Terror and the Press
Gómez, Ignacio
On May 25, Colombian journalist Jineth Bedoya was kidnapped, beaten and raped. She was my coworker at the Bogota daily, El Espectador. I use the past tense not because she has joined the...
...Green Berets were training a Colombian special counternarcotics battalion at the same time and in the same place where 67 coca-growing peasants were massacred by a paramilitary unit led by a Colombian military officer in Mapiripan, a municipality in southern Colombia, in 1997...
...Jineth, who had been reporting on the violence and wretched conditions in Colombia's prisons for years, decided to go to Bogotas Modelo Prison to speak with an inmate known as "El Panadero," a member of one of the paramilitary groups that have been terrorizing Colombian civilians for years...
...As they were waiting, a guard came to inform them that the authorization to enter the prison was being processed...
...Nor will she be the same person after the torture to which she was subjected with the complicity of members of the Colombian state-- the same state which the U.S...
...For ten hours, Jineth was physically and psychologically tortured before being released and abandoned by the side of a road in an unpopulated area near the city of Villavicencio...
...But once Escobar was killed in 1993, the ongoing criminal activity being directed from Colombian jails ceased to be a concern of the U.S...
...Jineth was to be accompanied by two other journalists at all times...
...What they did to her was intended as a message to all Colombian journalists: Any journalist who dares to talk about human rights will become the subject of a story even more horrific than the one he or she may be investigating...
...She agreed because it was her job, but Jineth had an agenda of her own...
...authorities used to complain about this quite a bit, particularly when it was drug kingpin Pablo Escobar directing the Medellin Cartel from his prison cell...
...Ironically, in 1992 Washington sent money and technical assistance to beef up Modelo's security system to make it the most secure prison in the country...
...Since that report was published, Colombian military officials have taken to calling me a Jineth Bedoya...
...Last February, El Espectador published my investigative report (available online at www.publicLorg) about the links between U.S...
...Twelve hours later, Jineth was kidnapped...
...This is when she was drugged, a pistol put to her stomach, taken out of the prison-how the guards could not have seen this is a mystery-and driven to another location...
...Through an intermediary, he told Jineth he wanted to meet with her to tell her the paramilitary's version of a violent outbreak on April 26, in which his group killed 26 inmates...
...I found evidence that U.S...
...Jineth was hoping to highlight this fact-and the related fact that this necessarily requires the complicity of agents of the state-during her trip to Modelo Prison...
...The U.S...
...Earlier this year he received the Sam Chavkin Award for Integrity in Investigative Journalism, an award established by the Chavkin family and administered by NACLA By IGNACIO GOMEZ sympathizers...
...Whoever sent the letter took the time to highlight the section of the text that discusses the cruelty with which the paramilitaries assassinated the 26 inmates...
...Jineth and several of her colleagues at El Espectador had been receiving death threats In fact, the day before El Panadero's emissary called Jineth, she, along with her editor and myself, received an envelope with no return address that contained a photocopy of one Jineth's articles about how prison officials "overlooked" paramilitary stockpiling of weapons...
...An important addendum to Jineth's story: The military has, of late, taken to calling those of us who author critical reports, or who document human rights violations by military or paramilitary units, "guerrilleros," or guerrilla Until he was forced into exile due to threats to his life, Ignacio Gomez was an investigative reporter for the Bogota daily El Espectador...
...On May 24, 1 fortuitously escaped a kidnapping attempt...
...guerrillero, and El Espectador a "guerrilla front...
...government...
...I use the past tense not because she has joined the long list of assassinated journalists in Colombia-152 in the last 20 years, ten from El Espectador-but because she will no longer be able to exercise her profession in Colombia...
...It was rumored that the paramilitaries were preparing to kill five journalists from El Espectador, and Jineth thought she could reason with El Panadero and convince him to respect her life and that of her colleagues...
...While she was being tortured, she was told that they were going to chop us up into little pieces...
...The meeting with El Panadero was to take place in the office of the prison warden...
...it is common knowledge in Colombia that criminals are lable to carry out their misdeeds from behind prison walls...
...military assistance, the Colombian military and paramilitary groups...
...Congress is preparing to give $1.3 billion in weapons and Colombian journals military training through the "Plan Colombia...
Vol. 34 • July 2000 • No. 1
