TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/111389/11138900.029

Text File | 1990-09-19 | 6KB | 106 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.