Gustavo Rugeles, the editor of the Bogotá-based news website Las 2 Orillas, has been receiving threats from neo-Nazi groups for the past two years and is still getting them, although the protection he receives from the state was recently reduced after a risk evaluation. In the latest instance, Alberto Acosta, a member of the far-right group Restauración Nacional, called Rugeles on October 29 to...
Security officials of Grupo Últimas Noticias (Grupo ÚN) forcefully removed journalist Odell López, the ÚN political correspondent, from the media conglomerate's facilities on October 1 after refusing to quit her job last September 30, when the HR department asked her to resign, according to Instituto Prensa y Sociedad de Venezuela. After this incident, the journalist went to the public...
The Committee to Protect Journalists has expressed alarm at death threats against numerous journalists in different states in Colombia over the past week and calls on authorities to ensure the journalists' safety. All of the journalists had reported on criminal activities in the region. "Local criminal groups are unabashedly and publicly threatening journalists as a means of silencing reporting on...
Colombian journalist Amalfi Rosales has fled her home in northern La Guajira state and is seeking government protection after gunmen fired at her house, and she received death threats, according to news reports. Rosales told the Committee to Protect Journalists the threats began after she reported on alleged links between a former state governor and criminal groups. "It is disturbing that...
The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) has called on Colombian authorities to investigate the brutal murder of the journalist Luis Carlos Cervantes in north west Colombia and to ensure that his killers answer for their crimes. According to media reports, Cervantes, journalist and director of the radio station, Morena FM, based in the township of Tarazá, in Antioquia, was killed at noon...
Colombian authorities should immediately investigate the murder of a journalist on Tuesday and apprehend the killers, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today. Luis Carlos Cervantes Solano had received threats related to his reporting since 2010, according to news reports. Unidentified gunmen shot Cervantes, who was on a motorcycle, in the municipality of Tarazá in the Bajo Cauca region of...
Radio Nizkor’s Claudia Julieta Duque is an investigative journalist who has been harassed, threatened, followed and kidnapped in 2001 after covering fellow journalist Jaime Garzón’s August 1999 murder in Bogotá. She was able to prove in 2009 that the Colombian Department of Security (DAS) was behind most of these intimidations. The criminal proceedings against her alleged torturers are...
The Committee to Protect Journalists calls on Colombian authorities to ensure the safety of three radio journalists in the southern state of Guaviare who have received death threats in response to their coverage of an upcoming recall vote that could remove the local governor from office. Erika Londoño, Gustavo Chicangana, and Jorge RamÃrez work for Caracol Radio Guaviare, one of five stations in...
Colombian journalist Luis Eduardo Gómez in Arboletes, was murdered last week in the northwestern department of Antioquia. Threats have also been issued against two journalists, Medellín-based Mary Luz Avendaño and Bogotá-based Gonzalo Guillén, in unrelated cases, Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has reported. It urged the authorities to implement strong protective...
Mario Estebán López, the owner and director of regional TV station Canal 22 RAV Televisión, could be executed if he does not leave the city of Ipiales, in the southwestern department of Nariño, by June 11, according to a warning he received on the night of June 8, nine days after he was nearly killed by three unidentified attackers armed with gasoline. In the attack with gasoline, which took place...
