23 journalists killed in 2018 in Latin America

SALTA, A rgent ina : The president of the Inter-American Press Association ( SIP/ IAPA), Gustavo Mohme said that there were a total of 29 journalists killed in the Americas in 2018, 23 of which were from Latin American countries.

Mohme, during the 74th general assembly of the SIP in Salta, Argentina, pointed out that 11 of the 29 murdered reporters are from Mexico, Brazil (4), Ecuador ( 3), Colombia ( 2), Guatemala ( 2), Nicaragua ( 1), and 6 from the United States.

The 74th IAPA Assembly was held under the slogan “The future of interactive technology and its impact on social evolution”.

According to Mohme, who is also the director of the Peruvian newspaper La Republica, the economic crisis has made the current era difficult for the press. Despite that, the press is showing signs of vitality.

To exempli fy that vitality, he cited his country for the investigations into corruption into the Peruvian judicial branch, and Argentina for the discovery of corruption notebooks that exposed various instances of transfers of large sums of cash.

During the conference, Edison Lanza, the special rapporteur for freedom of expression at the Organisation for the American States ( OAS) warned that the legislative branches of American countries continue to regulate freedom of expression instead of treating it as an absolute right.

“On the subject of protected or unprotected speech of section 8, we can have a more joint vision and say freedom of expression is absolute, without any type of censorship; but the reality is that I have spent four years as rapporteur and, if I look to back, I see in the reports that we do have that. The legislative powers continue to regulate on the issue of freedom, all the time, at all times they are attentive to that,” Lanza said.

Lanza made his comments regarding the eagerness to regulate the press while discussing the concept of protected speech included within the OAS’s Inter American Legal Framework on the Right to Freedom of Expression, a systematic analysis of interAmerican standards on freedom of expression that includes a review of certain important rulings and laws on the matter. — Bernama