Hollman Morris is one of the best investigative journalists in Colombia. Last night on his program TV program he announced it was going off the air. Morris had a program called "Contravia" or "Wrong Way" (as in a one-way street).
There was no further explanation but it smacks of a J.J. Rendon/Santos threat. Morris received numerous death threats after JM Santos claimed Morris was connected to the FARC. This was only a little over a year ago, in Feb. 2009.
So in little over two/three months, the prestigious mass-circulation magazine CAMBIO, which broke the multi-million dollar Agro-Industry scandal, was banned from political reporting.
Now Morris is off the air. (Think of Morris as K. Olbermann or Rachael M. and CAMBIO magazine as the TIME of Colombia.) This comes with only two weeks before the election.
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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 para-military 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’s 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, Contravía’s reporting prompted a denunciation by the government: 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 ...
http://www.centerforinvestigativereporting.org/articles/colombianjournaliststrackguerrillawaroncontrav%C3%ADa