Ignacio Gomez

Ignacio Gómez is the assistant manager of Noticias Uno, a current affairs program at Bogota television station Canal Uno, which has been voted the best news program each year from 2010 to 2014. His reports have probed deeply into drug-trafficking, political corruption, the arms trade, and international corporate involvement in the Colombian civil war, and have appeared in several international publications, including Germany’s Der Spiegel and Britain’s The Guardian. He also was the first to expose Chiquita Brands' deals with paramilitaries (2002) and the coltan mines of FARC guerillas in Colombia.

Gómez was a 2000-2001 Nieman journalism fellow at Harvard University. In 2002, he received the International Press Freedom Award from the Committee to Protect Journalists; in 2000 Amnesty International’s Human Rights Media Award; and, in 2009, the Fundación para un Nuevo Periodismo Iberoamericano (headed by Gabriel García Márquez) award for the best TV reporting in Latin América.

He has won numerous other journalism prizes, including the Rothko Chapel Award in 1991 for his “exceptional commitment to truth and freedom,” and the Sam Chavkin Prize for Integrity in Latin American Journalism. He is also a seven-time winner of Colombia’s Simón Bolívar National Prize for Investigative Journalism, and a three-time winner of the CPB Award for TV journalism. One of those prizes was awarded for a report that revealed how British mercenaries had trained Colombian right-wing paramilitaries involved in the narcotics trade. He later published a book, Los Comandos de la Guerra, on the topic.

Gómez has written six other books, including La Última Misión de Werner Mauss (Bogotá, 1997) and Der Agent Und Sein Minister (Berlin, 1998), which examined a German spy’s career in Colombia.

Gómez teaches at Rosario University, is the president of the Fundación para la Libertad de Prensa (Press Freedom Foundation) in Bogotá, and was the recipient of Missouri University’s Medal of Honor (2009).