Prominent Colombian journalists have warned that a string of death threats over their coverage of the country’s peace process reflects an ugly and dangerous new atmosphere in the country since the election of its new president. María Jimena Duzán of the weekly magazine Semana was threatened on Twitter with a message urging she will be “raped, spat upon, chopped up with a chainsaw and hung in the Plaza de Bolívar” – the main square in the capital, Bogotá. Minutes after the threat was sent, the account which posted it and the IP address was closed. Duzan said threats to her and other journalists have escalated since the election of conservative Iván Duque, a protégé of former president Álvaro Uribe – who viscerally opposes the peace deal with the Marxist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, the FARC. Duque has vowed to “overhaul” the peace accord. 

Threats were also made against Jineth Bedoya Lima of El Tiempo newspaper, and Yolanda Ruiz, Jorge Espinosa and Juan Pablo Latorre of RCN radio and also to La Silla Vacia – a website service reporting on the peace process brokered by the outgoing president Juan Manuel Santos. Bedoya and Silla Vacia both received leaflets declaring them as “military objectives” and signed by the “Black Eagles” – a name often used by the country’s far-right paramilitary groups. Duzán’s sister Silvia, also a journalist, was murdered by paramilitaries in 1990 while making a documentary for Britain’s Channel 4 on peasant organizations working for peace. Her killers have never been brought to justice and her case became a symbol of the impunity which has characterized attacks on the country’s journalists and activists.

The threats come amid a string of attacks on social, indigenous and land rights leaders and efforts to restore the land to rural families displaced by the rebels – or more commonly by paramilitaries working for large landowners and drug cartels. Since the peace accord was signed in August 2016, more than 150 activists and community leaders have been murdered. President-elect Duque responded to the threats on Twitter, saying: “We reject any type of threat to freedom of the press and expression. All our support and accompaniment to MJ Duzan, threats, attacks and violent deaths must end in Colombia.” But the threats to reporters have come all too common in Colombia, according to the Foundation for the Freedom of the Press, which reported 59 cases of threats to local reporters during 2015, 90 during 2017 and 89 so far in 2018.