(FLIP/IFEX) – On 16 October 2002, police officers at Palonegro Airport in Bucaramanga (Santander), in north-eastern Colombia, assaulted Javier Orlando Mantilla, a journalist with Productores de Television (PTV) and Colmundo Radio, and PTV camera operator Edison Figueroa Benítez. The incident occurred as the journalists were preparing to cover the Atlético Bucaramanga soccer team’s trip to […]
(FLIP/IFEX) – On 16 October 2002, police officers at Palonegro Airport in Bucaramanga
(Santander), in north-eastern Colombia, assaulted Javier Orlando Mantilla, a journalist with Productores de Television (PTV) and Colmundo Radio, and PTV camera operator Edison Figueroa Benítez. The incident occurred as the journalists were preparing to cover the Atlético Bucaramanga soccer team’s trip to Medellín.
Mantilla and Figueroa arrived at the airport at 1:15 p.m. (local time). The lieutenant in charge of the airport police station, named Guevara, asked them if they were going to film inside the airport, to which the journalists responded that they would not. “Our intention was only to take some footage of the players outside the airport,” Figueroa told FLIP.
As the players arrived, Figueroa began to film them as they were getting out of a bus and preparing to enter the airport. At that moment, a security guard approached the journalists and asked them why they were doing this. They replied that Lieutenant Guevara was aware of what they were
doing, and continued their work. Once the filming was finished, Figueroa shut off his camera and, a few minutes later, accompanied Mantilla inside the airport in order to conduct interviews with some of the players, which were to be transmitted to Colmundo Radio via telephone.
With his cell phone in hand, Mantilla was about to start the interviews when three police officers arrived and told him that he would be detained and had to accompany them to the station. Mantilla asked them why he was being detained, but received no answer. He was taken to see Lieutenant Guevara, to whom he asked what was going on, while at the same time transmitting over his phone what was occurring. The lieutenant took the phone away from Mantilla and shut it off. The journalist managed to get it back, but when he again tried to get in touch with the radio station, the lieutenant and his officers stopped him. He was kicked out of the airport and when he sought an
explanation he was detained. Mantilla told Figueroa to film what was happening; however, three officers threw themselves on the camera operator, damaging the camera in the process. Holding him by the arm and neck, the officer took Mantilla to the police station. “I asked them not to grab me like that, since I was not a criminal,” he said.
Once in the station, Mantilla tried to explain to Lieutenant Guevara that all of the footage had been of the soccer players outside the airport. He asked him to view the footage himself. Guevara agreed and Figueroa was about to show him the film when an officer suddenly punched the journalist in the abdomen. Lieutenant Guevara said that he could detain the two for 24 hours but was only going to give them a warning. According to Mantilla, he was “intimidated by all the verbal threats,” and agreed to sign the warning letter, in which he promised to announce on the radio the following day that everything had been a misunderstanding.
After being held for more than two hours, the journalists left the police station. They reported the incident in a letter to the Santander police chief, Colonel Álvaro Becerra, and to other institutions such as the Ombudsman’s Office. According to Colonel Becerra, who met with Mantilla and
Figueroa, an investigation will be launched. “I do not agree with what happened. However, it is not useful to make a big thing out of it, either,” he added.
