Open file: the role of journalist Vicky Dávila in the Álvaro Uribe case

This Saturday, Former Colombian President Álvaro Uribe Vélez was granted freedom After a guarantee control judge decided that there can be no detention without charges, in Law 906, which by order of the Supreme Court of Justice now governs the case of alleged manipulation of witnesses.

The news of the release of the former head of state, who had been under house arrest since August 3, generated a wave of comments on Twitter. One of the trends that stands out is “Thank you Vicky”, with which users thank the journalist of Revista Semana, Vicky Dávila, for making public the complete file of the Uribe case.

“Thank you Vicky for showing Colombia the entire Uribe case file… thank you because by transmitting without biases or interruptions all the complete pieces … we discovered a lying Monsalve and an Uribe without defense guarantees, who was violated due process, “wrote @ Setulus1.

But also, there are messages of thanks on this day for the Spanish journalist Salud Hernández-Mora.

However, on Twitter there were users who, contrary to those who appreciate their journalistic work, They criticize the communicator for her role in the case of former President Uribe.

The journalistic work of Vicky Dávila in the Uribe case

Once the arrest of former President Álvaro Uribe was known by order of the Supreme Court of Justice, which was investigating him for allegedly manipulating witnesses together with his lawyer, Diego Cadena, journalist Vicky Dávila was one of the first to talk about it in her opinion column.

On August 9, Semana Magazine published the journalist’s column titled: “Álvaro Uribe free”, six days after the then senator was notified of his house arrest.

There, Dávila declared: “Today, with Uribe imprisoned and Timochenko and his band free, Colombia is a country on the way to being unviable. They will say that the FARC chief went through a peace process. Of course, a process that lost at the polls and violated democracy. Which still led them to Congress. They have not paid a single day in jail. When this publication comes out, Uribe will almost complete his first week in prison ”.

It also promulgated that the Court’s decision was unfair by stating in that same column: “Injustice only generates spirals of hate and pain”.

That cost Dávila to be labeled in social networks as openly Uribista and even pointed out as the leader of a media campaign of Uribismo.

On January 24, 2019, Dávila wrote on Twitter: “Yesterday I was a Petrist and today I am an Uribe member. A journalist does not work to look good, or win applause. Less so that everyone is comfortable, you should not work for convenience, if not, to fulfill the duty of the trade “.

The Uribe case file

On September 5, the journalist, in another opinion column titled “The truth of the Uribe case,” predicted the following: “I am convinced that Álvaro Uribe will be released by order of a guarantee judge very soon. Several criminal lawyers tell me that today nothing can justify their detention and that the process will pass to Law 90 “.

In the opinion brief, Dávila insisted that Uribe’s case in the Supreme Court was not carried out in a partial way. “Some procedural pieces that could be key generate distrust because of the way they were collected. It happened with the audios and screenshots of the chats between the witness Juan Guillermo Monsalve and Carlos Eduardo López, alias Caliche. Where are those telephones? ”, The journalist wondered.

The now director of the digital platform of Revista Semana announced that in this medium they had access to the complete file of the process against Álvaro Uribe: thousands of hours of recordings, folios, transcripts, interceptions and documents that rest in that voluminous judicial file that put the former president in detention.

Throughout the month of September, Semana published several articles and developed several Semana TV programs with that information. Like on September 24, when they published a statement by the convicted paramilitary Juan Guillermo Monsalve, a key element in the case against Uribe, in which he stated: “where they transfer me to the Valledupar jail, I will go back,” the former paramilitary told his fellow prisoner Nicolás Jurado, a former guerrilla from the Farc.

Jurado gave this testimony to the Superior Council of the Judiciary, which, according to Dávila, did not want to accept the Supreme Court of Justice. The ex-guerrilla also allegedly said that Monsalve was very “sorry and wanted to retract” what he had said about Álvaro Uribe.

The journalist too exclusively revealed a conversation between the lawyer and Juan Guillermo Monsalve’s wife. Revista Semana says that both speak with familiarity about the document in which the former paramilitary would give a twist to his version of the ex-president.

Censorship against Vicky Dávila

In one of her most recent publications in the Uribe file, the journalist published conversations between the former member of the now-disappeared self-defense groups and her family.

Monsalve’s sister alleged that the publication of these dialogues violated the rights to a good name and to personal and family privacy, since “Matters such as her mother’s health status, personal problems, it was aired that she worked in a surveillance company, financial matters, and the names of her minor children were also aired”.

Through a guardianship ruling, the Bogotá circuit judge, Carlos Carreño, forced Revista Semana to unpublish and remove from all its platforms the program “Exclusive! The conversations of the witness Monsalve with his family ”, broadcast digitally and openly by Semana Magazine on August 30, 2020.

In the same document, the judge requests the Office of the Attorney General of the Nation to investigate journalists Vicky Dávila and Jairo Fidel Lozano for an alleged violation of the summary reservation. These journalists conducted the investigation that is reported in Judge Carreño’s ruling.

Dávila said in his social networks that this decision corresponded to a censorship The Foundation for Freedom of the Press (Flip), the Colombian Association of Information Media (AMI) and the National Association of Media (Asomedios) rated it as well.

La Flip stressed that what was published by Semana is about information about a process of high public interest and national significance and this is preponderant based on the duty of weighing between the investigation of crimes and the guarantee of freedom of the press. The recordings contain information about one of the witnesses against former President Álvaro Uribe Vélez and who appears in the proceedings against the ex-president for alleged bribery of witnesses and procedural fraud.

This Saturday, the journalist trilled as soon as it was known that the guarantee control judge granted Uribe his freedom.

It is certain that Vicky Dávila will continue to generate debate with her opinion columns and will continue to report on the Uribe case from her digital address in Semana Magazine.