Journalists in the Front Lines Of Colombia's Cocaine War (original) (raw)
World|Journalists in the Front Lines Of Colombia's Cocaine War
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- Sept. 14, 1989
Credit...The New York Times Archives
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September 14, 1989
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Section A, Page
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Every morning, Maria Jimena Duzan leaves her bomb-proofed apartment, greets her armed police guard and drives a randomly chosen route to work.
Nearing work, she stops at an army checkpoint, part of a new perimeter intended to keep car bombs away from her office. As guards scrutinize her car for dynamite, workers nearby rebuild walls and windows smashed in a recent bomb blast.
Miss Duzan is a journalist. Her newspaper, El Espectador, the oldest in Colombia, insists on giving unblinking coverage of Colombia's powerful and violent cocaine cartels. Her column, ''My Zero Hour,'' is one of the last in Colombia to criticize the drug cartels under a byline. 'We Are the Targets'
In Colombia's shifting war with the cartels, newspapers are often the front line and journalists like Miss Duzan find themselves in the trenches.
The security is not for show. In recent years, assassins working for the cartels and mounted on motorcyles killed the editor of El Espectador, Guillermo Cano, and its lawyer, Hector Giraldo Galvez. Death threats forced into exile two reporters for the paper who wrote about the cartels.
In the last five years, according to conservative estimates, more than two dozen Colombian journalists have been killed in connection with their work.
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