A Journalist's Reality
By Drew Hendrickson
*Some names have been changed.
On Monday morning at 6:30, Miguel banged on the door of my hotel room and stormed in to wake me up.
“Drew, an electric company just got bombed,” he said. I think he expected me to be awake already, and he didn’t stop his mile-a-minute explanation of why we had to get out the door instantly.
“A rebel group bombed the offices at three in the morning. No one was hurt but there are two people that were living there, and they are in the next town over. A friend of mine called and told me he’d set up an interview. Vamos, Drew. They are waiting.”
I pulled on the same pants I had worn three days in a row. I didn’t change the t-shirt I had slept in. I had only worn it for one day.
I had met Miguel the day before at a journalism workshop I was attending as part of my yearlong study of Colombian journalism. About four months into the project, I was glad to have finally made a good contact who, on a daily basis, confronts all the intimidation, threats and forms of censorship endemic to journalism in Colombia. Fortunately, Miguel and I were already fast friends (We must have been, because he felt perfectly comfortable yanking the covers off me in bed and piling me onto the back of his motor scooter.).
Before my Fulbright to Colombia, I had taken a few journalism classes but had no practical experience in the field. But the greater challenge for me was handling the responsibility of almost total freedom in the execution of my project. There were no faculty advisers or older students who had been through the same thing. I was on my own here. I needed to make my own contacts, develop my own research and make all the decisions about how I would spend this year. That is why I was so interested in accompanying Miguel. It was going to be a good chance to witness a Colombian journalist at work. It was exactly what my project was about.
I imagined that Miguel’s story would expose how a left-wing guerrilla group with a significant history of intimidating the media through threats, kidnappings and murder, had bombed an electric company and the home of two people. This story would show me how a journalist did his job in the face of such grave adversity.
The scene at the bombing was much more casual than I had expected. The offices were in the town’s central plaza, so a lot of people were milling around. Kids were riding their bikes and ice cream vendors had followed the crowd. Teenagers in school uniforms sat on the curbs talking and even laughing.
There were no tears, no heartache. Fear did not riddle the faces of onlookers. Instead of victims, I found people carrying on with their normal lives.
Miguel seemed to know everyone and, as he talked to the bystanders, he peppered those who volunteered information with questions.
“What are the names of the survivors? What do they do? How old are they? How long have they lived there? Do they have any other family in the area?”
As he jotted the answers down in his notebook, someone pointed out that the young man in the blue tank top was living in the building. Miguel hurried over to talk to him. His name was Salvador.
“We were sleeping—my grandma and I share a bed in the corner. I heard the bomb and sprang up,” Salvador said in a low, empty voice. It seemed like the voice of the building itself was telling us its sad history. “But all I saw were walls blowing up, broken glass, and the roof caved in on the offices. All the computers in the offices were destroyed, the furniture too. I carried my grandma out. From the street we saw our walls fall and the roof of our room start to collapse, but not all the way. Hopefully we can still live there.”
“Let’s go over to the building. I'll take a photo,” said Miguel after taking down his remarks. Miguel asked Salvador to sit on one of the fallen cinder blocks and look at the camera. As Miguel took photos, I asked Salvador what he was going to do now.
“We’ll try to fix it,” he said numbly.
“Is there anyone to help? Red Cross? Government support?” I asked.
“No. We will just keep living here and slowly put it back together on our own.”
Once Miguel took his photos and talked to all his sources, we got back on the scooter and went to his office. It took Miguel half an hour to write the story; then he let me read it.
“But who did it, Miguel?”
“The guerrillas.”
“Well, it doesn’t say that. And it doesn’t say why,” I said, confused.
“Drew, they bombed the offices because the company is private and they charge too much. The guerrillas want public energy, but because of Colombia’s deal with an international economic organization, the service is private.”
Miguel answered the question as though he had been over it several times before.
“Why don’t you write that then?” I asked, thinking of the different implications this story contained.
“Write what?”
“That the guerrillas did it and what international economics has to do with it.”
“Because no one said that. Drew, if I blame the guerrillas, they’ll kill me or threaten me, and I’ll have to leave. My family is here. My kids are in school. Shoot, you’ll meet them. We’ll all have lunch at my house.”
We didn’t talk much more about the bombing. But I thought about it. The story didn’t expose the guerrillas, and it certainly didn’t help Salvador. He is still living in shambles. Thinking about it made me sad and frustrated that we didn’t make a difference. But as I learn more and understand the forces at play, I see Miguel’s point. He has too much at stake.
Even though the role of a Colombian journalist was not as heroic as I had hoped, I saw the reality of reporting under various forms of censorship.
Drew Hendrickson graduated from the University of New Hampshire with a double major in English and Spanish. His Fulbright scholarship to study how Colombian journalists work in an environment of danger and censorship began in July 2002 and officially ended in July 2003
He has returned to live in Colombia. Contact him at dhendrickson21@yahoo.com.Fulbright Program Information