Treacherous Trails: The press in Colombia has access to public information, though looking for it can put journalists in grave danger - June 30, 2005
By Maria Teresa Ronderos
WASHINGTON, June 10, 2005 — Colombia is a country of extreme news, as evidenced by just one day's headlines: 17 military killed in a guerrilla ambush; U.S. soldiers caught smuggling cocaine out of the country; 19 of Bogotá's 20 deputy mayors fired by the mayor while most of them were under investigation on allegations of corruption. Too many stories to cover, all of them surprising, intriguing and hard to follow. Trails are sometimes treacherous and can become dangerous in the least likely places.
So far in 2005, two reporters have been killed. Maybe it was for what they published, maybe not. Hernando Marné Sánchez Roldán, 62, covered weddings, baptisms, celebrations and the like for El País, one of Colombia's major dailies. On February 19th he was going to Tuluá, a town about 450 kilometers or 300 miles southwest of Bogotá, when a hit-man fired several shots, killing him almost immediately. According to Colombia's Foundation for the Freedom of the Press (FLIP), it is unclear why someone would want to kill a social photographer. But as El País reported, by that date a war between the two main drug lords of the region had already left 43 homicides officially recorded in Tuluá for the year.