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By Marius Dragomir

13 December 2019

For more than a decade, the government has meddled with Bolivia’s news media. Following the collapse of the Morales regime, the country’s journalists want to put paid to that, once and for all.

In 2014, Virginie Poyetton, a researcher, found that more than half of Bolivia’s journalists have faced some form of censorship. The truth is that this terrifying fact was hardly shocking in Bolivia, a landlocked Latin American nation of 11 million people where censorship has a long tradition – particularly under the rule of Evo Morales, the man who led the Bolivian nation since 2006.

Under Morales’s rule, the control of the media by the government reached unprecedented levels – but after Mr Morales fled the country, following street protests triggered by a controversial election last month, a new era beckons for independent journalism in Bolivia; or at least that’s what journalists in the country are hoping for.

“After the fall of Morales, many things are changing,” said Mauricio Canelas, project manager with Los Tiempos, an independent newspaper from Cochabamba, Bolivia’s third largest city. 

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