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Video

  1. June 05, 2009 10:58 AM

    Colombian Journalists Track Guerrilla War on Contravía

    CJR presents an ongoing video series about the work of investigative reporters

    By Center for Investigative Reporting

    ABOUT THE SERIES

    Welcome to The Investigators, an ongoing web-video series produced by the Center for Investigative Reporting highlighting incisive work—as it happens—by journalists around the world. The series features interviews with journalists, who share the stories behind their groundbreaking international investigations into human rights abuses, financial corruption, political malfeasance, environmental destruction and other abuses of power. Often these journalists work in dangerous circumstances, risking their lives to reveal stories that have far-reaching impact and are relevant to us all. The original series is available at the Center for Investigative Reporting’s Web site.

    ABOUT CONTRAVIA

    [UPDATE: On Link TV's "Latin Pulse," CIR's Mark Schapiro talks to Morris via Skype about new developments with his television show, Contravia—including a recent scandal involving the Colombian secret service, which had been conducting systematic surveillance of Morris’ mail, movements, and computer communications for years, according to documents released in the Colombian Congress in March. Watch it here.]

    Our first segment features Colombian journalists Hollman Morris and Juan Pablo Morris, who created a series on Colombian television that is unearthing the largely hidden history of the country’s long-running guerilla wars. The series, called Contravía, airs on Colombia’s third public channel and online at www.contravia.tv.

    While the violent tactics of the left-wing guerilla movement, the FARC, have generated considerable press attention—most recently after the release of kidnapped former congresswoman Ingrid Betancourt and other hostages in July 2008—a major component of that violence, by right-wing paramilitary groups, has gone largely unreported. Founded some twenty years ago by landowners to combat the guerillas, the paramilitary groups have transformed into violent criminal enterprises financed through cocaine exports and kidnappings—much like the FARC itself. Over more than two decades, the paramilitary squads have been responsible for the deaths and disappearance of as many as 20,000 people, according to the National Movement of Victims of State Crimes, a human rights group established to protest paramilitary abuses.

    The Morris brothers take their cameras deep into the Colombian countryside to probe into the disappearance of thousands of individuals kidnapped over the past decade, and track efforts to unearth their graves far from the cosmopolitan capital city of Bogotá or the eyes of the international or global press. “Our aim,” Juan Pablo told us, “is to reconstruct the memory of those atrocities…. Many of the people who followed the paramilitaries in the 1980s and 90s are running the country today.”

    Contravia has uncovered links between paramilitary leaders and high officials in Colombian politics and finance. Thirty senators and representatives in the Colombian Congress have been imprisoned because of their ties to the paramilitary death squads; another sixty have been investigated. That’s a third of Colombia’s 268-member Congress, giving rise to a new term—‘para-politica’—to describe the ongoing crisis as one top politician after another is accused of complicity with the paramilitary squads. Most of those accused represent political parties that are part of the governing coalition led by President Alvaro Uribe.

    Hollman Morris was given the Human Rights Defender Award by Human Rights Watch in 2007. He has been forced to leave Colombia several times for extended periods after the airing of Contravía revelations. The show does not receive commercial backing; subsidies come from the Open Society Institute, the European Union, and other international sources.

    In February 2009, Colombia’s Minister of Defense, Juan Manuel Santos, accused Hollman Morris on national radio of being “close to the guerillas,” after he conducted several interviews with FARC hostages who were later released. Uribe himself denounced Morris to the national press, and implied he was a member of the “intellectual bloc” of the FARC.

    Such accusations in Colombia can have fatal consequences. Death threats followed. Shortly thereafter, Morris defended himself from the government’s charges on one of Colombia’s most popular morning talk shows; Contravía filmed Morris’s part of the conversation with host Julio Sanchez and produced an English translation of the interview.

    The government's accusations prompted a protest by the Committee to Protect Journalists and Human Rights Watch, which claimed in a letter to President Uribe that there was no evidence for such a statement, which could lead to “serious threats” of violence, and “undermines … freedom of expression” in Colombia.

    The Inter-American Human Rights Commission (IAHRC) of the Organization of American States issued a statement criticizing the Colombian government’s effort to vilify the journalists and link them to the guerillas. On March 23, attorneys for the Committee for Free Expression in Colombia and other free press advocates publicly challenged the Colombian government’s version of events, and described the potentially corrosive effects the personal attacks were having on the willingness of Colombian journalists to pursue controversial human rights stories.

    Two days after that presentation, Juan Pablo Morris commented by phone from Bogotá that Contravía will continue to defy efforts by Uribe to “link journalists who question the government to ‘terrorists’.”

    CIR Editorial Director Mark Schapiro interviewed Hollman and Juan Pablo Morris via Webcam at their studio in Bogotá.

  2. May 28, 2009 11:50 AM

    Openness Ombudsman: Lucy Dalglish on the OGIS and FOIA

    An interview with the RCFP's executive director

    By Clint Hendler

    Lucy Dalglish is the executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. Earlier this year, CJR spoke with Dalglish about the successful effort to establish the Office of Government Information Services at the National Archives and Records Administration, a new office charged with acting as an ombudsman for the Freedom of Information Act process.





    Edited by Betwa Sharma

  3. May 21, 2009 12:05 PM

    Tracking the Money: Craig Jennings on Bailout Transparency

    CJR talks with the OMB Watch analyst

    By Clint Hendler

    Craig Jennings is a federal fiscal policy analyst at OMB Watch, a non-profit advocacy and research organization that promotes government transparency and accountability.

    CJR spoke with Jennings in January 2009 about transparency and accountability in the government’s economic stimulus and financial bailout programs.


    Edited by Betwa Sharma
  4. May 18, 2009 12:29 PM

    Top Secret: Bill Leonard on Classified Documents

    An interview with the former head of the Information Security Oversight Office

    By Clint Hendler

    From 2002 to 2007, Bill Leonard served as director of the Information Security Oversight Office, a division of the National Archives and Records Administration, which oversees all governmental classification activity. CJR spoke with Leonard about the history of classification, how information becomes declassified, and the problems of over-classification.



    Edited by Betwa Sharma
  5. May 13, 2009 11:26 AM

    Shadows and Light: Dan Metcalfe on Government Transparency

    Former Justice official talks about the Bush era and discretionary disclosure

    By Clint Hendler

    Daniel J. Metcalfe served as head of the Justice Department’s Office of Information and Privacy from 1981 to 2007. He now runs American University’s Collaboration on Government Secrecy at the Washington College of Law.

    CJR spoke with Metcalfe about the secrecy-obsessed Bush era and the role of guidance from attorneys general in implementing the Freedom of Information Act.

    Edited by Betwa Sharma