BY DAVID LLOYD MARCUS
Marcus is South America bureau chief of The Dallas Morning News.

Francisco Santos, the whirling dervish editor of Colombia's largest newspaper, El Tiempo, left work in his bulletproof jeep last September 19 to go to a hypnotist who he hoped would help him overcome his addiction to cigarettes. On a suburban Bogota street a few miles away, several men with secret-police credentials stopped the jeep, shot and killed the chauffeur, then whisked Santos away in a stolen car. That was the last time he was seen in public.

A few days earlier, six journalists had packed clothing for a three-day trip to the countryside to interview a guerrilla leader. The group included a team from the TV news program Cripton; Diana Turbay, publisher of the magazine Hoy por Hoy and the daughter of former President Julio Turbay; and German stringer Hero Buss, who had decided to join the group at the last minute. There was no interview; the journalists were kidnapped.

Then, on the evening of November 7, Maruja Pachon, director of the state-owned film commission and a former television reporter, and her sister-in-law Beatriz Villamizar, also an employee of the commission, were forced from their car in Bogota. Their driver was killed.

No one took responsibility for these nine abductions until late fall, when, with a flurry of communiques, cocaine traffickers known as "the Extraditables" announced that they were holding the hostages to protest violations of the traffickers' "human rights." Throughout the 1980s Colombia's reporters and editors were threatened, their phones tapped, their relatives tailed, their offices bombed. Twenty-three of them were killed in the five years ending in 1990, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. Yet, remarkably, the media -- especially the print media -- remained aggressive. Much of what the world learned about the cocaine cartels came from hard-hitting reports that ran first in El Espectador and El Tiempo, Bogota's leading dailies, and Semana magazine.

Some reporters and editors fear that, in the wake of the kidnappings, Colombia's press is finally backing off. Special reports on the drug industry are increasingly rare and editorials increasingly feeble.

Colombian editors insist they are as dogged as ever, but in the same breath they admit to constant second-guessing about the dangerous fallout from sensitive scoops.

At El Tiempo, owned by the Santos family, Francisco's kidnapping "is like a ghost that you cannot avoid," says Juan Manuel Santos, the paper's managing editor and Francisco's cousin. "We haven't dropped any investigation, but we think twice -- an investigation has to be much more important now." Even before the kidnapping, El Tiempo couldn't find anyone to issue life insurance to its owners and employees. The newspaper has about forty bodyguards on its payroll, at a cost of "a fortune," one editor says, and it owns six armored cars, each worth more than $ 50,000. Guards frisk visitors and soldiers armed with automatic weapons patrol El Tiempo's offices.

Friends of the kidnapped journalists have been kept on edge for months. Juan Vita, news editor of Hoy por Hoy, was released in late November. Two members of the Cripton news team were released in December, as was Hero Buss. Newsrooms resonated with rumors that the rest would be freed by Christmas. The abductors released a tape of Santos reading front-page headlines of El Tiempo to prove he was alive. Christmas came and went, however, and the Extraditables sent out mixed signals.

In January, the kidnappers released a Cripton camera operator, but at the same time Hoy por Hoy's Diana Turbay was killed as special police stormed the neighborhood. Accounts of how she died differ; the police say her captors shot her in the back. The Extraditables subsequently sent out communiques vowing renewed violence. Beatriz Villamizar was released in early February. As of early April, however, Francisco Santos and Maruja Pachon were still missing; the Extraditables had threatened to kill them because, they said, traffickers' relatives were being tortured by police. Colombian journalists are embittered these days, sensing that they, and they alone, have been left to take a stand against drugs and corruption, while the country's congress, courts, churches, and other institutions have kept silent. The public, exhausted by bombings and political assassinations, now overwhelmingly favors light sentences or even amnesty for cocaine kingpins. And the international media, which couldn't get enough of Colombia's tragedy a year and a half ago, have moved on to other trouble zones.

Amid such change, journalists are rethinking their role. "You see there's no ending to this story. You want to stay alive. You don't want to get killed in a war that doesn't end," says Maria Jimena Duzan, formerly a columnist and foreign editor for El Spectador. Her friend and editor, Guillermo Cano, was assassinated by narcos in 1986, and her sister, a television reporter, was killed last year. Last spring, Duzan, who has been threatened more times than she can remember, went into exile in the United States.

"Freedom of expression is certainly sacrificed" in the current atmosphere of fear, says Juan Manuel Santos. "We try to think it's not, we try to think that it's still what it was before, but that's not true."

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