Prominent Colombian journalists have warned that a string of death threats over their coverage of the country’s peace process reflects an “ugly and dangerous new atmosphere” in the country since the election of its new president.

María Jimena Duzán of the weekly magazine Semana was threatend on Twitter with a message urging she be “raped, spat upon, chopped up with a chainsaw and hung in the Plaza de Bolívar” – the main square in the capital, Bogotá.

Minutes after the threat was sent, the account which posted it and the IP address were closed.

Duzan said threats to her and other journalists have escalated since the election of conservative Iván Duque, a protégé of former president Álvaro Uribe – who viscerally opposes the peace deal with the Marxist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, the Farc. Duque, who will be sworn in on 7 August, has vowed to “overhaul” the peace accord.



Threats were also made against Jineth Bedoya Lima of El Tiempo newspaper, and Yolanda Ruiz, Jorge Espinosa and Juan Pablo Latorre of RCN radio.

Threats were also sent to La Silla Vacia – a website service reporting on the peace process brokered by the outgoing president Juan Manuel Santos.

Bedoya and Silla Vacia both received leaflets declaring them as “military objectives” and signed by the “Black Eagles” – a name often used by the country’s far-right paramilitary groups.

Duzán’s sister Silvia, also a journalist, was murdered by paramilitaries in 1990 while making a documentary for Britain’s Channel 4 on peasant organisations working for peace.

Her killers have never been brought to justice and her case became a symbol of the impunity which has characterized attacks on the country’s journalists and activists.

The threats come amid a string of attacks on social, indigenous and land rights leaders and efforts to restore land to rural families displaced by the rebels – or more commonly by paramilitaries working for large landowners and drug cartels. Since the peace accord was signed in August 2016, more than 150 activists and community leaders have been murdered.

“The paramilitaries feel emboldened by the change in government,” said Duzán.

Duque’s electoral victory was largely due to the support by Uribe, who led a fierce military campaign against the Farc, but has been dogged by allegations of human rights abuses and associations with paramilitaries. His brother Santiago is currently awaiting trial for allegedly running his own death squad.

Earlier this week, Uribe announced his resignation from the senate after he was called to testify in a supreme court investigation over allegations of witness tampering, but his influence remains formidable. It was largely thanks to his efforts that the peace deal was initially rejected by Colombian voters in a 2016 referendum.

“Uribe’s position against the core of the implentation of the peace process was part of the speeches that won the elections. Uribistas are stigmatizing the voices that back the peace process. It’s has become a sin to say that you are for the peace process. Automatically you become someone sinister,” Duzán said.

Duzán warned that without action by the Colombian authorities, the country risked a return to the dark days was racked by all-out war between guerrillas, cartels, paramilitaries and the state.

She said: “I want to see a stop to this now. We cannot go back to those days when my sister and so many, many others were murdered for what they did. Colombia has moved on since then – there’s no going back to that nightmare.”

Bedoya was herself targeted kidnapped and raped by paramilitaries in 2000, and then abducted by Farc rebels in 2003.

Her response the most recent threats was characteristically forthright: “My life is governed by only one thing: journalism. And that is what I will continue to do regardless of ideologies and political convictions,” she wrote on Twitter. “To those who threatened me yesterday: line up because the list is long.”

President-elect Duque responded to the threats on Twitter, saying: “We reject any type of threat to freedom of the press and expression. All our support and accompaniment to MJ Duzan, threats, attacks and violent deaths must end in Colombia.”

But the threats to reporters have come all too common in Colombia, according to the Foundation for the Freedom of the Press, which reported 59 cases of threats to local reporters during 2015, 90 during 2017 and 89 so far in 2018.