TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/111389/11138900.029

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 6.1 KB | 114 lines

                                                                                PRESS, Page 76

The Deadliest Beat


For Colombian journalists, covering the drug story can be fatal


    Jorge Enrique Pulido, 44, producer of the Bogota TV news
show Mundo Vision, and anchorwoman Ximena Godoy, 20, had just
finished a Sunday broadcast. As Pulido halted his cream Renault
sedan at a stoplight two blocks from the government-owned
Inravision studios, a man waiting on a red Suzuki motorcyle
dismounted and opened fire. Bullets from a 9-mm Ingram
submachine gun hit Pulido in the throat and shoulder and struck
Godoy in the leg. The gunman and an accomplice sped off on the
motorcycle, as a passerby drove the victims to the hospital. By
week's end Godoy was in stable condition, but Pulido, who lost
a lung and suffered heart damage, remained on the critical list.

    They became at least the 86th and 87th Colombian
journalists to be killed or wounded in this decade -- and the
ninth and tenth known victims since the cocaine cartels vowed
retaliation last August against "journalists who have attacked
and abused us." Although drug lords have also menaced judges,
law-enforcement officials and industrialists, they have hit news
organizations with special savagery. Pulido, in fact, escaped
injury in an explosion at his headquarters in June. When he was
struck down last week, the national newspaper El Tiempo
editorialized that the attack was probably a punishment for his
years of unrelenting struggle against organized crime.

    The precise toll exacted by the drug lords is hard to
certify: Colombian journalists are also targeted by leftist
guerrillas and rightist death squads. In a new report titled
"Murder: The Ultimate Censorship," the Inter American Press
Association notes, "Nowhere is this struggle between the forces
of darkness and the forces of light more clearly drawn than in
Colombia." Some of the country's ablest reporters have fled into
exile or gone into hiding, their voices effectively silenced.
Others admit their news judgment has been affected.

    Those who continue the struggle have been driven to such
expedients as eliminating bylines on drug stories. For five
months several news outlets ran the same coverage, word for
word, on drug-related topics, so no one organization would be
the focus of wrath. But the agreement fell apart under
competitive pressures and the feeling of some reporters that
others failed to contribute their fair share. In any case, it
is a virtual impossibility for reporters to work in complete
anonymity, and most Colombian journalists simply shoulder the
risk. Says Enrique Santos Calderon, an El Tiempo columnist and
Sunday editor who spent several months in self-imposed exile
following a bombing at his home, then returned to his outspoken
ways: "We journalists aren't soldiers, but we have become the
first line of defense."

    The liberal daily El Espectador saw its editor-owner
assassinated in 1986. Five employees have been slain since. The
paper was bombed twice, most recently in September; the $2.5
million damage tally included destruction of the computer
system and presses. Yet El Espectador has not missed a day of
publication and has kept up the drumbeat against the cartels.
Even harder hit was the country's second oldest newspaper, the
Bucaramanga-based Vanguardia Liberal, which supported the
government's crackdown and was all but destroyed in an Oct. 15
bombing. It too kept on publishing. "We are not heroes," says
El Espectador's slight, bespectacled acting editor in chief Jose
Salgar. "We are dealing with a criminal wave that does not
tolerate opposition. We are learning to live with terror." For
top editors and a few prominent reporters and columnists, that
can mean traveling with bodyguards or maintaining
round-the-clock protection at home. Most, however, just try to
sustain their courage and vary their routes home.

    Broadcast journalists are perhaps the most at risk. Pool
techniques do not work for on-the-air reporters, who can be
identified by their faces or voices. Despite Pulido's bravery,
many print-news executives, in fact, share the feeling of El
Espectador director Juan Guillermo Cano, 35. Says he: "I think
the radio people are more intimidated, and it shows in their
reporting." In some cases, darker forces than fear may be at
work. A small radio network, Radial 2000, was listed among the
business interests of Gonzalo Rodriguez Gacha, the Bogota Mafia
superchief who is wanted by authorities. Another small chain,
Grupo Radial Colombiano, was believed to be owned until recently
by the Cali cartel. Such hints of corruption are uncommon. "In
general," says columnist Santos, "the press has been spared
economic penetration by drug traffickers."

    The fiercest division within the ranks of journalism is
between the majority who support all-out war against the drug
lords and those, notably the owners of Medellin's El Colombiano,
who prefer a negotiated truce. In 1984, when he was still editor
of the paper, Juan Gomez Martinez wrote, "To sit down with these
despicable people, who are wanted by justice, is dishonest. It
would twist the values of our country. It is an immoral and
terrifying proposition." Gomez -- whose title became publisher
when he was elected mayor of Medellin in 1988 -- has turned into
a leading advocate of government bargaining with all rebel
factions. His rationale for dealing with the traffickers: they
cannot be defeated outright. Some critics suggest he may have
been spooked by a bungled 1987 kidnap attempt.

    Gomez, Santos and Salgar were among a group of Colombian
journalists who were in New York City last week to discuss the
battle between drug lords and reporters under the sponsorship
of New York University and the International Press Institute.
Their goal was to remind the world that their nation is, as El
Tiempo said, "not a cave of thieves but the major victim of the
international drug trade." Potent as their words were, more
potent still was the harrowing image of Pulido cut down on his
way home from an honest day's work in a land ravaged by
dishonor.