El Espectador - Guillermo Cano's Murder

Guillermo Cano's Murder

As stated before, El Espectador stood firm against drug trafficking and often published articles on its crimes.

On 17 December 1986, the then director of El Espectador, Guillermo Cano Isaza, was assassinated in front of the newspaper offices by gunmen paid by Pablo Escobar, after publishing several articles critical of Colombia's drug barons. Cano left the headquarters around 19:00 in his family station wagon. After he made a U-turn on the Avenida El Espectador, one of the hitmen approached the wagon Cano was driving, shot him in the chest eight times, and then fled on a motorcycle identified with the licence plate FAX84. Cano was 61 years old, and had been a journalist for 44 years. His murder is still considered unpunished. The next day, El Espectador's main headline was Seguimos adelante ("We are going on").

The World Press Freedom Prize, awarded annually by UNESCO since 1997, is named in his honour, for "his courage, his compromise with independent journalism and the tenacity with which he fought for his country", which "are an example for the rest of the world to follow. Guillermo Cano's fate exemplifies the price paid by journalists the world over in exercising their profession; journalists are imprisoned and ill-treated every day and the fact that these crimes, for the most part, go unpunished is even more alarming."

On 2 September 1989 the paper's offices were bombed by the Medellín Cartel. The blast occurred around 06:30; it blew the building's roof up, destroyed the main entry and affected the newspaper's production. The bomb was hidden in a van parked minutes before it exploded in front of the main entry. The same day, 6 armed men broke into an exclusive island in Islas del Rosario, near Cartagena de Indias, and set fire to the Cano family's summer house.