TRUTH AND DEATH IN COLOMBIA

WASHINGTON -- On the morning of May 25, my colleague Jineth Bedoya, a
26-year-old reporter for the Colombian newspaper El Espectador, went
off to do an interview at the Modelo National Prison in Bogota. It
wasn't the sort of assignment one learns about in journalism school,
but it was typical enough of how Colombian reporters have to work
these days -- both to find out what's going on and to keep ourselves
alive. Ms. Bedoya, another colleague and I, by our reporting, had
angered a group of Modelo inmates from Colombia's right-wing
paramilitary forces. We had been receiving warnings and threats for
days. Ms. Bedoya, a former crime reporter, was a particular target.
She had reported in a recent article that the police were colluding
with the paramilitary prisoners, allowing them to keep guns in their
cells even after a night of violence in which 26 prisoners had been
killed.

Ms. Bedoya had been trying for weeks to interview the leader of the
paramilitary prisoners, a convicted murderer known as "the baker."
Finally, he had called and told her to meet him the next morning,
alone, in the office of the warden. Ms. Bedoya was unaware that less
than an hour before she got the call, two men had tried to force me
into a car outside my apartment. Still, she took her editor and a
photographer along as a precaution. If they reported the paramilitary
leader's views, they hoped, maybe he would drop his threats.

When they arrived at the prison, no one seemed to know anything about
the appointment. But when the photographer and the editor stepped
outside for a moment, Ms. Bedoya was abducted from the prison lobby in
full view of the guards. She was then drugged, bound and gagged, and
driven to a city about three hours away.

There she was beaten, tortured and raped by four men who accused her
of being a guerrilla sympathizer. Before kicking her out of their car
that night at a local garbage dump, the men told her they had plans to
kill me and two other journalists.

Ms. Bedoya is now out of the hospital and back on the job. She, her
editor and another threatened colleague ride around together in an
armored car with a police escort, trying to report their stories.
After police officials warned that they could not protect me, I left
the country. The prison guards who stood by as Ms. Bedoya was
kidnapped are still on the job, and Colombia's president, Andres
Pastrana (a former journalist), has yet to say a word about the crime.

In one sense, Jineth Bedoya's case is unusual: many journalists who
run afoul of the most violent parties in our country's long-running
civil conflict end up dead. Last summer, Jaime Garzon, a caustic and
well-loved television and radio commentator, also went to the Modelo
prison to plead for his life. He was shot to death two days later. Mr.
Garzon was one of seven Colombian journalists murdered last year, one
of at least 152 killed since 1980. In 1986, the publisher of El
Espectador, Guillermo Cano, was murdered by gunmen working for the
drug trafficker Pablo Escobar. Three years later, the paper's offices
were demolished by a bomb. Twelve of our colleagues have been killed,
and journalists at other news organizations can tell similar stories.

Yesterday the United States Senate approved a package of $1.3 billion
in aid for Colombia, which must be reconciled with an earlier House
bill providing $1.7 billion.

In both versions most of the aid is military, though the Senate would
do more to help protect human rights.

But as Congress debates how best to help Colombia, the question my
colleagues and I ask ourselves is, who will be left to report on how
the money is spent?

Journalists in Colombia understand that we are an annoyance to those
in power. Our job is to tell our readers not only about drug
trafficking and political violence, but also about official
corruption, government mismanagement and numerous social problems that
go unaddressed.

We have always accepted the consequences for what we write, and we
will continue to do so. Nonetheless, we believe that our government
must respond forcefully to the growing attempts to silence us --
especially when they come from military commanders and other public
officials. If Americans really want to help strengthen democracy in
Colombia, they should start by insisting that Colombian leaders defend
the people's right to a free press.