Impunity Spotlight: BRAZIL
Rodrigo Neto, Rádio Vanguarda and Vale do Aço
March 8, 2013, in Ipatinga, Brazil
Two unidentified men on a motorcycle shot Neto as he was getting into his car after attending a local barbecue in Ipatinga, in the southeastern state of Minas Gerais, according to news reports. The journalist died at a local hospital.
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Brazil is #11 on CPJ’s 2015 Impunity Index, which calculates the number of unsolved journalist murders as a percentage of each country’s population. This month CPJ is highlighting cases from each of the 14 countries on the list ahead of the International Day to End Impunity on November 2.
Brazil
Despite a growing record of convictions, deadly violence against journalists continues to outpace justice in Brazil. With 11 unsolved cases, the country maintains the same worldwide impunity ranking as last year. In a meeting with a CPJ delegation in May 2014, Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff pledged to pursue “zero impunity” and support legislative efforts to federalize crimes against free expression. Since then, suspects in the 2013 killings of crime reporters Rodrigo Neto and Walgney Assis de Carvalho have been convicted and sentenced. As with the majority of cases, however, accountability has extended as far as the gunmen but not the mastermind. 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.
IMPUNITY INDEX RATING: 0.053 unsolved journalist murders per million inhabitants
LAST YEAR: Ranked 11th with a rating of 0.045