Death Beat recounts the dramatic life story of one of Colombia’s most courageous investigative reporters, a fearless woman who has withstood bombs and death threats to cover her beat -the cartels, their authority, their activities, their associations. It is a vivid, harrowing, and necessary chronicle of unflinching courage, in which the defense of freedom of the press has become a matter of life and death. As a reporter and columnist for Colombia’s oldest newspaper, El Espectador, thirty-four-year-old Maria Jimena Duzan has broken stories that have made her a target for the most vindictive and violent organized criminals in the world: the drug barons of Colombia. One of the last reporters to attack the cartels under a byline, in 1988 she exposed the close cooperation between Colombia’s drug traffickers and the nation’s military, a story that threatened not only the Colombian government itself but its lucrative aid from the U.S. In 1989, El Espectador’s offices were blown up (Duzan’s house had already been bombed in 1982), and in 1990, her sister, a documentary filmmaker, was murdered by assassins. Death Beat is a chilling account of a reporter’s life in a country where half the presidential candidates are assassinated before the election, where kids enact video game-like violence as sport in the street, and where the drug lords who rule the country have not only declared a “total and absolute war” on the media, but have staged vicious attacks to back up their threats -two of the former members of Duzan’s investigative unit are now dead; two others are in exile. However, as we learn from her book -which takes us through the recent killing of Pablo Escobar- the war is far from over.This is a story of dedication and immense personal courage marshaled against merciless enemies, and an eyewitness testimony to the harrowing life in Colombia under the cartels.
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