Successive criminal and compensation lawsuits against journalists and the media in various Latin American countries show a constant “judicial harassment” denounced journalists and representatives of organizations for press freedom this Wednesday afternoon.
“These lawsuits violate freedom of expression and imply the judicialization of informative and public interest work and Latin America is fertile ground where journalistic practice is literally practiced and is increasingly suffocated,” said Paulina Gutiérrez, from the organization Article 19.
A dozen organizations that advocate for the free exercise of journalism attended a hearing on the “Judicialization of matters of public interest against people who exercise freedom of expression in the region” before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR).
These are judicial cases that for Gutiérrez occur within a framework that goes unnoticed by the public because it “seems to be legitimate legal processes”, but which are basically aimed at “silencing” and “limiting the debate on issues of public interest”.
“The problem spreads throughout the region due to the lack of a central view of the abuse of the judicial process (…) these demands occur in a form of legal or judicial harassment”, different, but as harmful as the creation of laws to persecute or “prosecute journalists and dissident voices” in authoritarian states, he opined.
Guatemalan journalist Juan Luis Font, director of the radio with criteriawhich works from exile, explained that in his country he is facing a series of investigations opened by the Public Ministry that are not moving forward, with petitions before a judge to deprive him of his liberty.
“The public ministry has opened investigations against me, it almost always uses the topic of money laundering” as it did against the journalist José Rubén Zamora imprisoned since July 2022 and recently sentenced to six years in prison.
Font says that in Guatemala there is also a strategy of limiting the defense of journalists -as happened with the president of elPeriódico-, by forcing defense lawyers to resign under penalty of opening investigations.
“Pressures against the press have clouded the electoral process in Guatemala, and the most vulnerable are journalists who live in remote regions, where there are mining operations, where there is pressure to dissuade them from reporting,” Font denounced.
The experiences of the journalists seem to be traced from one region of the continent to another. In Colombia, the journalist Catalina Ruiz Navarro explained how, with her media outlet Vocán, they have had to face million-dollar lawsuits for a case investigated with journalistic rigor, with a bank of sufficient evidence and testimonies and even with the version of a person accused of sexual harassment in several cases, who with his influence has opened a judicial process for which he claims a million-dollar compensation for “damage to his image.”
Even worse seems the story of the Brazilian journalist Joao Paulo Cuenca who, after disseminating a satirical version of a historical text on his social networks, initially became a target of attacks by the government of former President Jair Bolsonaro “for attacking morality.”
The one that -in the initial lack of merits on the part of the Prosecutor’s Office to open legal proceedings at the request of the presidency- later more than a hundred religious organizations activated the complaint that now maintains it in court.
Cuenca lost his job “due to the pressure exerted by government influences” before the international news agency for which he worked and is now facing the million-dollar lawsuit filed by 200 evangelical pastors who claim close to half a million dollars, “for attacking against religious faith.
Cases like this of multiple demands are common in the region, agreed the journalists and representatives of organizations that attended the hearing, these can range from matters of morality and faith, damage to image and even incitement to hatred.
“In Latin America, we refer to journalists facing more than 100 lawsuits in different cities of a country for some publication,” said Paulina Gutiérrez of Article 19, these can sustain alleged acts of sexual harassment against journalists by public figures, others open proceedings criminal “incitement to hatred, claims for million-dollar compensation that are difficult to pay, which endangers the work of freedom of expression,” added the expert.
Paula Moreno Román, from the Argentine Journalism Forum, says that in that South American country the origin of these demands has been reviewed, and the vast majority are filed by members of the public service, which indicates “judicial abuse and harassment”, which It has increased in the last three years that 44 lawsuits have been counted.
For this expert, “judicial harassment is an abusive form of the justice system” and evidences in many cases the lack of independence of the establishment as there are communicating vessels in those waits for power that impact against freedom of expression and of the press.
From La Veinte, Justicia – Libertad de Expresión, Ana Bejarano, agrees with Moreno Román that “in most cases the sector that harasses journalists the most is the one that has power”, with the particularity of operating in situations when there are issues of public interest at stake.
From the IACHR, Commissioner Stuardo Ralón said that discussing this issue of regional impact in this 187th Period of Sessions of the organization based in Washington, is very important and poses “an enormous challenge in the Inter-American System” to face this situation.
Since it will have to act with a lot of force “when addressing this problem” because it goes hand in hand with “judicial independence” with which the procedures of “due process” have to be reviewed with which mechanisms have to be created to “identify legal action to silence [periodistas] of a legitimate one”.
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