito, 53, has been the trusted voice of Radio Selva, broadcasting important community news to…
‘Powerful enemies’: Did a prosecutor order the murder of Haitian journalist Garry Tesse?
Haitian journalist Garry Tesse was on his way to work at a local radio station in the southern city of Les Cayes when he disappeared shortly after exiting a taxi. His naked and disfigured corpse was found six days later face down on the seashore close to downtown. One of his eyes was gouged out,…
Why extradition of WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange to US would be cataclysmic for press freedom
The Australian founder of the website WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, has been fighting extradition to the U.S. from the U.K. since 2019 on charges that could strike a blow to press freedom globally. Here is CPJ’s briefing on the legal battle to extradite Assange, the charges he would face in the U.S., and why his prosecution…