By Roque Planas, The Huffington Post
News Corp. plans to welcome the newest member to its board of
directors on Tuesday: the former president of Colombia, Alvaro Uribe.
For Rupert Murdoch's media conglomerate, still reeling from a phone
hacking scandal, Uribe is an odd choice, many journalists and press
advocates say. Under Uribe's command, Colombia's intelligence service
became mired in an illegal wiretapping scandal. Several ex-intelligence
agents and former aides to Uribe
now face criminal charges or investigations
from the public prosecutor’s office, which accuses them of illegally
spying on Supreme Court justices, journalists and human rights
activists. Uribe, a controversial conservative leader, himself lashed
out at journalists he perceived as critical during his two-term
presidency from 2002 to 2010.
“It’s ironic that someone who has such an adversarial relationship
with the press would be elected to the board of a media company,”
Carlos Lauria, senior Americas program coordinator of the Committee to
Protect Journalists, told The Huffington Post. “His accusations
endangered the lives of local reporters.”
News Corp. declined to comment on Uribe's appointment or his
relationship with the press. The company did share a written statement
submitted to the Securities and Exchange Commission in September,
describing Uribe as a potential addition to the board with meaningful
international political experience. News Corp. contacted a spokesperson
for Uribe on behalf of The Huffington Post, who did not respond to
requests for comment.
Uribe, a highly popular political figure, is credited with restoring
security to Colombia by dealing a near-fatal blow to the FARC, Latin
America’s longest-lasting insurgent group. Formed in 1964, the
Marxist rebels
aimed to overthrow the Colombian government. The tactics they adopted,
such as kidnapping hostages for years at a time and using the drug
trade to finance operations, have blackened the group's name. The
United States classifies the FARC as a terrorist organization.
Uribe left office in 2010 with an
approval rating of 80 percent, according to Gallup.
But Uribe also polarized the country. Approaching his goal of
defeating the FARC with zeal that for some bordered on the messianic,
Uribe publicly painted certain journalists, social activists and human
rights defenders as collaborators with leftwing terrorism when they
criticized his policies.
The environment Uribe created made
covering the Colombian government's half-century-old conflict even more
dangerous, says reporter Hollman Morris, an investigative journalist
and
2011 Harvard Nieman Fellow.
Morris and his brother Juan Pablo Morris took cameras into the
Colombian countryside during the years under Uribe to document
atrocities.
That work involved interviewing members of the FARC -- something that infuriated Uribe. In 2009,
Uribe publicly accused Morris of using journalism to be a “permissive accomplice of terrorism." Morris had interviewed four hostages in FARC captivity.
Human Rights Watch and the Committee to Protect Journalists
hammered Uribe in a statement, saying the baseless accusations endangered Morris’ life by opening him up to retaliatory violence.
“Every report we did, we knew we were going to be threatened,”
Morris told The Huffington Post. “Uribe made us into enemies of the
country.”
The former president repeatedly lobbed similar accusations at other journalists, activists and union leaders,
according to Human Rights Watch. He has continued the pattern since leaving office.
In 2010, senior vice president and executive news director for
Univision Daniel Coronell, then a columnist for Semana, a Colombian
news magazine, sued Uribe for slander after being accused of ties to
organized crime in a series of tweets. Coronell had penned a column
implicating Uribe’s sons in shady business dealings (they denied wrongdoing).
In August,
Uribe accused Washington Post correspondent Juan Forero of being a “great sympathizer of the FARC” who had “defamed” his administration with a
report on the illegal actions of the Colombia’s intelligence service, the Department of Administrative Security (DAS).
The Committee to Project Journalists’ Lauria calls the intelligence
service’s abuses one of the “worst threats to journalism” during the
Uribe administration. The DAS was like the CIA, FBI and U.S. Secret
Service rolled into one, answering directly to the president.
Semana reported in 2009 that the DAS had illegally wiretapped and
spied upon Colombian Supreme Court justices, journalists and other
government critics. Panicked
DAS agents fearing for their jobs sold off classified material
to guerrillas, drug traffickers and foreign governments when the
incoming administration of President Juan Manuel Santos announced two
years later that it would
close the agency down, Semana reported.
But DAS didn’t just illegally tap journalists’ phones -- it also threatened them with death, according to Semana.
Semana obtained
a
DAS manual from the public prosecutor's office in 2009 reportedly
outlining how to make a threatening phone call to Claudia Duque, an
independent journalist who reported that the DAS had interfered with an
investigation into the murder of Jaime Garzón -- a popular political
humorist and television journalist comparable to Jon Stewart. Semana
reported that Duque’s name, phone number and email appear on the top of
the manual, which instructs the agent making the call not to stutter
and to keep it under 49 seconds.
Duque received the call on Nov. 17, 2004, according to Semana.
“We tried to tell you in every way we could. Now not even armored
cars or lousy police reports will help you. We have no choice but to go
after what you most love," the DAS agent said, going on to say he would
rape Duque’s 10-year-old girl, according to Semana. “Your daughter is
going to suffer. We’re going to burn her alive. We’re going to scatter
her fingers around the house.”
Uribe's relationship with the press makes him a potentially
eyebrow-raising addition to the News Corp. board. The company’s
reputation was gravely damaged last year when it was reported that its
London tabloid News of the World had culled its scoops for years by
illegally hacking the voicemails of celebrities, an underage murder
victim and the relatives of soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The revelation led to 50 arrests, torpedoed News Corp.’s $12 billion
bid to take over British Sky Broadcasting and prompted criminal charges
against eight of the defunct paper’s editors and journalists.
“It’s a funny thing for two people with illegal wiretaps in their
recent past to be getting together,” Adam Isacson of the Washington
Office on Latin America said in a telephone interview, referring to
Uribe and Murdoch, News Corp.'s CEO. The Washington Office on Latin
America is an advocacy organization that promotes human rights.
News Corp.'s board is asking its shareholders to elect Uribe to the
board of directors at the group's annual meeting in Los Angeles on
Tuesday. The move could again cast light on a board that some
News Corp. shareholders wanted to sue, alleging it had failed to provide the oversight needed to stop the U.K. phone hacking scandal from occurring.
A spokesman for News Corp. declined to comment on Uribe’s nomination to the board, but
forwarded a proxy statement the company shared with investors and the SEC on Sept. 4, which says:
Mr. Uribe brings to the Board strong leadership skills
gained from his distinguished political career and service as President
of Colombia. He offers the Board a valuable international perspective
on political and governmental matters.
Uribe’s defenders point out that the Colombian courts haven’t
charged him with wrongdoing in the DAS scandal, and no evidence
demonstrates that Uribe gave direct orders to follow journalists, tap
their telephones or threaten them with death.
“No smoking gun has emerged,” said Isacson of the Washington Office
on Latin America. The DAS’s flagrant illegality may owe to a few
overzealous leaders who overstepped their bounds in pursuit of the
FARC, he added.
But for political scientist Claudia Lopez, whose research helped
uncover links between Colombian Congress members and rightwing
paramilitary groups, there’s no need for direct evidence.
“To me it seems like inverted logic,” Lopez told The Huffington
Post. “The DAS is an institution that answers directly to the
presidency. It should be assumed that Uribe was giving the orders.”
Lopez viewed Uribe’s nomination to the board of News Corp. as
ironic, but drew a distinction between the media company and the DAS.
“News Corp., as far as I know, never threatened anyone with death,”
Lopez said. “Institutions that answered directly to Alvaro Uribe did.”