Jorge Enrique Pulido, 44, producer of the Bogota TV news show Mundo Vision, and anchorwoman Ximena Godoy, 20, had just finished a Sunday broadcast. As Pulido halted his cream Renault sedan at a stoplight two blocks from the government-owned Inravision studios, a man waiting on a red Suzuki motorcyle dismounted and opened fire. Bullets from a 9-mm Ingram submachine gun hit Pulido in the throat and shoulder and struck Godoy in the leg. The gunman and an accomplice sped off on the motorcycle, as a passerby drove the victims to the hospital. By week's end Godoy was in stable condition, but Pulido, who lost a lung and suffered heart damage, remained on the critical list.
They became at least the 86th and 87th Colombian journalists to be killed or wounded in this decade -- and the ninth and tenth known victims since the cocaine cartels vowed retaliation last August against "journalists who have attacked and abused us." Although drug lords have also menaced judges, law- enforcement officials and industrialists, they have hit news organizations with special savagery. Pulido, in fact, escaped injury in an explosion at his headquarters in June. When he was struck down last week, the national newspaper El Tiempo editorialized that the attack was probably a punishment for his years of unrelenting struggle against organized crime.
The precise toll exacted by the drug lords is hard to certify: Colombian journalists are also targeted by leftist guerrillas and rightist death squads. In a new report titled "Murder: The Ultimate Censorship," the Inter American Press Association notes, "Nowhere is this struggle between the forces of darkness and the forces of light more clearly drawn than in Colombia." Some of the country's ablest reporters have fled into exile or gone into hiding, their voices effectively silenced. Others admit their news judgment has been affected.
) Those who continue the struggle have been driven to such expedients as eliminating bylines on drug stories. For five months several news outlets ran the same coverage, word for word, on drug-related topics, so no one organization would be the focus of wrath. But the agreement fell apart under competitive pressures and the feeling of some reporters that others failed to contribute their fair share. In any case, it is a virtual impossibility for reporters to work in complete anonymity, and most Colombian journalists simply shoulder the risk. Says Enrique Santos Calderon, an El Tiempo columnist and Sunday editor who spent several months in self-imposed exile following a bombing at his home, then returned to his outspoken ways: "We journalists aren't soldiers, but we have become the first line of defense."