Miami (September 30, 2014)—The Inter American Press Association (IAPA) today expressed concern regarding threats to journalists in Colombia and urged the authorities there to “deal with the utmost priority” with these cases in the light of problems of lack of security that members of the press have been facing.
The paramilitary group calling itself “Los Urabeños” threatened eight reporters in Cali and Buenaventura, ordering them to abandon the cities within 14 hours. In a pamphlet e-mailed to them during the weekend the group declared that its members were “tired of your attacks and the fact that you show us up to be murderers … that is why from this point onwards anyone who fails to obey the order to shut up … is going to be blasted away….”
The threatened reporters work for the newspapers El País, Q’hubo and El Tiempo, Caracol Radio, a community broadcast station in Buenaventura, and television news channel Más Pacífico. The is an apparent reprisal for stories about a female member of Los Urabeños under detention in Chile for alleged connection to houses being used for torture and executions.
The chairman of the IAPA’s Committee on Freedom of the Press and Information, Claudio Paolillo, repudiated the threats, expressing his solidarity with the journalists and urging the Colombian authorities “to act urgently at this new wave of threats that have intensified in recent months.”
Paolillo, editor of the Montevideo, Uruguay, weekly Búsqueda, added, “These actions, which have the clear intention of provoking anxiety and self-censorship, should be dealt with urgently and not be trivialized.” He called on the authorities to “give these cases the maximum priority.”
Paolillo also referred to another case of intimidation of journalists with the Cali newspaper El País, threatened in the town of Palmira in Cauca Valley. The reporters were working on a report about the trafficking of exotic animals, when the owner of an agriculture and livestock warehouse whom they were interviewing threatened to turn them over to a group of guerrillas operating in the area.
The journalists were chased off by a motorcycle rider. Then, after a fruitless formal complaint made to local authorities they chose to denounce the actions at a public prosecutor’s office in Cali.
This year two journalists have been murdered in incidents apparently related to their work – Luis Carlos Cervantes, director of the community radio station Morena FM in the municipality of Tarazá, Antioquia, on August 12, and Yonni Steven Caicedo, a cameraman with television channels TV Noticias and Más Noticias in Buenaventura, Cauca Valley, on February 19.
The IAPA is a not-for-profit organization dedicated to the defense and promotion of freedom of the press and of expression in the Americas. It is made up of more than 1,300 print publications from throughout the Western Hemisphere and is based in Miami, Florida. For more information please go to http://www.sipiapa.org.
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