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Alert

IAPA asks for review of Garzón case

(IAPA/IFEX) - The following is a 17 December 2001 IAPA press release:




IAPA asks for review of Garzon Case in Colombia

Miami (December 17, 2001) - The Inter American Press Association urges Colombian authorities to review its investigation into the case of journalist and satirist Jaime Garzon, who was murdered in 1999, after finding that several leads accusing the military of being suspects in the crime were ruled out.

An investigation conducted by the IAPA's Rapid Response Unit concluded that the Colombian Attorney General dismissed testimonies that linked the military to Garzon's murder and only considered evidence against Carlos Castaño, head of the paramilitary group United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC, for its Spanish acronym), as the person who ordered the murder, and against hit man Juan Pablo Ortiz Agudelo, who carried out the crime.

Garzon, 39 years old, was murdered in Bogotá, on August 13, 1999, as he was going to work at the Radionet radio station. The two hit men were riding a motorcycle when they ambushed him and fired shots.

During his final years, Garzon combined his work as a journalist with negotiations for the release of kidnapped hostages and with the internal peace process. As a result, several sectors in Colombia, among them the military, questioned Garzon's ties to guerrilla groups, while the AUC had declared him a "military target." Garzon also had discovered that a military group in Bogotá was selling weapons to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC, for its Spanish acronym).

An IAPA report on the Garzon case, whose full text can be found at www.impunidad.com, coincided with other investigations done by local civic groups, in establishing that Castaño and Ortiz Agudelo were not the only ones involved.

Rafael Molina, Ahora magazine, Dominican Republic, Chairman of the Committee on Freedom of the Press and Information, declared that "the Attorney General should guarantee that there is a fair trial and that all leads be investigated so that this murder does not remain only partially solved or in complete impunity."