Journalists Rank High on Factions' List of Targets

By Scott Wilson
Washington Post Foreign Service

CALI, Colombia -- Marching blindfolded through thick jungle outside this city in southwestern Colombia, Gildardo Arango imagined the gunshot that would kill him.

The young radio reporter had been kidnapped hours before, lured by members of Colombia's second-largest guerrilla army to a fake news conference. Arango was
packed into a taxi between guerrillas dressed in civilian clothes and whisked off to see their commanders.

But after three days of sleeping on farmhouse floors, of pre-dawn marches and abiding fear, the bullet never came. Arango was not a target, but a means to a murky
end for the guerrillas of the National Liberation Army (ELN). Guerrilla leaders made a condition of his release a conversation with the provincial governor, who
otherwise would have been prohibited from talking to the group by a national law governing the peace talks. After 72 hours, Arango was released to the Red Cross.

"I took the next day off," said Arango, now 33, remembering the events of May 1998. "Then I was back to work."

In a country where a four-decade civil war has reached into every facet of life, few institutions reflect the complexity of the conflict better than the news media.

Reporting in Colombia, particularly by Colombians, has long been a perilous vocation. But mounting violence, combined with the weakness of public institutions and
the blurry line between journalism and advocacy in a country at war with itself, have increasingly placed journalists high on the list of targets.

"We are trying to stick to the conviction that we are the center and to maintain this position in a very polarized society," said Rafael Santos, co-editor in chief of
Colombia's only national daily newspaper, El Tiempo. "I don't know if we are succeeding."

So far this year, nine journalists have been killed in Colombia and dozens threatened with death, a sharp increase from previous years. In the past decade, 37
journalists have been murdered. The Interior Ministry has received 67 requests from journalists in the past 12 months for security assistance, including armored cars
and bodyguards.

Those developments reflect information's increasingly central role in Colombia's war and in three-year-old peace talks between the government and the country's
largest guerrilla army, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). During the 1980s, when large drug cartels waged war against the state, crusading
newspaper editors were killed and their buildings bombed after they took editorial stands in favor of extraditing kingpins to the United States.

Today, according to many of the country's leading journalists, the war against the news media is in some ways subtler. But they say the coercion, coupled with a
severe economic downturn that has been crippling to media companies, is equally damaging to the quality of information being presented to an educated urban elite
that relies on the press for analysis and to a rural population that uses radio and television reporting to make life-or-death decisions: Which road is safe? When should
I leave?

"The real threat to the freedom of the press here is self-censorship, the information that you know is of public value that you do not publish out of fear," said
Alejandro Santos, editor of the prestigious weekly magazine Semana and a cousin of El Tiempo's Rafael Santos. Alejandro Santos said the Roman Catholic Church
is the only other institution with a credible claim as an honest broker in Colombia's conflict.

Colombia's war is being fought by several parties with a stake in good public relations: a Marxist-oriented guerrilla movement whose rhetoric champions the poor but
whose mass kidnappings and attacks on civilians have driven its poll numbers into the low single digits, a brutal paramilitary counterforce seeking political recognition
and the Colombian armed forces, chief recipients of a $1.3 billion U.S. aid package that hinges in part on the military's human rights record.

The news media play a much different role in Colombian society than in the United States, staking out a strong position in defense of a democratic state rather than
observing from an impartial perch. "In the end, the media is not neutral in this conflict," said Rodrigo Pardo, Colombia's former foreign minister, now El Tiempo's
managing editor. "It is not neutral between the two alternatives -- liberty on one side and on the other, none."

This has not translated into a reflexive defense of the Colombian government by the media, which vigorously criticize President Andres Pastrana's peace process and
expose public corruption. But it has highlighted the lack of credible public institutions to address Colombia's problems and prompted journalists to put themselves at
risk by taking on roles usually beyond a reporter's responsibility.

In August 1999, Jaime Garzon, a popular columnist and TV commentator known mainly for his satiric take on the news, was killed as he sat in his car at a stoplight in
Bogota. Paramilitary commander Carlos Castano has been charged with ordering the killing, a crime that has been widely viewed as a measure of the armed groups'
growing intolerance for even humorous criticism.

But Garzon was more than a journalist, working unofficially with the leftist FARC as a liaison for the release of kidnapping victims. "He was a very respected
journalist and person, but he was seen by too many as a friend of the guerrillas," said Libardo Cardona, investigative editor of El Espectador, a famed national daily
newspaper that for financial reasons recently cut publication to Sundays only.

The Colombian press has a long tradition of crusading, literate journalism and a list of heroes, including Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez, owner of the
influential magazine Cambio, and Guillermo Cano, El Espectador's editor, who was killed in 1986 by drug trafficker Pablo Escobar's hit men for his unwavering stand
against the drug cartels. Jineth Bedoya, an El Espectador reporter, recently joined the list. In May 2000, she was kidnapped before an interview at a Bogota prison,
beaten, raped and left in a garbage dump, most likely by paramilitary forces and police collaborators. She is working today, although her assailants remain at large.

In this media age, the armed groups have their own ways to publicize ideas, explanations and positions outside of mainstream media. The FARC operates Radio
Resistencia and receives favorable coverage from Voz, the newspaper of Colombia's Communist Party. Castano's United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC)
uses its Web site to comment on issues of the day.

Castano, named by the Committee to Protect Journalists as one of the "10 worst enemies of the press," also has used the national news media effectively. He showed
his face for the first time during a television interview in March 2000, wearing civilian clothes instead of his military fatigues. "He presented himself as a victim in the
conflict, a modern Robin Hood who represents the unprotected middle class," Alejandro Santos said. "It was very successful."

Alejandro Santos said the "armed actors increasingly see the press as a tool of war." He said the FARC, for example, relies on the media to publicize the rural
roadblocks it sets up outside major cities for mass kidnappings. That publicity has perhaps given the guerrillas an image that exceeds their actual strength. "This is the
media being used to send a message by the FARC: 'Outside, we run things,' " Santos said.

Frequently, as journalists come closer to the war, the sources of the death threats and killings become more difficult to identify. Part of the reason, reporters say, is
that criminal elements take advantage of the general lawlessness in war zones to settle personal conflicts.

Of the journalists killed in Colombia this year, all have worked as regional correspondents for national publications or, more commonly, for local media outlets.
Cardona, the El Espectador editor, said "90 percent of the journalist murders in this country are the result of personal problems and disputes."

At this level, the information most vital to the public is the most dangerous to report. Arango, who now works for Noti5, atelevision newscast in Cali, said he
frequently receives calls from guerrilla and paramilitary groups after he reports the location of roadblocks or camps. Yet, for a viewer, this information can mean the
difference between being kidnapped or killed in an attack.

Since his kidnapping, Arango has received other threats from sources that remain unidentified. Sometimes the threats come from unpredictable places. In June,
Arango appeared on a list of five journalists threatened with assassination by the AUC. It turned out that the list was fake, manufactured by one of the journalists on it
to help him gain political asylum abroad.

On a recent day, Arango had two fairly typical assignments. At a cemetery, he interviewed the relatives of a police inspector killed by drug traffickers in a nearby
town. The inspector's body had turned up weeks after his disappearance, and the funeral home was filled with the nauseating sweetness of its decomposition.

His other assignment was a seemingly simple one. The owner of a faucet fixture store had won $1,500 in a local lottery, but the company that sold him the ticket was
refusing to pay. "This," Arango said," is exactly the type of story that will bring a death threat."

                                               © 2001