Writing with a bodyguard: Colombia’s state protection unit has supported journalists in danger for 16 years,but does it work?

When journalists in Colombia find themselves in severe danger for investigating violence and corruption, the state protection unit steps in. But does it really help? Catalina Lobo-Guerrero reports

SO FAR THIS year, Colombian journalist Javier Osuna has been the victim of break-in attempts at his office, he has been followed by men on motorcycles, and his family has received intimidating phone calls. That’s on top of the previous year’s arson attack on his apartment, which destroyed his computer and files containing months of research. Many of the country’s reporters investigating violence and corruption face similar threats, but Osuna should have felt safer than most: he had been under the state’s protection programme for reporters in danger since 2014.

Osuna had been assigned two bodyguards by the programme, which is run by the state’s UNP (national protection unit), but in May 2016 he grew suspicious about one of them and asked the UNP to discreetly reassign him. Osuna, who has been researching murders carried out by paramilitary forces in the north of the country, claims his bodyguard found out about the request before being officially notified. He said his mobile and a USB key had also gone missing. “There’s no point in being part of a [protection] programme that has only made me feel more threatened,” Osuna told Index.

“This is a very serious situation, we are concerned and are conducting a full investigation into this case,” said Diego Mora, the UNP director, when Index asked about Osuna’s case. Mora has been responsible for restructuring the unit after corruption accusations forced the previous director to resign in December 2014.

Following pressure from both inside and outside the country, Colombia set up a protection programme for reporters, as well as other vulnerable groups, such as union workers, activists and political leaders in 2000. With the country’s human rights record in tatters after years of bloody warring between drug cartels, illegal armed groups and the Colombian armed forces, the government hoped the programme would pacify its critics and secure the flow of foreign aid into the country.

Initially the programme was supervised by the ministry of justice, but in 2012 the government created the UNP as a separate entity with an independent budget. In the past 16 years, more than 150 journalists have benefited from some sort of state protection, whether it’s a bulletproof vest or a permanent escort scheme with several bodyguards. Each case is analysed through a risk matrix to determine which mechanism is most appropriate. The UNP works with several government agencies, an ombudsman office and the police to evaluate cases.

Defected members of Colombian guerrilla group ELN handing over their weapons at a military base in Cali in 2013. Despite such surrenders, reporters are still being heavily threatened for investigating crimes

CREDIT: Reuters/Jaime Saldarriaga

Since 1977, 152 journalists have been killed in Colombia, but the numbers have decreased since 2003, according to the Foundation for Press Freedom in Colombia (FLIP). General security conditions have improved in the country in the last decade, but the protection programme is also credited with having helped save lives.

However, in recent times the programme has come under the spotlight for the wrong reasons. An investigation by the Contraloría General (the government accountability office) in August 2015 revealed that the UNP couldn’t account for how it spent approximately $5 million and had a budget deficit of around $11 million. There was concern that corruption and mismanagement inside the UNP affected the safety of journalists in the programme. Fecolper (the national association of journalists) and Reporters Without Borders released a 2015 survey of 104 journalists in the programme. A worrying 75% of them said it wasn’t working properly. Many complained about the quality of the cars, vests, other equipment that had been assigned to them and also stated that the bodyguards weren’t being paid on time. The report said this had led to 700 bodyguards going on strike in November 2014.

Safety concerns have led some reporters to take drastic measures. Since Mora has been in charge, the programme has undergone some changes, including cutting the transportation stipend reporters received on a regular basis. The decision came after journalist Yesid Toro, who had mounting debts and feared he would be cut out of the program because his security situation seemed stable, fabricated a death threat against him and seven of his colleagues in 2014.

Many journalists that go into the Colombian protection programme never come out of it, and this has made it extremely expensive. “It was originally designed to address an exceptional risk, but the protective measures became permanent,” Pedro Vaca, director of FLIP, told Index. Some journalists have been inside the programme for more than 14 years.

According to Mora, the reason for this is that hardly anyone gets prosecuted for threatening journalists. A recent report by FLIP showed that out of 338 investigations, only one has concluded with the perpetrators being convicted. The attorney general’s office said publicly in 1999 that it would create a sub unit inside the human rights division to investigate cases involving journalists. Sixteen years later, that unit still doesn’t exist.

“Despite its shortcomings, the Colombian protection programme is the only one that works in Latin America,” said Catalina Botero, the former special rapporteur for freedom of expression for the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. The lessons learned by the Colombian programme could be valuable for other countries in the region, such as Mexico, where journalists suffer similar hostile conditions.

Osuna’s case illustrates how dangerous it is for Colombian journalists to keep digging into the past of an armed conflict that is supposedly coming to an end. Even if the old rebel groups like the Farc and ELN hand in their weapons, drug-trafficking rings and new illegal armed groups continue to operate in certain areas of the country, and corrupt politicians and their partners in organised crime are also behind current threats to reporters who get in the way of their interests. Until the justice system plays a more active role in the programme, the files of unsolved cases will keep piling up and journalists will remain at risk.