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Essay On Investigative Journalism

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Complicating definitions: Latin American watchdogs
[en] el periodismo de investigación…, sos tan grande como el enemigo que elegís o como el desafío que elegís… eso es lo que define tu capacidad de grandeza
Eduardo Galeano (interviewed by Faúndez, 2002: 11)

The narratives and the evidence about the status of IJ in Latin America are contradictory. For some, there is an increasing practice of this genre of journalism (Alves, 2005; Castillo, 2016; Joyce, Saldaña, Schmitz Weiss, & Alves, 2017) while for others, there is a relative declining of it (Dermota, 2002). These perceptions heavily depends on the chosen type of medium (newspapers, television, digital), the massiveness of them (mainstream or independent/non-profit), or the period of …show more content…

Indeed, these countries share certain backgrounds, such economic crisis in the 1980s and the 1990s and the consequential foreign debt and adjustment policies, high inequality, poverty, and a skyrocketing corruption that came afterwards. Expressed in particular local tones, these features have framed Latin America’s entrance to neoliberalism during the 1990s. Violence in different shapes is also a common ground for Latin American societies, but with different patterns. For example, drug trafficking and drug lords’ violence –eventually in partnership with local authorities- are rather a familiar experience for Colombian and Mexican media workers, while political state violence was a landmark during dictatorships in South America. Cases of these unlikely experiences of violence against journalists populate this landscape. Colombian editor, Guillermo Cano, was killed by gunmen in Medellín (Colombia) in the 1980s, as well as occurred to Javier Valdez in Cualiacán (México) in 2017; while reporters Rodolfo Walsh and José Carrasco Tapia were victims of state polices’ brutality in Argentina in the 1970s and in Chile in the 1980s, respectively. Although violence was the shared feature of these cases, the contexts, the driven forces, and the journalists as targets vary.

Precisely these Latin American particularities –among others- have challenged the established Anglo-American operationalization of IJ and

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