By Agencies
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Photojournalist Alfredo Cardoso died in a hospital Sunday two days after being shot in Acapulco, the second Mexican journalist to be killed during the week, an international journalism group informed.
Jan Albert Hootsen, Mexico’s representative for the Committee to Protect Journalists, reported Cardoso’s death, saying he had direct confirmation from Cardoso’s family.
Prosecutors in Acapulco said Friday that Cardoso, who worked for a news virtual portal, had been found sitting on a city street with gunshot wounds and was taken to a hospital.
According to the National Union of Press Editors and information from the family relayed by CPJ, Cardoso had been taken from his home earlier Friday by armed men.
On Thursday, reporter Fredy López Arévalo, who contributed to several local, national and foreign media outlets, was shot to death when he arrived at his home in San Cristobal de las Casas in Chiapas state.
During the first three years of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s administration, 47 journalists and 94 human rights defenders have been slain in Mexico, according to data offered in early October by the undersecretary of human rights, population and migration, Alejandro Encinas.
Mexico is the most violent and despotic country in the Western Hemisphere for journalism, according to CPJ, a New York-based press protection group.
NICARAGUA
Meta Platforms, the company that runs Facebook, said Monday it has canceled 937 accounts linked to the government of Nicaragua and the Sandinista party of President Daniel Ortega.
Meta said it also removed 140 deceptive pages, 24 groups and 363 Instagram accounts for violating the company’s policy against “coordinated inauthentic behavior on behalf of a foreign or government entity.”
Meta said it was a classic example of a “troll farm,” which it defined as attempts “to corrupt or manipulate public discourse by using fake accounts to… mislead people about who’s behind them.”
The firm said the network of accounts was launched after mass protests against the government in 2018.
A tactic that the Trump’s campaign used to win its election in 2016, according to some documents from the Department of Justice.
The accounts sought both to denigrate members of the opposition, and praise the government.
Some of the accounts purported to be students from a Nicaraguan university that was an epicenter of the protests.
Nicaragua is set to hold elections on Nov. 7 in which Ortega is seeking a fourth consecutive term.
But those elections have been rendered almost moot by the government’s arrests of critics and seven potential challengers.
Starting in May, Ortega began arresting almost any public figure who publicly disagreed with him, including people who fought alongside him in the country’s 1979 revolution. Families of 155 political prisoners said in a statement that their loved ones have been subjected to “mistreatment and torture” in prison.
The country’s main opposition coalitions have said that Ortega’s moves have “ended any vestige of real electoral competition.”
About 140,000 Nicaraguans have fled their homeland since the government cracked down on widespread protests starting in 2018.
Meta said the troll farm removed in October was operated from the offices of the postal service, noting “additional smaller clusters of fake accounts were run from other government offices, including the Supreme Court and the Nicaraguan Social Security Institute.”
“This campaign was cross-platform as well as cross-government,” the company said. “It ran a complex network of media brands across Facebook, Tiktok, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Blogspot and Telegram, as well as websites tied to these news entities. They posted positive content about the government and negative commentary about the opposition, using hundreds of fake accounts to promote these posts.”
Ortega claims the protests that erupted in April 2018 were an attempted coup with foreign backing. And he has feuded with Roman Catholic bishops who participated as mediators then in the short-lived first round of dialogue between the government and opposition, after which the government harshly put down the protests.
At least 325 people died during clashes that year between civilians and government forces in Nicaragua, according to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.
COLOMBIA
A proposal to grant early release from prison to one of the world’s most prolific serial killers has raised outrage in Colombia and a denunciation on Monday from President Iván Duque.
Luis Alfredo Garavito confessed to killing about 190 children, most aged 8 to 16 and received more than 50 long sentences.
Prosecutors said sometimes posed as a beggar or a monk and lured poor children with money and soft drinks, then he later slit their throats, sometimes after torturing and raping them.
But Colombia limits prison sentences to 40 years and allows early release for good behavior after more than half a sentence is served.
The television program “Los Informantes” revealed on Sunday that the national prison institute had asked a judge in May to grant Garavito provisional release because of his “exemplary” behavior in prison.
A judge denied the request because Garavito, now 64, had not paid a fine for his victims of roughly $41,500.
“I have profound indignation at the possibility that anyone would suggest that that beast leave prison,” Duque said in Glasgow, Scotland, where he was attending the U.N. climate conference.
“The national government neither sponsors or supports that,” he added.
Garavito was arrested in April 1999 on an attempted rape charge, but when an investigating judge asked him if he was the killer of 114 children whose bodies were found in 59 Colombian towns beginning in 1994, Garavito admitted the crimes and begged to be forgiven.
Then he confessed to 26 more murders.
“I ask you to pardon me for all I have done, and all I will confess. Yes, I killed them and many others, ″ he said in an excerpt from the videotaped confession broadcast by Colombian television newscasts.
Garavito showed the judge and psychologist his tally of the killings that he kept in a battered notebook, according to a leading newspaper, El Tiempo.
Across the creased pages were scratched 140 lines, one for every victim.
Later, while in prison, he confessed to about 50 other killings.
El Tiempo said Garavito told the judge he was the oldest of seven children and grew up beaten by his father, and repeatedly raped by two neighbors.
He left home at 16, working first as a store clerk, then as a street vendor who sold religious icons and prayer cards.
