Bedoya had gone to the prison after receiving a telephone call from an inmate. The caller said he had information about an April riot at Modelo. During the riot, 25 inmates had been hacked and shot to death by a group of prisoners who belonged to a right-wing paramilitary group.

Bedoya, who covers law enforcement, knew quite a bit about the riot. She had previously reported in her newspaper that the smuggled guns used by the killers had yet to be confiscated by guards.

This time, as she waited outside the jail for a visitor's pass, Bedoya herself was seized — kidnapped at gunpoint by two strangers.

Her abductors blindfolded and drugged her, tossed her into a van and whisked her to a secret location on the outskirts of the city, where for the next 10 hours they tortured and raped her.

During the ordeal, the assailants warned Bedoya that if she continued her reporting they would kill her and four other Colombian journalists — and cut their bodies into pieces.

One journalist her assailants kept mentioning as their next target was an editor at El Espectador, Ignacio Gomez.

Gomez, or "Nacho," as his friends call him, has been at the newspaper for 16 years. He is one of the most famous investigative reporters in a country where journalists who make waves have short careers.

During little more than a decade, 89 Colombian journalists have been assassinated. Back in 1989, at the beginning of the killings, Gomez published a sensational report. He dared to list the hundreds of buildings and properties secretly owned by Medellin druglord Pablo Escobar.

Gomez was targeted for death and had to flee the country for several months. In the end, it was Escobar and most of the Medellin gang who were hunted down and killed.

The threats against Gomez resumed again in earnest earlier this year. His bosses have tallied 53 separate threats since Feb. 28. That was the day that Gomez and the investigative team he heads published another explosive article.

The subject this time was one of Colombia's worst atrocities — the infamous massacre of Mapiripan. Between July 15 and July 20, 1997, a death squad loyal to right-wing paramilitary leader Carlos Castano hacked to death more than 60 peasants in the northern village of Mapiripan.

The killers were trying to teach a lesson to residents of the area, where left-wing guerrillas were operating.

Gomez uncovered some disturbing connections between U.S. Special Forces stationed in Colombia and the massacre.

According to his report, the Colombian colonel now awaiting trial as the mastermind of the massacre was trained by U.S. Special Forces troops. And they were secretly conducting training in the northern zone just before and just after the massacre.

The Colombian soldiers trained by our Special Forces, according to Gomez, facilitated and backed up the efforts of the death squad at Mapiripan.

On May 23, just days before his colleague Bedoya was abducted, Gomez was assaulted just outside his house. As he tried to hail a cab to work, two men tried to grab him and throw him into their car. He managed to escape and call police on his cell phone.

After police officials told Gomez they could no longer guarantee his safety, he fled to the United States last week. His co-worker Bedoya remains under police guard in a hospital in Bogota. Another of the journalists on the latest death list has fled to London.

The war of terror against journalists in Colombia has few precedents in modern times.

Which brings us to the huge $1.2 billion in military aid to Colombia the Clinton administration keeps demanding from Congress as part of the drug war. Colombia — which clearly cannot control its own military — already gets more arms aid than all the other countries in the Western Hemisphere put together. This package would quadruple the current aid. It would make Colombia the third-largest recipient of U.S. military aid in the world, after Israel and Egypt.

Next week, Clinton's people begin a new attempt at getting the package passed. Most of the money would go for 60 helicopters for the Colombian Army to fight left-wing "narcoguerrillas."

But the problem is both left-wing guerrillas and right-wing paramilitaries are trafficking in drugs, Gomez told me yesterday.

"If you put all these weapons against the guerrillas you will create a drug monopoly for the fascist paramilitaries," he said. "This is all stupid. You don't support more war when our country is in the middle of negotiating peace [with the guerrillas]."

Copyright 2000 NY Daily News

###