Cuban journalist José Luis Tan Estrada boarded a plane in Havana last December because he thought exile was the only way to continue his career and protect his family. It was his first time on an airplane. Tan Estrada, 28, had faced escalating repression by Cuban authorities for months. After he was fired from teaching…
Haitian journalist Jean Marc Jean was covering an anti-government protest in Port-au-Prince in February 2024 when he was struck in the face by a gas canister fired by police into the crowd. One of at least five journalists injured while covering civil unrest in the country that month, Jean arrived at the hospital with a…
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,…
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….
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…
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…
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…
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 —…
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…
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…