COLOMBIAN JOURNALISTS FEAR FOR LIVES

TV Video Of Slaying Spurs Death Threats

BOGOTA, Colombia (AP) -- Two Colombian television reporters have gone
into hiding after receiving death threats that they believe were
triggered by their footage of a mob attack.

In an interview Friday, the two described an anonymous terror campaign
that began immediately after their network, RCN Television, broadcast
footage of the June 8 killing of a 37-year-old shoe repairman as he
tried to calm an angry crowd in a western town.

The journalists said they thought the intimidation stemmed from the
emphasis in their reports on the inaction of four police officers who
stood a few feet away as the repairman, Jorge Evelio Cardona, was
clubbed to the ground, kicked in the head and stabbed.

Their video proved instrumental in helping authorities identify and
arrest three of Cardona's attackers. The four police officers have
been suspended pending an internal investigation.

The arrests and suspensions haven't shielded reporter Juan Carlos
Aguiar and cameraman John Jader Jaramillo from trouble.

"Turn over the video, you stoolies. We're going to you kill you if we
end up going to jail," Aguiar quoted one of a group of six police
officers as saying as he and Jaramillo left Cardona's wake on June
9.

From then on, the two said, they received daily death threats by
telephone.

After they provided sworn statements to prosecutors and presented
video of the stabbing as evidence for possible prosecution, the
threats mounted.

Finally on Wednesday, the two, accompanied by their families, fled
their homes in Pereira and neighboring Manizales for an undisclosed
location.

Numbed as they are to the violent death so common in this country
plagued by guerrillas, drug traffickers and right-wing paramilitary
groups, Colombians were shocked and outraged by the Cardona killing,
especially because the nation witnessed it on television.

Cardona was trying to persuade a mob protesting the eviction of
squatters from public land in the town of Chinchina to stop throwing
stones through downtown shop windows.

After being beaten and stabbed, he was left on the street to die until
a cousin collected him and took him to a hospital.

Aguiar, 27, said he and Jaramillo, 33, were paying the price for
refusing to be silenced.

"I don't have the soul of a martyr, but I've always told myself that
if I'm going to be killed it will be for telling the truth," Aguiar
said.

On Monday, an anonymous caller described to Aguiar's wife the daily
routines of her and the couple's 2 1/2-year-old son, and said that she
was going to have to pay her husband's "debt" because he couldn't be
located, said Aguiar.

The following day, Jaramillo was accosted twice.

First he was grabbed at his door by two men who tried to pull him from
his house in the provincial capital of Pereira.

Then he was jumped on the street and thrown against a wall by a man
who stripped him of his identification papers.

"That's what they do to you in this country before they kill you. It's
what the drug mafias used to do. First they take your papers. Then
your body is found later abandoned somewhere with nothing to identify
it," Jaramillo said.

Colombia is the hemisphere's most dangerous country for journalists.
Eighteen Colombian journalists have been killed since 1995 and two
have been forced by death threats to flee the country.

A photographer whose pictures of the Cardona killing were published in
newspapers across Colombia, Dario Agusto of the Pereira daily La
Patria, said he has also received threatening phone calls.

Agusto changed his telephone number and then his residence, but has no
plans to leave.

"I work for a small regional paper so I don't have the option of
moving elsewhere," he said.