A Reporter on the Lam in Latin America

Gonzalo Guillén is on the lam. His wife and son are in hiding.

"I got a call at my home ... a guy said, 'We can kill you,'" Guillén recalls from Lima, Peru, where he's been laying low for five days. "Then the threats started coming fast. Five calls at my home, e-mails, 24 death threats in 48 hours. I was afraid for me, for my family. I left the country in a sprint."

Sound like a spy thriller?

It ain't.

Guillén has for seven years been a reporter for Miami's El Nuevo Herald, one of America's top Spanish-language publications. He's one of two Colombian journalists whom President Uribe has dumped on in the past two weeks. Daniel Coronell, a columnist for the well-known magazine Semana, also went abroad after the president publicly called him "a coward, a liar, a swine, and a professional slanderer." In this South American country, where vigilante justice rules, insults can mean bloodshed.

"Outrageous," comments Joel Simon of New York's Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). "President Uribe knows that to say this kind of thing opens the doors for [thugs] to potentially kill."

Venezuela and Cuba got most of the ink and opprobrium at last weekend's meeting of Latin American journalists in Miami. News of Hugo Chávez's closing an opposition TV station in Caracas, as well as restrictions on reporters and jailing of critics in Havana, was lapped up like milk by a gatito.

But it's even more difficult to report the truth in Colombia, which will receive $756 million in U.S. foreign aid this year. At least 39 journalists have been whacked for doing their jobs there in the past 15 years. These days, many reporters avoid criticizing the government. Why risk being murdered? More than 3000 cases of self-censorship were recently documented in the country.

The heart of the Colombian problem is a longstanding civil war — as well as Uribe's ties to paramilitaries and drug lords. This might sound familiar. Al Gore refused to come to Miami in April to share the stage with Uribe because the Nobel Prize winner found reports of the Colombian president's violent rep "troubling."

There's no question Uribe is a jerk. In 1980, when only 27 years old, he took over the Colombian ministry of aviation. Traffickers were flying out cocaine by the ton back then. Uribe probably helped them. Indeed his aviation deputy, César Villegas, was later sentenced to five years in prison for ties with the narcotics trade. Even Uribe's successor in the ministry, Rodrigo Lara, called the now-Colombian prez negligent with regard to drug flights.

In 1983, when left-wing rebels killed Uribe's father and wounded his brother, he tried to take a helicopter that belonged to coke kingpin Pablo Escobar to the site. He claimed not to know it was Escobar's. (Coronell, who could not be reached to discuss this, posted photos of the copter with a recent column about Uribe on the Semana Web site.)

Uribe would become mayor of Medillín and then climb to the presidency. He was identified in a 1991 U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency report — later disavowed by the government — as "a close personal friend" of Escobar's. Colombian investigators also claimed right-wing wackos stayed at his ranch and that Uribe had many other paramilitary ties.

Indeed, besides Gore, reporters in and outside Colombia have continued to question Uribe. And the president has continued to both lash out at them and react with paranoia. A few examples:

• In 1994, when author Simon Strong questioned the Colombian president in a restaurant, he jumped up, ran into a crowd of bodyguards, and screamed, "I am honest!"

• In 2002, he accused Newsweek reporter Joe Contreras of trying to "slander" and "smear" him.

• This past spring, Ignacio Gómez, director of investigations for Noticias Uno, a TV news program, received threats and was confronted by a gang of six men after he criticized Uribe. He barely escaped. "I prefer not to think who sent them," he says.

• In April, speaking before journalists from around the world at the Ritz-Carlton in Coconut Grove, Uribe castigated Guillén's colleague, El Nuevo Herald investigative reporter Gerardo Reyes, for asking about the paramilitary ties.

The scene was otherworldly weird, Reyes says — a president who follows the press too closely. "He began reciting each story I had written," Reyes recalls. "He was furious, and he was looking right at me. Everyone turned around to look. It was very uncomfortable."

Guillén's might be the most telling case, though. The 55-year-old has worked more than three decades as a journalist for some of South America's largest and most prestigious publications, including Colombia's El Tiempo and Ecuador's El Universo.