COLOMBIA'S BEST-KNOWN JOURNALIST FORCED TO FLEE

By: Mark Fitzgerald A World Press Freedom Day Special Report



Death threats are a way of life for Colombian journalists. An
investigative reporter for Bogota's El Espectador estimates he's
received 40 'serious' death threats in just the past two or three
years. So many armed groups in Colombia - left-wing guerrillas, right-

wing paramilitaries, cocaine traffickers, and even some police and
military officers - are making so many death threats that they
sometimes don't bother with mentioning individual targets. The National
Liberation Army (ELN, for its initials in Spanish) once announced its
intention to kill journalists in a press release, and a paramilitary
group circulated its hit list in pamphlets dropped in city streets.



As the best-known journalist in Colombia, El Tiempo Editor
Francisco Santos has had his share of death threats. But it was the
warning he never got that convinced him a guerrilla unit had scheduled
his murder for sometime this spring - and that he would have to flee
the country.



'This time, there was not even a phone call,' Santos says. 'There was
no threat. They don't threaten you when they have issued an order that
you are going to be killed.'



And there was no doubt in his mind that he had been marked for death.
For Santos, it was more than a sixth sense: Bitter experience had
taught him what can happen to a prominent journalist in Colombia. One
November evening in 1990, while driving home from the paper, Santos'
Jeep was blocked, and five men armed with Uzi submachine guns equipped
with silencers dragged him from the vehicle. Santos would spend the
next eight months chained to a bed as a captive of Pablo Escobar's
cocaine trafficking cartel.



His story would later be told, in some detail, by Nobel Prize-winning
novelist Gabriel Garc?a M?rquez in his 1997 journalistic study, 'News
of a Kidnapping.'



In danger again



This January, Santos began to sense he was in danger again.



'Two months ago, I understood what was happening,' Santos recalls. 'I'm
a guy who moves very efficiently. I'm aware of where I'm going, and I
began to notice I was being followed. I knew somebody was doing
intelligence on me. In the business that I'm in, I know many different
kinds of people. I went to those sources, and they told me, 'Yes, there
is a plot against your life.''



Santos learned that 'Frente 22,' a unit of Colombia's biggest left-wing
guerrilla army, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC, for
its initials in Spanish), planned to murder him and make it look like
just another random killing - easy enough in a nation with a murder
rate eight times higher than in the United States. The hired killers,
known as 'sicarios' in Colombia, had already been picked, Santos says.



This sort of tip is best not ignored in Colombia. In the past 20 years,
151 journalists have been murdered because of their work. Seven were
killed in just the past six months, according to the Inter American
Press Association.



And so last month, Francisco Santos, 38, fled Colombia. In an April
telephone interview from Miami, where he is staying with friends,
Santos spoke at length of his hopes and fears for Colombia, its people,
and its press. Again and again, Santos returned to the frustrations of
exile.



'I'm feeling like s---. I'm p---ed off. I'm upset. I'm disillusioned,'
he says. 'I want to go back ... and I think, at a certain time, I'm
going to have to go back and risk my life. If they are going to kill
me, then, what the hell.'



Santos' decision to flee was a shock to Colombians, even though
violence in recent months has forced out an increasing number of
journalists. Just a day before Santos fled, Mireya ?lvarez Ram?rez,
publisher of La Palma de Facetas newspaper, left the country for
the second time in six months after a guerrilla unit told her to hand
over $5,000 by March 20 or be killed. When Santos left March 10,
Colombians had not yet stopped buzzing about Fernando Gonz?lez Pacheco,
who fled the country because of unspecified threats. Pacheco, a beloved
figure with a 40-year TV career as a host of talk shows and game shows,
could be called the Regis Philbin of Colombia.



But the flight of Santos was different.



The whole country knew 'Pacho,' as the editor is called. It wasn't just
that he was a scion of the politically powerful family that owns El
Tiempo. It wasn't even that he was in the national news throughout
his 263-day kidnapping ordeal, which came at the height of the Medellin
drug cartel's violent campaign to prevent extradition for traffickers.



Santos won the admiration of many in Colombia for what he did after he
was freed. 'I was eight months chained to a bed, and when I came out, I
wrote an editorial column about how my family really had suffered,
almost more than me,' Santos says. 'I just received a ton of mail about
that from people who wrote about what kidnapping does to families. So,
along with my wife, we created Fundaci?n Pa?s Libre.'



The Free Country Foundation helps people cope with a kidnapping in
their family through psychological counseling and practical advice on
things such as the dos and don'ts of negotiating. Kidnapping is big
business in Colombia. According to the foundation, there were 3,000
kidnappings in the last 12 months alone. The ransoms paid out totaled
$200 million.



Caging the guerrillas



Santos aimed his organization right at the heart of that business.
First, his foundation gathered 1 million signatures on petitions in a
successful campaign to strengthen the kidnapping laws. 'Unfortunately,
in Colombia, the judiciary, it just doesn't exist at all,' he says. 'We
were putting pressure on the government and doing some things well -
but the kidnapping kept increasing.'



In 1996, Santos began leading mass demonstrations against kidnapping
and violence from both the political right and left. 'At a time when no
one was doing anything massive, we put 1 million people out in the
streets,' he says. Pa?s Libre organized a mock election for peace that
drew 10 million voters in a country of 36 million.



At the newspaper, Santos did not handle any stories about his
foundation or its activities. 'It obviously presents some ethical
challenges,' he says. 'But Colombia is such a violent country that
sometimes you're drawn to advocacy and doing more than just your job.'



In his weekly column, Santos attacked extremists of all stripes while
championing the average person, who, he says, is 'stuck between a rock
and a hard place.' But his writing and activism were putting him on a
collision course with Colombia's armed insurgents. 'The guerrillas do
about 60% of the kidnapping,' Santos says. 'I am an enemy of their
business.'



For guerrillas, in fact, kidnapping is an important fund-raising
venture, second only to protection money from drug cultivators and
traffickers. Insurgents sometimes carefully target victims - and at
other times simply throw up a roadblock and see who they come across.
Guerrillas call it 'miracle fishing.' Its leading practitioner is Henry
Castellanos, known by the nom de guerre Roma?a, who commands the FARC
unit Santos says set him up to die.



Colombia's other main guerrilla group, the ELN, has matched Frente 22
in audacity: Soon after kidnapping a planeful of people, ELN commandos
drove a bus to church in Cali and kidnapped the entire congregation as
the worshippers left Mass last June.



'People began to say, 'Jesus Christ! Now we won't be able to fly again,
we won't be able to pray again?' So we began putting pressure on the
guerrillas,' Santos says. The result was a movement called 'No M?s' (No
More) that organized huge marches. 'We did the first national marches
Oct. 26. Twelve million people - a third of the country - came out into
the streets,' he says. To protest the common guerrilla practice of
blowing up electrical towers, No M?s asked people one night to turn off
their home lights. Some four million homes went dark.



Santos struck a chord among Colombians, commentator Otty Pati?o wrote
recently in an open letter to the editor. 'The people saw you, a
Santos, a privileged person, an oligarch, as a person of flesh and
blood, pounding the pavement, walking to the rhythm of the country,
smiling, eager, enthusiastic, part of the crowd, recapturing the
streets for mobilization and protest,' Patino wrote. 'So they joined
you, these people who in another time saw in crowds only the dangers of
destabilization and anarchy.'



But even as No M?s gained strength, Colombia's destabilization and
anarchy reasserted itself. In only the last six months, seven Colombian
journalists have been killed and another 14 kidnapped - all in the
midst of a 'peace process' that includes the government giving the FARC
effective control over a section of Colombia as large as Switzerland.
FARC leader Manuel Marulanda V?lez, who goes by the nickname 'Tirofijo'
(Sure Shot), declared last year that journalists 'owed' the guerrillas
- and that they had ways of 'collecting the debt.'



Through spokesman R?ul Reyes, the FARC denied any plans to kill Santos.
The so-called plot, he said in a statement, must be an invention of
military intelligence operatives opposed to the peace process. Reyes
accused Santos of 'campaigning against that process.'



'That just goes back to a very cynical view of the peace process by
them,' Santos responds. 'If anybody has been generous about the peace
process in his editorials, it's me. They have to spin it, and it sucks.
The FARC allows a lot of dirty business to be done, and then when
they're caught, they want to stop it. ... And [Frente 22] is a command
front that corrupted itself and got very much involved in kidnapping
and extortion and common criminals.'



Santos scoffs at the notion that Colombian authorities told him of the
plot. In fact, he says, it was the other way around: He told the police
of the assassination plans. 'If I had waited for them to warn me,'
Santos says, 'I'd be dead right now.'



Still, Santos says he fights impulses to take the next plane back to
Colombia. And it's clear he's painfully aware of the symbolism of his
departure. 'I'm not sure I've made the correct decision,' he wrote in a
column. 'But I feel my commitment is to fight, something I can only do
while I'm living.'



Better fled than dead



The accelerating exodus of journalists from Colombia worries many in
the region. 'This atmosphere of intimidation is beginning to affect
journalists, columnists, even longtime television hosts. This exile
'could bring about an even greater weakening of the free press,' says
Rafael Molina, director of El Nacional newspaper in Santo
Domingo.


Things are getting palpably worse for the press in Colombia, says Maria
Cristina Caballeros, an investigative reporter for the magazine
Semana. A year ago, Caballeros was able to get interviews with
the military leader of the FARC and the commander of the largest right-

wing paramilitary. It was tense, she says, but even the threats were
not that worrying: 'If you are a Colombian journalist, threats are part
of the job.'



But then in May, serious threats - 'very directly saying, 'This is your
last day,' in very strong and grotesque words' - were left on the
answering machine in her apartment and she was forced into hiding in
her own city. Caballeros is now at the Kennedy School of Government at
Harvard University, writing a book on Colombia - and unsure when she
will be able to go back.



'It's a fact that these threats that we have received affects also
other colleagues that remain in the country,' Caballeros says. 'There
are some very good colleagues still in Colombia, but the intimidation,
the killings, the kidnappings, and the journalists who have left - yes,
I think that has an impact on journalism in Colombia.'



In Miami, 'Pacho' Santos finds himself wondering at times what impact
he's has managed to have. 'I feel angry that they run out of the
country the editor of El Tiempo - and nothing happens,' he says.
'What do we have to do to get a reaction?'



His wife Marieve and their four children are still back in Colombia
while they finish the school year. His older children, he says, 'are OK
one day, the next day they're crying. And it hurts because I'm here not
because I stole something or I'm running from justice. I'm here because
one of those guys decided I'm a target.' Are the children safe? 'Yes,'
he replies, 'I think so. I hope so - I sure as hell hope so.'



Nevertheless, Santos insists that Colombians will find a way out of
their nightmare. 'Society is avid for action. They're tired of leaders
and institutions that have lost a sense of righteousness, of the right
and wrong of things,' he says. 'I'm still an optimist. I'm definitely
an optimist. It's just that one of the difficult things that is
happening is that we're negotiating with a gun to our head.'