US gives visa to Colombian journalist previously turned away under Patriot Act

US reversal on visa denied to Colombian journalist

BOGOTA, Colombia — The U.S. State Department has reversed its decision to deny a visa to a leading Colombian journalist whose reporting has been highly critical of the country’s U.S.-allied president.

“Happy, happy! This was terrible,” a relieved Hollman Morris, an independent TV producer and reporter, told The Associated Press after he and his family picked up their visas at the U.S. Embassy on Tuesday.

Morris, his wife and their two children can now travel to Harvard for a yearlong Nieman Foundation fellowship for mid-career journalists.

A U.S. consular officer in Bogota told the journalist last month he was ruled permanently ineligible for a visa under the “terrorist activities” clause of the USA Patriot Act.

Morris said he was not given an explanation for the denial or the reversal. Nor was Nieman curator Robert Giles.

U.S. Embassy spokeswoman Ana Duque-Higgins said Tuesday she could not discuss the issue due to privacy rules.

Morris expressed deep gratitude for the support he has gotten from fellow journalists at home and abroad, lawmakers in the U.S. Congress and organizations including Human Rights Watch, the Committee to Protect Journalists, The InterAmerican Press Association and the American Civil Liberties Union, who decried the visa denial as an attack on free speech.

Some said it put Morris’ life in danger.

Morris blamed a smear campaign by allies of outgoing President Alvaro Uribe, who had accused him of being “an accomplice of terrorism.”

That effort “was about trying to silence a journalist who his entire career has sought to bring attention to the victims, to the invisible,” he said.

Morris, who produces the TV news show “Contravia,” has reported on ties between illegal far-right militias and allies of Uribe, Washington’s closest ally in Latin America.

The 41-year-old Morris, one of 12 foreign journalists admitted to the Nieman program for the 2010-2011 academic year, is among the most controversial chroniclers of Colombia’s long-running conflict.

On various occasions, Uribe has accused him of collaborating with rebels of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, which killed Uribe’s father in a 1983 botched kidnapping.

Morris acknowledges having contacts with the FARC — it’s part of his work, he says — but denied aiding, abetting or advising the rebels in any way.

He was among journalists, judges and opposition politicians whose phones were illegally tapped by Colombia’s DAS state security agency.

Prosecutors weighing criminal charges are currently questioning Uribe’s closest aides about the eavesdropping.

In addition to making public letters they’d written to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton protesting the visa denial, the U.S. rights groups that supported Morris privately lobbied State Department officials.

Giles said he thought those actions “helped open the way for a review of the visa denial. We felt that if the State Department had a full understanding of Hollman’s journalistic work, it would correct the mistake and issue him a visa.”

Colombian President-elect Juan Manuel Santos, who takes office on Aug. 7, was a Nieman fellow in 1988.

(This version CORRECTS that consular officer told journalist he was permanently ‘ineligible’ for visa instead ‘eligible.’)