Editorial of the Razón de Estado program number  252

The exercise of politics suffers from frivolity, incompetence, authoritarianism, and corruption. The elites have lost their control on information. The platforms offered by technology and their echo chambers make everyone believe they have the truth.

Fake news, misinformation, and disqualification are creating distrustful and polarized societies. Democracy, as a system, is paying the consequences.

This phenomenon, in addition to returning us to tribalism, promoting rejection of what is different, conflict, and dispersion, weakens and exposes the integrity of freedom of expression.

Now, an ignorant, misinformed, and manipulated citizen is a grave threat to democracy and freedom, but limiting freedom of expression is condemning them to death.

From Los Pinos to Casa Rosada, Latin America faces an authoritarian, illiberal, and antidemocratic conflagration that compromises the present and threatens the future.

The prevailing political underdevelopment, the worst kind of underdevelopment, has allowed most governments to be taken over by caudillo-style politicians, autocrats who seek to make societies function like barracks. And freedom of expression is the first among their victims.

Self-censorship, gag laws, threats, persecution, imprisonment, and even murder are some of the consequences when politicians seek silence and impunity.

The common threat to journalists comes from organized crime, cartels, and criminal activities. However, this criminal and shameful practice is growing more today from government palaces.

The situation for independent press in extensive geographical areas of the planet is bleak and calls for immediate action from those committed to democracy and the rule of law.

It is common in Latin America for a journalist to go hungrier than a schoolteacher. The press, while generating great satisfaction, is a misunderstood, difficult, and sometimes ungrateful profession.

Freedom of information and journalism require basic conditions for their exercise: one of them is legal certainty, and the other is respect from political power.

Freedom of expression and information are not a generous concession that politicians in power give to the citizens; they are indisputable and decisive rights for democracy.

Citizens must be willing to defend them to the ultimate consequences because it is there where democracy and freedom are either saved or condemned.