Mónica Oblitas is in danger. She feels lost, uneasy. Everything has changed for this Bolivian journalist since she published, in La Prensa newspaper, an investigative report about alleged corruption in the Bolivian Forensic Research Institute. She has received anonymous threatening phone calls, text messages and emails; she and her son have been followed and the windows of her apartment were shattered.

Oblitas has filed legal complaints and gone to the media, but to no avail, because of what she believes is fear on the part of her colleagues and the inefficiency of the judicial system. In September, Oblitas began contacting international organisations for help and support.

Although Oblitas appears to be the only Bolivian journalist receiving death threats at the moment, her case is not an exception in Latin America. Just in the last month, 11 other journalists have reported death threats. The number is alarming – but is only a snapshot of a broader picture. The International Press Institute (IPI) is concerned about the fact that nine of the reported death threats in the last month allegedly stemmed directly or indirectly from the local authorities. The other three were allegedly related to drug dealers.

For the report that apparently prompted the death threat, Oblitas, seeking to confirm allegations of corruption centering around the Bolivian Forensic Institute, posed as an ordinary citizen and asked the coroner of the Bolivian capital La Paz to provide a medical certificate stating that she had been assaulted. Without a medical examination, and in return for a fee, the doctor issued the requested document – which detailed non-existent injuries. The journalist filmed the encounter with a hidden camera and her article appeared on the front page of the Sunday edition of La Prensa. The case was also made public in a radio program.

The story led to a legal investigation in May, but no arrests have been made. Meanwhile, the threats have continued. Callers have told Oblitas they will shoot her and break her legs, and that her days are numbered. One text message read: “You like playing with forensics. The next case will be yours.” Another described the clothing her son was wearing on a particular day at university. By 13 September, she had received over 20 death threats, but the number has increased in the last two weeks, Oblitas told IPI.

“I am very scared, but not sorry,” she said. “These threats are not going to make me stop investigating who is behind all this. I am sure it is someone with a lot of power in the government. Intimidation against journalists demonstrates the extent of the long chain of corruption from judges to forensics.”

Oblitas’ son now lives with a family member and Oblitas is still considering options to better ensure their safety.

Honduras: A High Price for Political Reporting

In Honduras, where five journalists have been killed since the beginning of the year, both reporters and sources are in danger. The police, the government and organised crime gangs allegedly made a total of three death threats in September against local reporters. In addition, a former mayor was harassed over comments an anonymous source made to a newspaper.

On 12 September, C-Libre reported that Alejandro Casco Sierra, who works for the newspaper Nueva República, was told by a colleague that a police officer wanted to eliminate him. Casco Sierra was in the Brazilian embassy in 2009 with former Honduran President Manuel Zelaya after the military coup that ousted him and was physically attacked by police officers. Apparently, a journalist and friend of Casco Sierra noted that during a press conference this month, one of the alleged aggressors of Casco Sierra pointed to him and told another officer that “he would take care” of him.

C-Libre also reported on 12 September that the director of the news program “El látigo contra la corrupción” – which highlights alleged corruption cases – had received several death threats via text messages and had reported being followed on a number of occasions by armed and hooded men. In his program, aired by Globo TV, he covers government corruption and human rights violations. He and his brother have been granted precautionary measures by the Inter American Commission of Human Rights.

Meanwhile, journalist Edgardo Antonio Escoto Amador told C-Libre that on 22 September, he was accosted by two heavily armed men in the city of Comayaguela. Escoto presents the programs “Temas y Debates” and “Entrevista con El Washo” on Channel 13 in Tegucigalpa. He told a local press freedom organisation he had recently been followed and had received death threats through phone calls and text messages.

Escoto recounted: “They pointed guns at me and snatched my briefcase, which contained a laptop with important information. One of the men, whom I couldn’t identify, gave me back some documents, a radio and my cell phone, and then they took off. The laptop had confidential information about the coup that was shared with me and other journalists several months ago and provoked the ire of retired general Miguel Ángel García Padgett.”

Escoto added that three months ago García Padgett said he was not pleased about information that had been published and warned him against continuing to report on it. García Padgett was one of the four leaders of the 2009 coup that ousted President Manuel Zelaya; at the time, he was the commanding general of the Honduran army, C-Libre reported.

Also in Honduras, the former mayor of Copán Ruinas, Lisandro Mauricio Arias Avilés, was targeted by drug traffickers who believed he was a source for an article in El Faro newspaper, in El Salvador, describing drug trafficking activity along the border. Even though the report cited anonymous sources, Arias Avilés received death threats.

Peru: Provincial Reporters a Principal Target

In Peru, three journalists have received death threats over the last month. As IPI recently reported, press freedom in the country is deteriorating in areas far from the capital, Lima.

Kety Vela, director of a program on TV San Juan and Radio Marginal, in Tocache, northern Peru, told the Press and Society Institute (IPYS) that there was a plan to kill her. She has reported on alleged links between drug trafficking and the mayor of Tocache and has received threatening phone calls since August. She also said that an assassin had confessed to being paid more than $US 1,800 to kill her.

Segundo Alvines and Braulio Rojas, who present the “Hits Star Noticias” program broadcast by the Hits Star radio station in Bagua, in the northeastern Amazonas region, told the Press and Society Institute that on 24 September they received threatening leaflets at their homes after they reported on corruption allegations involving the provincial municipality. During an interview on the journalists’ news program, an engineer brought to light documents allegedly exposing irregularities in payments authorized by Bagua Mayor Ferry Torres. The printed flyers the journalists received told them to leave the news program and said they would be killed if they refused to do so, IPYS reported. The journalists filed a formal complaint with the police and also notified the local Public Prosecutor’s Office about the threats.

Meanwhile, another journalist, Javier Poma Sotelo, has received official letters in which Alfredo Vera Arana, the mayor of the Independencia district in the province of Huaraz, orders him to clarify comments he says he never made, or face a defamation suit. Vera Arana is the director of the “Huaraz Informa” program broadcast by Global TV, and said he believes the letters are an attempt to silence him because of his critical reporting about the municipality.

In another case, journalists Cristian Rojas Silva, a correspondent for Canal N in Cajamarca, and Roberto Cacho Uriarte, a reporter for Radio Líder, were intimidated on 16 September by police officers involved in a confrontation with university students. In order to prevent the journalists from recording the incident, one of the officers fired a tear gas canister which exploded very close to Rojas Silva, while Cacho Uriarte was pushed and beaten. Both were told that their cameras and mobile phones, which they had used for the news reports, would be confiscated, IPYS reported.

Argentina: Trouble in the North

Journalists from the provinces of Salta and Formosa in northern Argentina have been recently targeted for their reporting. The Rodolfo Walsh news agency, which specialises in information regarding NGOs and minorities, reported on 28 September that an indigenous journalist, a member of the Wichí community in Formosa, was threatened last week by Cristino Mendoza, from the local authority in the village of Barrio Obrero Village. “Starving Indian, we will kill you”, Mendoza allegedly told the host of “Despertar Indígena”, broadcast on Radio Identidad. Formosa is a province with very powerful governments, were the Wichís live in extreme poverty. According to local media, politicians only pay attention to them when elections are close.

In Salta, journalists Gloria Seco and Claudio Ruiz, who host the program “Arriba todo el mundo” on Radio Ciudad 99.5, in San Miguel de la Nueva Orán, were threatened twice because of their reports about drug dealing. According to the local press freedom organization FOPEA, on 24 September a well-known regional drug dealer sent via a friend of Seco a message telling her that she and her family were in danger.  On 27 September, the same person called Seco and Ruiz to threaten them. Salta is a province located on the border with Bolivia, and is believed to be a conduit for drugs transported from Argentina to Bolivia, on the way to Europe.

In the Dominican Republic, Colombia, Argentina and Paraguay, Warnings for Journalists

The Dominican Union of Journalists reported that reporter Jhony Alberto Salazar has received threats from public officials working in the Nagua municipality. He was told that “things could get ugly and scary” due to his critical position towards the government, made public in his program on Vida FM.

“We do not want martyrs in the press,” Aurelio Henríquez, president of the Dominican journalists’ union, told the local press earlier this month.  Nobody will intimidate us. We will continue defending the free practice of journalism in the country, because no sector has the right to make threats or attempt to scare people who report information in the public interest.”

In Colombia, radio journalist Claudia Julieta Duque sent President Juan Manuel Santos a request for an investigation on 14 September, after being told of an alleged order to attack her, Reporters Without Borders reported. Duque, who works for Radio Nizkor, is one of a number of journalists directly targeted after 2001 by the Administrative Department of Security (DAS) during the so-called DASGate scandal, involving illegal phone-tapping of those critical of former President Alvaro Uribe’s policy of dealing with the country’s armed groups.

The threats against Duque have intensified since she published a story in The Washington Post about the use of U.S. aid for illegal activities by the DAS under the guise of fighting terrorism. Uribe responded to the article accusing its authors of being paid by the guerrillas, the Knight Center for Journalism reported. Duque was the beneficiary of a formal protection request which the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights addressed to the Colombian government in 2009 and she has been under interior ministry police protective surveillance since 2004.

In Paraguay, the leader behind the guerrilla Paraguayan People’s army warned that journalists would become military targets if they acted as informants for the government, the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas reported. Alcides Oviedo Brítez told the newspaper La Nación that the press was producing terror amongst citizens and was the only part of society that thought of police as “poor little angels”. From a maximum security cell, he said that there would be more deaths of police, journalists and civilians.

Murder, Exile, Threats

Governments in Latin America, and organized crime cartels, remain the principal enemies of press freedom in the region, as they try to silence independent reporting through threats against journalists, legal action, physical aggression and murder.

According to the IPI Death Watch, 85 journalists have been killed worldwide so far this year. With 35 murdered journalists in the last 10 months, Latin America is the deadliest region for reporters, accounting for almost half the death list, or 41 percent. IPI is concerned that the list could grow because of the number of journalists affected by death threats and because organised crime remains endemic in the region. IPI calls on the authorities to protect all the reporters who have been targeted, and to end impunity in cases against journalists.

Furthermore, journalists who investigate corruption, especially in the countryside, are often harassed by the local authorities, who also remove advertising from local media, aware of the importance of such funds for regional news outlets. At the same time, both national and regional authorities in Latin America are using criminal defamation laws to muzzle critical reporting.

Death threats are forcing journalists like Silvia González, a correspondent for El Nuevo Diario in Jinotega, Nicaragua, to leave their countries. González was forced into exile in September after receiving phone calls saying that she and her family would be killed. El Nuevo Diario reported on her case last month, noting that the journalist had asked it to keep her new address secret.

Within the last month alone, IPI reported on the exile of two journalists: Mexican reporter Alejandro Hernández Pacheco, who was granted political asylum in the United States after being kidnapped by a drug cartel in 2010; and Ecuadorian journalist Emilio Palacios, former opinion editor of El Universo newspaper, who fled his country after being sentenced to three years in prison for defamation.