Media: Blind spot in drug-war coverage

By Phillip Cryan
Colombia Week

VILLAGARZON -- If the media were going to report on the effects of U.S. antidrug efforts, they'd have to focus on this southern Colombian town of 7,000 inhabitants. Just outside Villagarzon, the Colombian army established its first U.S.-funded counternarcotics brigade, the central component of Plan Colombia, a multibillion dollar aid package signed by President Bill Clinton in 2000. Washington chose this site because it lies in the middle of Putumayo Province, until recently the heartland of Colombia's coca industry and a stronghold of the country's largest guerrilla army.

Yet, more than three years since the aid dollars began flowing, news outlets have provided almost no coverage of Villagarzon happenings. It might have something to do with the people who expelled the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and took control of the town. Like nearly every other Colombian urban area with a large military or National Police base, Villagarzon is awash with paramilitary groups, the private militias that carry out most of the killing in this country's war.

Villagarzon's new regime has evaded even Semana, a news magazine known for questioning U.S. and Colombian military initiatives. This year three Semana articles have focused on Putumayo. But instead of investigating the paramilitary control, the coverage has consisted of statistics on the province's coca acreage, a one-paragraph item on a FARC bombing of an oil pipeline, and a defense of Plan Colombia written by its former director, Gonzalo de Francisco. The three pieces cited just one Putumayo resident: Gov. Ivan Guerrero Guevara.

Dozens of other Semana stories this year have mentioned Putumayo in passing, but not always accurately. On February 8, for example, the magazine failed to catch an error by former human rights ombudsperson Eduardo Cifuentes Muñoz, who referred to the southern Putumayo municipality of La Hormiga as "Puerto Hormiga."

What's the news coverage missing? Paramilitary tactics in Putumayo have included massacres, extortion, assassination and public torture.

Here in Villagarzon, home to the U.S.-trained brigade and about 750 other military and police troops, 170 paramilitary victims have been buried since 2001. And the paramilitaries have killed many others. "They throw the bodies off a bridge into the Mocoa River," a local religious leader told Colombia Week on condition of anonymity.

"The district attorney goes out drinking and dancing with the paramilitaries," the religious leader added. With friends in such high places, the paramilitaries operate openly. They patrol the streets every night and, a couple weeks ago, they even threw a Halloween party in the central plaza.

It's no wonder folks in the United States and Colombia's major cities tolerate the paramilitary ties of the Colombian military. They come to know about the ties through the media--which is to say, not at all.