By Timothy Pratt
Cali, Colombia: When you see the same pickup trucks following you several days running in Bogota, Colombia's capital, it's time to get worried. Odds are someone's out to take your money, your life, or both. Or at least threaten your family.
Francisco Santos, editor-in-chief of El Tiempo, the country's largest daily, started noticing the pickups several months ago. They were there when he went to a restaurant, or as he drove off to don his other hat as president of the La Fundación País Libre (Free Country Foundation), which he founded in 1991 to combat kidnapping. Nobody got out of the trucks or said or did anything. Still, after 40 years of internal conflict involving the army, paramilitaries and guerrillas, Colombians have a way of knowing things without being able to say how or why. And people kept telling the 38-year-old University of Kansas-educated journalist, "I think you're in danger."
So Santos went off to Spain three weeks ago, and the Administrative Department of Security (DAS), Colombia's secret police, went off after leads. In this, the editor was a fortunate exception. The 14 journalists kidnapped, four forced into exile, and seven killed in the last six months alone had no such support. But the Santos family has run Colombia's main newspaper for all of its 90 years, making many friends both here and in the United States. So when Francisco needed help, it was there. And when he came back to Bogota last week, the DAS confirmed his fears. The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the largest of Colombia's three guerrilla armies, with an estimated 15,000 combatants, was out to kill him.
Today, Francisco Santos is in Miami, advising his colleagues on stories via e-mail. Sorting through the Western Hemisphere's longest-running civil war, Colombians have gained an aplomb that's sometimes jarring. El Tiempo editor Juanita Leõn's response to her colleague's exile was no exception. In a telephone interview while last Wednesday's paper was closing, she said, "I was relieved he left, since at least they won't kill him now."
Leõn, along with crime editor Alirio Bustos, explained that the trucks were driven by thugs controlled by an inmate in Bogota's La Modelo prison, who in turn works with the 22nd front of the FARC. This rebel brigade specializes in kidnapping and extortion in Bogota and the surrounding area. The inmate hires out his thugs to the rebels. One day several months ago, a businessman swindled out of cash — one of 40 every day of the year by the 22nd front — got fed up and went to the Free Country Foundation. Santos started the Foundation after being kidnapped himself by the notorious drug lord Pablo Escobar, who held the journalist for eight months to pressure against extradition laws. Nearly a decade later, the Foundation now helps around 2,000 families a year with everything from counseling to release negotiations. Santos and a small staff also helped organize the launch of Columbia's first-ever countrywide peace movement last year, with marches that took an estimated 10 million Colombians to the streets. But this time Santos paid a price for his involvement: a one-way ticket to Miami.
This is a typical Colombian story, where everything turns gray quickly, it's not clear who's against whom, alliances shift, people leave the country or disappear. Other events of the last two weeks include: Colombian army brass fired for letting paramilitaries out of a military jail, soldiers caught selling arms to guerrillas, and FARC chief Raul Reyes saying that "not all army officials are corrupt and linked to paramilitaries. Some are quite progressive."
Covering these events as a journalist is not only highly confusing, it's also dangerous. Ironically, this worrisome situation was being discussed in last week's Mexico City meeting of the Inter American Press Association when the news of Santos fleeing from Colombia broke. There's another major part to the story: how journalists here cover Colombia's war and search for peace. In the process, the country is becoming a media lab of sorts for war-and-peace journalism.
Juanita Leõn is one of the many pushing along this swell of events. She was just named editor of the Peace Unit at El Tiempo again, Colombia's premier daily with a circulation of nearly 400,000. The year-old unit is separate from the main editorial committee, and Leõn wants her four or five reporters to "offer valuable information on the process of reaching peace, as well as create the idea that peace is possible in the collective imagination."
This refers in part to peace talks between the government and the rebels, which have been going on for about a year. She also means writing on teen gangs laying down arms in Medellin, on exiled Colombians holding masses for peace, as happened in 10 countries last week, as well as the story of her colleague Alirio Bustos, who taught his brother's assassin to read in prison without ever telling the prisoner who he was until the last lesson. "We have to prepare ourselves as a society for reaching peace," says Leõn. "These stories can help."
She's not alone. There's also Media for Peace, a loose-knit network of journalists around the country who offer workshops on how to do more balanced, historically documented coverage of the army, paramilitaries and rebels. Media for Peace publishes works like "Disarming the Word," a glossary for Colombian journalists that contains these observations: using the term "fishing for miracles," as the rebels call mass kidnappings, only serves to numb the reader to the atrocity of the act; and borrowing one or the other side's way of referring to the enemy only serves to fan flames.
Readers and viewers have been an integral part of the process. Leõn says El Tiempo receives letters ranging from indignant diatribes against violence in the press to leads on stories they expect to help build hope for a peaceful future. The most notable response came last year when television news crews jostled along mountain roads at night to be the first to stick a microphone in the face of recently released kidnap victims and ask, "How do you feel?"
News stations were flooded with calls; newspapers filled with letters. Colombia Nobel laureate writer and journalist Gabriel García Márquez had once said, "The irresponsibility ... stemming from ... the scoop syndrome [is] finishing off journalism here and will wind up finishing off the country." In this case, the press seemed to agree. In the months that followed, television news directors signed — then broke — agreements to use more discretion, and tried — then abandoned — innovations like showing battle scenes and dead bodies in black and white, to tone down the blood.
García Márquez, who has covered myriad aspects of his country's violence and search for peace for half a century, is also still involved. His Iberian American Foundation for New Journalism in Cartagena brings in foreign journalists to teach workshops such as "Investigative Journalism and Ethics in Armed Conflicts."
Of course, in practice, clear-cut answers don't come easy. Two weeks ago, Carlos Castaño, founder of the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, showed his face on a television interview program for the first time since he
started up his paramilitary army nearly 20 years ago. This is the same army that roams the countryside massacring peasants in a sort of holy war with the rebels and has been linked to the Colombian army. While observers praised
journalist Dario Arismendi for showing Castaño and much of his life story to the nation, others said the interview pandered to the paramilitary's search for political legitimacy.
One thing is certain. The whole issue of security for journalists here is emblematic of a deeper problem. When I asked Juanita Leõn if she was scared to be the visible head of a Peace Unit, she first said no, not if the paper does balanced, in-depth coverage of each group involved in the conflict. Then she admitted that certain armed groups do scare her. "I guess I'm a bit of a coward," she said.
While I'm not sure I agree with her self-appraisal, it is true that all journalists working in Colombia right now have to place themselves along a spectrum. This goes from saying it all — witness satirist and columnist Jaime Garzõn, shot dead in a Bogota street last year for doing just that — to leaving the country. Sooner or later, as in all countries that have suffered serious internal conflicts, not only will Colombia need the sort of journalism that displays the society's efforts toward peace, it will also need to know who did wrong. Investigative journalism can help bring about justice, but for that, journalists will need much greater guarantees of security. This will require solidarity and coordination between members of a trade that has
traditionally been competitive and divided. Much more security will probably not be forthcoming from the state, at least not in the near future — it's already got a full plate trying to protect the entire country from three armies and crime rings, all funded by billions earned through narcotics.
There has been talk in Colombia just last
week of early warning systems between journalists, links with international groups like the Committee to Protect Journalists and the World Association of Newspapers, along with editorial strategies such as not giving coverage to groups that endanger journalists or their work. But these and other measures all require unity — a scarce commodity among journalists here at the present. It remains to be seen if the common desire for peace helps reach that unity.
- Timothy Pratt is a freelance
journalist living in Cali, Columbia, whose work has appeared in The New York Times, the
Economist, the Christian Science Monitor, the Chicago Tribune, the Times of
London and Reason.
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