A group of organisations sent a letter to US Attorney General Eric Holder demanding a full and transparent report on the Department of Justice’s secret investigations into journalists and whistleblowers.
Brazil’s Federal Police seized a journalist’s equipment – including his computer – during an operation to remove indians from a farm in the state of Mato Grosso do Sul. The seizure was decried as illegal by the reporter’s employer, one of the country’s most prominent aid agencies aimed at indigenous peoples, Rafael Spuldar reports.
Speaking for the first time since the Associated Press announced that the United States Department of Justice had seized two months of phone records, Gary Pruitt, president of the AP, said in an interview that the Obama administration should “rein in that out-of-control investigation.”
Journalists in Mexico’s border area with the United States face huge pressures from drug gangs in reporting on violence, Ana Arana reports.
Brazil loves football – and it loves the game so much it’s hosting next year’s World Cup finals. But a huge number of fans from the state of Paraná are having a very hard time following their team this year because of media restrictions imposed by directors of the local club, Rafael Spuldar reports.
In Argentina, media organizations take sides: for or against the government. Graciela Mochkofsky tells the story behind the turf war between President Fernández de Kirchner and Grupo Clarín.
The Brazilian Congress is considering draft legislation to ease the publication of biographies without prior authorization from the subject, but the move is not without opposition, Rafael Spuldar reports.
Brazil’s position in free speech’s world charts has consistently worsened in recent years, Rafael Spulder writes from Sao Paolo.
Local broadcasters, the lifeblood of many Brazilian communities, face tough times. Rafael Spuldar reports
The Guatemalan daily El Periódico and Fundación MEPI have published an exposé of corruption in the current Guatemalan government. The story, with information and documents gathered during the first year in office of president Otto Perez Molina and vice president Roxana Baldetti, detailed a multi-million dollar web of corruption in a country where 50 per cent of the population lives on less than two dollars a day. 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. […]