The irony is that Samper took office in 1994 with broad support from the media, which hoped that the new president would put a stop to the drug-related violence that had decimated the press. But the relationship with Samper soured after El Tiempo, Colombia's leading daily, published testimony from a former cabinet minister who alleged that the president had knowingly accepted more than US$6 million in campaign contributions from the Cali cartel. Samper survived impeachment proceedings, but, greatly weakened politically, he has been unable to stem Colombia's slide into anarchy. In this environment, Colombian journalists face myriad and growing risks.
With the power and strength of Colombia's two major guerrilla groups (the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the National Liberation Army (ELN)) continuing to grow, the military and violent paramilitary groups asserted de-facto political control over large portions of the country. Meanwhile, common crime has reached epidemic proportions and drug-related violence has continued unabated.
Of the four journalists who died in the line of duty, one may have been murdered by local police, another by a paramilitary group, and in a third case, both the paramilitaries and the guerrillas are suspected. In a crime that dispelled the widespread notion that the leaders of the Cali cartel were less violent than their rivals in Medellín, Gerardo Bedoya, the opinion editor of the Cali daily El País, was gunned down in front of his home by a professional gunman only days after he wrote a column in favor of extraditing Colombian drug traffickers to the United States. Meanwhile, cameraman Richard Vélez, who recorded soldiers firing on unarmed peasants during demonstrations in 1996, was forced to flee into exile in the United States after he narrowly escaped being abducted.
Despite appeals to Colombian authorities to conduct thorough investigations, no suspects have been detained in any of these attacks. Instead, Samper has tried to turn the tables on the press, declaring, in a speech in August before the Inter American Press Association in Guatemala that, "The news media have been formed by action and violence and what does not march to the tempo is left out."
Rather than publicly affirming the role of a critical press in a democratic society, Samper has tried to limit negative coverage through government regulation and the distribution of media outlets to political cronies. Under a controversial 1996 law, the National Television Commission gained authority to revoke television licenses of news programs that do not conform to standards of "objectivity, impartiality or balance." In October, the commission, packed with Samper supporters, failed to renew the licenses of two newscasts that had broadcast critical stories. In protest over the regulations, Nobel prize-winning author Gabriel García Márquez withdrew his bid to renew the television station he co-owns with journalist Enrique Santos Calderón.
In August, two cabinet ministers were forced to resign after the weekly Semana published the transcript of a surreptitiously recorded cellular phone conversation in which they discussed Samper's plan to award radio frequencies to his friends and supporters. The frequencies were supposed to be awarded to the highest bidders at public auction.
The spread of violence and a cynical government effort to control coverage are rapidly undermining one of Latin America's most respected presses. Colombian journalists, who have not flinched from covering the drug trade despite the extreme danger, say they feel at even greater risk in an environment in which physical threat has become more generalized and the government has turned against them. Privately, journalists acknowledge that the new dangers have led to increased self-censorship.