Attacks on the Press in 2010 - Committee to Protect Journalists

Americas: AnalysisanalysisIn Latin America,A Return of Censorshipby Carlos LauríaAs the preeminent political family in the northeastern state ofMaranhão for more than 40 years, the Sarneys are used to gettingtheir way in Brazilian civic life. So when the leading national daily OEstado de S. Paulo published allegations in June 2009 that linked JoséSarney, the Senate president and the nation’s former leader, to nepotismand corruption, the political clan did not sit idly by. The Sarneys turnedto a judge in Brasília, winning an injunction that halted O Estado frompublishing any more reports about the allegations. Eighteen months later,as 2010 came to a close, the ban remained in effect despite domestic andinternational outcry.The reports in O Estado—based in part on leaked transcripts fromphone conversations that were tapped during a federal investigation—charged that Sarney used his position in the Senate to award jobs and giveraises to his friends and family. The judge’s ruling, an indefinite injunctionissued without hearing arguments from the newspaper, became the mostnotorious of the numerous recent instances in which Brazilian courts havewielded censorship powers.The Brazilian constitution guarantees free expression and prohibitscensorship, but hundreds of lawsuits have filled court dockets in recentyears, filed by businesspeople, politicians, and public officials who allegethat critical journalists are offending their honor or invading their privacy,CPJ research shows. The plaintiffs in these cases typically seek injunctionsto bar the defendants from publishing anything further about them or toremove the offending online material.The resulting censorship was illustrated in a 2010 global report byGoogle, which said that Brazilian authorities had demanded that contentbe removed from the company’s servers on 398 occasions in the first sixmonths of the year, twice the number of the next country, Libya. Most of71