Colombian Journalist Ricardo Calderón Survives Assassination Attempt

Ricardo Calderón, a journalist with the Colombian magazine Semana, was shot at five times this Wednesday while traveling in a car between Bogotá and the city of Ibagué. Calderón, 41, managed to escape unscathed. The director of Semana, Alejandro Santos, said in an interview with Blu Radio that Calderón had been researching a story pertaining to the nation's military and suggested that the attempt was not the action of a few loose hit men but rather a "much more delicate matter".

Calderón said that some time after he realized he was being followed, two men approached his car, called him by his name and started shooting. Police found casings corresponding to a .38-caliber firearm on the scene.

Alejandro Santos told the radio program that around 7 p.m. on Wednesday, Calderón was returning from researching an article when a car with tinted windows pulled up beside him. Two men got out and began shooting. Calderón was able to seek cover behind his car and threw himself into a nearby ditch.

In 2011, Calderón created a national firestorm with a report on the privileges enjoyed by convicts in the Tolemaida military prison, the principal place for members of the Colombian military. "For years," the report read, "the flagship prison of the Armed Forces, the Tolemaida Centro de Reclusión Militar (CRM) has seemed more like a leisure club than a high-security prison. Semana discovered that many of the 269 officers, petty officers, and soldiers paying for homicides, massacres, torture and kidnapping came and went as if in their own house, had businesses inside and outside of the prison and live not in cells but in cabanas...many of them are still active and receive wages and other benefits...there are even prisoners who take vacations in San Andrés and Cartagena."

A second article published in early April of this year revealed that despite the controversy stirred up by the first article, "members of the military sentenced to more than 30 years go shopping in Bogotá, go out to parties and do business".

Colombian president Juan Manuel Santos and minister of the interior Fernando Carrillo condemned the act. Police indicated that the case would be a "number one priority" for investigators.

General Alejandro Navas, commander of the Armed Forces, would not rule out the possibility that reports denouncing the military prison had anything to do with the attempt. "The reports that this warrior of journalism who we know and appreciate was doing have to be taken into account," he said.