Ignacio Gómez

Ignacio Gómez Gómez (also known as Nacho; born 1 January 1962) is a Colombian journalist. He is known for his high-risk reporting on organized crime, corruption, and paramilitary groups. In 2000, he received the "Special Award for Human Rights Journalism Under Threat" Amnesty Media Award. In 2002, he was awarded the International Press Freedom Award of the Committee to Protect Journalists.

Background Gómez began working at El Espectador, a daily newspaper in Bogotá, at the age of 24. The paper's editor-in-chief at the time was Guillermo Cano, who was a hero of Gómez. On 17 December 1986, only a few weeks after Gómez's hiring, Cano was assassinated outside the El Espectador'''s office by a man with a submachine gun, apparently in retaliation for his reporting on Pablo Escobar and other drug lords. In the 1980s and 1990s, Colombia had the highest rate of murders of reporters in the world, and over the next fourteen years, ten more El Espectador reporters would be murdered. Gómez later described the mood at El Espectador as "like having your gravestone tied around your neck".

Reporting In the late 1980s, Gómez continued Cano's mission of aggressively investigating Pablo Escobar's connections with the Colombian government, at one point publishing a list of properties in Medellín that the drug lord secretly owned.

In 1996, Gómez co-founded La Fundación para la Libertad de Prensa (English: "The Foundation for Press Freedom"; abbreviated "FLIP"), a non-profit organization to protect threatened journalists. When Gómez broke the story of the Army's involvement in February 2000, he received 56 threats in the next two months. On 24 May, a group of men attempted to abduct Gómez as he was entering a taxi in Bogota, but he escaped. The next day, Gómez's colleague Jineth Bedoya was kidnapped, tortured, and raped; her kidnappers told her that they "planned to cut Gómez into tiny pieces".

On 1 June 2000, Gómez left the country, moving to the U.S. state of Massachusetts, where he served for a year as a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University. He returned to Colombia in late 2001, becoming the Director of Investigations for the television news show Noticias Uno. After a report on links between presidential candidate Álvaro Uribe Vélez (who became President of Colombia later in the year) and the Medellín Cartel, Gómez was once again the target of death threats, along with news director Daniel Coronell and Coronell's three-year-old daughter,

On 24 May 2011, burglars tried to force their way into Gómez's home for the seventh time in ten years; noting the "sophisticated equipment" of the burglars, he attributed the attempted break-in to agents of Colombia's Administrative Department of Security.

In 2024, he was appointed director of the Noticias Uno'' newscast, replacing Cecilia Orozco Tascón.

Awards and recognition In 2000 Gómez was the recipient of the "Special Award for Human Rights Journalism Under Threat" at the Amnesty International UK Media Awards.

In addition to his 2001 Nieman Fellowship, Gómez was awarded the 2002 International Press Freedom Award of the Committee to Protect Journalists, In the award citation, the CPJ praised Gómez's "exceptional commitment to truth and freedom".