Eduardo Estrada Gutiérrez remembered as a leader of San Pablo

That year, the Foundation for Freedom of the Press (FLIP) registered nine journalists who were killed. It wasn’t easy to report, denounce and inform the public.

San Pablo still has no community radio fourteen years after Estrada’s death. He hoped that by giving the people a voice they would be able to condemn corruption, poor financially handlings by the administration, and, in those years, the connections the town had with paramilitaries.

Estrada wasn’t just a journalist. San Pablo considered him a leader. He was president and founder of the Association for Communication and Cultural Development of San Pablo (ADECOSAN) and civic director of the Program for Development and Peace in Magdalena Medio (PDMM),

His activism and interest in social issues pushed him toward journalism. In community radio he believed he had found a way to give his fellow citizens a way to influence public policy. 

He had started the process to get the radio started a year before his death. At the same time, he and ADECOSAN began an investigation into a local government policy on land reorganization, focusing on the weaknesses of the program.

But the report was never published.  Estrada was killed as the investigation was ongoing. His co-workers, fearing the Estrada’s same end, didn’t finish the report or the community radio project. San Pablo remained under paramilitary control until 2006, when the Central Bolivar Bloc demobilized, after terrorizing the town with violence in the hopes to control the area. 

That bloc, lead by Carlos Mario Jimenez Naranjo, alias “Macaco”, is held responsible for his death.  During a Justice and Peace hearing those involved with Estrada’s killing said the “investigations and accusations of money mismanagement at the local hospital and the beginnings of a community radio” were motivation to kill him according to a report by the Center for Historic Memory.

Fourteen years later, the Court of South Florida in the United States is carrying Estrada’s case. “Macaco” was extradited to the United States under Alvaro Uribe’s government. He is on trial for Estrada’s killing and other crimes against humanity. For the moment, the trial is still in its procedural phase. The intellectual authors of Estrada’s death are still unknown.