Peace, language and journalism

BOGOTA—“FOR you, the Spanish language is the language of old and rich people, but for us, English is the language of the imperialist and the elite,” said Rosa Emilia Salamanca, coordinator of the Colombian leg of the “Comparative Learning Series” between groups of women from the Philippines and Colombia.

Salamanca was commenting on the language gap between our two groups, since none of us in the group were either old, rich, imperialists or members of the elite. But the reality was, we would have to speak in the tongues of colonialists and imperialists if we wanted to understand each other.

“Women, Peace and Security” is the theme of this exchange between two groups of 10 women each vitally interested in the intersections between gender, conflict and peace-building, and willing to see for themselves the roots of the conflicts besetting each other’s countries, and to listen to the stories of survivors, protagonists, advocates, peace-keepers, politicians and policy makers.

So the 10 of us are here in this city, in the first part of the exchange, listening first to resource persons recall the roots of the armed conflict in Colombia rooted in the displacement of peasants, the current hunger for land and exploitation of oil and mineral resources, and the complicating factor of the cocaine trade.

Later, it was the turn of the Colombian women to explain what they and their organizations have been doing to promote the role of women in peace and conflict resolution. What we didn’t expect was the rapid, impassioned exchange of opinion (conducted mostly in Spanish) on Colombian history and policy, which, so Salamanca commented, was a much welcome development “because we get together so rarely and the opportunity to exchange views comes few and far between.”

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MY “counterpart” in this Comparative Learning Series is Marisol Gomez, news editor of El Tiempo, one of two leading daily broadsheets based in Bogota. After our late lunch, Gomez  and I visited the El Tiempo offices, which houses, aside from the paper and press, a local TV station (CityTV), the on-line edition, the offices of several magazines, and a business daily.

I was quite impressed with what I saw on the whirlwind tour as I trailed after Gomez who strides swiftly through the open-plan offices. She also speaks in rapid-fire Spanish, but our conversation proceeds painfully since she apologizes time and again for her “inadequate” English.

She began work on El Tiempo as a reporter, covering a series of beats but spending the most time covering the justice beat, which included the armed conflict between government and para-military forces and the communist guerrillas. She then rose steadily through the editorial ranks, first as a night editor and now is responsible for closing the front page and main news section.

Gomez may strike new acquaintances as the epitome of the hardened journalist, an impression complemented by her slim figure and severe suit. But after 17 years of coverage, she says, she and other journalists realized just “covering” the decades-old war could not bring an end to it. She is part of a group called “Media for Peace,” and while they maintain their independence and objectivity, they do give out an annual National Prize for Peace not to prominent figures but to “communities that have survived the effects of armed conflict … to give recognition and make visible people who try to overcome the effects of conflicts instead of to perpetrators of violence.”

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PAINFULLY conscious of her English, Gomez asked her friend, El Tiempo opinion editor Francisco Hamburger, to discuss other issues with me.

Hamburger gets his unusual surname by way of a German grandfather who fled the War and settled in the northern coastal area of Colomia. But he got his facility with English while a college student with a girlfriend from Oregon, “so you can understand why I was committed to learning the language,” he says with a smile.

His joining El Tiempo is a human interest story in itself. As a third year political science student, Francisco began e-mailing Enrique Santos, then deputy editor in chief of El Tiempo, commenting on current events. Four months after his e-mail exchange, the editor in chief who was Santos’ uncle (El Tiempo was owned and managed by the Santos family and some members still sit on the board) died, and Enrique Santos and a cousin were named co-editors. “He then offered me a job to write editorials,” says Hamburger, totally out of the blue.

Hamburger would go on to write political stories for the newsweekly Semana (Spanish for “week”), manage a campaign for the mayoralty of Bogota, serve on the city government, and earn his MA in government and international relations in Columbia University in New York on a Fulbright scholarship.

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HAMBURGER is back to editing the Opinion section of El Tiempo, basking in the high trust ratings that Colombian media enjoy, “alongside the Church and the army.”

The biggest problem that El Tiempo faces today is that Juan Manuel Santos, a cousin of Enrique Santos, is Colombia’s president. “We can’t change that,” Hamburger says simply when asked about how the family connection affects the paper’s credibility. He concedes that El Tiempo is widely viewed as “pro-Santos,” but adds that most Colombian media are, too, since Santos enjoys a comfortable 78 percent approval rating after his first year in office.

It’s a problem some newspapers (or newspaper owners)—in Colombia or the Philippines—would want to have. But that journalists like Gomez and Hamburger acknowledge the awkward situation and strive to do better in their individual jobs is reassurance enough.