Several journalists were harassed this weekend during a Latin American far-right summit in Balneário Camboriú, a city on the coast of Brazil’s Santa Catarina state. Some even had to leave the venue, where the meeting was being promoted by Jair Bolsonaro and his son Eduardo Bolsonaro, to avoid physical attacks.
In one of the most publicized cases, a CNN Brasil reporter, mistaken for a TV Globo journalist, was harassed when she took photographs and angered followers of Brazil’s former president. She was surrounded by a large group of men with threatening language and forced to leave the scene amid shouts of “Globolixo” and “Lula, thief, you belong in jail.”
In another moment of tension faced by social communications professionals, a journalist for the Estado de S. Paulo newspaper was also surrounded by a group of participants at an ultra-conservative event and forced to leave. In this case, the people who surrounded the reporter and forced him to leave the summit after he asked a question that angered Jair Bolsonaro’s wife, Michelle Bolsonaro, repeatedly pushed the journalist and slapped him on the back to hurry him away, at least twice with such force that he staggered and almost fell.
At the summit, attended by Argentine President Javier Miley and representatives of several Latin American countries such as Chile, El Salvador and Mexico, one of the main themes of the speeches was the attack on the mainstream press. Like Jair Bolsonaro, who accused the traditional press of being in the hands of communists and enemies of freedom, praising social networks as the only ones where freedom of expression is truly guaranteed to citizens who defend the values of family and country.