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Panama News Briefs

Some media reports apparently disinformation

Kidnappers contact abducted Spaniards’ family

by Eric Jackson, from other media

Early on the morning of January 21, armed men wearing masks and speaking with Colombian accents entered the indigenous village of El Guayabo, in Darien’s Jaque district, abducted Spanish naturopath José Vicente Colastra and his film maker son Sergio, stole some gasoline and warned residents not to follow them and not to attempt to inform authorities about the crime for the rest of the morning.

The abductors did not identify themselves, nor did they make demands or use slogans that would be helpful in determining who they were. The leftist FARC rebels who come into Panama from time to time usually wear uniforms that clearly identify them as members of the guerrilla group, except when on covert gun running or other clandestine missions. The rightist AUC paramilitary, which has attacked Panama at least 18 times, almost always paints anti-FARC slogans around a village or harrangues its residents with dire threats of what will happen if they have anything to do with FARC. The area of Colombia across the border from Jaque is mostly FARC turf, with that group holding the adjacent district of Jurado. However, there is an AUC stronghold in Ríosucio, about 40 miles away from Jurado, and the whole area across the border from the Darien is an active combat zone.

But Panama is also frequently invaded by bandoleros, gangs with ordinary criminal motives that use military weapons and tactics and often organize themselves along military lines. Some of the members of these are veterans of or deserters from the various combatant forces in Colombia’s civil conflict. It has been alleged that bandoleros have abducted people from Panama and sold them to either the guerrillas or the paramilitaries, to be held for ransom or punished for allegedly belonging to or supporting a rival organization.

In La Prensa on January 26, the lead story headlined “Guerrillas kidnapped the Spaniards.” But reading the article by José Otero and Paco Gómez N. and an accompanying story by Otero on Page 6A, there was nothing to support the headline. In the latter article Otero did cite complaints by people in El Guayabo about FARC units moving through the area and Panamanian police being reluctant to confront them, and the story also noted that people in the village were afraid to talk because of the possibility of informers reporting them to Colombian belligerents.

(In ordinary Panamanian Spanish discourse about Colombia, guerrilla means FARC and paramilitar means the AUC. This would not be the first instance of Panamanian mainstream media automatically blaming FARC regardless of the evidence or lack thereof, and La Prensa is not the only medium that has been caught doing this. When pressed on this point editors and news directors sometimes say that by guerrilla they mean any armed force other than the government. But the tenor and the contexts of the usages belie deliberate news slant rather than mere imprecision.)

On February 1, another story by Otero first broke the news that there had been contact between the kidnappers and members of the victims’ family. His article also cited unidentified sources who claimed that the Colastras had been taken by FARC’s 57th Front so that the elder of the two could help treat a number of its members who were sick with malaria.

However, the notion that FARC would go to a naturopath would appear odd, first because the group adheres to rather orthodox Marxist-Leninist attitudes which lay claim to being scientific and thus tend to dismiss most alternative healing traditions as reactionary superstition; second because in the event that FARC would use an alternative healer there are a number of Kuna, Embera and Wounaan practitioners on both sides of the border whose services they might employ; and probably most significantly of all FARC is a wealthy group despite its losses of territory and consequently revenue from taxing the illegal drug business in recent years, and can thus afford to pay physicians for standard medical care and pharmacists for the mainstream medicines that are needed. If Otero’s sources are right, it would imply that the 57th Front is caught in a desperate situation indeed.

But the Spanish EFE news service has reported that while La Prensa was right about the kidnappers contacting the Colastra family, the Spanish Foreign Ministry’s coordinator of relations with Latin America, Miguel Cortizo, dismissed the tale about the 57th Front as baseless and reports attributing the crime to guerrillas as “the fruit of mere speculation, as there are no data that allow the determination of who the authors of this kidnapping are.” Cortizo also confirmed that no ransom demand had been made, which would be unusual in a FARC kidnapping but ordinary for the AUC. (Contact with the families of victims would on the other hand be most unusual for the paramilitaries.)

So the kidnapping of the Colastras remains something of a mystery, overlaid with a veneer of disinformation apparently spread by people who don’t like FARC.