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The Colombian Press under Siege

According to its constitution, Colombia is a democracy. In fact, it is the oldest democracy in South America. But the sad reality is that widespread violence and the fear resulting from a four-decade-old civil war and a decade of narco-terrorism have left Colombia’s civil institutions bruised and bloody, seriously undermining democratic government. All institutions in Colombia have suffered, including the executive and legislative branches of the government, the courts, the churches, the universities, the nongovernmental organizations, and the businesses. But perhaps among the most significant casualties have been the Colombian media, which have struggled to tell the stories of Colombia’s distress while undergoing frequent assaults on themselves. The toll on Colombia’s free press is hard to measure, since a great part of the damage has involved lost potential. Unlike assaults on another institution, the problem of Colombia’s besieged press cuts across the country because the flow of information has been manipulated, slowed down, and sometimes violently stopped. How many injustices have not been exposed? How many possible solutions to problems have never been published? What’s more, the problem with Colombia’s media has not been widely understood because the media themselves are not in a good position to—or have little inclination to—report on themselves. Like their colleagues in the United States, the Colombian media play a major role in the civil society: to portray things as they really are, to act as watchdogs over government and other powerful institutions, and to highlight problems and offer possible solutions. My colleagues in the Colombian media have tried heroically to fulfill all these roles but have found themselves stopped repeatedly by what former journalist and Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez calls “the Biblical holocaust [that] has been consuming Colombia.” To understand the challenges before the Colombian media, it is important to know about the problems faced by Colombia. That nation, as Roger Fisher, Harvard Law School professor and a negotiation expert, has said, is involved in the world’s most complex conflict. Here are some of those problems: