Colombia

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IAPA Midyear Meeting 2017

Antigua Guatemala, Guatemala

March 31 – April 3

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One of the events of most concern during this period occurred on March 8 when a news team made up of Hugo Mario Cárdenas, Oswaldo Páez and Octavio Villegas of the Cali newspaper El País was held and intimidated by armed men who identified themselves as members of the Eln guerrilla group.

The incident occurred in a Cauca mountainous area. The men who threatened them demanded they tell why they were there and ordered them to leave immediately. The Colombian media rejected this action and called for a pronouncement from the guerrilla group, which is in the midst of a peace process with the government.

On January 13 journalists Andrés González and Cristián Herrera of the newspapers La Opinión and Q'hubo were attacked by armed men while heading for a rural area of Cúcuta city. The journalists and the vehicle driver who accompanied them were uninjured. The authorities suggested that those responsible could have been smugglers operating on the border with Venezuela. The matter is still under investigation.

In late January Edwin Montiel Salgado, director of the radio station Frontera Estéreo in La Guajira province, was the victim of an armed attack. His vehicle was shot at three times. He was unhurt. There are not yet any results of the investigation.

Currently 147 journalists have some form of security from the National Protection Unit, 103 of them have bodyguards and 82 are moved around in security vehicles. In all during the past year 47 journalists complained of having been victims of physical aggressions and 44 said they had suffered obstructions in their work.

Of the 12 attacks that were reported in Casanare province in 2016 11 occurred after local journalists denounced acts of corruption on the part of the Yopal administration.

There persists the issuing of court rulings that impact the exercise of freedom of expression. In January a judge in Manizales sent a communication to the newspaper La Patria in which he requested that it withdraw from its Web site a news item about an indigenous community that was putting its children on sale and the consumption of hallucinatory substances. According to the judge that information put the indigenous community at risk. However, after the newspaper argued that the order amounted to censorship the judge responded that it was only a recommendation.

Faced with the increase in legal requests that seek the elimination or correction of information on the basis of a so-called "right to forget" news media chiefs have expressed their concern at the interference by the petitions and decisions of judges in the practice of journalism.

Taking these concerns into account Andiarios in January asked Catalina Botero, today law school dean at the University of the Andes and who served as Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Expression of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, for a guide on legal protection that the media in Colombia have to respond to this kind of requests. The document seeks to armor-plate the media with weapons to confront abuses of the "right to forget."

There were recorded numerous violations by public servants. A journalist with El Informador of Santa Marta was detained for an entire night after he complained to members of the police force for not allowing him to speak to witnesses of a traffic accident. The policemen took him to a judicial unit, citing "attacks upon public officials."

In October City Councilman Alexander Madrid of Montería city, took the camera of two Nortevisión reporters because they were taking pictures with the support of the Council in which he appeared.

The level of impunity in cases of murder of journalists continues to be high. In this period there became subject to statute of limitations investigations into the murders of four journalists: Norvey Díaz Cardona, editor of the newspaper Rodando Barrios, killed on October 18, 1996; Santiago Rodríguez Villalba, Sucre journalist, killed on February 2, 1997; Freddy Elles Ahumada, Bolívar news photographer, killed on March 18, 1997, and Gerardo Bedoya, op-ed editor of the Cali newspaper El País, killed on March 20, 1997. To date there have been subject to statute of limitations 76 cases of journalists murdered because of their profession.

In three representative cases the following legal developments have occurred: 2016 ended with two convictions as the authors of mistreatment suffered by El Tiempo journalist Jineth Bedoya 17 years ago when she was carrying out an investigation into serious violations of human rights in Bogotá's Modelo Prison. Mario Jaimes, a.k.a. Panadero, admitted the charges of torture, kidnapping and rape; Alejandro Cárdenas, a.k.a. J.J., for his part accepted responsibility in the crimes of torture and kidnapping, is facing trial for the crime of rape. The two were excluded from the Justice and Peace program which contemplates legal benefits for demobilized paramilitaries. In the current proceedings there is also Jesús Emorio Pereira.

While the proceedings showed advances in the last year the Public Prosecutor's Office again asked that the journalist declare against her assailants. Bedoya complied with that requirement on March 1, but before that issued a call for non-renewed victimization on the part of the justice system, as this was the twelfth time that she had to speak about the violation of which she was victim.

In January captured in the United States and deported to Colombia was Fabio López Escobar, convicted of having participated in the murder of Orlando Sierra, former editor of the newspaper La Patria. López Escobar's conviction was upheld in June 2015, when the Manizales High Court sentenced him to 28 years and 10 months in prison.

A judge ordered the arrest of Emiro Rojas Granados and Néstor Pachón Bermúdez. Pachón is accused of having participated in the kidnapping and follow-ups to which journalist Claudia Julieta Duque was victim in 2001. She has denounced that in recent months harassment of her has increased.

In December the Bogotá High Court decided to cease criminal action against José Miguel Narváez for the "wire-tappers" case that involved telephone interceptions and illegal monitoring of several journalists. He was former deputy director of DAS, an intelligence agency that was eliminated following scandals. According to the Court the former official's conduct became subject to statute of limitations in November last year.

During the presentation of the Nobel Peace Prize to President Manuel Santos in Oslo, Norway, on December 12 there arose an incident between a female journalist of the Noticias RCN television channel and President Santos.

Karla Arcila, the reporter providing coverage for the news channel, asked President Santos during a press conference with the Prime Minister of Norway, "Mr. President, what do you say to your opponents, especially former president Uribe, who have said that the Nobel Peace Prize was purchased by oil interests of Norway?"

At that moment the President replied that the opposition said many things "that are not true." Later he approached the journalist and told her that the question had been "completely offensive and beyond reality." Other journalists intervened in the conversation and the President told them that the question "offended the Prime m\Minister of Norway and left the Colombian press very bad." He added, "Will it be that the journalists lost judgment of what can be true and what cannot be true? One should not be the transmitter of madness."

RCN News added that a presidential claim questioning the job of the journalist is an intimidating message that violates freedom of the press for the following reasons: first, it violated her professional legitimacy in front of her peers and companions; second, she was discredited in front of senior public servants, which could create a pattern of behavior to be imitated by other officials; third, the relationship of power is disproportionate and the journalist does not have the legal duty to support it; four, to violate the journalistic practice of the reporter is to attack the weakest figure of the media, and five, the President did not recognize the standard of greater tolerance in the face of public criticism and scrutiny that weighs upon every public servant.

In February there was introduced in Congress a bill that has caused concern. It is the opposition statute that seeks to provide guarantees to political minorities and opposition parties. It would establish a controversial right to reply that would interfere with editorial criteria. It would give to the parties that say they are in opposition the possibility of intervening, with equal time and space, in the state news media or in those that use the electromagnetic spectrum, in order to dispute a government position.

Also pending is regulation of the use of broadcast outlets and television spaces that were agreed upon in the peace accord with the FARC and whose content will be coordinated by a communications committee made up of the government and the demobilized guerrilla force. Of concern is the risk of interference in content.

There is limited access to information. A report by the Foundation for Press Freedom (Flip) disclosed that in the country nearly 600,000 people are living in 52 municipalities where there is not one local news media outlet, another 2.4 million people are living in 146 municipalities where there are media but these do not cover all the municipality or do not produce local news. Another 60 municipalities have just one news media outlet each.

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