Journalists Flee Colombia for U.S. Sanctuary

The soldiers came to Olga Behar’s apartment in late 1985, shortly after she published an uncompromising book, now in its 11th edition, on the four decades of political violence that had racked her native Colombia. Behar, a television and newspaper reporter who has won Colombia’s equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize, was away at the time but the search of her home--purportedly for weapons--crystallized her free-floating suspicion and distrust into rock-hard fear.

For Mauricio Gomez the signs were less concrete but equally disturbing. At least twice, the former television anchorman and news director of the national TV news program “24 Hours” says he was followed around Bogota, apparently by minions of drug dealers he had been covering. Strangers asked questions about him at his apartment building. His home phone rang at odd hours. The callers never spoke more than a sentence but it was more than enough: “Congratulations, you also will be eliminated.”

Behar and Gomez, colleagues who once worked together on “24 Hours,” chose to leave Colombia, where the homicide rate was seven times greater than that of the United States even before the latest round of bombings and shootings in that country’s cocaine war. They are among an estimated 40 or more Colombian journalists who have fled the country in recent years out of fear for their lives.

Behar estimates that about five Colombian journalists have come to this country, including Fabio Castillo, author of a book about drug lords called “The Cocaine Jockeys,” who is in deep hiding in the eastern United States and makes only rare public appearances. Other Colombian journalists--including Daniel Samper, brother of a presidential candidate Ernesto Samper--have fled to France, Spain, Mexico, Peru and Venezuela, she says.

Although both Behar and Gomez say they intend to return, they concede that moment is two or three years away, at best.

In the meantime, Behar, who is a fellow this year at USC’s Center for International Journalism, says she tries to live as normally as possible. At the moment normality means filing commentaries via her portable computer from her Los Angeles apartment to El Mundo, a newspaper in Medellin, the heart of Colombian drug dealer country.

“I can’t assume the way of living of an exile, always dreaming of going back,” she explains. “You ask an exile, ‘Why don’t you buy a television set?’ and the exile says, ‘No, no I’m going home very soon.’ ”

Immigration Ban Lifted

Ironically, Behar, who had been living in Mexico, almost didn’t make it to USC because her name turned up in the so-called “Lookout Book,” a secret list of aliens prohibited from U.S. entry. The list is maintained by the Immigration and Naturalization Service. After vociferous protests from center director Murray Fromson and the Lawyers Committee for International Human Rights, the ban on her was lifted last month but the reasons for Behar’s inclusion in the book remain a mystery.

During her reporting career in Colombia, Behar covered the M-19 guerrilla organization, one of a half-dozen armed groups active throughout the country. She has written two books about her country’s political turmoil, “The Wars of Peace” and “Night of Smoke,” both critical of military conduct and including documentation of human rights abuses, she says. Behar suspects that her contact with government opponents as well as her writings led to her being put on the U.S. list at the request of the Colombian government. She notes also that circumstantial evidence indicates she was placed in the “Lookout Book” about the time a Colombian government delegation was visiting Washington.

Arthur Helton of the lawyers committee says that being listed in the lookout book can be dangerous because it can be used by enemies as evidence that the person listed is politically suspect, perhaps even subversive.

Helton, who went to bat for Behar, is also representing Patricia Lara, another Colombian journalist barred from this country, who remains in Colombia. Lara apparently has been kept out of the United States because she too had contacts with Colombian guerrilla leaders.

In September, Helton won a court order for an unprecedented look at the the list. Although he hasn’t seen the list yet, Helton says early indications are that it contains at least 327,200 names.

Compared with Behar and Lara, Gomez’s problems are straightforward. A former news director and anchorman and the son of a former diplomat, Gomez had no problem coming to this country early last year. He lives in Atlanta where he has been working, off and on, for Cable News Network. “I had plans a month and a half ago to get back to Colombia by early next year, but now I know I can’t go back because, definitely, things have gotten worse,” he says.

The synergism of politics and drug crime have made journalism dangerous work in Colombia for much of this decade. A recent study by the Committee to Protect Journalists, a global organization that monitors threats to press freedom, reported that 16 Colombian editors and reporters had been slain since January, 1984--by far the highest toll in Latin America. Just last month a part-time reporter was killed when more than 200 pounds of dynamite heavily damaged the offices of El Spectador, one of Colombia’s most important newspapers. Last March El Spectador columnist Hector Giraldo Galvez was shot dead, apparently by drug dealers. And last week, El Spectador’s president said the paper may be forced to close because some smaller advertisers had pulled out and the daily had begun losing money.

The current round of violence has become so acute that former Colombian justice minister Monica de Greiff is thought to be in hiding in this country. De Greiff resigned last month after repeated threats against the lives of herself and her family by drug dealers.

The experiences of Behar and Gomez offer one measure of the pervasiveness of violence and intimidation within Colombian society. Both say that they had grown accustomed to telephone and other verbal threats and left the country only after the threats had escalated into overt actions against them.

Although Colombia’s then-President Belisario Betancourt apologized on television for the military raid on her apartment, Behar says that she decided to leave the country after the president told her in person that he could not protect her life.

While Behar has no idea just who her shadowy enemies are, Gomez says that in the course of his work he apparently angered one of Colombia’s top three drug kings, Jorge Luis Ochoa, also known as El Gordo, the Fat One.

Before he left Colombia in February, 1988, Gomez’s life began to resemble episodes from seemingly far-fetched Latin American novels such as those by Nobel Prize-winner Gabriel Garcia Marquez, another former Colombian journalist who has long been in exile in Mexico.

For instance, not long after Gomez left Colombia, his father, a former presidential candidate and ambassador to the United States, was kidnaped by the M-19 guerrillas and held for two months before being released unharmed.

The elder Gomez, who edits a paper called El Siglo, was fortunate, his son says.

“Most of the people who are kidnaped you don’t hear from the anymore,” he says, “and if you do, you find them dead.”