Experiment in Colombia p.

By: Stephen F. Jackson

American journalist, who has spent 26 years as a free-lance correspondent there, is now running an English-language weekly sp.

DEADLINE TAKES ON an eerie, double meaning for journalists in Colombia. Since 1985, more than 50 journalists have been murdered. Newspapers, radio and television stations have been bombed by the dozen. Heavily armed soldiers are commonplace ? gajes del oficio (part of the territory) ? for the news media in Colombia.
Why? Because the news media are in the crossfire or actual targets in the interminable civil war and drug war waged against the government, the police, the judicial system, the press, and anyone else who crosses or displeases any of the ruthless factions in Colombia.
Running a newspaper ? being a journalist ? in Colombia ranks somewhere close to Evil Knievel in the death-defying, high-risk category. In a country where journalists are murdered, kidnapped and threatened on a periodic basis, why would anyone want to step into the news media arena, an arena which can be as bloody and violent as Bogot?'s Santa Maria Plaza de Toros on a Sunday afternoon bullfight.
"Desaf?o," said Tom Quinn.
"Defiance," he said, repeating himself in English. Quinn is the new editor of the Colombian Post, the new English-language weekly newspaper in Colombia.
Quinn said the evil forces in Colombia, the parties he is defying, are a threat not only to freedom of expression but to a fragile democracy in this country of 33 million people, one of the oldest democracies in South America.
Quinn pointed out that his free-lance work in Colombia for 26 years had been for audiences and clients abroad. Now he realizes his new duties mean high-profile, and often unwanted, attention in Colombia.
"It's a challenge," Quinn said, explaining why he had accepted the job as editor in chief of the new paper and, metaphorically, picked up the cape of the matador.
"I took it on to start them off and now, after a few months, I feel and see a real need for this newspaper."
Quinn is a transplanted Californian who received his early journalism training in the 1960s at the Nashville Tennessean while working on his college degree at Vanderbilt University.
Thanks to a Rotary scholarship and a grant from the Inter American Press Association, Quinn came ? and more or less stayed ? in Colombia. Except for a two-year hiatus in Washington, D.C., with Scripps-Howard in the early 1970s, Quinn has been working as a free-lance foreign correspondent in Colombia since 1966. The expatriate is married to a Colombian and has four daughters. He is considered the dean of the foreign press corps in Colombia.
Quinn's clients include UPI, Time-Life, Knight-Ridder Financial News and, in London, the Sunday Telegraph and the Financial Times.
The Colombian Post is the brainchild of Fernando Leyva, a fiftyish Colombiano from a patrician conservative family that is well-placed politically and well-heeled financially.
Leyva said he runs an independent newspaper with no sacred cows, no partisan politics, no backing off from the five major antagonists in Colombia's non-ending civil war ? an inept, inefficient government, the drug cartels, the terrorist Communists, paramilitary renegades, and organized crime.
"I had the idea of starting this newspaper here last summer when I was on a business trip in Caracas and saw the Daily Journal and realized we should have a similar English-language newspaper in Colombia," Leyva said.
Leyva, articulate and bilingual, is an economist by profession and an investor in energy and petroleum by instinct. The newspaper business is foreign to him, but he relates to his fledgling Post as if it were a newborn baby.
Since the birth of the newspaper in late October, Leyva has spent most of his time in the spartan, four-room office suite in Bogot? where all the functions except the printing are performed. His eyes lit up as he reviewed the list of advertisers for a recent week's issue.
"Avis, Carocol, Avianca, Citibank, Emerald World, AeroFlot, Mobil," Leyva recited, checking off the page placement of the international businesses whose advertising revenue is crucial to the long-term financial success of the Colombian Post.
Leyva said he estimates about 40,000 U.S. citizens live in Colombia, which, despite its continuing violence, attracts about 100,000 businesspeople and tourists annually who speak and read English. This is the audience?along with Colombianos who want to read news and comments from an English-language perspective?Leyva is building the newspaper around. He has also targeted audiences in large metropolitan areas in other parts of the world. The Post, a broadsheet, is running 12 to 16 pages and printing 10,000 copies weekly for subscriptions, single-copy sales and distribution to hotels and airlines.
"What makes this newspaper so important and unique is that it fills a need for these decision makers and people in high-income brackets who live or visit here," Leyva said.
"We would like to be a point of reference for the foreigners here in Colombia," Quinn said. "Foreigners here often feel they are like orphans, just floating around. We want to get into issues and topics that are interesting and important to foreign residents and to foreign visitors. That's why we have a lot of business and financial news, but we also provide information about U.S. sports and about tourism and unusual customs here in Colombia."
Quinn said the Colombia Post has also attracted a native Colombian audience, Colombianos, who are interested in reading the viewpoint of foreigners who live in Colombia.
"The Post is interesting to bilingual Colombianos who want to see the perspective of resident foreigners here who are committed to suffering the same reality that the rest of Colombianos have to suffer," Quinn said. "Colombianos are interested in what we have to write and they also know we have sources they do not have."
"The Colombian Post is a very interesting and a pretty good-looking paper," opined Bill Williamson, the executive director of the Inter American Press Association, from his Miami office. "Of course, Colombia is a very exciting place for a journalist, but it is also a very dangerous place."
Williamson, himself once the editor and managing partner of a now-defunct English-language daily in Rio de Janiero, the Brazil Herald, was asked what the Post owners, managers and staff can expect in the way of difficulties.
"Challenges too numerous to mention," the voice of experience responded. Williamson added that he is delighted to see Quinn, an IAPA alumnus, in a leadership role with the new newspaper.
"The Colombian Post is an interesting experiment," said Gabriel Silva, the top adviser in international affairs for Colombia's President C?sar Gaviria. "With the opening of our economy a lot of Americans and foreigners are coming to our country. To have a newspaper in English is useful. We had one once before ? about 15 years ago ? but it only lasted several months."
Not only was the previous English-language paper in Colombia short-lived, it was actually against the law. "Non-Spanish language newspapers were illegal in Colombia until our new Constitution of 1991," Leyva said.
"Now it's a legal and consecrated right," added Robin Wasson, another expatriate, who heads the Post advertising and marketing department.
Even though the Colombian government still requires a perfunctory license for all newspapers, it is not the government but other forces in this Third World country which pose the greatest threats to freedom of the press.
"If the newspaper touches a sore spot with the drug trade industry, or the kidnapping industry, or the guerrilla industry, well, that's part of our job," Wasson said. "I think it's our obligation to expose the situation in Colombia. It's no-holds-barred. The perverse men won't be able to shut our mouths."
Wasson says, "The Post will make readers aware of what's going on in Latin America and developments and attitudes here in Colombia. This is a tremendous advance in democracy in Colombia. The fact that the Post is published is a tribute to the changes in Colombia."
Quinn said one of the most important ongoing stories in Colombia is the level of U.S. military activity in that country.
"We want to open the debate on what U.S. tax money is being used for in Colombia and what the DEA [Drug Enforcement Agency] is up to here," Quinn said.
He noted that the United States is currently?and somewhat secretly?constructing a fortresslike embassy in Bogot? but U.S. officials in Colombia will not comment on the project.
"But the real threat to freedom of expression in Colombia is the self-censorship the Colombian journalists impose on themselves," Quinn said. "The Colombian journalists are sort of in retreat. They are under threat from the evil powers in Colombia, evil powers which are hard to define here?the leftist terrorists, the rightist terrorists, the drug cartels, corrupt government officials.
"Now I see that Colombia is a country which is more and more coming under the sway of organized crime," the veteran journalist continued. "Some people here feel organized crime ? I don't mean just the drug cartels ? is taking over the economy and taking over politics in Colombia. Organized crime limits the press here in Colombia, what the press can cover and can report here in Colombia."
Guillermo Calle, the news director of 24 Horas television in Bogot?, said he is glad to see the Colombian Post in the arena. He said he reads the paper to spark ideas and get information for stories, ideas and information that may not be available elsewhere.
"Self-censorship is a problem for us journalists here in Colombia," agreed Calle. "You never know ? at work or when you go home ? when you might be the target of a bomb or a bullet from the communists or the narcotraffickers or organized crime."
If publishing a newspaper is perceived in the classical sense as bringing some measure of order out of chaos, then the Colombian Post is in the right place at the right time.
"Due to a new wave of bombings and killings we've had a declared emergency by the government, an official National State of Internal Commotion, here in Colombia since early November when the Post first started," said Enr?que Reyes.
Reyes, a longtime Colombian journalist and former international editor of El Espectador in Bogot?, observed that "If the Post can develop and function through all this, and it looks like it can, then maybe it will survive and prosper.
"I hope so," he said, paging through a recent issue. "Our country ? Colombia ? needs something like this."