Colombian journalists become pawns in armed struggle
By Steven Dudley Posted Sat, Jan 1 2000
BOGOTA, COLOMBIA – Threats to journalists working in Colombia are often anonymous. Potential assassins threaten reporters by sending condolence letters with the journalists’ own names on them. Unarmed men follow the reporters through the streets. Other threats are more direct. Right-wing paramilitaries drop by newspaper and radio offices leaving biographies of their leaders, and left-wing guerrillas kidnap journalists for days at a time.
Intimidation is constant and getting worse. According to the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), Colombia is poised to take over the No. 1 spot from Algeria as the world’s most dangerous place for journalists to work.
“Journalists feel that the threat is coming from all directions,” says Joel Simon, deputy director of CPJ, whose organization has documented 52 murders of journalists in Colombia since 1989.
Eight journalists fled Colombia last year because of threats. Another 24 were kidnapped, and CPJ says that at least three more were assassinated. The organization is still investigating two other cases from 1999, including the November deaths of two cameramen, Luis Alberto Rincon Solano and Alberto Sanchez Tovar, who may have been murdered for videotaping an interview with a paramilitary leader.
Latin America has been a difficult place to work as a journalist. Dictatorial regimes persecuted reporters in Brazil, Argentina and Chile during the 1970s, and now, journalists are being targeted in Colombia despite its being the oldest democracy in South America.
Those who target the press in Colombia have been powerful drug-trafficking organizations and local politicians accused of corruption, according to Ignacio Gomez, who heads Colombia’s Foundation for Press Freedom.
“In the old days, everyone knew it was the drug traffickers,” says Gomez, who currently works for El Espectador. “It was easy to identify them and publicly protest what they were doing.” In the late 1980s, criminal organizations led by Pablo Escobar’s Medellin drug cartel assassinated top newspaper editors, kidnapped journalists and even exploded a powerful car bomb in front of the Bogota-based daily El Espectador. Gomez left the country for a brief period during the late 1980s because of death threats.
The current crop of assassins is now expanding as the government negotiates a peace settlement to the country’s 35-year-old civil war with Colombia’s largest guerrilla group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). The National Liberation Army (ELN) and a group of right-wing paramilitaries are also jostling for a position at the negotiating table. All three armed groups have made it a point to put pressure on the media to prop up their images and destroy the reputation of the enemy.
“Public perception is so important to all sides of the conflict that they are using journalists to get their message across,” Simon says. “And they’re using increasingly violent means: kidnapping, threats, assassinations.”
That was the experience of Carlos Pulgarin, a reporter for Colombia’s most circulated daily, El Tiempo. After jumping from bureau to bureau, Pulgarin settled in Monteria, a city near the Atlantic coast about 150 miles from the Panamanian border. Monteria is known as a right-wing paramilitary stronghold, but this did not stop Pulgarin from reporting on alleged right-wing militia killings and on the paramilitaries’ ties with the Colombian military.
The story Pulgarin says got him in trouble concerned a bungled military operation in the area during which 35 Colombian army soldiers were ambushed and killed by FARC rebels. The military commander, who Pulgarin reported had mistakenly dropped the soldiers into the guerrilla trap, was relieved from his duties. Shortly after the story’s publication, Pulgarin says he was called in for a meeting with another local military commander, who told Pulgarin he was “like a press officer for the guerrillas.”
Threatening phone calls followed the meeting, and Pulgarin fled to Bucaramanga, 300 miles away. According to Pulgarin, paramilitaries threatened him in Bucaramanga as well. Finally, in December last year, the reporter fled to Lima, Peru. Pulgarin said he recently received threatening phone calls there as well.
Armed groups also use kidnapping as a means of pressuring the press. Kidnappings have doubled in Colombia during the last three years, perhaps due to the coverage the armed groups can obtain by these actions.
In October, Blanca Herrera and several of her colleagues met with the FARC guerrillas in the jungles of central Colombia where the rebels told the reporters they needed to take a trip with them to speak with some victims of paramilitary violence. When Herrera and the others refused to go along, the FARC brought them by force.
After their five-day jaunt through the jungle, Herrera and her colleagues did what the guerrillas asked. They reported that paramilitaries had killed civilians they suspected were rebels and forced thousands of others to flee the area. Other stories in newspapers and radio followed, and the government even organized a special commission to visit the refugees.
The FARC rebels continue to put pressure on the press. A recent statement by the head of FARC that he has some debts to pay with regard to the press has also been interpreted by some as a threat. It was the first time he spoke to the press in many years. He later denied that his statement was meant as a threat.
Colombian journalists have also been compromised by their contacts and the expectation that they will cover the war in its entirety. It is common for a journalist to receive word of a guerrilla attack before it happens. On occasion, the cameramen will follow the rebels as they approach their targets, which often include police stations or banks.
“What is crazy is that the guerrillas call and say, ‘Look, we are going to take a town,’ and when the cameras arrive, the rebels start to shoot,” says Aida Luz Herrera, the news director of Radionet, a 24-hour news radio station.
There are some organizations trying to address both the safety and ethical issues that journalists face in Colombia. The group Media for Peace organizes workshops during which they teach reporters Colombian history, language and journalism ethics. It has been a long road for Media for Peace. In the two years since the group began, it has given workshops to hundreds of journalists who cover the war and has more than 200 reporters on its weekly mailing list. But top editors and owners of news outlets have yet to sign on to the program. And journalists continue to be sent into difficult situations.
“The war is worth more than anything here,” Blanca Herrera says. “And if it is a violent image, it is worth much more.” Last fall, Colombian television news stations decided to broadcast violent images in black and white. But when ratings fell, the stations abandoned the program.
“Journalists are disorganized here, and this lack of solidarity has stopped us from creating an important movement that can say ‘no to this’ or ‘change that,’” says Aida Luz Herrera.
The response by the Colombian government to the killings has been mixed. Colombian President Andres Pastrana, who was a television journalist himself before stepping into politics, responded to a campaign by the InterAmerican Press Association by creating a special police unit to investigate crimes against journalists. He has offered journalists some protection. Most journalists refuse the protection because it limits their work, but the special police unit has had results. In early January, it arrested one man suspected in the murder of political satirist and journalist Jaime Garzon, who was killed last August in Bogota by two gunman on a motorcycle as he drove to work. Gomez says other investigations have produced similar captures.
Still, most of the other cases remain unsolved and virtually lost in a sea of violence that has spread to include academics as well as columnists and has cost the lives of 35,000 Colombians in the last 10 years. According to human rights groups, 95 percent of all crimes in Colombia go unpunished, and when crimes are politically motivated, as in the cases of journalists, the chance of successful prosecution is even more remote.
“We at the Foundation realize that it’s more difficult to kill a journalist when everyone knows that the case will be investigated and the assassins put in jail,” Gomez says. “But the fact is that the judicial system is so inefficient and impunity so high that it becomes easy to kill journalists.”