Colombia’s Attorney General Viviane Morales Hoyos has announced that she will beef up the anti-journalist crimes unit so as to expedite investigations into threats that members of the press have received in that South American nation. 

During 2010 the Attorney General’s Office recorded 50 threats to journalists in Colombia, and the investigations into them “have shown no kind of progress,” Morales Hoyos admitted. 

Given this situation, the Attorney General has reported a strengthening of the department for crimes against journalists of the National Human Rights and International Humanitarian Law Unit, which will handle all these cases that are currently dealt with independently by each province’s State Attorney’s Office. 

According to Morales Hoyos it is not only death that silences news men and women, but also the threats that “imply a serious risk for freedom of information, and if there is no free press neither is there democracy.” 

Figures compiled by the Attorney General’s Office show that under the old system there were 13 convictions on charges of murder of journalists, while currently under the Human Rights Unit there are two cases under way.