This article is more than 4 years old

This article is more than 4 years old

I reported last week on a Brazilian blogger, Ítalo Eduardo Barros, who had been shot dead on 13 November. Eight days later, another of the country’s bloggers, Roberto Lano, was also shot dead. This report on his death, and on the impunity allowed to killers of journalists in Brazil, comes from Anna Sophie Gross in Rio de Janeiro.

On Saturday (21 November), blogger Roberto Lano was killed by a bullet to the head in the city of Buriticupu, Maranhão. He was the victim of shots fired by a suspect on a motorbike, and died immediately. The killer remains unidentified.

Roberto was known for his involvement in political campaigns, and in his most recent post he criticised the mayor of Buriticupu.



His murder was disturbingly similar to the killing of Ítalo Eduardo Barros, who was also shot by men firing from a motorbike, and also in the state of Maranhão.

In recent blog posts, both Lano and Barros had criticised the policies adopted by local politicians. Both had written posts about the state’s former health secretary, Ricardo Murad, and its governor, Flávio Dino.

Barros, who was 29, posted a blog item in which he said he had received murder threats in a Whatsapp group for journalists. He wrote: “I’ve already received threats from mayors, councillors, cronies, and security. I don’t pay attention, but I always file a report.”

Four days before his death, radio reporter Israel Gonçalves Silva was killed in the eastern state of Pernambuco. His radio programme dealt with corruption allegations against politicians and police.



According to the National Association of Newspapers (ANJ), 23 journalists have been killed in Brazil in the seven years since 2008. In the same period, 24 were imprisoned, 33 were victims of assault and 59 received threats.



The ANJ has stated that judicial censorship and other legal measures seriously limit freedom of expression in the country. Since 2008, at least 77 cases of judicial censorship have been registered in Brazil.



Earlier this month, Brazil was listed among the 14 nations in the global impunity index created by the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). It was the 11th placed country, having 11 unsolved cases of journalistic killings in the years between September 2005 and August 2015.



In a meeting with CPJ delegates in 2014, Brazil’s president, Dilma Rousseff, promised to adopt a policy of “zero impunity” and pledged to support legislative initiatives to combat crimes against freedom of expression.

Since then, there have been accusations, and occasional sentences, of alleged perpetrators. But, in the majority of cases, the people who ordered such murders have avoided prosecution.

The CPJ report stated that “prosecuting those who order killings of journalists remains a key challenge to breaking Brazil’s cycle of violence, particularly when taking into consideration the fact that local government officials are the leading suspects in the majority of cases.”



According to the latest report by the US-based Freedom House, Brazil’s press is only “partly free.” The report states: “Brazil has a vibrant democracy with strong constitutional guarantees of freedom of expression. However, violence and impunity persist along with judicial censorship as the principal threats to these guarantees.”

At the same time, highly concentrated media ownership is controversial too, with hundreds of Brazil’s politicians being either directors or partners in roughly 300 media companies, according to an independent media-monitoring group, Donos da Mídia.