The president of the main Spanish news agency recalled that ‘there are many journalists who have had to take on other jobs to survive economically or have left the profession for fear of reprisals against their families’ and insisted that, ‘if there were no media in exile, there would be information black holes and zones of silence on issues of national and global concern’.
On this point, Oliver gave the example of EFE which, ‘like so many other media’, had to reorganise itself when its delegate in Nicaragua was forced to go into exile and continue working from outside the country.
‘Like him, other brave and committed journalists make it possible for us to continue to have quality journalism in exile’, added the president of EFE, who is convinced that “when the rule of law has collapsed, the defence of freedom and the credibility of the profession depends exclusively on the work of all those journalists (...) who face political persecution, criminal violence in their countries or even prison”.
Oliver also regretted that ‘in the Americas, confidence in the press has been greatly affected by attacks by politicians’.