Uribe's supporters have showered the cartoonist with insults, tried to take him to court, and now have called for him to be assassinated.
The following is an excerpt of a 1 May 2018 CPJ Blog post by John Otis/CPJ Andes Correspondent.
During his 15-year career satirizing public figures, Colombia’s best-known editorial cartoonist has made numerous enemies. In his drawings for the Bogotá daily El Tiempo, Julio César González, better known by his pen name, Matador, targets politicians of all stripes.
But he often zeroes in on Álvaro Uribe, a popular senator and former president. He depicts the right-wing Uribe as a two-faced strongman, a saboteur of Colombia’s peace process that ended a long-running guerrilla war in 2016, and a political puppeteer scheming to place one of his ideological allies in the presidency
In response, Uribe’s supporters have showered Matador with insults in speeches and on social media, tried to take court action to make the cartoonist apologize for his work – a judge threw out the case earlier this year – and, in a more recent and worrying turn, called for the journalist to be assassinated.
The threat came last month, when Ariel Ortega Martínez, a Colombian travel agent and Uribe backer, lamented on Twitter the 2004 death of a notorious paramilitary death squad leader and suggested that if the killer were still around he could be used to silence Matador, according to reports.
