Bogotá, September 17, 2002—Edgar Buitrago Rico, founder and director of the monthly Revista Valle 2000, today fled the city of Cali in fear of his life after receiving repeated death threats since May. In response, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) today sent a letter to Colombian interior minister Fernando Londoño Hoyos urging him to…
Bogotá, August 14, 2002—Paramilitary fighters are threatening to kill members of the Colombian press in a northeastern region of Colombia where a journalist was recently shot and killed. A July 29 e-mail message sent to Radio Meridiano-70 and to Caracol Televisión correspondent Rodrigo Ávila accuses press members and media owners in the Arauca Department of…
Bogotá, August 9, 2002—The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) detained two newspaper journalists and their driver in Colombia on Tuesday, August 6, freeing them unharmed two days later, CPJ has learned. Iván Noguera and Héctor Fabio Zamora, a correspondent and photographer, respectively, for El Tiempo, Colombia’s largest daily, and their driver, Henry Gómez, were…
New York, July 12, 2002—The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has just learned that Mario Prada Díaz, of the weekly El Semanario Sabanero in the Santander Department in northeastern Colombia, was killed this week. His death occurred the same week in which another journalist in the region was threatened at gunpoint, one day after a…
Bogotá, July 1, 2002—The owner of a radio station, who recently had alerted the public to the presence of paramilitary fighters in the region, was shot and killed in northeastern Colombia. Efraín Varela Noriega, owner of Radio Meridiano70, was driving home from a university graduation in Arauca Department on the afternoon of June 28 when…
389 journalists killed between 1992 and 2001, most murdered with impunity New York, June 4, 2002–The majority of journalists killed in the line of duty during the last decade were murdered because of their reporting, concludes a study released today by the Committee to Protect Journalists. This comprehensive analysis of journalists killed between 1992 and…
Bogotá, May 24, 2002–The leftist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) have demanded that a newspaper in northern Colombia pay the equivalent of US$250,000 and publish a four-page communiqué to secure the release of a reporter and another employee who were kidnapped last week, the newspaper’s director said yesterday. Ulilo Acevedo, founder and director of…
Bogotá, May 21, 2002—Two newspaper reporters and their driver were kidnapped by the leftist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) on May 16 in northern Colombia. According to local police, the rebels freed one of the reporters the following day. Nidia Álvarez Mariño and Ramón Vásquez Ruiz of the Santa Martabased daily Hoy Diario del…
New York, May 9, 2002—The Committee to Protect Journalists is extremely concerned about a series of menacing threats against four Colombian journalists, including an incident yesterday. At around 6:30 a.m. on May 8, two men approached Carlos Pulgarín—a journalism professor at the Universidad de La Sabana, a private university in the capital, Bogotá—as he was…