On May 25, Colombian journalist Jineth Bedoya was kidnapped, beaten and raped. She was my co-worker at the Bogotá daily, El Espectador. 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. 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. Congress is preparing to give $1.3 billion in weapons and military training through the “Plan Colombia.”
Jineth, who had been reporting on the violence and wretched conditions in Colombia’s prisons for years, decided to go to Bogotá’s 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. 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. She agreed because it was her job, but Jineth had an agenda of her own.
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. 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. 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.
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 sympathizers. Last February, El Espectador published my investigative report (available online at www.public-I.org) about the links between U.S. military assistance, the Colombian military and paramilitary groups. I found evidence that U.S. 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 Mapiripán, a municipality in southern Colombia, in 1997. Since that report was published, Colombian military officials have taken to calling me a guerrillero, and El Espectador a “guerrilla front.” On May 24, I fortuitously escaped a kidnapping attempt. Twelve hours later, Jineth was kidnapped. While she was being tortured, she was told that they were going to chop us up into little pieces.
It is common knowledge in Colombia that criminals are able to carry out their misdeeds from behind prison walls. The U.S. authorities used to complain about this quite a bit, particularly when it was drug kingpin Pablo Escobar directing the Medellín Cartel from his prison cell. 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. government. 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 meeting with El Panadero was to take place in the office of the prison warden. Jineth was to be accompanied by two other journalists at all times. As they were waiting, a guard came to inform them that the authorization to enter the prison was being processed. 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. 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. 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. 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.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Until he was forced into exile due to threats to his life, Ignacio Gómez was an investigative reporter for the Bogotá daily, El Espectador. 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.
