The United States has experienced the most drastic decline in the Inter American Press Associations Chapultepec press freedom Index as they lost 22.65 points completely dropping out of the top 10 to 11th place from 4th. A document published in Miami on Tuesday pointed out that this drop was caused by the environment that was characterized by a hostile tone against the media during President Donald Trump’s administration, the weakening of some institutional safeguards and the occurrence of attacks on journalists while doing their work. The IAPA introduces the new version of the gauge which includes 23 countries of the American continent.
Across the Americas, officials consider the press as their public enemy number one to shirk responsibility and diminish the power of people through the press, the Inter American Press Association says. The consolidated average has hit its lowest point ever since the indicator was introduced, standing at 47.13 out of 100 points. During a press event for the research in Miami, IAPA Executive Director Carlos Lauría expressed his concern that data show a sharp decline both in authoritarian regimes and also in well, established democracy, indicating a regional pattern of the use of politics for pressurising media violence the legal persecution of journalists, and increased exposure of the journalism profession to dangers.
Martha Ramos, president of the IAPA’s Committee on Freedom of the Press and Information and director of Organización Editorial Mexicana (OEM), drew attention to the spread of authoritarian rhetoric and practices which identify the press as ‘public enemy number one’ to shun accountability and decrease public scrutiny. León Hernández, the index’s academic coordinator and researcher at the Andrés Bello Catholic University (UCAB), shared the results after consulting 195 freedom of expression experts in 23 countries.
The Dominican Republic still leads the pack with 82.17 points, and is the only country in the category ‘With Freedom of Expression’. Even so, Hernández alerted about the existence of a ‘silent gag’, which is identified as the use of official advertising at the discretion of the authorities and the economic weakening of many media outlets. The United States had the biggest drop in the index, losing 22.65 points and sliding from fourth to eleventh place. According to the report, this fall was mainly due to a setting where hostile rhetoric against the press was a feature of the President Donald Trump administration, some institutional safeguards were removed, and journalists were attacked during their news coverage.
Venezuela (7.02 points) and Nicaragua (18.22 points) continue to fall in the category ‘Without Freedom of Expression’. The IAPA has, in fact, pointed to the establishment of a systematic structure of censorship in Venezuela, which has led to the shutdown of more than 400 radio stations and the arrest of 25 journalists since the 2024 election events. El Salvador: Sergio Arauz, president of the Association of Journalists of El Salvador (APES), provided an in, depth analysis of the El Salvador situation. The country is still on par with Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua as the most severe level of the index.
Arauz labelled ‘an increasing repression’ the policy under the state of exception that the government of Nayib Bukele has been promoting. In his view, the modeling together of the use of the Foreign Agents Law and judicial harassment of media has driven about fifty Salvadoran journalists to exile in the last year. “There is no way of practicing journalism without facing threats when the Executive branch has almost unlimited powers and there is no legal oversight,” said Arauz, a deputy editor of El Faro. He warned that self, censorship is increasing in El Salvador because people are afraid of reprisals. This time frame is one of the most challenging periods for journalism in the region, with journalists being killed, detained without reason, brought to court, and even forced to flee from Mexico and Central America to countries of the Southern Cone.
Some of the most common ways of restricting independent journalism are making it a crime, using negative language to describe the press, and various ways to deliberately financially starve critical media outlets. The Dominican Republic is still the only country with a score higher than 80, followed by Chile Canada Brazil, Uruguay, and Jamaica, but most of the hemisphere still has to deal with the difficulty of finding ways to protect journalists and changing the laws that are limiting or discouraging free expression.
As we look ahead to 2026, the region is about to go through a time marked by elections and changes in the geopolitical landscape that could completely change the information environment, resulting in new dilemmas, challenges, and responsibilities for the defence of press freedom.
The writer is a Senior journalist and geo-political analyst
