Miami, Jan 10 (EFE).- The Inter American Press Association (SIP) condemned on Tuesday the attacks against journalists from Brazil and foreign correspondents during the assault made by followers of the former president of that country Jair Bolsonaro to the Congress, the Planalto Palace and the Supreme Court last Sunday.
“Freedom of the press is essential for the existence of democracy,” the agency said today in a statement in which it asked to respect journalistic work, after Sunday “press agencies, media and journalist organizations registered attacks, threats and robberies against local and foreign journalists”.
On Sunday afternoon, the headquarters of the three powers were the target of attacks by radical Bolsonarists, who sought to overthrow the progressive Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva a week after he assumed the head of state in Brazil.
Among the registered attacks, the beatings against a journalist from the New Yorker magazine and a photographer from the Metropoles website and the Folha de Sao Paulo newspaper stand out, during a day in which, according to the IAPA, workers from the EFE agencies , France Press, Reuters and The Washington Post newspaper, among others, denounced being subjected to attacks.
Reporters from the newspaper O Tempo and from the Jovem Pam radio-television network were also attacked and threatened with weapons.
“Some photographers were forced to delete the images they had taken and several journalists had their work equipment stolen,” the hemispheric organization, based in Miami (USA), deepened.
The president of the IAPA, Michael Greenspon, and the president of the organization’s Freedom of the Press and Information Committee, Carlos Jornet, jointly expressed the organization’s “concern for the safety of press personnel while carrying out their work informative”.
Greenspon, who is a director of The New York Times newspaper, and Jornet, journalistic director of La Voz del Interior, from Argentina, warned in the statement about the increased danger faced by “journalists who cover social and political conflicts in the region”.
Last week, the IAPA condemned the attacks and acts of violence against journalists in Bolivia.
The Brazilian Association of Investigative Journalism (Abraji, for its acronym in Portuguese) and the National Federation of Journalists (Fenaj) counted 77 attacks of political violence against the press between October 30, 2022 and January 6, 2023, as it does echo the SIP.
The most recent IAPA Chapultepec Index shows Brazil in 15th place out of 22 States in terms of press freedom, particularly due to the attacks by the previous government against the media and journalists registered between August 2021 and August 2022.
The Chapultepec Index is an annual barometer that measures institutional actions that affect freedom of the press and expression in 22 countries of the Americas. The measurement is made on the basis of the principles of the IAPA declarations of Chapultepec and Salta. EFE
