RIGHTS-LATAM: Colombia Tops List of Murders of Journalists

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Yadira Ferrer

BOGOTA, May 5 1999 (IPS) - Nine of the 18 reporters killed last year in Latin America worked in Colombia, according to a representative of the Organisation of American States (OAS), although a local organisation put the number at 13 instead of nine.

The reign of democracy in Latin America has notably improved respect for freedom of expression in the region, although serious violations persist, OAS rapporteur on press freedom Santiago Canton said in Bogota.

Threats against journalists and the media, government harassment “to silence critics,” and a number of laws and acts of censorship have also conspired against freedom of expression and the exercise of democracy in several countries in the region, Canton said at a conference on freedom of the press this week.

A Peruvian law making it obligatory for reporters to reveal their sources, the prohibition in Chile of “The Last Temptation of Christ” by U.S. filmmaker Martin Scorsese, and 11 acts of censorship in Argentina are demonstrations that freedom of the press continues to be restricted, he added.

Other analysts attending the conference that ended Tuesday pointed out that censorship and aggression against journalists constituted attacks on society’s right to information, and thus on society as a whole.

Half of the murders of Latin American reporters committed in 1998 occurred in Colombia, Canton told the conference, which was sponsored by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) and Colombia’s ‘Fundacion Guillermo Cano’.

But Ignacio Gomez, with the Foundation for Freedom of the Press (FLP), presided over by Colombian Nobel Literature laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez, made un upward revision of that figure.

Gomez said that last year the local press in Colombia reported the murders of 13 reporters. But he pointed out that the figure must be understood in the context of a country with one of the highest rates of violence in the world.

Over the past five years “an average of 23,000 people have been killed yearly” in Colombia, which is in the grip of a decades-old civil war.

He added that in five of the 13 murders of reporters “no signs were found that the deaths were linked to the exercise of their profession.”

But a number of the murders were clearly connected, according to the FLP.

For example, Oscar Garcia, a columnist with the daily ‘El Espectador’ killed on Feb 22, 1998 had announced plans to report on criminal activity in the bullfighting business, according to a colleague.

And Nestor Carvajal, director of a radio programme in Pitalito, in the central Colombian department of Huila, was killed Apr 17, 1998 while waiting for a bus.

Former mayor of Pitalito Ramiro Cuenca, Deputy Fernando Bermudez and Marco Collazos, former president of the city council of Neiva – the capital of the department of Huila – are being investigated in connection with Carvajal’s murder.

During his radio programme, Carvajal had accused the suspects of involvement in corruption.

On May 19 Bernabe Cortes, who worked for a TV channel in the southwestern city of Cali, was killed. Cortes had worked in radio stations belonging to the brothers Gilberto and Miguel Rodriguez Orejuela, the imprisoned heads of the Cali drug cartel.

The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists pointed out that in June 1997, Cortes had reported the dismantling of a cocaine laboratory and a guerrilla ambush against the agents who carried out the operation.

Cortes’s report, according to the testimony of journalists in Cali, suggested that insurgent groups had obtained financing from drug cartels.

The most dramatic case cited at the Bogota conference was narrated by Jesus Blancornelas, director of the Mexican weekly ‘Zeta’ in the city of Tijuana along the U.S. border.

On Nov 27, 1998, 10 gunmen opened fire on Blancornelas’s car, killing his bodyguard and riddling the vehicle with 180 bullets. He himself received four bullet wounds and survived two operations.

The director of Zeta said that since the attempt on his life, he never went anywhere without being escorted by a group of around 10 soldiers.

Blancornelas had reported on the activities of two jailed drug traffickers, identified the murderers of a federal police officer, and published the letter of a mother who lost two of her children at the hands of the drug mafia.

Now he only leaves his home to go to Zeta, stays shut inside on the weekends, and although he occasionally travels – with bodyguards – to the United States, “the first public place I have visited since the attack is a restaurant this Monday in Bogota,” he told the conference.