At the request of the prosecution, a criminal court in Bogotá, Colombia agreed to terminate the investigation for injuria (defamation) against journalist Juan Esteban Mejía Upegui, according to newspaper El Espectador.
Juez precluyó el proceso penal contra mí porque encontró que no participé en ningún delito.
— Juan Esteban Mejía (@JuanesMejia_) 6 de octubre de 2016
The case dates back to 2011 when the journalist – then a correspondent at the magazine Semana in Medellín – sent an article to the magazine in which he denounced various cases of alleged medical negligence by Carlos Alberto Ramos Corena. One of the cases involved the death of a patient.
In 2012, Ramos Corena filed a complaint against the journalist for the crime of injuria (defamation). His argument was that the journalistic article claimed that he was not a doctor when he was.
Since the accusation was first made against the journalist, Mejía said that the error was committed by editors and not by him. In the original text, the journalist pointed out that the doctor had no credentials as a plastic surgeon, but in the published version, it said that Ramos Corena did not have a medical license.
According to Mejía, the text submitted to the magazine said: “A general practitioner achieved fame and recognition as a plastic surgeon. He posed next to people in show business and gave interviews in media, but the truth was known after the death of one of the many young people on who he operated.”
However, the edited and published version said: “A man without a medical degree became one of the most consulted plastic surgeons in Medellín,” according to the journalist.
In June 2015, the prosecution formally charged Mejía for the crime of injuria (defamation).
The magazine Semana published a correction that year at the request of the doctor in which it not only corrected the information, but also clarified that the error was not made by Mejía, but was made “later, in the collective work of revision, editing and proofreading,” according to the Foundation for Press Freedom (FLIP for its acronym in Spanish).
Before the recent decision, FLIP called attention to the fact that although “Mejía obviously was not the author of the alleged injuria” and that Semana published the correction, “the case was terminated more than a year and a half after the journalist was tied to the criminal proceedings.”
Therefore, the FLIP made a call to the prosecution for “the criminal investigations to move ahead quickly, so as to not unfairly affect the work of the journalists.”
However, for the injuries caused to a patient after surgery in April 2016, Ramos Corena was charged with the crimes of fraud, culpable injuries and falsifying a private document, according to El Espectador.
Note from the editor: This story was originally published by the Knight Center’s blog Journalism in the Americas, the predecessor of LatAm Journalism Review.
