Absence of progress in the case of Nelson Carvajal: Colombia

Nelson Carvajal Carvajal
Journalist with Radio Sur radio station
Pitalito, Huila province, Colombia
Murdered on April 16, 1998

Detention pending trial:
• Fernando Bermúdez, 31 months in prison, acquitted (alleged mastermind)
• Víctor Félix Trujillo Calderón, acquitted (alleged perpetrator)
• Alfonso Quintero Alvarado, acquitted (alleged perpetrator)
• Carlos Augusto Rojas Ortiz, released (alleged joint perpetrator)
• Marcos Fidel Collazos, initially linked to the crime, released
• Ramiro Falla Cuenca, initially linked to the crime, released

IACHR
• June 21, 2002, case submitted to IACHR
• November 11, 2004, case accepted by IACHR for review, amicable agreement proposed (Case no. 12,462)
• December 14, 2005, IAPA and Colombian government representatives begin amicable agreement process (seven meetings between 2005 and 2009)
• May 13, 2009, IAPA reports to IACHR that amicable agreement effort ended as crime remains unsolved and no lessening in level of impunity
• October 26, 2009, Colombian government asks IACHR to conclude it has no international responsibility in the murder
• IAPA to request that in the absence of any progress the case go to the Inter-American Court

In Pitalito, a municipality in the Colombian province of Huila, a hired gunman shot seven times and killed a journalist who was also a teacher at a poor school as he was finishing work and was about to get on his motorcycle to go home.

He was Nelson Carvajal Carvajal, 37, a member of a large family that had to leave town one by one after threats and intimidation they faced in trying to have th murderers pay for their crime: three brothers, his widow and and two daughters went into exile.

Carvajal founded in Pitalito the Los Pinos school which today bears his name. He was the school’s principal at the time of his death. He began working as a journalist in 1986, when he conducted the news program “Momento Regional” (Regional Time) broadcast by Radio Sur radio station, an RCN Radio network affiliate. He soon became director of the programs “Mirador de la Semana” (A Look at the Week), “Amanecer en el Campo” (Dawn in the Countryside) and “Tribuna Médica” (Medical News). He practiced a journalism in defense of community interests and called for transparency in the actions of public officials.

On the day of the murder at the Los Pinos School one of his five sisters, who worked with him at the school, noted that he was nervous. She even recalls that at the end of the day he refused to take her home. “Nelson knew they were going to kill him,” she never tires of saying.

In his last Radio Sur newscast before his murder Carvajal made a number of denunciations of political corruption in the Pitalito municipality, particulalry against businessman and politician Fernando Bermúdez concerning the construction of some houses in a high-risk area using unsuitable materials. Also, according to colleagues and family members, Carvajal had decided to release some documents that would prove that Bermúdez was taking part in arms trafficking in the Huila and Putumayo provincial areas and his relationship with the leftwing FARC guerrillas.

The Colombian Attorney General’s Office accused Bermúdez of being the alleged mastermnd and Víctor Félix Trujillo Calderón and Alfonso Quintero Alvarado of having carried out the murder, but the Neiva Specialist Court acquitted them for lack of evidence against them. The ruling was upheld by the Neiva High Court.

Bermúdez sued for defamation all those those who had testified in the Carvajal case against him and sued the Colombian government for payment of 96 billion pesos as compensation for his having spent two years in prison.

In June 2002 the IAPA’s Rapid Response Unit began an investigation into the crime and the performance of the Attorney General’s Office, the lower court and the high court. Carvajal’s murder could not remain unpunished. The work of the IAPA and its RRU had already been successful in the Guzmán Quintero Torres and Amparo Leonor Jiménez cases, among others, whose killers were acquitted at the initial hearings but thanks to the RRU investigation an appeal was lodged and they were convicted by a higher court.

The RRU went to Pitalito on three occasions, it spoke with eye-witnesses, with family members, with colleagues. All were scared even though it had happened three years ago.

Inquiries were begun and a lot of leads and irregularities were discovered.

—The investigation into the journalist’s murder went from one prosecutor to another four times, which meant things moved slowly.

—During the investigation more than 20 persons gave testimony under the now abolished rule of their not being identified or being faceless witnesses. The identities of many of them were disclosed and several witnesses received threats, despite the fact that one of the rules in such proceedings is that it is up to the Colombian Attorney General’s Office to provide protection and assistance to victims, witnesses and others involved who require it, in order to ensure full and free legal rights and judicial cooperation.

—One of Carvajal’s sisters who has been cooperating with the Attorney General’s Office from Pitalito in the quest for evidence that would clarify what had occurred, received a number of death threats so she would stop helping in the gathering of evidence and on two occasions she escaped being killed, and that is why she took advantage of the Attorney General’s Office witness protection program as requested by the IAPA.

—The Attorney General’s Office merely looked at the evidence it had, without having taken up and investgiated the various theories about the journalist’s murder.

—Several witnesses who wanted to collaborate with the Attorney General’s Office and provide what they knew or thought about the journalist’s death were intimidated and could not be heard during the process.

—Due to the threats and the failed attempted murder of Carvajal’s sister and the persistent threatening phone calls, made both to his wife and his family that they stop calling for the investigation, his family members felt they were unable to take any civil action.

—One of the prosecutors in charge of the case, Carlos Hernando Esteves Amaya, asked Carvajal’s sister, Judith, to stop collaborating with the investigation, which he said did not need any further evidence.

—The court endorsed the version of the witness that the defense presented in the trial, Mario Rincón Contreras, despite his having four charges pending against him for fraud, racketeering and falsifying documents. Rincón blamed the FARC guerrillas for Carvajal’s murder. He was arrested in July 2002 in the town of Garzón, Huila province.

IAPA’s investigative work had three stages which were posted on the IAPA Web site in 2002, April 2003 and October 2006. But since June 21, 2002 the case was sent to the IACHR, which accepted it in November 2005 and called on the parties (the IAPA and the Colombian government) to a working session to consider an amicable agreement.

For four years from December 2005 in the company of IAPA Press Freedom Director Ricardo Trotti and the then IAPA Vice President Enrique Santos Calderón, seven meetings were held with the Colombian government, represented by the Attorney General’s Office, the Foreign Ministry, the Inspector General’s Office and the Judiciary High Council, in a bid to have the crime solved, an investigation be carried out into irregularities committed by judicial officials that had handled the case previously, and that support be given to the murdered journalist’s family, among other points.

It was a productive process but one full of intimidations that even went beyond the country’s borders to reach the IAPA offices in Miami. Diana Calderón, the RRU investigator, received threats that led her to make a formal statement to the Attorney General’s Office on May 7, 2007, spelling out:

1. The repeated phone calls that Fernando Bermúdez had made to the IAPA offices in Miami and Press Freedom Director Ricardo Trotti’s cel phone since April 2006, calling for corrections and warning that “he would not rest until his name was cleared.”

2. A phone call from a Bermúdez lawyer to Diana Calderón’s cel phone in which he asked her if she was the Diana Calderón who worked for the IAPA and that his client wanted to talk to her, to which she replied that she had nothing to say and they should contect the IAPA.

3. In April 2006 she received in her office a book by Mr. Bermúdez titled “Una propuesta de paz para Colombia” (A Proposal for Peace for Colombia), with a dedication to Diana Calderón Fernández.

4. The same day that Miriam Carvajal, a sister of the murdered journalist, reported that some anonymous notes, a kind of condolences, had come to her home there arrived at Diana Calderón’s office a photocopy depicting graves and crosses with the words “Sigan investigando y también descansarán” (Keep on investigating and you too will be resting).

5. The constant phone calls by Miriam to Diana to warn that she was scared for her, because in the area it was known she was the one behind the investigation.

From the moment that Colombian newspapers published the news that the IACHR had accepted the case, in Pitalito everyone was saying “They’re looking again for those who murdered the journalist.”

The threats not only affected the work of the RRU but the family was subjected to systematic intimidation – leaflets, trailing, phone calls, words such as “the next ones to die are you” were received day after day by the Carvajals in Pitalito, until Gloria Carvajal, along with the widow, Estela Bolaños, and the twins, left the country with the help of the Colombian government.

During the IAPA investigations and meetings with the government a witness, Pablo Emilio Bonilla Betancur, was killed on April 19, 2007. He was a key witness in the inquiries that were being carried out. The IAPA had on November 8, 2006 asked the Colombian authorities to ensure his protection.

But things went ahead with the work because amid all the difficulties for the first time it was achieved that the Attorney General’s Office reactivated the investigation, that the Inspector General’s Office and the Judiciary High Council would investigate and punish judicial officials who had committed irregularities during the prevous inquiries, that the Foreign Ministry would locate and offer aid to those family members who had had to flee the country, that the Interior Ministry would give protection to Diana Calderón, and in this way ensure the continuity of unfettered reporting and investigation. And even that the Supreme Court would review a case that had already been tried and because of the new evidence and anomolies in the proceedings could be reopened in order to bring the guilty to justice.

The reasons to follow up the case are many: On August 26, 2008 the arrest was made of Carlos Augusto Rojas Ortiz, president of the Huila City Council, as alleged joint perpetrator of the murder. On the same date the Attorney General’s Office asked the Inspector General’s Office to have the Supreme Court “review the decision taken by the Neiva Specialist Court which on December 15, 2000 acquitted Fernando Bermúdez Ardila, former member of the Pitalito Council, and Ramiro Falla, former mayor of the same city.”

The arguments: New evidence in the Bermúdez and Falla cases and proven anomolies in the investigation and legal proceedings which resulted in their acquittal.

Carlos Arturo Rojas Ortiz was later released from jail and the Supreme Court’s Criminal Division denied the appeal, but the investigation continues.

The family members are following the case each week and the IAPA with its RRU is committed to not leaving them on their own until the guilty are behind bars.