Ignacio Gómez

Ignacio Gómez
Born	c. 1962
Nationality	Colombian
Occupation	journalist
Organization	El Espectador
Known for	reporting on organized crime
Awards	Nieman Fellow (2000) International Press Freedom Award (2002)

Ignacio Gómez (born c. 1962; also known as "Nacho") is a Colombian journalist 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.

Gómez began working at El Espectador, a daily newspaper in Bogota, 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".

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 Medelin that the drug lord secretly owned. He also expanded his reporting into coverage of the conflict with far-right paramilitary groups, such as Carlos Castaño's Peasant Self-Defense Forces of Córdoba and Urabá (ACCU). In September 1988, he was forced to flee the country after a firebombing of El Espectador's offices believed to be a retaliation for his reporting, but he returned nine months later. In 1989 alone, he reported on 36 separate massacres.

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