Atlético Paranaense from Curitiba, one of Brazil’s top flight teams and Brazilian champions in 2001, banned press conferences and independent media work during their weekly activities and on match days.

On top of that, no staff member — including players and managers — of Atlético is officially allowed to speak to the media. The club says that radio stations and newspapers should pay for the right to report on the club, along the lines of fees television stations pay to broadcast matches.

However, a 2011 federal law forbids football clubs from charging money for radio broadcasts.

The club’s policy is that all information about the team will be funneled through official channels ike the team’s website, online radio and TV. Independent journalists will be limited to background information and off-the-record statements.

It’s a common practice in Brazil’s football industry to have at least two press conferences a week with players and managers and regular media activity on match days. It’s also usual in the country to have people from clubs on sport shows airing on TV and radio, which makes Atlético’s move a rare one in Brazilian football.

“The content we offer is not of a primary importance to the audience, it’s pure entertainment. So we don’t feel obliged to let anyone enter the club’s premises and profit from our business without paying for it, like radio stations do”, says Mauro Holzmann, Atlético’s director of communications and marketing.

“Less than thirty years ago it was OK for televisions to broadcast football matches without paying for it, but now it’s unthinkable to do so. So why don’t the other media pay for it? We know it’s a paradigm shift, but maybe other clubs will do this too”, Holzmann told Index on Censorship.

Broadcasting of matches became another problematic issue. Atlético did not reach an agreement for Paraná’s State Championship with TV rights holders RPC  – a local affiliate of national media giant Rede Globo. Because of that, fans were not be able to watch the games unless they bought tickets and went to the pitch.

“This is a complete enclosure that ends up damaging everybody”, says Leonardo Bonasolli, reporter at Gazeta do Povo, Curitiba’s biggest newspaper.

“The club loses exposure at the media, and exposure means more sponsorship money. The press loses the chance of providing a different, independent point of view and, of course, fans also lose because they are not interested only on the team’s monolithic media work”, Bonasolli told Index on Censorship.

Atlético’s chairman Mário Celso Petraglia said the State Championship – which runs from January until early May – is not profitable, so he would not only deny TV broadcasting but would also put the Under-23 team on the pitch, while the main squad would have an extended pre-season in Europe until the start of the Brazilian Championship.

About the media ban, Petraglia said in a rare interview that the club “reached a limit” in its relationship with the press, and that journalists “should be neutral and conduct [their work] in an ethical and moral way”, something he believes does not happen in Paraná.

Petraglia’s disturbed relationship with the press has a long history – it started in the late 1990s, when he was involved in a bribery scheme with referees to fix match results. He was neither convicted nor banned because of the episode.

Atlético first tried to charge money from radios to broadcast its games in 2008. However, a judge ruled the fees were illegal and radio stations have since been given stadium access on match days.

Atlético’s media ban was effectively shut down in early May, during the State Championship finals against historic rivals Coritiba. Rede Globo, which also owns the TV rights of the Brazilian Championship, made a deal with Atlético to allow both matches to be aired. It also closed an agreement for broadcasting the State Championship in 2014 and 2015.

After the game, Atlético’s players gave interviews normally, even to outlets other than Globo, as if there was no ban.

Paraná’s Sports Journalists Association believes Atlético’s attitude towards general media won’t change much, even with the upcoming Brazilian Championship, which draws national attention to all clubs.

“When the Brazilian championship starts, Atlético will be forced to speak to Globo, and they will also feel pressed to hold conferences after matches, because there will be so many journalists from the whole country. But I doubt they will allow other radio or TV stations inside the club during the week, so Globo will do all interviews and share their material to the other outlets”, says the Association’s president, Isaías Bessa.

Local journalists also say the club’s lack of transparency damages Curitiba’s position as one of the host cities of the 2014 World Cup – Atlético’s stadium will a venue. Renovations on the stadium are said to be the most behind schedule of any of the 12 World Cup venues, but independent media was never allowed inside after the works began.

Atlético’s Mauro Holzmann firmly says the stadium will be ready by the end of 2013, like FIFA demands, and blames all delays on “Brazil’s bureaucracy” to deal with public financing.

The post Brazil loves football, but Atlético Paranaense doesn’t have the hots for the press appeared first on Index on Censorship.

Argentina’s President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner Photo: Demotix

Argentina has an extraordinary number of newspapers, magazines, radio and TV stations. Greater Buenos Aires, the largest urban centre where 13.5 million people live has 18 newspapers, 37 TV channels (five analogue and 32 digital), seven news channels, and 550 AM and FM radio stations. Does this mean that it is a thriving market, with highly educated, enlightened audiences, where the development of the media is directly linked to prosperity?

No. The reason Argentina boasts a huge proliferation of media organisations is strictly political.

Many of the media outlets – indeed most newspapers – could not survive a single month with what they get from selling copies of the newspaper and sales in advertising space. The country’s 141 periodicals and newspapers sell a total daily average of 1.3m copies. Eighty-two per cent of them have tiny circulations of about 10,000 copies. Over 40 per cent sell less than 1,000 copies, according to the Asociación de Entidades Periodísticas Argentinas (ADEPA), the largest association of press companies in Argentina.

How do most of them survive? From state advertising paid by public funds or from surreptitious contributions made by entrepreneurs seeking to impose their political agenda.

In 2011, the government earmarked 1,490m pesos (about US$300m) for public advertising, according to data from the private organisation Asociación Argentina de Presupuesto y Administración Financiera Pública, which analyses public finance and official government data in Argentina.

Being that the state is a vital advertiser, successive governments have attempted to put pressure on the critical press by withdrawing or cutting its publicity disbursements from certain newspapers. It happened, for example, during the administrations of Carlos Menem (1989-1999), with Página/12, and, for the administrations of Néstor Kirchner (2003-2007) and Cristina Kirchner (2007-present), with Perfil. In 2012, the owner of Perfil, Jorge Fontevecchia, succeeded in getting the Supreme Court to rule against the government for its discriminatory use of its advertising policies. The Supreme Court ordered the government to restore its advertising in Perfil. It did not conform.

This article appears in the current issue of Index on Censorship, Fallout: The economic crisis and free expression. Subscribe.

It was also Fontevecchia who, in 1998, publicly denounced Grupo Clarín, the largest media conglomerate in Argentina with about 44 per cent of the market, accusing it of cajoling major advertisers to avoid placing ads in his newspaper. He was not the first media entrepreneur to denounce Clarín, which, because of its dominant position in the market, was able to ‘punish’ advertisers that placed ads in other rival papers. In a practice openly criticised by its peers as ‘discriminating’, Clarín has been controlling the commercial ads market for years.

In Argentina, in many cases nobody knows who the owners of media organisations are, what their ownership structure is or even how big – or small – their sales and audience are. Official circulation figures are often pumped up and not to be trusted. This lack of transparency extends to media relationships with any kind of political influence or impact. Entrepreneurs routinely strike secret deals with government officials, including the president of the nation, resulting in financial or economic benefits on one side and favourable coverage on the other. It’s a win-win situation. These agreements, never admitted publicly, bring about self-censorship in newsrooms and are characterised by manipulation, concealment, and outright lies.

In a book published in 2011, I disclosed several of these secret meetings between Grupo Clarín’s CEO, Héctor Magnetto, other media organisations, President Néstor Kirchner and public officials. Both ranking government sources and Clarín executives provided evidence that pointed to a cosy relationship. One such meeting in 2008 between President Kirchner and Grupo Clarín, for example, resulted in the opportunity for the media conglomerate to acquire shares in Telecom, one of the country’s biggest telephone companies. In 2009, the negotiation failed and the group never acquired the shares. Kirchner, in a rare television interview on 24 February 2010, disclosed that he had discussed the deal with Magnetto.

Vortex of bitter battles

Things began to change in 2008, starting a long process that ended in a declaration of war. For the last four years, media organisations and journalists have been in the middle of a virulent public debate rarely seen in this country. It is a conflict that has permeated daily life, creating a national divide. It started when the Kirchners decided to wage war against Grupo Clarín and other newspapers, magazines, TV channels and cable networks, along with many other companies. Since then, media organisations have taken sides: for or against the government. Both sides depict the opponent as the personification of evil. Grupo Clarín, together with other national and international organisations, claims President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner is seeking to muzzle the independent press, stifle freedom of expression and put a stop to criticism. The government and its many supporters respond with the argument that it is the corporate media, especially Clarín, who are trying to hurt democracy and plurality.

The polarisation is such that it has become very difficult to find independent observers able to capture nuances and explain the situation in all its complexity. To understand it, you have to examine the recent history of the relationship between the press and those in power.

Until 1983, Argentina suffered several military dictatorships, during which more than 100 journalists were ‘disappeared’ (a euphemism for kidnapped and assassinated) and many magazines and newspapers were expropriated or closed down. Traditional newspapers, some of them centenarian, lived through these dictatorships without difficulties, or by agreeing to partner with military governments, supporting them enthusiastically in some cases – even backing their mass killings and disappearances. Some of those newspapers are still active today.

But it is also a country with a fertile journalistic tradition that has produced brilliant journalists and has become a model for reporting in the Spanish language throughout the world. In the 1990s, for example, we saw the birth of a vigorous investigative journalism wave that held the government and the political power to account. The turning point was the creation of Página/12, a newspaper that exposed rampant corruption in the public sector during the government of President Carlos Menem. It was a golden age for journalism.

All major polls revealed that journalism was regarded as the most prestigious national institution, above the Catholic Church, teachers and, of course, politicians.

This period also saw the beginnings of heavy concentration in media ownership. Powerful multimedia conglomerates were created, Grupo Clarín being the most powerful – economically and politically – of them all. Then came 2001 and an economic, political, social, cultural crisis – the worst in decades. Politicians, but also journalists and the media in general, were casualties of the crisis and lost public credibility. The government fell, Argentina defaulted on its foreign debt; there were riots, high unemployment and a proliferation of alternative currencies.

Néstor Kirchner came to power with little political legitimacy. He had lost in the first round against former president Carlos Menem, who, foreseeing a defeat in the second round, abandoned the race. The country was still in the middle of the great crisis. ‘They must all leave’ was the most popular slogan during 2001 and 2002, hinting at attitudes to foreign intervention.

Political parties were at their lowest levels of popularity since the return of democracy, without credible leaders or solid policies. Kirchner, like other presidents on the continent, decided to renew and revive politics. During both Néstor Kirchner and Cristina Kirchner’s administrations, the economy recovered. As in much of Latin America, the last ten years have been a period of extraordinary economic growth and prosperity for Argentina: during successive years, its GDP grew at a rate of nine percent, poverty fell from 57.5 to 20 percent and unemployment rates fell by 54 percent.

But the press did not recover.

During the presidential transition, before even taking office, Néstor Kirchner denounced the media publicly, stating that journalists were not independent: they had their own political and economic agendas. With this announcement, he drew a line between friends and foes. On one side he placed mainly the Clarín Group, with which he negotiated important agreements in private meetings, and on the other side he placed La Nación, a centenary, conservative daily Kirchner denounced for having supported the last military dictatorship.

But, in 2008, due to a series of political disagreements, the Kirchners split up with Clarín. By then, Cristina was the president. An open war commenced, in which key government officials, including the president and her husband, verbally attacked Clarín – ‘Clarín lies’, they said, calling it a ‘quasi-mafioso power’. The government, which for four years had given preferential treatment to Clarín, stopped talking to its journalists and executives. ‘Since 2008, the government has ordered its officials to cut off any contact with our journalists and to deny them access to public information’, Martín Etchevers, spokesman for Grupo Clarin, told me. The same had been done before to La Nación and this silence from those who traditionally provided official information sunk the paper. Clarín responded by becoming an anti-government newspaper.

The Kirchners also decided to damage Grupo Clarín’s economic interests in order to reduce its political influence and economic power. They withdrew their exclusive, multi-million dollar rights to broadcast football matches on television, initiated court cases to investigate their association with the last military dictatorship and managed to pass a media law that would force Grupo Clarín to get rid of most of its cable television licences, which represented more than 60 per cent of its income, as well as other assets.

Clarín refused to comply with the new media law and appealed to the courts, where a bloody battle continues to rage. Cristina Kirchner (Néstor died in 2010) seems determined to destroy Clarín, even if this is the last thing she does before leaving office in 2015. Clarín, its secret deals out in the open, has lost standing and political power.

The war has affected all media, which is now divided between those who oppose the government (Clarín, but also La Nación and Perfil, among others) and those who support it without question, small and medium newspapers and magazines and some important TV and radio stations controlled by opportunistic entrepreneurs who earn big profits from their association with those in power. Media outlets are either opponents or pro-government, with very little in between.

Today in Argentina, there is no state repression of freedom of speech, there is no censorship of the press. There is no need: the fact that journalists must align themselves on one side of the divide or the other speaks volumes about the country’s media environment.

Graciela Mochkofsky is the author of Timerman. El periodista que quiso ser parte del poder (1923–1999) (Sudamericana, 2003) and Pecado Original: Clarín, los Kirchners y la lucha por el poder (Planeta, 2011). She has investigated the relationship between the press and political powers in Argentina for 15 years.

This article appears in the current issue of Index on Censorship, Fallout: The economic crisis and free expression. Subscribe.

The post The press and the maiden appeared first on Index on Censorship.

The country’s 2002 reformed Civil Code made it mandatory for works of a biographical nature – films, books or otherwise – to have prior authorization from the subject of the work before public release. As a result, most biographies published in Brazil end up being eulogistic to the people they portray.

Critics contend that the current legal framework causes editors to practice self-censorship. “Instead of only taking care of the literary quality of the work, editors end up being busy with judicial problems and carrying out a self-censorship that is harmful to the industry”, says Sônia Machado Jardim, president of Brazil’s National Union of Book (Sindicato Nacional dos Editores de Livros, Snel).

Sônia Machado Jardim supports a change to Brazilian law, which would allow publication of biographies without prior approval of the subject. Photo: www.snel.org.br

Jardim also says that many relatives of people portrayed in biographies try to take advantage of the need of previous approval to demand huge amounts of money, making it impossible to have the works published.

Some controversial cases have become notorious in Brazil. Singer Roberto Carlos, one of the most popular artists in the past 50 years, not only barred in the 2007 circulation of a biography written by Paulo Cesar de Araújo – the copies were already printed and ready to go to the stores – but also banned the publishing of a master’s degree thesis on Jovem Guarda, the musical movement he was part of in the mid 1960s. Before that, in the 1980s, Carlos also prevented the publication of magazine articles about him.

The biography of former footballer and two time World Cup champion Garrincha, who died in 1983, provides another infamous example. Written by journalist Ruy Castro, the book was withdrawn from circulation in 1995 because of a lawsuit filed by Garrincha’s relatives. The author appealed and his work eventually went back on sale.

In 2011, controversies like these led deputy Newton Lima (Workers’ Party) from São Paulo to draft legistlation that changes the Civil Code and annuls the need for prior authorization of biographies from public people – like politicians and media celebrities.

“When people go into public life, they give up part of their right for privacy. Of course one does not want to deprive public people of all their privacy, but it certainly gets diminished”, says the draft bill’s rapporteur in the Congress, deputy Alessandro Molon (Workers’ Party) from Rio de Janeiro.

“It doesn’t mean that the modified law will make it free for anyone to publish anything about anybody. If the person portrayed in a biography feels attacked, he or she can go to the court against the author, and the author himself is still responsible to answer for his work”, says the deputy.

The Chamber of Deputies’ Constitution and Justice Committee passed the draft bill conclusively in early April, which meant it should have gone straight to a Senate vote. However, deputy Marcos Rogério (PDT Party) from the state of Rondônia filed a petition against the proposed bill, making it mandatory that the deputies voted before senators, which slowed down the approval process.

Rogério justified his petition by saying the draft bill’s language left some issues unaddressed.

“What is ‘public dimension’ anyway? It’s a relative concept. Someone can write, for example, a biography about a city counselor either accusing him or promoting him electorally. It can be used for good or for evil. Constitution protects both freedom of expression and privacy”, the deputy said during a Constitution and Justice Committee debate.

Molon regrets this reaction to the draft bill. “While this bill is not voted by the deputies, it cannot go on, and now we depend on the Chamber of Deputies’ speaker’s good will to put it on the voting schedule”, he says. Marcos Rogério could not be reached by Index on Censorship to comment about this subject.

Aside from the new biographies bill, a group of publishers filed a direct action of unconstitutionality with the supreme federal court in July 2012. In their filing, the book firms argue that the Civil Code clause governing prior authorization generates censorship, which is prohibited in Brazil.

Opinions of the suit are to be issued by Brazil’s Solicitor-General Luis Inácio Adams and Attorney-General Roberto Gurgel. Minister Carmem Lúcia is responsible for ruling about the case in the federal supreme court. There is no deadline for the opinions or the court’s ruling.

“When you have a restriction for publishing stories about personalities, the preservation of history’s knowledge is lost. It’s a higher issue than looking for profit”, says Snel’s Sônia Jardim.

“After so many years of fighting to reestablish democracy and freedom of expression in our country, we cannot allow censorship to put its clutches over artistic works ever again”.

The post New law set to ease the way for biographies in Brazil appeared first on Index on Censorship.

After the story was published on 8 April, the newspaper was immediately the hit with a cyber attack, according to El Periodico’s publisher, José Rubén Zamora. The website went dead and nobody could read the story for a few days. Readers who did manage to access the website had their computers infected with a virus. The attack was the latest salvo against the daily, which focuses on exposing government corruption. Zamora said it was the sixth attack against its website in the last year. He said each attack had occurred after the newspaper published investigations into corruption in Molina’s government. Zamora said that they have been investigating the attacks — which have been coming from a neighbourhood in Guatemala City. “We will pinpoint the exact area soon”, he said. The Inter American Press Association wrote a letter to Guatemala’s government expressing their concern over the attacks.

According to Zamora, officials have pulled government advertising from the newspaper, and constantly harass independent advertisers who work with the daily. In the last two decades, Zamora has been at the helm of two newspapers. His first paper was Siglo Veintuno, which he left after disagreeing with his co-owners over the paper’s robust coverage of corruption and government abuses. He has been target of kidnappings and death threats, and even had his home invaded by armed men in 2003, who held his wife and three sons hostage for several hours at gunpoint. Zamora won the Committee to Protect Journalists Freedom of the Press award in 1995, and in 2000 was named World Press Freedom Hero by the International Press Institute.

I asked Zamora why he continues to put his life in danger with government exposés:

Ana Arana: You knew the danger with this story, why did you want to publish it?

José Rubén Zamora: It is indispensable to stop the corruption and self-enrichment by the Guatemalan political class. They forget that our country is overwhelmed by misery, malnourished children, and racism. Guatemala is a country without counterweights or institutional balances to protect it from abuses. That is why to write about these stories is our obligation. If we did not focus on these issues, why should we exist?

Our stories are written so Guatemalans get strong and do not accept abuses of those in power. We also do it to get information on corrupt practices and human rights violations in Guatemala out in the international community.

AA: What is the real problem in Guatemala?

JRZ: I think there is an excessive concentration of power and money, and a serious penetration of organised crime, especially drug trafficking organisations, in  spheres of power.

AA: Do you fear any further attacks against the newspaper?

JRZ: Yes, I expect them to harass us through taxes, and to engage in defamation campaigns to discredit the newspaper. Sources close to the Presidency have said that the government is trying to organised a commercial boycott that could take the newspaper towards bankruptcy.

The post Guatemalan newspaper faces cyber attacks after exposing corruption appeared first on Index on Censorship.

Brazil’s constitution guarantees both freedom of the press and free speech. The government does not impose censorship in the media. However, recent actions taken by the judiciary —  most of them concerning the removal of online content deemed defamatory —  have been extremely controversial.

In September 2012, a judge from the state of Mato Grosso do Sul ordered the arrest of Fabio Coelho, Google’s top executive in Brazil, after videos about a mayoral candidate were uploaded to YouTube. They were considered to be offensive to Alcides Bernal, who was running for office in the state’s capital city. When the posts were not immediately deleted, Brazil’s federal police temporarily detained Coelho.

Fabio Coelho’s case illustrates clearly how rigid the country’s laws are when it comes to offensive material. Still, many people argue that some of the judges’ decisions in these cases have been excessive. “There are gaps in Brazil’s electoral legislation that make this kind of situation possible”, said Google Brazil’s Public Policy Senior Counsel Marcel Leonardi when asked about Coelho’s detention. He hopes that the case will shine a light ‘on the need to adjust Brazil’s law, so that legitimate political outcries from internet users can be differentiated from, say, unlawful propaganda. The internet’s dynamics need to be understood.”

By not removing the videos, Google tried to make a case for the need for more liberal laws regarding free speech in Brazil, says Marcelo Träsel, Digital Journalism Professor at Pontifícia Universidade do Rio Grande do Sul University (PUCRS) in Porto Alegre. To make the internet giant responsible for the content ”is like making builders liable for crimes committed by apartment-buyers, or a bus company for crimes committed by its passengers”, he says. “As long as Google has proper means for filing complaints about content — and it does have them — and takes effective measures to restrict abuses when warned about them, the final responsibility must be laid upon the client that published controversial material”, he adds.

Falha de S Paulo is a blog that was shut down for parodying one of Brazil’s leading newspapers

When Folha de S Paulo, the country’s most influential daily newspaper, was criticised for its coverage of that year’s general elections in a blog called Falha de S Paulo (Folha, meaning “newspaper”, was replaced with falha, meaning “fail”), Folha filed a lawsuit claiming the blog’s logo, content, pictures and text font imitated its graphic design and confused web users. A judge demanded the website be removed and imposed a daily fine on its authors. On 20 February, the ban was upheld. “Censorship is supposed to be prohibited [in Brazil]“, said one of the blog’s creators, Lino Ito Bocchini, in an interview with the website Comunique- Se, “but in reality, free speech is only guaranteed to those who have money”. He later expressed his intention to appeal the decision. The case was raised with Frank la Rue, UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Opinion and Expression. In a recent visit to Brazil, he referred to the situation as “terrible”. Marcelo Träsel agrees that financial pressure comes into play in cases like this. “Politicians, business people and other powerful personalities found that they can silence their critics by filing lawsuits. Influential figures who become  the subject of a scandal are in a financial position to “torment” those who criticise them. “These people don’t even need to win in court”, Träsel says. Filing a lawsuit claiming damages could be enough to shut up a whistleblowing blogger, for example. ”I believe that’s the main threat to free speech in Brazil, and I believe that cases like Falha de S Paulo will grow in number.”

The practice of filing lawsuits to remove defamatory content from the internet also disturbs Google’s Marcel Leonardi. “The internet gives you the possibility to immediately respond to anyone, and in many different ways, like posting videos or creating hyperlinks,” he told Index. In situations like the Falha de S Paulo case, the best way of replying to criticism is by having an online presence so that people can “inform and reply to critics in one’s own virtual space,” he said. According to a recent Transparency Report published by Google, Brazil tops the list of countries that regularly removed digital content. In Leonardi’s opinion, Brazil will continue in this vein unless the “culture of lawsuits” is somehow overcome.

In Brazil, the judiciary has the exclusive power to order content to be taken down from a website — no government body has the right to do so. Other public agents, like federal prosecutors, can only file their demands through lawsuits, as regular attorneys must do. Leonardi believes Brazil is caught between liberal countries like the US, which seldom accepts non-copyright related content removal, and less democratic nations where the main problem isn’t content removal but attacks against publishers and direct government censorship over websites and social media.

Experts like PUCRS’s Marcelo Träsel say that adopting laws that differentiate the “virtual world” from traditional media would bring more clarity to judges’ decisions. In 2012, Congress debated two initiatives that pointed in this direction. One of them — a bill that deals with digital crimes, specifying correlated penalties — was voted in by lawmakers in early November.But another draft bill — called Marco Civil da Internet, or the Internet Civil Right Framework, seen as an “Internet Bill of Rights” — was shelved in November. Marco Civil would have guaranteed basic rights for users, content creators and online intermediaries and established that providers are not responsible for user content. It also would have guaranteed net neutrality, a move that angered the telecommunications industry, as it would prevent them from charging different rates for the various kinds of online content.

Deputy Alessandro Molon, who sponsored the bill, says Brazil’s main telecom companies lobbied hard against it, arguing it was contrary to the principles of the free market. “Approving Marco Civil would be a very important step to guarantee freedom of expression in Brazil”, notes Träsel. However, this type of guarantee for civil rights is unlikely to be seen in the country for the foreseeable future, and judges’ decisions are likely to remain as controversial and damaging as ever.

Rafael Spuldar is Index’s regional editor in Brazil. He tweets from @spuldar

This article appears in Fallout: free speech and the economic crisis. Click here for subscription options and more.

The post On the ground: Sao Paulo appeared first on Index on Censorship.

Brazil’s indigenous population have gone online to campaign against social injustice in their community – Alberto Cesar Araujo/Demotix

Despite their poor economic and living conditions, Brazil’s indigenous peoples are increasingly using the internet to make their struggle for rights known to the world.

Historically, native Brazilians have been deprived of proper citizenship, first by slavery and the loss of their homeland in the 16^th century and, after that, by prejudice, impoverishment, the loss of cultural traces and the disappearance of entire populations. But, the emergence of the internet has allowed Brazilian Indians access to a new era of free speech and civil activity.

One example of their fight to be heard is the campaign against the Draft Constitutional Amendment #215, currently being debated in the Chamber of Deputies. If the amendment passes, it would remove the Federal Government’s power to delimit indigenous lands and pass it to Congress.

Indigenous leaders fear this would strengthen landowners’ powers, who already have a strong lobbying position in Congress and would likely do their best to inhibit the creation of new reservations.

An online petition against the amendment has gathered more than 27,000 signatures.

Their cause also attracted huge support through social media late last year. Facebook users showed support to the Guarani and Kaiowá peoples by adding “Guarani-Kaiowá” to their profile name. The 45,000-strong group perpetually struggle to protect their ancestral province from land-grabbing farmers in the state of Mato Grosso do Sul.

In January 2013, however, Facebook ordered the additional names be removed, reminding users that they were forbidden from adopting fake names on their accounts.

Access to justice

Considered to be one of the main platforms for indigenous discussion, the Índios Online website is maintained by indian peoples from the states of Alagoas, Bahia, Roraima and Pernambuco.

Supported by the Ministry of Culture and Thydewá, an organisation protecting the rights of indigenous peoples, Índios Online allows “offline” Native Brazilians from all over the country to voice their needs and interact with other users.

According to the president of Thydewá, Sebastián Gerlic, those who feel their interests have been threatened by the website often approach the Justice system to censor its content — particularly regarding videos produced and uploaded by the indians.

Ingigenous Brazilian Potyra Tê Tupinambá ended up in court for her film documenting land reposession in an indigenous reservation in the northeastern state of Bahia. The ongoing lawsuit was taken out by a land owner interviewed on camera. It was a testimony, according to Gerlic, given spontaneously and with no animosity.

“The farmer accused Potyra of transmitting his image on the internet without his permission, and now he looks for reparation,” says the president of Thydewá, who took reponsibility for the director’s legal defence.

The internet was also a strong ally in the indigenous peoples’ struggle against the looting of the natural resources on their reservations. In mid-2011, the Ashaninka people used a solar-powered computer to denounce the invasion of their land by Peruvian woodcutters. This information was passed to authorities in federal capital Brasília, who sent a task force formed by the Federal Police and the Brazilian Army to arrest the invaders.

The Ashaninkas also addressed chief justice of the Supreme Court Joaquim Barbosa in an online petition, urging the Supreme Court to address the problem of tree cutting in their native territory. They demanded financial reparation for the lumbering activities that could reach 15,000,000 BRL (around 30,000,000 USD). 

Limited access

Indians usually access the internet through centres maintained by Funai, Brazil’s National Indian Foundation or in LAN (local area network) houses, schools or in private homes. Funai does not have any digital inclusion programme specifically for the indigenous peoples – this responsibility goes to the Ministry of Culture. Through its programme called “Points of Culture”, the Ministry invested more than 1,300,000 BRL (about £447,000) on installing internet connections inside the Indian communities.

Despite public investments, online access has grown far less in indigenous communities than in poorer urban areas. According to a survey led by Rio de Janeiro State’s Secretary of Culture, in partnership with NGO Observatório das Favelas (“Slum Observatory”), 9 out of 10 people living in low-income areas in Rio have internet access.

Brazil has a population of 896,917 indigenous people divided in 230 different ethnic groups, according to the last Brazilian Census from 2010. This represents around 0.47 per cent of the country’s population.

Amongst this populus, access to employment is a problem. According to the last Census, 83 per cent of adult Brazilian indians earn no more than minimum wage (678 BRL a month, about £233) and 52.9 per cent of them don’t have any income at all.

According to the Indigenous Missionary Counsel, an organisation aiding native Brazilian peoples, at least 200 indians have been killed in Brazil in the last decade, mainly because of land disputes.

The post Brazilian indians go online to demand their rights are protected appeared first on Index on Censorship.

Yoani lives with her husband, son and a large, friendly black-and-white dog. They occupy a 19th-floor apartment of a drab, weather-stained 1960s Soviet-style tower block behind several ministry buildings in the west of Havana. However, it is almost luxurious by the standards of the capital: it is relatively large and airy, boasts two bedrooms, and its tiny internal courtyard is crammed with tropical greenery. The living-room walls are lined with books. Many of the volumes are brought into the country by individuals, to be loaned out as part of the increasingly prevalent system of “private libraries”, a means of breaking the state’s monopoly on publishing and distribution.

Yoani is now 35 years old, and her parents were part of the generation of the 1960s, raised in the first decade following “the Triumph of the Revolution”. They shared the faith that Che Guevara’s “New Man” would combine with the state communism adopted by Fidel Castro and his regime to create a better world. Yoani recalls how they laboured long hours for scant pay, over and beyond their jobs. “They sacrificed their lives to build a socialist heaven for their children,” she recalls.

By the time the Russians pulled out in the 1990s and the islanders were facing up to the stringencies of what Fidel Castro termed “a special period in times of peace” — one that translated into further shortages, along with still less freedom of speech and movement — Yoani’s parents finally lost faith in this promised paradise. “They changed overnight. My father stopped being a Communist Party militant. My mother was no longer a leader in the communist youth movement. They became completely disillusioned, and that was the world I grew up in.”
This atmosphere led Yoani to look abroad for opportunities. Unlike many, however, she did not aim for Miami and life as a Cuban exile. Instead, she taught in Europe, spending two years in Switzerland, where she studied computer science and realised how powerful the new technologies could be.

On her return to Cuba in 2004, she put her mastery of the medium to practical use. She opened a web portal and with others began publishing online blogs. Since only 5 per cent of Cubans, almost exclusively officially sanctioned state employees, are currently allowed direct internet access, Yoani started using the large tourist hotels where business centres are intended for the use of resident foreign tourists.

Cuba has no internet cafes and the libraries do not offer online access. A small number of “dissident” Cuban writers rely on weekly access of a few hours a week, granted via foreign embassies. Yoani is determined that if she is not permitted access to the internet in her living-room, she should at least be able to be free to walk into the only public centres available. She regards it as her right, as a Cuban: “I prefer visiting hotels and confronting the system rather than just bypassing it by using the embassies. Anyone who does this automatically enters the system via servers in the countries of origin, rather than over a Cuban server.” When she was denied access on one occasion, she filmed the event on her phone and posted it online, immediately attracting 50,000 hits.

It was after Yoani took the decision in 2007 to put her name to her blogs that trouble with the regime began. As often happens with “dissidents” in Cuba, she has been accused of being a CIA agent, and more recently of being part of a foreign-instigated “cyberwar” against the regime. This has had predictable repercussions on her personal life: “I don’t consider myself paranoid, but people have been encouraged to ostracise me,” she says with a shrug. She says she can live with the constant surveillance of the building where she lives, but is worried about what might happen to her son. A star school pupil, he could be subjected to exclusion from tertiary education on spurious (non-academic) grounds. This would be another example of the way in which parents are punished through their children, by the unexplained refusal of university admission.

Occasionally the harassment has been more brutally direct. Yoani was physically assaulted in November 2009 and February 2010, when she was going to a meeting of the “damas de blanco” — the women in white — who protested silently each week about the notorious detention of 75 journalists, writers and human rights activists arrested during the “Black Spring” of 2003. She paused to show us how she was held down on the floor of a taxi with her knee pressed against her sternum, causing maximum pain with least visible effect. She also showed us how this has left her unable to turn her head from side to side, the apparent consequence of pressure on her cervical vertebrae. “They prefer methods that cause lasting pain but don’t produce an immediate show of blood.” She pointed out how counterproductive these violent acts of aggression can be: “They had the opposite effect to that intended — there was a surge in support for us, and the attacks only made me more determined.”

Apart from instances of intimidation, the main restriction Yoani currently faces is that of not being able to travel abroad. In 2009, she was refused permission to leave the country in order to collect the prestigious Moors Cabot award for freedom of speech from Columbia University in New York. More recently, she has been denied a visa to travel to collect prizes in Germany and Spain for her work. “They took my passport, and instead of giving me a visa, simply failed to return it. They do not need to refuse to [grant me a visa], they just do not give [my passport] back. So I cannot leave to go anywhere outside the island,” she adds.

Beyond what affects her personally, what most incenses Yoani is the amount of doublespeak and hypocrisy that the Cuban authorities indulge in. Showing us her ration card, she remarks that, for example, each Cuban is allocated six kilos of sugar per month. This is not because it grows in such abundance on the island (Cuba in fact now has to import from Brazil what for so long used to be its main crop) but because of the quantity of calories it contains. In this way the country avoids appearing poverty-stricken in terms of global statistics. Above all, the revolution would face ultimate shame and failure if Cuba were shown as a country where malnutrition affected the population.

Yoani relates the surge in street crime to the current economic crisis. “Take the crime wave there has been here,” she continues. “It hardly receives a mention, even in the [state-owned] media. The government’s attitude is: if you don’t talk about something, then it doesn’t exist. The commonest crimes, like robberies and muggings, are rarely recorded. The police are complicit in this, for fear it could reflect badly on them; all state employees are constantly looking over their shoulder. We even hear, for example, about hospitals equipped with the latest technology, but not that they are lacking such basic materials as sheets or thermometers.”
Yoani is well aware that such criticisms are bound to make life harder for her in Cuba. But she insists that she is doing nothing wrong or “unpatriotic” and that visibility and being completely open about what she is doing are her best defence. “A blog is a way of talking to yourself. At the same time, you have to be completely transparent and honest with yourself to be able to explain to anyone who was not born in Cuba what this society is like.”

There are now at least a hundred “alternative bloggers” in Cuba, despite the lack of official access to the internet. It is estimated that her own Generación Y blogs are translated into 21 languages, but she has also moved on to the next stage. “I’m really proud that I can reach 102,000 people on Twitter, whereas Fidel only has 93,000 followers. That’s because his tweet is really boring.” Bringing an apparently new word into the Cuban vocabulary, she adds: “But Raúl no es twittero.”

She is confident that the Castro regime cannot keep the lid on the free circulation of information on the island: “The information monopoly is being broken thanks to satellite phones, the internet, all the new technological developments. More people are becoming aware of them every day, it’s something you can’t prevent.”

Yoani herself helps promote this spread of the use of new technologies by running courses on using the internet and Twitter, and on how to create new blogs and websites. She insists again that she has every right to do so, and that this is in no sense a “war” on the Cuban government. The library she runs from home is to loosen the state’s stranglehold on the publishing and circulation of books. “I know many people have sent me hundreds of them, but not one has ever arrived,” she tells us.

Like many dissidents — the last of the Black Spring 75 has only just gone into involuntary exile — she is fiercely Cuban, and prefers to be able to live in her home country. Despite the risks to which she is now exposed, she insists she has no regrets: “I am living the life I have chosen to live.”

We all need to leave the apartment at the same time, to go our separate ways. We agree to split up as we depart, in order to avoid attracting the attention of anyone who might be watching outside. However, this is Cuba and we have to wait ten minutes for the lift to arrive. We end up sharing it for the long drop down to street level. We emerge at the same time, studiously avoiding each other, and without bidding goodbye. Yoani puts on her sunglasses before we go out into the sunlight.

Amanda Hopkinson is visiting professor of literary translation at both Manchester University and City University, London. She has published many books on Latin American culture and translated more from the Spanish, Portuguese and French
Nick Caistor is a freelance writer. He teaches journalism at UAE. Reaktion Books will publish his book Fidel Castro: a critical life next year

The post Yoani Sánchez: Living the life appeared first on Index on Censorship.

MEXICO CITY – It was 38 minutes into the First Division football match at the Santos Modelo Stadium, about 275 miles from the US border, when players suddenly started running from the pitch to their locker rooms. Popping sounds interrupted the announcers. More than one million Mexican television viewers watched as a firefight between the country’s most ruthless drug cartel and local police unfolded.

August 21: Fans seek safety during gunfight outside Santos Modelo Stadium

The images broadcast from the industrial town of Torreon showed terrified men, women and children crouching under the stadium seats and scrambling for cover. Television Azteca, the second largest Mexican network, stopped transmission of the game. But ESPN continued, breaking its audience records worldwide for a domestic soccer match.

It was the first time drug-related violence had played out on live television alongside the country’s beloved national sport. But it also highlighted another battle, one raging inside the local Mexican media as criminal groups have continue to muzzle regional reporting on drug violence —  savagery that has left more than 60,000 dead since outgoing President Felipe Calderon took office in December 2006.

Despite the stadium gun battle’s obvious news value, in the newsroom of the local daily El Siglo de Torreon, editors and reporters pondered whether to publish news of the shootout in a prominent place in the following day’s paper.  The attack had pitted the Zetas organised crime group against a municipal police contingent parked near the stadium.

“The pictures were provocative,” says the newspaper’s top editor Javier Garza. The staff worried they might become a target if they featured the images prominently. Assailants have bombed and sprayed the newspaper’s offices with bullets twice since 2009. Journalists receive death threats and warnings from criminal groups that don’t like El Siglo’s coverage.

Mexico was the most dangerous country to be a reporter in 2011, according to the International Press Institute. Ten journalists were killed here last year and the trend continues into 2012. A well-founded fear of retaliation from organised crime has deepened an atmosphere of self-censorship among Mexico’s regional news outlets.

In a six-month investigation, a follow-up to a study in 2010, Fundacion MEPI examined publishing trends in 14 of 31 Mexican states to better understand how drug violence affects news content in regional media. The states, concentrated in northern and central Mexico, are among the country’s most violent. The study found provincial newspapers increased their coverage of organised crime in 2011 by more than a 100 per cent over last year, publishing reports on 7 out of 10 organised-crime incidents in their coverage area. But only two newspapers — El Norte in Monterrey and El Informador in Guadalajara — were able to provide context to the violence, identify the victims and follow-up on crime stories.

The shootout did feature on El Siglo’s front page the day after the attack but in line with its editorial policies the paper did not explain why the gunfight happened. Editors know that criminals read their pages to see how their organisations are portrayed and are careful not to provoke them. El Siglo’s problems are the same as those faced by regional papers across Mexico.

The Theatrics of Violence

Sadly increased coverage of drug violence in 2011 was not a sign of the threat of violence against journalist waning. Rather it reflected the news media’s response to a spike in more gruesome violence including gangland-style executions, which sociologist Eduardo Guerrero estimated grew nine per cent countrywide and by more than 100 per cent in several municipalities.

“The murders in many parts of the country were spectacular in size and dimension,” adds Alejandro Hope, a former intelligence analyst with the Mexican civilian intelligence CISEN. During an interview with MEPI in Mexico City last month he says: “There was no way the local media could ignore  them.”

Some of high-profile 2011 incidents were: a fire set by Zeta operatives in the Casino Royale, a middle class gambling venue which killed 52 people; 35 nude bodies left on a main thoroughfare in in the southern state of Veracruz, and in Guadalajara, Mexico’s second largest city, 28 bodies stuffed into a parked SUV abandoned on a busy avenue.

Government Reports

Regional editors and reporters told MEPI that fear is not the only cause for spotty and weak news coverage.

A key factor is the limited flow of public information. In the stadium shootout case, local authorities failed to provide reporters with a proper police report, and according to El Siglo’s own safety protocols, reporters should not investigate such stories beyond the simplest official facts.

“It has been an uphill battle to try to get precise data from the local authorities,” Garza says. For instance, he noted, the prosecutors count homicides differently than the local police department. “Sometimes we get information from three government agencies, and they all contradict each other.”

Without this information from federal and local authorities, the regional news media cannot add context to their reporting, says Garza.

But there is yet another side of the story.

El Siglo’s patch, Torreon, is at the centre of a drug cartel turf war. Many other Mexican states face the same issues, their media are caught in the middle of cartel crossfire. In most of these states, the fear of retaliation combined with a lack of credible official information give rise to lopsided reporting dominated by coverage of beheadings, kidnappings and other criminal activities.

At El Siglo the coverage of government anti-crime efforts versus cartel-related crimes was  heavily tilted towards cartel crimes.  MEPI found 457 government operations described in the newspaper, far fewer than the 713 organised crime incidents El Siglo covered in 2011.

Ironically, the media in states controlled largely by one cartel tend to publish more stories about government anti-crime initiatives such police arrests and raids rather than the executions, kidnappings, home invasions, shootouts, attacks on police, government offices and personal that are the hallmarks of the cartels.

Forensic officers investigate murders of traffic police in Monterrey – 11/07/2012

In the Zeta controlled states of Tamaulipas, Michoacan and Zacatecas the media shied away from writing about drug organisations and their activities.

In Tamaulipas, which the MEPI study found suffered the highest rate of self-censorship, the newspaper El Mañana rarely covered organised crime violence. The few cartel stories it reported happened in Texas.

“In Tamaulipas the press is often co-opted,” says Carlos Flores, a security expert, and author of a book on the ties between local authorities and organised crime in Tamaulipas. Flores believes many journalists are concerned about cases of cartel spies infiltrating the newsrooms.

In Michoacan, another state where the study revealed organised crime reporting was limited, it is widely accepted that the cartel, La Familia, and its splinter group, the Knights Templars, are in control of criminal activities. Yet the newspaper monitored, La Voz de Michoacan, never mentions cartel names.

Not an Easy Fix

In some cities, official reporting has improved somewhat with the help of civil society and private sector initiatives. In both Ciudad Juarez and Monterrey, new private-public initiatives increased the flow of statistics. Alfredo Quijano, editor of the daily Norte, pointed to the creation two years ago of the Mesa de Seguridad, or Roundtable on Security, a civil society and government entity that gathers crime information and promotes public participation. And in Monterrey, the Consejo Civico de Instituciones de Nuevo Leon, or Civic Council of Institutions of Nuevo Leon, a private sector advocacy group that pushes for transparency in government affairs.

The lack of accountability and information flow goes back to Mexico’s history of a political system dominated by one party — Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) — Flores says.

For many years the authorities were not there to inform the public, but to release information that was useful to the government.

Getting the various government entities to release credible information will remain difficult, according to security experts familiar with government reporting in Mexico.

Local governments officials often do not have accurate intelligence about what is going on in their regions, says Leticia Ramirez de Alba, who coordinates studies on criminal trends for the non-governmental organisation Mexico Evalua.

Many often lack basic investigative skills while others are in collusion with organised crime, she says. In the last six years dozens of top government officials and police have been identified by Mexican intelligence as working for various organised crime groups. A recent case involved the arrest of 14 federal police officers who detained in connection with the attempted murder last August of two CIA contract officers and a Mexican Navy captain in a remote road near Mexico City. US officials suspect organised crime links, according to press accounts.

Meanwhile, statistics became an important measure of Mexico’s anti-crime programmes. In 2010, President Felipe Calderon, under pressure from human rights groups, released the first online database of organised crime-related homicides, dating back to 2006. For the first time there were official government numbers on the toll of rising drug-related violence. But the online database was criticised for lax sourcing. As the database was national, it also raised a legal question over whether the responsibility to investigate these murders lay with state-level, or federal authorities.

In 2011, the Attorney General’s office released another set of statistics, but it only covered homicides from January to September. It is unclear whether incoming President, Enrique Peña Nieto, of the PRI, which ruled the country for 70 years, will continue to provide statistics on crime.

Meantime, every state is ostensibly required to give the federal government credible figures on its crime trends. But local and state authorities have being caught manipulating the numbers to make their state look safe and appealing to voters. The practice is very common, according to Mexico Evalua.

According to El Siglo, in 2011, officials in Torreon faked crime figures, erasing more than 100 killings from the official docket. In 2007, the government of Mexico state, which borders Mexico City, also manipulated its numbers, reducing its violent homicide rate by 60 per cent, says Ramirez de Alba. The errors were made while President Elect Peña Nieto was governor of that state.

No Watchdog Journalism in Mexico

Marco Lara Klahr, a journalist and media trainer, has his own theory about why Mexican journalist shy away from digging deeper:

Journalists are not being trained to report on stories that go beyond the violence and which describe endemic problems with Mexican justice and political systems…As journalists, we are not doing our job of watchdog journalism.

In Torreon, El Siglo editor Garza says his editors and reporters understand there is a need to find better, safer ways to report on the drug war but for now they are doing the best they can.

In March 2011, 715 newspapers, radio and television stations attempted to improve crime coverage, signing an agreement to promote fair coverage. The final document included a statement obligating news media “to present information with exact context that explains the real problem of violence in the country.” The accord also required journalists to make sure “crime-news stories specify who provoked and carried out the violent act.” El Siglo signed up.

Garza says he knows the newspaper’s limitations and is searching for better ways to practice strong journalism while under constant threat. He is now encouraging his editors to build databases and use crime statistics in charts and maps that quantify the scope of the state’s problems.

He remains hopeful, saying: “We think it might be the way to avoid security threats in the future.”

Ana Arana And Daniela Guazo, Fundacion Mepi. Ana Arana is also Index’s Mexican correspondent

This report was based on research supported in part by Index on Censorship & the Doen Foundation

Read or download the report here or scroll through below (slow to load)

Report: Censored Media Mexico, 2011

The post Mexican press: Self preservation becomes self censorship appeared first on Index on Censorship.

Index’s Sara Yasin spoke to the candidate about free speech in America, and the challenges she’s faced as a third party candidate in the Presidential race

Index: What are the biggest barriers faced by alternative candidates in the Presidential race?

Jill Stein: Its almost as if third parties have been outlawed. There is not a specific law, but they have just made it incredibly difficult and complicated to get on the ballot, to be heard, it is as if [third parties] have been virtually outlawed.

To start with we don’t have ballot status, the big parties are “grandfathered” in. Other parties have to collect anywhere from ten to twenty to thirty to forty times as many signatures to get on the ballot. We spend 80 per cent of the campaign jumping through hoops in order to get on the ballot. It really makes it almost impossible to run.

It takes money in this country. You have to buy your way onto TV. The press will not cover third parties, challengers, alternatives. The press is consolidated into the hands of a few corporate media conglomerates, and they’re not interested and they also don’t have the time because their staff has been cut. So they’re basically, you know, covering the horse race. Not looking at new voices, new choices, the kinds of things that the American public is really clamouring for, and also not looking not the issues. And so you get this really dumbed down coverage that excludes third party candidates.

And then you have the debates, which are a mockery of democracy. Which are really sham debates held and organised by the Commission on the Presidential Debates, which is a private corporation led by Democratic and Republican parties. They sound like a public interest organisation; they’re not. They’re simply a front group to censor the debate. And to fool the American voter into thinking that is the only choice that Americans have. And in fact, by locking out third party candidates, we’ve effectively locked out voters.

According to a study in USA Today a couple weeks ago, roughly one out of every two eligible voters was predicted to be staying home in this election. That is an incredible indictment of the candidates.

Index: What are your thoughts on how multinational companies are using lobbying, lawsuits and advertisements to chill free speech around environmental issues?

This is certainly being challenged. Fossil fuels are an example. The fossil fuel industry has bought itself scientists — pseudo scientists I must say — and think tanks to churn out climate denial. That whole area of climate denial has been sufficiently disproven now, to the point where they don’t rear their ugly head anymore. Now there’s just climate silence, which Obama and Romney really share. Romney is not denying the reality of climate change, he’s just not acting on it. Unfortunately, Obama has seized that agenda as well in competing for money.

I think we are seeing enormous pushback against this, in the climate movement, in the healthy food movement, in the effort to pass the referendum in California (37) that would require the labeling of food which the GMO industry is deathly afraid of, because people are rightly skeptical. So for them, free speech, informed consumers, informed voters, are anthema, it’s deadly for them. They require the supression of democracy and the suppression of free speech. And the buying of the political parties is all about silencing voices like our campaign. which stands up on all of these issues.

There are huge social movements on the ground now for sustainable, healthy organic agriculture. For really concerted climate action, for green energy, for public transportation. These are thriving movements right now. Our campaign represents the political voice of those movements. There is also a strong movement now to amend the constitution to stop these abuses, to stop this suppression of free speech.

Index: Do you think that the two-party system allows for topics viewed as inconvenient to both Republicans and Democrats to remain untouched?

JS: That’s their agreement really. And the commission on presidential debates makes it so very clear. They have a written agreement that was leaked a couple of weeks ago. That agreement includes very carefully selected moderators who agree about what kinds of questions they will ask and they will go through…until they find the candidate for a moderator that will agree basically not to rock the boat. The moderators have to agree to not only exclude third parties, but not to participate in any other format with candidates whose issues can’t be controlled. This has everything to do with why they make the agreements that they do and why they will only talk to each other, because they’re both bought and paid for by the same industries responsible for the parties.

When I got arrested protesting the censorship of the debate, my running mate and I were both tightly handcuffed with these painful plastic restraints, and taken to a secret, dark site. Run by some combination of secret service, and police, and homeland security. Who knows who it really belongs to, but it was supposed to be top secret and no one was supposed to know and we were then handcuffed to metal chairs and sat there for almost eight hours. And there were sixteen cops watching the two of us, and we were in a facility decked out for 100 people to be arrested, but it was only the two of us and one other person brought in towards the end of the evening who was actually a Bradley Manning supporter who had been arrested just for taking photographs of someone who was photographing the protesters.

Index: What does freedom of expression mean to you?

JS: It means having a democracy, having a political system that actually allows the voices of everyday people to be heard. Not just, you know, the economic elite which has bought out our establishment political parties. So free expression, for me, is the life blood of a political system. I was not a political animal until rather late in life. I was shocked to learn we don’t have a political system based on free expression. We have a political system based on campaign contributions and the biggest spender, and they buy out the policies that they want, so to me, that is where free expression goes. And if we don’t have it we don’t have politics based on free expression —- it’s not just our health that is being thrown under the bus, it’s our economy, it is our climate, it is our environment. We don’t have a future if we don’t have free expression. If we don’t get our first amendment and free speech back, and that means liberating it from money.

Sara Yasin is an editorial assistant at Index on Censorship. She tweets at @missyasin

The post INDEX Q&A: It’s not easy being Green for US third party candidate appeared first on Index on Censorship.

Take Two: Film protests about much more than religion

The United States is the world’s undisputed king of culture. No country’s film industry can rival Hollywood; no nation’s musical artists sell more records worldwide than America’s. Boasting such a diverse, pulsating, frequently vulgar and often blasphemous entertainment industry, not everyone — including many Americans — is going to be pleased with what they see and hear coming out of the United States. Films ranging from Martin Scorcese’s The Last Temptation of Christ (which depicted the lustful fantasies of the Christian savior) to Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ (which depicted Jesus’ crucifixion as essentially Jewish-orchestrated) have outraged Christians and Jews, respectively. The latest Broadway smash hit, The Book of Mormon, mercilessly ridicules the foundation myths of America’s newest and fastest-growing major faith.

In none of the controversies surrounding these productions, however, did the producers fear for their lives, nor did US government officials feel it incumbent upon themselves to apologise to the world’s Christians, Jews or Mormons for the renderings of artists. This straightforward policy of respecting the autonomy of the cultural sphere was amended earlier this week, however, when a branch of the United States government officially apologised to the world’s Muslims over a film for which the word “obscure” is too generous.

On 11 September, 12:11 PM Cairo time, the Embassy of the United States to Egypt released the following statement:

The Embassy of the United States in Cairo condemns the continuing efforts by misguided individuals to hurt the religious feelings of Muslims — as we condemn efforts to offend believers of all religions. Today, the 11th anniversary of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States, Americans are honoring our patriots and those who serve our nation as the fitting response to the enemies of democracy. Respect for religious beliefs is a cornerstone of American democracy. We firmly reject the actions by those who abuse the universal right of free speech to hurt the religious beliefs of others.

The “misguided individuals” in question were the producers of the now-infamous YouTube flick, The Innocence of Muslims, a crude, low-budget film which portrays the Prophet Muhammad in a none too pleasant light. Much about The Innocence of Muslims remains a mystery; its now-debunked origin story, that of an “Israeli Jew” filmmaker who “financed [it] with the help of more than 100 Jewish donors,” had all the makings of anti-Semitic disinformation campaign.

Several hours after this statement was released on the Embassy’s website, about 2000 Salafist protestors gathered outside the US Embassy, breached the compound’s walls, took down the American flag, and replaced it with the a black banner inscribed with the Islamic profession of faith: “There is no God but God and Muhammad is his prophet.” When, in the aftermath of this outrage, some American conservative bloggers began criticizing the Embassy’s statement as an apology for a specific exercise — however crude — of the constitutionally-protected right to free speech, the Cairo Embassy’s Twitter account defiantly released the following:

Shortly after 10:00 P.M. that evening, the campaign of Mitt Romney, Republican presidential nominee, released the following statement:

I’m outraged by the attacks on American diplomatic missions in Libya and Egypt and by the death of an American consulate worker in Benghazi. It’s disgraceful that the Obama Administration’s first response was not to condemn attacks on our diplomatic missions, but to sympathize with those who waged the attacks.

This riposte was embargoed until midnight, 11 September being a day that American politicians exempt from their usual partisan sniping. Yet, shortly after releasing the statement to the media, the Romney campaign lifted the embargo. Heightening the controversy was the revelation that Islamist militants had attacked the American consulate in Benghazi, Libya (it would not be confirmed until early next morning that the Ambassador, Chris Stevens, had been killed). Suddenly, an issue not normally considered American presidential campaign material — freedom of speech — had become a political football.

Since then, the liberal chattering classes, as well as ostensibly unbiased news reporters, have universally condemned Romney for “politicising” a national tragedy (just watch this press conference Wednesday morning in which reporter after reporter asks the Republican candidate, incredulously, how he could deign to stoop so low). The main line of attack against Romney is essentially a defense of the US Embassy’s original statement, which, in the words of Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank, “came out before the attacks, was issued by career diplomats in Cairo without clearance from Washington, and was disavowed by the White House.” This line was echoed in a New York Times news story, which reported that “The embassy’s statement was released in an effort to head off the violence, not after the attacks, as Mr. Romney’s statement implied.”

“But the fact is that the ‘apology’ to our ‘attackers’ was issued before the attack!” pronounced Michael Tomasky of The Daily Beast. Josh Marshall, proprietor of the popular Talking Points Memo blog, declared that the two-sentence statement from the Romney campaign was reason enough to disqualify the former Massachusetts Governor from the presidency. “Romney, or folks writing in his name at his campaign, claimed that the administration’s first response to the attacks was to issue a press release condemning the anti-Islam film which had helped trigger the attack,” Marshall wrote. “In fact, according to all available press reports and the account of the State Department, the press release in question came from the US Embassy in Egypt and preceded the attacks” (emphasis original).

The New York Times, America’s left-wing pundits, and the rest of those who have criticized the Romney campaign are missing the point, which is that it is no more  appropriate to apologise for the First Amendment before a raging mob attacks an American embassy than it is to apologise for the First Amendment after such an attack occurs. The embassy’s pre-emptive apology – and that’s exactly what it was – shows just how useless it is to apologise for the most basic principle of the Enlightenment. Someone who would ransack an embassy and kill American diplomats over a movie he saw on the internet is not likely to be persuaded by a mere statement assuaging his “hurt religious feelings.”

The Obama administration did indeed repudiate the Embassy’s statement – which has since been removed from its website – and some sources have anonymously claimed that the release was the work of a freelancing, public diplomacy officer who acted without express approval from Washington. This, the administration’s supporters claim, absolves the president of blame for a statement they nonetheless defend on its merits. Regardless, the buck stops with the President of the United States; if a US Embassy releases a statement, one must assume it is something the President stands behind. Revoking the statement while failing to discipline or fire the individual behind it sends mixed signals. Moreover, in remarks at the White House condemning the murder of Ambassador Stevens, the President appeared to reiterate the Cairo Embassy’s statement, announcing that “We reject all efforts to denigrate the religious beliefs of others,” in effect passing a value judgment on a certain instance of expression while failing to explicitly defend the principle of free expression itself.

Like the fury over the Muhammad cartoons in 2005 — which were published months before opportunistic imams whipped up an international (and deadly) controversy — clips from The Innocence of Muslims were put on YouTube in July this year. It was not until 9 September, however, that the Grand Mufti of Egypt declared that, “The attack on religious sanctities does not fall under this freedom,” the freedom in question being freedom of speech. Pointedly, the asinine US Embassy statement, while directly condemning shadowy American filmmakers, made no mention of the Egyptian Grand Mufti or other religious fanatics who had condemned the film and whipped people into such hysteria.

We are now treated to the strange spectacle of Western progressives aligning with Islamic religious reactionaries, both arguing that freedom of speech can go too far (of course, it is only speech that offends Muslims which comes under progressive suspicion; the same liberals who insist that the tender sensitivities of Muslims be respected have no problem with speech that maligns religious Christians and Jews). Those arguing that the YouTube clips that allegedly “incited” this mess should be banned – like the Guardian’s Andrew Brown – would do well to pause and consider the implications of what they are arguing. Does Brown think that Mitt Romney, a practicing Mormon, would be justified in demanding that the New York City authorities shut down The Book of Mormon? I am frequently outraged by what I read on the website of Brown’s newspaper (as one wag put it to me; “With Comment is Free, you get what you pay for”); would I be justified in expressing that anger through violence towards various and sundry Guardian writers?

Meanwhile, one can turn on the television or open a newspaper in any Muslim country and be sure to find grossly anti-Semitic material that is just as, if not more, offensive than anything contained in The Innocence of Muslims’ puerile script. Do American and British Jews then trek to the Libyan or Egyptian embassies in Washington and London, scale the fence, plant an Israeli flag on the roof, slaughter the ambassadors therein, and drag their remains through the street?

At least since the Rushdie affair, rioting and murdering over “insults” to religion has been a phenomenon almost exclusive to Muslims. It is strange, then, that those who insist the West must show more respect for Islamic civilization are precisely the same people who treat its adherents like children.

James Kirchick, a fellow with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, is a contributing editor of The New Republic. He tweets at @jkirchick

Also read:

Kenan Malik on The Satanic Verses and free speech andWhy free expression is now seen as an enemy of liberty

Sara Yasin on France, Charlie Hebdo and the meaning of Mohammed

When we succumb to notions of religious offence, we stifle debate, writes Salil Tripathi

Sherry Jones on why UK distributors refused to handle her book The Jewel of Medina

The post Islam blasphemy riots now self-fulfilling prophecy appeared first on Index on Censorship.