JavaScript is disabled in your web browser or browser is too old to support JavaScript. Today almost all web pages contain JavaScript, a scripting programming language that runs on visitor's web browser. It makes web pages functional for specific purposes and if disabled for some reason, the content or the functionality of the web page can be limited or unavailable.

Tuesday, July 29, 2025

Editor: Honduras most dangerous

by

20120625

Latin Amer­i­ca and Caribbean ed­i­tor of As­so­ci­at­ed Press, Mex­i­co, Ma­jorie Miller, be­lieves Hon­duras is the mur­der cap­i­tal of the world, both per capi­ta and in terms of jour­nal­ist killings. Miller was part of a pan­el at yes­ter­day's In­ter­na­tion­al Press In­sti­tute (IPI) World Con­gress which dis­cussed "Mex­i­co, Cu­ba, Venezuela: The big three and their im­pact on press free­dom in the re­gion". The three-day con­fer­ence is be­ing held at the Hy­att Re­gency, Port-of-Spain. "I am very wor­ried about that coun­try and my col­leagues in that coun­try," Miller said. She spoke specif­i­cal­ly about press free­dom in Cu­ba, say­ing, while there was cur­rent­ly no press free­dom in that coun­try she be­lieved it would even­tu­al­ly change.

She said jour­nal­ists were un­der survel­liance from the gov­ern­ment there. The two news­pa­pers in the coun­try car­ry con­tent dis­sem­i­nat­ed from the gov­ern­ment and there was no free ex­change of ideas, Miller added.

She said there were blog­gers in the coun­try but they usu­al­ly act­ed as opin­ion jour­nal­ists as op­posed to pro­vid­ing a bal­anced re­port. Even for­eign me­dia, such as BBC, CNN and AP who have out­lets there, she added, were re­strict­ed by lack of ac­cess to in­for­ma­tion and of­fi­cials. Re­quests for in­for­ma­tion, she said, have to go through the gov­ern­ment and they usu­al­ly re­ceived five per cent of the re­quests for in­ter­views af­ter the sto­ries/ar­ti­cles would have al­ready been writ­ten or pro­duced.

But even though they were heav­i­ly mon­i­tored and reg­u­lat­ed, she said, there was lit­tle threat of vi­o­lence. On Hon­duras, she said there was an emer­gency sit­u­a­tion where 25 jour­nal­ists have been killed in a coun­try with a pop­u­la­tion of ap­prox­i­mate­ly eight mil­lion. She said jour­nal­ists in Mex­i­co have be­come war cor­re­spon­dents. She said the dis­ap­pear­ances of jour­nal­ists have been oc­cur­ring since 2003. She said that was be­com­ing worse since drug car­tels of­ten told jour­nal­ists what they could and could not pub­lish.


Related articles

Sponsored

Weather

PORT OF SPAIN WEATHER

Sponsored