Colombian Journalist Looks Forward to as Year as IWMF Elizabeth Neuffer Fellow
By Peggy Simpson
Jenny Manrique covered the villages where Colombia’s narco-traffickers intimidate and co-opt the locals in order to assure smooth exit paths for their drugs. She says she covered trauma almost nonstop for years, including debriefing kidnap victims and people who had been brutalized by the competing left-wing guerrilla group FARC (the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) and the state-backed paramilitary groups.
She won an award as the best journalist in Bucaramanga in 2004, from the magazine La ponzona Bucara, for getting the gory details, the horrific stories from the survivors. And then a fellowship from the Dart Center for Journalism at the University of Washington changed her life and changed the way she interviewed victims.
“When you respect their pain,” she said, “and show their resilience, the reporter enables the person to say ‘I’m more than a victim. I’m a survivor.’”
Manrique, 27, has been awarded the 2008-09 Elizabeth Neuffer Fellowship from the International Women's Media Foundation. The annual fellowship gives a woman journalist the opportunity to focus exclusively on human rights journalism and social justice issues. Manrique will spend the nine months as a research associate in residence at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Center for International Studies. She will also have access to the Boston Globe and New York Times.
Manrique excelled at math in high school, and her parents expected her to be an engineer. She graduated from high school at 15, took a year off, and stumbled into a university course that aimed to train journalists to cover peace in conflict situations.
She never looked back after becoming a reporter, and she became increasingly engaged in how to communicate to Colombians what was happening at a time when potent forces “were very creative…in telling lies to society.”
Manrique learned the ropes in one of the country’s largest daily newspapers, El Espectador, where she starting in 2001 as part of a “peace unit” covering the courts and the police, as well as kidnapping, drug trafficking and armed conflict. She said the newspaper was very conservative and committed to civil society, instilling in her a belief she still has: “that we journalists have to be on the side of the civilian population.”
Nearly a year after joining El Espectator, Manrique moved away from the relative safety of the capital to a region where villagers were caught up in the turf war between FARC guerrillas, the paramilitary and the state.
At first, she worked for the TV Telepais news program in Bucaramanga. By September 2002, she had switched to a regional newspaper, Vanguardia Liberal, in the same city, coordinating the national section and editing the Sunday section with a staff of three.
It was there that Manrique began writing about armed conflict, human rights, and kidnapping and torture victims. She said she didn’t want to stay in the newsroom, writing stories from official sources, and opted instead “to go out in the country, where the sources are.”
She talked to locals who had first-hand exposure to the crimes and who knew whether the corpses presented on TV by Colombian troops were combatants, as the military said, or actually were civilians who had been executed.
Manrique wrote about the squeeze play put on villagers by the competing paramilitaries and guerrilla forces who were “infiltrating into neighborhoods, pretending to be the law in poor neighborhoods. These are unprotected populations so these [outside] people get control. It’s hard to even find a journalist. “
She learned invaluable information about how narco-traffickers got a grip on people in the countryside in order to keep open channels to sell drugs. She also faced new hazards. Manrique was warned that she saw too much and wrote too much, And she received death threats. By March 2006, it was clear that being “imbedded” into the villages had gotten the attention of the paramilitary officials controlling the villages. “These people know I am there. And people were threatening my sources. It was hard to do coverage. Your protection was not good enough all the time,” she said.
She concluded she was too vulnerable to keep on reporting in-country. She moved to Buenos Aires and freelanced on social justice issues for Noticias Aliadas, a bimonthly Peruvian news magazine. She also earned a master’s degree in international affairs from Buenos Aires University.
Then, in November 2006, Manrique became the first Latin American journalist to win the Dart fellowship for “trauma training.” What she learned totally changed her reporting. (We’ve already said this above, so this has to be references slightly differently.
“I had been covering trauma all my life,” she said, including doing interviews with people who had spent years as hostages and, when freed, faced more trauma from reporters asking all about it.
Manrique was good at these interviews, too. She, as did other journalists, often asked “what was the worst day of your captivity?” The Dart fellowship made her realize that these questions exacerbated the awful memories.
When she returned to South America and reporting, she put in place what she had learned. A former Colombian congresswoman had been freed as a hostage. Journalists battled to talk to her, to ask those “worst moment” questions. Manrique and her colleagues from Sao Paolo waited to get an exclusive with her.
“We decided we were not going to ask anything about the ‘worst thing.’ We were going to ask about how they coped, about their recovery.
“We tried to treat victims and survivors in a constructive way. They are vulnerable people so why go there and put them in a more horrible way. I learned that from Dart. …You can have a conversation where you are not asking about the pain but about the recovery.”
Nothing has made her sanguine about the global threats posed by drug trafficking. “Without drug trafficking, a peace process might be possible. But if there is (continued) strong financing from drugs, you’re fooling yourself if you think they are going to leave the money and leave the weapons.” And with the U.S. market for drugs so huge, “people are going to produce more in Colombia.”
When she returned to Colombia in January 2008, after her two-year exile, she said she found “a country totally polarized, where the big media networks have taken sides with those in power.” That left much of the civilian population in the lurch. “I returned to find a devastating monopoly on one of the most valued goods of the society: information.”
During her Neuffer Fellowship, Manrique wants to improve her skills as a writer and as a researcher and write a book on Colombian refuges in Latin America.
She also plans to investigate the sources of guns provided to the narco-traffickers. She says that tens of thousands of Colombian farmers have been displaced by paramilitary groups taking over their villages. She wants to investigate reports that U.S. corporations help finance the paramilitary groups. The multinationals may pay fines in the United States “but the victims don’t have any reparations.” She said that “paramilitary forces are there, awaiting trials. But they are not paying for their crimes here. It’s not fair.”
Peggy Simpson is a freelance writer based in Washington, D.C.