Gossip ban rumoured to be for mayor's benefit

COLOMBIA: Tongues are wagging as politician outlaws gossip in Colombian town of Tulua, reports Chris Kraul

COLOMBIA:Tongues are wagging as politician outlaws gossip in Colombian town of Tulua, reports Chris Kraul

Tulua's mayor Juan Guillermo Angel got tired of the gossip swirling around this Colombian farm town that has been famous for rumour-mongering for nearly three centuries.

So he outlawed it.

Or did he? "An anti-gossip law? That's just gossip," said Angel, who prefers to describe it as an anti-slander ordinance.

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Semantics aside, at his urging the town council passed a law this year that imposes fines of up to $1,100 or two months in jail for anyone spreading "calumny that injures or dishonours".

The law is permitted by Colombia's penal code, but only four out of 1,119 municipalities have enacted one like it, police officials say, because of freedom of expression concerns and the difficulty of defining the crime.

Angel says the law is part of his campaign to improve Tulua's quality of life. The city simultaneously adopted measures to bolster pedestrian rights, care for senior citizens, facilitate conflict resolution and create stricter control over public spaces, he said.

But some observers contend that the law is a heavy-handed effort to muzzle the mayor's critics, particularly former mayor Gustavo Alvarez Gardeazabal, who regularly pokes fun at politicians, including Angel, on his nationally broadcast radio show, The Firefly.

"It's an attack on free expression more or less designed to shut me up," Gardeazabal said.

The mayor, he said, was annoyed by Gardeazabal's insinuations of irregularities when he was elected in 2003 and ever since by allegations of his administration's mishandling of public transport and of the proceeds from the sale of the municipal television station.

Gardeazabal's complaint is bolstered by the fact that on the day the law took effect, he was hauled before a prosecutor in Tulua to answer slander charges lodged by a "city functionary". He pleaded not guilty, saying he had been misquoted in an interview. The case is pending.

Angel responds that Gardeazabal is "paranoid . . . The law was an official, not a personal, decision". In any case, observers expect the law to have little effect in a town that has always loved its tittle-tattle.

"We have a reputation as gossip-mongers," said Omar Franco Duque, a local historian and professor at Central Cauca Valley University. "It's our custom and it's not going to disappear easily, because it's a way of life."

Books have been written about the town's oral tradition and the roving poet minstrels who travelled around Tulua, reciting short poems filled with gossip, after Spaniards founded it in 1719.

"Lies are spoken of as if they are the truth," Bolivar said. "People take the truth and add to it, not always in a positive way."

Some supporters of the law insist that malicious gossip has brought death and dishonour to the town and that the line drawn by Angel was needed.

Gossip indeed has had tragic consequences in Tulua. In an early 1990s case reminiscent of Shakespeare's Othello, a Colombian airforce major named Jorge Lopez Quintero killed his wife after hearing that she was having an affair. A close friend turned out to be the source of the rumour, Bolivar said. The major was released after two years in prison but was killed a short time later by an unknown assailant. -