By chance, Colombian journalist Ricardo Calderón discovered that two hitmen had been hired to kill him for 20 million pesos, about $ 6,000. An old source told him what he had heard in error and managed to meet with the men who admitted the attempted murder and then disappeared. He had already lived another similar case of which he was alerted in time. All in the same year and for a journalistic investigation. He is alive, as Colombian religious culture points out, for "the good of God."
In a dangerous country for journalists, Calderón is one of the most threatened. He has uncovered scandals such as the Chuzados del DAS , about illegal listening by the secret police during the Government of Álvaro Uribe; parapolitics, as the relations between paramilitaries and politicians are named; o Tolemaida Resort , on the privileges of imprisonment of military personnel accused of human rights violations. Now he won the King of Spain Award with the reports Operation Silence and Black Sheep , published in the Semana Magazine , where he is director of research. A work of more than nine months that included several fronts on alleged corruption, interceptions and extrajudicial executions committed by uniformed officers.
Despite putting military officers and corrupt public officials on the ropes, Calderón is relatively unknown in Colombia, almost a myth. In the magazine there is a stir and they ask if it is true that they will be allowed to interview, take photos. He has cultivated a low profile and flees to visibility. “I have the conviction that complaints and stories are more important than who makes them. Anonymity has also allowed me to protect my sources, ”he says in an interview with EL PAÍS. He is concerned about the reflectors he has now, but he believes that the award is a stimulus to the persecution. “It is the recognition of a job that many people believe is in danger of extinction and this demonstrates the opposite, it is a claim to this type of journalism, confirms that it is worth betting on these types of stories. It shows that journalism is not dead, ”he adds and says with laughter that he wants the euphoria of the prize to pass quickly and he can“ go back to the cave ”, to his longed for anonymity.
Calderón's cave is an office full of folders, several cell phones and upholstered walls with huge flipcharts titled 'telephone links' in which the connections between characters and their numbers are shown. “The phones never lie,” says the journalist, who always talks in plural about the work and usually ends the sentences with a final sound, a jup, as if he wanted to round them up or give them more strength.
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He says that 2019 was one of his toughest years. He received a dozen funeral votes and put a gravestone in his car to silence him, his work team and the sources. They threatened his father, sister and his little niece of just six years. He has been chased in cars and communications have been intervened, as denounced in his last job Chuzadas without barracks , about illegal interceptions made from military bases. The scandal would have forced the withdrawal of former Army Chief Nicacio Martínez, although it was officially said that it was for personal reasons.
“I don't know how many suffrages [offerings] they have sent me in life, but that always gets out of control. You never get used to it and the tombstone was a very strong message, ”says Calderón. In 2013 he was attacked, also for complaints about the military. And yet, this time, he says, it has been more intense, different.
The investigation began at the end of 2018, when he and his team denounced a case of alleged corruption in the general command of the military forces for the use of expenses reserved for purchases of equipment to hack and diversion to personal matters. After they located old sources, they corroborated with audios and videos to publish another similar story. And then threats began to come to the informants and their families. That, however, indicated that they were on the right track. But the intimidations came to the team's journalists. And then, aggressions. “A driver was beaten almost to death to send a message to a person they thought was our source and was not. They made a video and sent it to us saying: this is what will happen to them. It was terrible because people began to fall who had nothing to do with anything, ”says Calderón, who moved to cities near Bogotá to mislead his persecutors and do interviews in different places.
The reporter did not stop. “Even if I was afraid I had to keep going. There was a commitment to the team and the sources. That he left is just what the threat was looking for. I thought, if we have been so many months and people are taking risks we cannot stop. ” The following work revealed the hunt against the sources and then the attacks increased. For him, a tanning in threats, unlike other investigations this time could not identify where the danger came from. “It was not a single structure, they were four groups that acted independently. During the journalistic work of the DAS, which took us two years, there was a head and we knew who were on top of us. With Tolemaida we were also clear. Here were many fronts. It was to add in a single job what we had done over 10 years of isolated research, ”he adds.
Although then came the strongest follow-ups against him and his family, and the discovery of the attempt to assassinate him. “Knowing about the hitmen was a stroke of luck. An old source, from other subjects, contacts me and tells me: 'Look, these two boys hired them to kill you. ” However, the journalist admits that after knowing this information they had no one to turn to. In the Prosecutor's Office the investigations were suspended, they could not alert the Police to avoid a confrontation between the two forces and they never called them. “It was up to the good of God, to bless us and go forward. Nor did anyone from the institution or the Government call us. ”
Calderón does not deny that he has felt and feels fear, but fear has become an engine to continue investigating. “I don't like bulls, but it's like in the bullfights that bite and keep going. Colombia seems to me to be the best country in the world and I never think of going here or because they shoot me. What they do with threats is to encourage us to do much more journalism. ”