Iain Marlow and Eric Martin, Bloomberg News

LOS ANGELES
EnergiesNet.com 06 08 2022

Secretary of State Antony Blinken slammed Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua and El Salvador for repressing journalists as the US kicked off a summit of leaders from Latin America in Los Angeles, with tensions between Washington and the region’s authoritarian nations hanging over the event.

In a speech on media freedoms in the hemisphere, Blinken singled out the countries  — whose heads of state weren’t invited or planned to skip the summit  — for jailing and harassing journalists as well as passing laws that curtail press freedoms.

“In Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, the simple act of carrying out investigative journalism is a crime,” Blinken said. “When individual journalists are attacked, when they’re persecuted, when they’re imprisoned, when they’re targeted in any other way, the chilling effects reach far beyond the immediate victims.”

His remarks come at a tense time for press freedom in the hemisphere and globally. A British correspondent and his companion, a Brazilian expert on indigenous peoples, disappeared days ago in a remote part of the Amazon rainforest after receiving threats. In Europe, Russia has cracked down on independent journalism after its invasion of Ukraine, where journalists have been killed and injured covering the conflict.

In Blinken’s remarks, he said the US government has backed new initiatives to help journalists globally, including $30 million to fund public-interest news organizations in “resource-poor and unstable settings.” The US will provide as much as $9 million for a global fund to defend journalists accused of defamation and $3.5 million to help at-risk journalists with security training, he said.

“It’s hard to think of a smarter investment in our democracies given the incredibly brave and innovative work that journalists are doing throughout our region,” he said.

The high-profile US summit being hosted by President Joe Biden is likely to deliver some agreements on the sensitive issue of northbound migration. But the conference continues to be dogged by controversy over who is attending after Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said he planned to skip it unless the US included all countries in the region after Washington refused to invite the leaders of Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua.

On Monday, State Department spokesman Ned Price condemned Havana for prosecuting two dissident artists on charges that “criminalize the freedom of speech and artistic expression in Cuba,” and said that inviting officials from the three nations would be at odds with some of the issues being discussed at the summit. 

“The challenges that these three regimes pose to some of the central tenets of the Summit of the Americas that is to be held this week, those challenges were just insurmountable when you talk about bringing together a summit where democratic governance — democratic values — is on the agenda,” Price said.

bloomberg.com 06 07 2022