Kidnapped, killed and abandoned: this was the tragedy of Ecuadorian journalists from El Comercio massacred by the FARC

Silence. After the noise of the 16 between the date of the kidnapping and the confirmation of the murder of Javier Ortega, Paul Rivas and Efraín Segarra, a journalistic team of the Ecuadorian newspaper El Comercio on the border with Colombia, there has been only silence. The governments of both countries have not advanced in the investigation beyond two convictions and the absence of certainties has kept several doubts unanswered for four years.

Why were they murdered? What happened from the time of the kidnapping to the time of his murder? Why was his release frustrated? These are the questions that the organization Journalistas Sin Cadenas and Fundamedios points out that remain unanswered despite the four years of one of the most serious cases of attack on the press in Colombia and Ecuador.

Yadira Aguagallo, journalist and girlfriend of murdered photographer Paúl Rivas, says that “it must be said with name and surname: the case has already gone unpunished. Four years were enough to investigate, four years were enough to determine responsibilities, to at least be in a trial stage; however, the investigation that opened on 26/03/2018 is still in the investigation stage” is not the case.

She believes that at this time a systematic policy of silence, concealment of information and non-access to justice has been established in the Nos Falca 3 case, and only the victims' colleagues, the journalists themselves, have tried to promote the missing truth without the help of the states, as argued by the director of the Foundation For Freedom of the Press (Filp), Jonathan Bock in Colombia.

For the first months of 2018, there was a sharp escalation of violent actions on the border between Ecuador and Colombia. Bombs and harassment against the military, as well as attacks on civilians had been the weekly news in that area.

The situation had caught the attention of journalist Javier Ortega, who had traveled to the area several times to inform the country about the establishment of drug trafficking networks with the presence of Mexican cartels and dissidents from the FARC of Colombia.

He planned a new trip, to confirm information from a secret chat between the authorities and the criminals. Paul Rivas, a veteran photographer for the newspaper El Comercio, would accompany him and the driver would be Efraín Segarra, a 60-year-old man who had worked most of his life with journalists from the media and although he didn't work there, he looked like just another reporter with his own camera.

On Monday, March 26, they left at dawn. At approximately 9:00 in the morning, they crossed military control on their way to the town of Mataje, on the border, an area that was the victim of harassment and that by then was very dangerous.

The last record we have are the photographs of the credentials they made at military control and some testimonies of people who indicated where the bridge between Ecuador and Colombia was located. But his whereabouts were not known again.

Not until two days later, when the newspaper and relatives were already warning of his disappearance, that Ecuador's interior minister, César Navas, reported that the journalistic team had been kidnapped. He learned this through the secret chat between Major Alejandro Zaldumbie, according to the GK media, with the FARC dissidents, who sent him a photograph of the communicators and the driver, on March 26, threatening that if he did not receive a response “those gentlemen will disappear”.

According to Flip, “that same night on March 28, the then Ecuadorian prosecutor, Carlos Baca, went to the San Lorenzo naval base, located near the border with Colombia, to receive the abductees.”

The Ecuadorian government had received information of the release and that they could reach that point in the next few hours, but after five hours of waiting there was no sign. However, they denied actions to free the journalistic team.

It became known then that they were in the hands of the Oliver Sinisterra Front and the face of terror Walter Arízala, alias “Guacho”, the leader of that residual group that sought to regain control of drug trafficking in the country's south pacific without having accepted the Peace Agreement signed two years earlier. On this historic agreement, Ortega had written at the Tenth FARC Conference, whether there could be an escalation of violence.

On April 3, there was a proof of the journalists' survival, as well as of a violence that was expected to have been left behind: kidnapped in chains. The three of them were emaciated by the situation to which they had been subjected, with a chain and locks that attached them at the neck. “Although these images showed the anguish and difficult conditions in which the captors held journalists, none of the governments took effective humanitarian action for their release,” Flip said.

It wasn't until ten days after that test that President Lenin Moreno confirmed the murder of the three journalists. Since April 11, pamphlets and photographs of the murder of journalists in rural Nariño had been circulated, but that day, four years ago, the authorities confirmed this.

The necropsy indicates that they were shot dead while on the move, meaning that it is not known whether they were fleeing an apparent combat, although military activities in the area have been denied. However, the bodies were not found until June 21, when the identification process began.

Moreno ordered the removal of alias Guacho in 10 days, but it did not happen, nor did he fulfill the promise on the day of the confirmation of the murder, to declassify the proceedings to Cosepe and thus clarify the dialogues with dissent and the failed negotiation, but after four years he remains under reserve.

According to the Código Vidrio portal, the case has not passed the stage of previous investigation, prosecutors have been constantly changed because they have failed to forge a solid theory, while the press, in search of truth and without the tiredness promised since the day of the kidnapping, continues to raise doubts.

As journalist Mayra Prado puts it about the negotiations. Guacho called for the exchange of journalists for his men who were imprisoned in Ecuador. The IACHR revealed that three cell phones, from Diego Tobón and Patrocinio Corte Preciado and James Guajiboy, were found in those cells, from which up to 500 messages were issued on April 12, the same day they were confiscated.

“There is evidence that communication between FOS and the Ecuadorian State broke down days before the team was killed, but it is still uncertain whether it was the bureaucratic and judicial procedures in that country that thwarted it and, on the other hand, the real impact that the operations carried out by the Colombian military forces on the zone”, says the organization Journalists Without Borders.

On December 21, alias Guacho was discharged by the Colombian Army. In Colombia, only two convictions have been issued, against Jesús Vargas Cuajiboy, alias Reinel, and Gustavo Angulo Arboleda, alias Cherry, as responsible for the case issued in 2021, with no major contributions to the truth.

According to the newspaper El Comercio, the last statement by the Prosecutor's Office in this regard was in 2019 and from there it has been silence. The victims' families have called for the declassification of the records, but they are now distrustful of the future of the process. They believe that it could be archived and in that case they would go to the IACHR to ensure access to the truth denied while facing the absence of their loved ones.

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