A Colombian radio journalist and former mayor was shot and killed Thursday after being lured from his office in the city of Dosquebradas, approximately 170 kilometers southeast of Bogotá.
A regional police commander told local media that Argemiro Cárdenas Agudelo, 56, had received a phone call early Thursday afternoon while working inside Metro Radio, which he also owned. Cárdenas left the building and was heading towards what the police commander believed was a rendezvous appointed by the unknown caller when he was ambushed.
According to media reports, Cárdenas died immediately after being shot four times by a single gunman, who was said to have escaped on foot.
Local journalists told the Colombian Press Freedom Foundation (FLIP), that Cárdenas was close to retiring and did not appear to have been investigating any potentially controversial themes at the time of his murder.
FLIP said that in addition to his journalistic work, Cárdenas had been a local leader of Colombia’s left-leaning Liberal Party and had served as Dosquebradas mayor in the late 1990s. The city on Thursday declared three days of mourning and ordered flags to be flown at half-staff, according to its official website.
In a statement condemning the killing, Colombia’s Interior Minister, Germán Vargas Lleras, noted that Cárdenas, whom Vargas Lleras said he had known personally, had not requested the security measures that the Colombian government offers to journalists.
Had the journalist reported threats to his safety, the minister said, “we would have provided him with protective measures, as we have already done in other cases.” (FLIP said 97 journalists benefited from such protection in 2011.)
He added: “This is an unfortunate event and I hope that the National Police turns this into a priority case that will lead to the capture of those responsible and set an example precedent for similar cases.”
IPI Executive Director Alison Bethel McKenzie said: “We extend our deepest condolences to the family and colleagues of Argemiro Cárdenas Agudelo. While Colombia has made significant strides in terms of protecting the media from violence, it must continue to remain vigilant—regional journalists in particular are still acutely vulnerable to threatening and aggressive behavior resulting from their reporting.”
An IPI special investigation last month found that regional and local journalists are suffering disproportionately in Latin America’s growing press-freedom crisis.
Bethel McKenzie continued: “Mr. Cárdenas’s murder must be investigated for any links to his work as a journalist and those responsible must be apprehended and brought to justice.”
According to IPI’s Death Watch, 80 journalists have been killed in Colombia since 1997, with 53 of those occurring between 1998 and 2003. The number of annual deaths has since steadily decreased: 1 journalist was killed in 2011 and the Cárdenas is the first in 2012.
In its 2011 annual report, however, FLIP said it had recorded a “significant increase” in threats toward journalists compared to the past several years and warned of a growing “environment of established censorship”.
Earlier this month, a Colombian provincial court upheld the defamation conviction of a journalist sentenced last October to more than a year and a half in prison.
