COLOMBIA'S SECRET WEAPON

BY STEVEN DUDLEY

 

When Andres Pastrana became president of Colombia in 1998, one of his shrewdest moves was hiring a little-known former NBC news producer as his aide for dealing with the foreign press. It was her first government position but Adrianne Foglia mastered her job -- not to mention the foreign press -- with such agility that several other governments in the region have sought her advice on how to reshape their own images.

Foglia's approach led to a vastly different outside perception of Pastrana's government. Plagued by a forty-year-old civil war and the country's worst recession in decades, his domestic approval rating has hovered near 30 percent -- a rating lower than his much-maligned predecessor, Ernesto Samper. Yet the Colombian president has persuaded foreign governments, in particular the United States, to give his administration unprecedented financial aid. Foglia -- Ariana, as members of the press affectionately call her -- gets credit for molding Pastrana's image as "a fighter who deserves U.S. support" -- a common refrain among the throngs of American legislators passing through the Andean nation during the period when Congress was debating a controversial multibillion-dollar aid package for Colombia. That job completed, Foglia moved on in June to the Colombian embassy in London, to concentrate on melting resistance to aid from the European Union.

Foglia, who is now forty-eight, started her tenure as press officer in Bogotá by firing all the men in the office. "I find women much more helpful," she says. She told the remaining women that they were there to serve two clients: the president and the foreign press.

Her entry splash came in 1998 when she obtained for Tim Johnson, then The Miami Herald correspondent in Colombia, a visa to accompany Pastrana on his visit to Cuba. The Herald's correspondents had been banned from Cuba since 1996 for what Fidel Castro deemed its slanted coverage of the regime. Foglia championed Johnson's case, opening the way for the Herald's historic return visit -- brief though it was -- to the island.

Foglia quickly became the person "who knows how to avoid red tape," says Maria Ines Carrizosa, a longtime stringer for ABC News who has known Foglia for twelve years. Foglia once obtained permission for Carrizosa's crew to visit a heavily restricted volcanic region in just three hours. The process usually took weeks.

Foglia and her staff got reporters interviews with ministers, peace commissioners, generals, and senators at a moment's notice. She'd ask all the right questions: When's your deadline? Can it be over the phone? Do you need his recent statements? She compiled a database of names and numbers of people that she would want to talk to herself if she were a reporter. Police anti-narcotics officials, generals, special presidential counselors, analysts, and academics -- all were in her Rolodex.

At least a few reporters thought there might be a price to pay for all this help. "She was the smart one," one journalist said. "The dumb ones were us, who didn't understand we were being fed the line."

Foglia explains, "After twenty years in journalism, I'd had enough experience with press offices in Latin America and the United States to know what I didn't want." As a kid in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, she pored over newspapers. Her father was a successful real estate developer. Soon she was studying political history at Marymount College in Tarrytown, New York. After school, she interned at a small newspaper and TV station in Florida, and at WNYC, a public TV station in New York, before landing a job as a researcher and later a producer at NBC's Miami bureau in 1975. She stayed at the network until the Pastrana job came up.

The network sent her to Colombia for the first time in 1980 when leftist guerrillas overran the Dominican Republic's embassy during a party and took twelve ambassadors and the papal nuncio hostage. While covering the story, she met Andres Pastrana, then the owner of the fledgling Colombian television news program, TV Hoy. She also met some of Pastrana's friends, including Luis Alberto Moreno, who was working for a family business then but would eventually become a top executive on Pastrana's TV team.

Foglia and Moreno soon began seeing each other romantically. She moved to Colombia, began stringing for NBC, married Moreno (they are now divorced), and had two children. (Moreno is now Colombia's ambassador in Washington.) She kept working. Among her many scoops was footage of mercenaries training Colombian assassins. She knew how to use her continued friendship with the up-and-coming Pastrana, the son of a former Colombian president with a contact list that read like a Who's Who of the Colombian elite. "Her background was unique," says Bob Anderson, a producer at 60 Minutes who worked with Foglia when his program reported on Pastrana in 1999. "She was a very close family friend of the president and had experience in the press. She had it on both channels."

Foglia says she took the job with Pastrana because she believed in him; that was never more evident than in her handling of 60 Minutes. The December 1999 report came at a critical time for the Pastrana government. Washington was debating giving Colombia more than a billion dollars in aid to help its ill-defined strategy to fight drugs and shore up the ailing economy. 60 Minutes wanted a profile of the man who would get this money, and so Foglia organized it.
"We thought she was spectacular," Anderson says. "She knew exactly what we needed, had great access, and made life easy for us without giving us any stilted, spun bullshit." The normally tough-to-please Mike Wallace was so impressed that he said he wished CBS would hire her.

The Wallace story turned into a deal-maker for Pastrana. At one point in the piece, after Pastrana says his country needed the money, Wallace says, "I know you need it." Just a month after 60 Minutes aired the piece for a second time, in June 2000, Congress approved a $1.3 billion aid package for Colombia.

Foglia's office organized trips for almost all parachuting reporters. Her staff knew exactly what journalists wanted: a little trip in police drug planes, a government official who could speak English, a chat with an army general. One Foglia assistant said the office organized upwards of 80 percent of visiting journalists' agendas. It also set up trips for reporters permanently assigned to Colombia, obtaining for some of them the first glimpses of the once shadowy American officers who were training Colombian troops to fight drug trafficking and leftist guerrillas. Foglia got permission to send reporters to interview U.S. military personnel by cornering the normally cagey former American ambassador Curtis Kamman and former Colombian defense minister Rodrigo Lloreda at a cocktail party and asking them point-blank if they would allow it. When each deferred to the other, Foglia said, "Well if you guys want to leave it up to me, I think we should take a group down." And she did.

Such junkets also were used to obtain more favorable coverage for her boss's administration. Following an article in The Washington Post slamming the government for its use of the chemical glyphosate to destroy illegal coca fields, the government organized a special trip for The New York Times and The Dallas Morning News to see for themselves the damage done by the herbicide. Foglia also arranged for reporters to talk to the defense and environmental ministers, who arrived at the interviews with copies of government-produced pamphlets on glyphosate. The Times and Morning News stories remained critical of the herbicide but carried longer sections describing the government's positions than had the Post.

When things didn't go her way, Foglia could get nasty. A former Reuters reporter, Karl Penhaul, says Foglia called him or his boss, former bureau chief Tom Brown, on a weekly basis to complain about Penhaul's tone and language. Once banned from the U.S. embassy for two years for writing about the blurring of lines between the drug and counterinsurgency wars, Penhaul was not known for his subtlety. The reporter's description of Colombian rebel chieftains talking peace at the Vatican, while "the United States threatened to unleash its military wrath on the insurgents" caught both Foglia's and the American embassy's attention. Both complained to Brown.

The same occurred in July 1999 when Penhaul correctly reported that guerrillas were fighting the army fifteen miles from Bogotá and "were planning a raid on the Colombian capital." Penhaul says an angry Foglia, who thought he had exaggerated the danger, told him: "I've got reporters calling me from the top of Machu Picchu saying that Reuters is reporting that Bogotá is about to fall." The U.S. embassy complained as well.

Foglia says she telephoned the Reuters office when errors showed up in their coverage. But Penhaul claims that Reuters corrected only one mistake, and the editing desk in the United States admitted it was their error. No matter, Foglia's and the embassy's campaign seemed to influence the company's evaluation of Penhaul. Reuters cut Penhaul from its staff last year after he refused a change of assignment. He now works in Colombia for The Boston Globe and CNN.
Being on Foglia's bad side could make life difficult for anyone hoping to practice journalism in Colombia. Most interview requests for the ministries were channeled through her. Foglia organized interviews and trips according to the importance of the media outlet and the standing of the individual reporter. Having her as an ally became as essential as a portable computer. For new and visiting correspondents, she became what she happily called a "one-stop shopping" center. She helped people find hotel rooms, look for apartments, get their kids into good schools, find reliable household help, and anything else that a newcomer to Colombia might need. Her flirtatious nature tended to endear her to many male journalists. "You'd find yourself sitting in her office talking about everything under the sun," one reporter said.

During her term in Bogotá, Foglia's influence also stretched to other parts of the government, most notably the defense ministry. The military's once closed-door policy took a 180-degree turn under the direction of Foglia and former defense minister Luis Fernando Ramirez, himself a longtime friend of Pastrana. Both Foglia and Ramirez seemed to understand that human rights concerns and the military's alleged ties to murderous right-wing paramilitaries were what most threatened foreign aid. During the year 2000, Ramirez produced the military's first human rights report as well as several studies documenting its fight against the paramilitaries. These reports received significant play in the major U.S. newspapers. More importantly, he was readily available to the press through Foglia. These days, access to the military has never been better. In July, the head of the armed forces held his first informal off-the-record session with the foreign press.

Foglia's style also caught the attention of other governments. During her tenure, presidential press aides from Ecuador, Mexico, and Argentina sought advice from Foglia on how to improve their offices, and both Ecuador and Mexico have begun to implement her open-door policy. The Colombian government got the message as well. It hired Victor Arango, a former NBC producer, to replace Foglia on August 1.

But Foglia's job is far from over. At the London embassy, one of her main tasks is to help persuade the E.U. that Colombia is a worthy recipient of financial aid. So far, the country has received $366 million, and hopes that figure will rise to $650 million, but the balance has been slow in coming because of E.U. fears that it will be spent on the drug war rather than on social projects.

If Foglia has her way, the money will be winging toward Bogotá any day now.
 
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Steven Dudley is a journalist living in Bogotá who regularly reports for NPR and The Washington Post.