The Deadliest Beat

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

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."

The liberal daily El Espectador saw its editor-owner assassinated in 1986. Five employees have been slain since. The paper was bombed twice, most recently in September; the $2.5 million damage tally included destruction of the computer system and presses. Yet El Espectador has not missed a day of publication and has kept up the drumbeat against the cartels. Even harder hit was the country's second oldest newspaper, the Bucaramanga-based Vanguardia Liberal, which supported the government's crackdown and was all but destroyed in an Oct. 15 bombing. It too kept on publishing. "We are not heroes," says El Espectador's slight, bespectacled acting editor in chief Jose Salgar. "We are dealing with a criminal wave that does not tolerate opposition. We are learning to live with terror." For top editors and a few prominent reporters and columnists, that can mean traveling with bodyguards or maintaining round- the-clock protection at home. Most, however, just try to sustain their courage and vary their routes home.

Broadcast journalists are perhaps the most at risk. Pool techniques do not work for on-the-air reporters, who can be identified by their faces or voices. Despite Pulido's bravery, many print-news executives, in fact, share the feeling of El Espectador director Juan Guillermo Cano, 35. Says he: "I think the radio people are more intimidated, and it shows in their reporting." In some cases, darker forces than fear may be at work. A small radio network, Radial 2000, was listed among the business interests of Gonzalo Rodriguez Gacha, the Bogota Mafia superchief who is wanted by authorities. Another small chain, Grupo Radial Colombiano, was believed to be owned until recently by the Cali cartel. Such hints of corruption are uncommon. "In general," says columnist Santos, "the press has been spared economic penetration by drug traffickers."

The fiercest division within the ranks of journalism is between the majority who support all-out war against the drug lords and those, notably the owners of Medellin's El Colombiano, who prefer a negotiated truce. In 1984, when he was still editor of the paper, Juan Gomez Martinez wrote, "To sit down with these despicable people, who are wanted by justice, is dishonest. It would twist the values of our country. It is an immoral and terrifying proposition." Gomez -- whose title became publisher when he was elected mayor of Medellin in 1988 -- has turned into a leading advocate of government bargaining with all rebel factions. His rationale for dealing with the traffickers: they cannot be defeated outright. Some critics suggest he may have been spooked by a bungled 1987 kidnap attempt.

Gomez, Santos and Salgar were among a group of Colombian journalists who were in New York City last week to discuss the battle between drug lords and reporters under the sponsorship of New York University and the International Press Institute. Their goal was to remind the world that their nation is, as El Tiempo said, "not a cave of thieves but the major victim of the international drug trade." Potent as their words were, more potent still was the harrowing image of Pulido cut down on his way home from an honest day's work in a land ravaged by dishonor.

With reporting by Joelle Attinger/New York and Tom Quinn/Bogota