By Constanza Vieira
BOGOTÁ, Dec 30 2006 (IPS)

“Jorge Eliécer” is the alias attributed by Colombian authorities to Fredy Muñoz, correspondent in Colombia for the Caracas-based Telesur Latin America TV news network, who was arrested on Nov. 19.

Muñoz was one of 134 reporters in prison worldwide as of Dec. 1, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) which is based in New York.

Muñoz will spend New Year in prison because the prosecution maintains that he was “commander of the Bolivarian Militia of the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia)” in the port city of Cartagena in 2002.

“I can’t accuse people I don’t know. I spoke very clearly to the prosecutor and told her that the ‘Jorge Eliécer’ that I knew deserted from the guerrillas and the (paramilitary) self-defence forces in Ñanguma killed him,” Yainer Rodríguez testified under oath on Dec. 5. He is serving a 12-year sentence for rebellion and terrorism.

Rodríguez was responding to a question from a representative of the Procuraduría (an office that oversees public employees, including prosecutors), who arrived at the end of the questioning session.

According to Rodríguez, the prosecutor questioning him threatened to press for an additional sentence of 30 to 40 years for him if he did not cooperate.

The representative of the Procuraduría asked Rodríguez if he knew Fredy Muñoz. “I am just now hearing that name for the first time, from the prosecutor,” he replied, according to the interrogation transcript to which IPS had access.

Three purported witnesses against Muñoz, all allegedly former FARC guerrillas, are all serving sentences or living in military units or regional facilities of the Administrative Department of Security (DAS), the presidential intelligence service.

They testified that they had heard of terrorist acts committed by “Jorge Eliécer” in 2001 and 2002, but Muñoz’s defence attorneys stressed that the witnesses all added that they themselves did not actually see “Jorge Eliécer” himself place the bombs..

For example, one of the witnesses, who inexplicably does not remember whether he was captured in 2000 or 2001, declared that “Jorge Eliécer” placed bombs in 2002, when he himself was already in custody.

In 2001, according to his curriculum vitae on file at Telesur and obtained by IPS, Muñoz made a documentary film about the war-torn Colombian region of Montes de María on the Caribbean coast. He had a contract with the United Nations and the Social Pastorate office of the Catholic archdiocese of Cartagena.

In 2002, he was editor-in-chief of the weekly Al Día in Barranquilla, the industrial capital of Colombia’s Caribbean coastal region. While there, he also coordinated the newspaper’s investigative journalism unit.

The “Jorge Eliécer” who is wanted spent several months in the mountains that year at a guerrilla camp, according to the witness who does not remember the date of his own arrest.

Muñoz’s CV shows a young man interested in environmental, development and cultural question, who studied televisual communications at the National University of Bogotá.

From 2003 to 2005, before he was named Colombia correspondent by Telesur, Muñoz studied sociology at the state University of the Atlantic in Barranquilla. He never studied at Cartagena University, as three of the witnesses claimed.

One witness stated that in early 2002, “Jorge Eliécer” suffered burns to his arms, neck, ears and head when a bomb he was placing at a power station exploded.

IPS had access to the forensic report by the National Institute of Legal Medicine and Forensic Science, in Barranquilla, with the results of the physical examination of Muñoz’s skin.

The report describes, in technical language, several skin lesions, most of them “old.” “Because of the time elapsed since the injuries were sustained, the causes cannot be established,” it reads.

IPS showed the text of the report to a forensic anthropologist, whose identity is withheld for security reasons, for a second opinion. Based on the forensic description, none of the scars, marks or even the “dermatological process of acne” listed could have arisen from burns, the source told IPS. “The marks are too dispersed” and “could even be from childhood games.”

The scars described by the Institute of Legal Medicine “could have arisen from chickenpox, insect bites or lesions from coral” due to swimming in the Caribbean Sea, added the source, who is part of a team that has studied the effects on the human body of anti-personnel mines.

Rodrigo Barrera, spokesman for the attorney general, told CPJ that the “evidence would not be made public until the investigation was concluded.”

“I have no time to be a militia commander, I only have time to be a journalist. I would not have a single spare moment for anything else in life, let alone to be a commander of terrorist militias in our country. I love my country too much to get involved in anything like that,” Muñoz was quoted as telling Telesur over the telephone after the first investigation on Nov. 21.

“I am innocent, completely innocent. There’s been a confusion. This is an attack on the media, on freedom of speech, freedom of the press. Not against me, but against the brave journalists who call a spade a spade in this country,” said Muñoz to a cluster of his colleagues when he was arrested, as a DAS agent dragged him away.

The Colombian authorities have repeatedly said that the case has nothing to do with the Telesur correspondent’s critical journalism work.

This war-torn Colombian country is one of the most dangerous in the world for journalists to exercise their profession, and most crimes against reporters remain unpunished.

Colombian journalist César Molinares has known Muñoz for 12 years and has worked with him at the Cartagena newspapers El Universal and El Periódico, and on the radio programme Puro Ambiente.

“I am bewildered by his arrest,” he wrote from London to Red Caribe, a network of Colombian journalists in the Caribbean region of the country, promoted by the Foundation for a New Ibero-American Journalism, founded by Nobel Literature Prize-winner Gabriel García Márquez and based in Cartagena.

According to Molinares, Muñoz does not fit the picture of “a master of disguise, who works by day as a journalist and at night dons a balaclava and carries a suitcase full of explosives. Quite the contrary.”

“In Colombia people are condemned first and asked questions later,” was Molinares’ concern.

He said that in Telesur, Muñoz had found a perfect fit, “especially for his non-conformist mind.”

Many people, not just in Telesur, see this episode as an attempt to bring the TV channel, financed by the Venezuelan administration of leftist President Hugo Chávez, into disrepute.

On Tuesday Dec. 26, Venezuelan Foreign Minister Nicolás Maduro expressed concern about the case, and announced that it would shortly be discussed with his Colombian counterpart, María Consuelo Araújo.

(*Corrects aspects of paragraphs 4, 5, 8, 10, 16 and 22.)

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