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Santos’ story: editor in a time of cholera

By Mark Fitzgerald

Death threats are a way of life for Colombian journalists. An investigative reporter for Bogota's El Espectador estimates he's received 40 "serious" death threats in just the past two or three years. So many armed groups in Colombia — left-wing guerrillas, right-wing paramilitaries, cocaine traffickers, and even some police and military officers — are making so many death threats that they sometimes don't bother with mentioning individual targets. The National Liberation Army (ELN, for its initials in Spanish) once announced its intention to kill journalists in a press release, and a paramilitary group circulated its hit list in pamphlets dropped in city streets.

As the best-known journalist in Colombia, El Tiempo Editor Francisco Santos has had his share of death threats. But it was the warning he never got that convinced him a guerrilla unit had scheduled his murder for sometime this spring — and that he would have to flee the country.

"This time, there was not even a phone call," Santos says. "There was no threat. They don't threaten you when they have issued an order that you are going to be killed."

And there was no doubt in his mind that he had been marked for death. For Santos, it was more than a sixth sense: Bitter experience had taught him what can happen to a prominent journalist in Colombia. One November evening in 1990, while driving home from the paper, Santos' Jeep was blocked, and five men armed with Uzi submachine guns equipped with silencers dragged him from the vehicle. Santos would spend the next eight months chained to a bed as a captive of Pablo Escobar's cocaine trafficking cartel.

His story would later be told, in some detail, by Nobel Prize-winning novelist Gabriel García Márquez in his 1997 journalistic study, "News of a Kidnapping."

This January, Santos began to sense he was in danger again.

"Two months ago, I understood what was happening," Santos recalls. "I'm a guy who moves very efficiently. I'm aware of where I'm going, and I began to notice I was being followed. I knew somebody was doing intelligence on me. In the business that I'm in, I know many different kinds of people. I went to those sources, and they told me, 'Yes, there is a plot against your life'."

Santos learned the "Frente 22," a unit of Colombia's biggest left-wing guerrilla army, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC, for its initials in Spanish), planned to murder Santos and make it look like just another random killing — easy enough in a nation with a murder rate eight times higher than that in the United States. The hired killers, known as "sicarios" in Colombia, had already been picked, Santos says.

This sort of tip is best not ignored in Colombia. In the past 20 years, 151 journalists have been murdered because of their work. Seven were killed in just the past six months, according to the Inter American Press Association.

And so last month, Francisco Santos, 38, fled Colombia. In a telephone interview from Miami, where he is staying with friends, Santos spoke at length of his hopes and fears for Colombia, its people, and its press. Again and again, Santos returned to the frustrations of exile.

"I'm feeling like s---. I'm p---ed off. I'm upset. I'm disillusioned," he says. "I want to go back ... and I think, at a certain time, I'm going to have to go back and risk my life. If they are going to kill me, then what the hell."

Santos' decision to flee was a shock to Colombians, even though violence in recent months has forced out an increasing number of journalists. Just a day before Santos fled, Mireya Álvarez Ramírez, publisher of La Palma de Facetas newspaper, left the country for the second time in six months after a guerrilla unit told her to hand over $5,000 by March 20 or be killed. When Santos left March 10, Colombians had not yet stopped buzzing about Fernando González Pacheco, who fled the country because of unspecified threats. Pacheco, a beloved figure with a 40-year TV career as a host of talk shows and game shows, could be called the Regis Philbin of Colombia.

But the flight of Santos was different. The whole country knows "Pacho," as the editor is called. It wasn't just that he was a scion of the politically powerful family that owns El Tiempo. It wasn't even that he was in the national news throughout his 263-day kidnapping ordeal, which came at the height of the Medellin drug cartel's violent campaign to prevent extradition for traffickers, or that his story was later recounted in García Márquez best-selling "News of a Kidnapping."

Santos won the admiration of many in Colombia for what he did after he was freed. "I was eight months chained to a bed, and when I came out, I wrote an editorial column about how my family really had suffered, almost more than me," Santos says. "I just received a ton of mail about that from people who wrote about what kidnapping does to families. So, along with my wife, we created Fundación País Libre."

The Free Country Foundation helps people cope with a kidnapping in their family through psychological counseling and practical advice on things such as the dos and don'ts of negotiating. Kidnapping is big business in Colombia. According to the foundation, there were 3,000 kidnappings in the last 12 months alone. The ransoms paid out totaled $200 million.

Santos aimed his organization right at the heart of that business. First, his foundation gathered 1 million signatures on petitions in a successful campaign to strengthen the kidnapping laws. "Unfortunately, in Colombia, the judiciary, it just doesn't exist at all," he says. "We were putting pressure on the government and doing some things well — but the kidnapping kept increasing."

In 1996, Santos began leading mass demonstrations against kidnapping and violence from both the political right and left. "At a time when no one was doing anything massive, we put 1 million people out in the streets," he says. País Libre organized a mock election for peace that drew 10 million voters in a country of 36 million.

At the newspaper, Santos did not handle any stories about his foundation or its activities. "It obviously presents some ethical challenges," he says. "But Colombia is such a violent country that sometimes you're drawn to advocacy and doing more than just your job."

In his weekly column, Santos attacked extremists of all stripes while championing the average person, who, he says, is "stuck between a rock and a hard place." But his writing and activism were putting him on a collision course with Colombia's armed insurgents. "The guerrillas do about 60% of the kidnapping." Santos says. "I am an enemy of their business."

For guerrillas, in fact, kidnapping is an important fund-raising venture, second only to protection money from drug cultivators and traffickers. Insurgents sometimes carefully target victims — and at other times simply throw up a roadblock and see who they come across. Guerrillas call it "miracle fishing." Its leading practitioner is Henry Castellanos, known by the nom de guerre Romaña, who commands the FARC unit Santos says set him up to die.

Colombia's other main guerrilla group, the ELN, has matched Frente 22 in audacity: Soon after kidnapping a planeful of people, ELN commandos drove a bus to church in Cali and kidnapped the entire congregation as the worshippers left Mass last June.

"People began to say, 'Jesus Christ! Now we won't be able to fly again, we won't be able to pray again?' So we began putting pressure on the guerrillas," Santos says. The result was a movement called "No Más" (No More) that organized huge marches. "We did the first national marches Oct. 26. Twelve million people — a third of the country — came out into the streets," he says. To protest the common guerrilla practice of blowing up electrical towers, No Más asked people one night to turn off their home lights. Some four million homes went dark.

Santos struck a chord among Colombians, commentator Otty Patiño wrote recently in an open letter to the editor. "The people saw you, a Santos, a privileged person, an oligarch, as a person of flesh and blood, pounding the pavement, walking to the rhythm of the country, smiling, eager, enthusiastic, part of the crowd, recapturing the streets for mobilization and protest," Patino wrote. "So they joined you, these people who in another time saw in crowds only the dangers of destabilization and anarchy."

But even as No Más gained strength, Colombia's destabilization and anarchy reasserted itself. In only the last six months, seven Colombian journalists have been killed and another 14 kidnapped — all in the midst of a "peace process" that includes the government giving the FARC effective control over a section of Colombia as large as Switzerland. FARC leader Manuel Marulanda Vélez, who goes by the nickname "Tirofijo" (Sure Shot), declared last year that journalists "owed" the guerrillas — and that they had ways of "collecting the debt."

Through spokesman Rául Reyes, the FARC denied any plans to kill Santos. The so-called plot, he said in a statement, must be an invention of military intelligence operatives opposed to the peace process. Reyes accused Santos of "campaigning against that process."

"That just goes back to a very cynical view of the peace process by them," Santos responds. "If anybody has been generous about the peace process in his editorials, it's me. They have to spin it, and it sucks. The FARC allows a lot of dirty business to be done, and then when they're caught, they want to stop it. ... And [Frente 22] is a command front that corrupted itself and got very much involved in kidnapping and extortion and common criminals."

Santos scoffs at the notion that Colombian authorities told him of the plot. In fact, he says, it was the other way around: He told the police of the assassination plans. "If I had waited for them to warn me," Santos says, "I'd be dead right now."

Still, Santos says he fights impulses to take the next plane back to Colombia. And it's clear he's painfully aware of the symbolism of his departure. "I'm not sure I've made the correct decision," he wrote in column entitled, "Why I'm Going." "But I feel my commitment is to fight, something I can only do while I'm living."

The accelerating exodus of journalists from Colombia worries many in the region.

"This atmosphere of intimidation is beginning to affect journalists, columnists, even longtime television hosts. This exile could bring about an even greater weakening of the free press," says Rafael Molina, director of El Nacional newspaper in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic.

Things are getting palpably worse for the press in Colombia, says Maria Cristina Caballeros, an investigative reporter for the magazine Semana. A year ago, Caballeros was able to get interviews with the military leader of the FARC and the commander of the largest right-wing paramilitary. It was tense, she says, but even the threats were not that worrying: "If you're a Colombian journalist, threats are part of the job."

But then in May, serious threats — "very directly saying, 'This is your last day,' in very strong and grotesque words" — were left on the answering machine in her apartment and she was forced into hiding in her own city. Caballeros is now at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, writing a book on Colombia — and unsure when she will be able to go back.

"It's a fact that these threats that we have received affect also other colleagues that remain in the country," Caballeros says. "There are some very good colleagues still in Colombia, but the intimidation, the killings, the kidnappings, and the journalists who have left — yes, I think that has an impact on journalism in Columbia."

[Editor's note: Maria Cristina Caballeros was a 1991 World Press Institute fellow.]

In Miami, "Pacho" Santos finds himself wondering at times what impact he has managed to have. "I feel angry that they run out of the country the editor of El Tiempo — and nothing happens," he says. "What do we have to do to get a reaction?"

His wife Marieve and their four children are still back in Colombia while they finish the school year. His older children, he says, "are OK one day, the next day they're crying. And it hurts because I'm here not because I stole something or I'm running from justice. I'm here because one of those guys decided I'm a target." Are the children safe? "Yes," he replies, "I think so. I hope so — I sure as hell hope so."

Nevertheless, Santos insists that Colombians will find a way out of their nightmare. "Society is avid for action. They're tired of leaders and institutions that have lost a sense of righteousness, of the right and wrong of things," he says. "I'm still an optimist. I'm definitely an optimist. It's just that one of the difficult things that is happening is that we're negotiating with a gun to our head."