It also welcomes progress in case involving murder of journalist Jaime Garzón

The Inter American Press Association (IAPA) expressed approval of a decision by the Colombian Attorney General’s Office to consider the 1986 murder of journalist Guillermo Cano Isaza a “crime against humanity” and urged authorities to take the same action in other unpunished crimes against journalists.

On July 2 the Attorney General’s Office declared that the murder of Cano, editor of the Bogotá newspaper El Espectador, “has the features of a crime against humanity” on the grounds that the murder was part of a systematic plan by the Medellín drug cartel, headed by Pablo Escobar. The act exempts the case from any statute of limitations

IAPA President Alejandro Aguirre, editor of the Miami, Florida, Spanish-language newspaper Diario Las Américas, declared, “We are delighted with this decision, but we wonder whether that same reasoning could be applied to numerous other crimes of the time that were committed to silence critical voices by the same perpetrators and under the same circumstances.”

The IAPA in 1997 submitted to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) the case file containing investigative reporting into the December 17, 1986 murder of Cano in Bogotá. Cano was riding in his van on a Bogotá street when two hired gunmen riding a motorcycle drove up and shot him at point-blank range.

The current decision by the Attorney General’s Office prevents legal proceedings against murderers ending or being dropped after 20 years as currently occurs under Colombia’s criminal law. Following Cano’s murder, among other violent acts, the family lawyer was killed in addition to judges and prosecutors; two of his children had to leave the country, and the offices of El Espectador in Bogotá were attacked with explosives.

In October 1995 Luis Carlos Molina Yepes, a member of the Pablo Escobar cartel in Medellín, was sentenced in abstentia to 16 years and six months in prison. He was arrested in February 1997, and in September 2004 the only person convicted of the murder of Cano regained his freedom after serving just six years behind bars – three-fifths of his sentence.

Jaime Garzón case

The IAPA also welcomed the announcement last week by Acting Colombian Attorney General Guillermo Mendoza Diago that he had ordered the preventive detention of the former assistant director of the State Security Administrative Department (DAS), José Miguel Narváez, as the alleged mastermind behind the murder of Jaime Garzón n 1999.

Robert Rivard, IAPA Committee on Freedom of the Press and Information Chairman and managing editor of the san Antonio Express-News, stated “The decision of the Attorney General’s Office is good news; it indicates there will be a solution to the Garzón murder and in some measure will console his family and colleagues and send a message to those who resort to violence that their crimes will not go unpunished.”

Mendoza Diago explained that the action was taken after statements by a number of former paramilitaries, including Jorge Iván Laverde, a.k.a. “El Iguano,” who declared that the former public official chose paramilitary chief Carlos Castaño Gil to execute the details.

Another former paramilitary chief, Diego Fernando Murillo, a.k.a. “Don Berna,” confirmed to the Attorney General’s Office that Castaño ordered Garzón’s killing and used hired gunmen from the La Terraza gang of criminals in Medellín to carry out the plot.

Narvaéz, deputy chief of intelligence in 2005, is in custody for his alleged responsibility in the unlawful spying on and wiretapping of judges, journalists and political opposition members.

Garzón, a journalist and commentator for the Bogotá radio network Radionet and a humorist for Caracol TV, was murdered in Bogota on August 13, 1999.