On April 9, 2024, at four in the afternoon, while Juan Valentín Gamboa was walking down a street in Arauca, an unknown woman approached him and warned him that he had to leave the apartment. Gamboa, then 27, had been receiving messages from ELN guerrillas for days and knew they could retaliate at any moment. He goes home, packs what he needs and, the next day, leaves the region where he has worked since he was young.
After almost a decade on local broadcasts then at the head of Jet-Set Creolethe media outlet he single-handedly founded and supported, Gamboa was one of the most visible voices of young regional journalism in Colombia. His speed in connecting the facts and the ingenuity with which he named his project – an irony directed against the jet set Araucano: politicians, civil servants and armed commanders – made the media a reference in a territory with little independent information. The fact that his name appears today among the 100 new leaders of Colombia recognizes a generation of regional reporters who support the profession in unfavorable conditions.
Gamboa was born in Cubará, a municipality in Boyacá on the border with Arauca and Venezuela. He grew up in a house without television, with radio as his only link to the country. His father would light it at four in the morning, before going fishing or checking the crops, and in this daily ritual, the youngest of five brothers learned to pay attention: to distinguish who was relevant, who spoke with genuine interest, and who sought to influence.
He finished his studies at 16 and spent almost three years between Cúcuta and Bucaramanga, looking for a place in environments that had no place for a boy without formal studies. He returned to Cubará, convinced that if he wanted to pursue journalism, he should leave there. With a friend, he created an opinion show on community radio, where they analyzed the peace talks during the plebiscite debate. They didn’t charge, but they gained an audience: people called, gave their opinions, asked questions. Local businesses offered prizes for drawings and the program ended up being the most listened to in the region. “It was our way of explaining to people what was going on,” Gamboa recalls. This first experience taught him something essential: that reporting is a service and not an exercise in visibility.
In 2017 they called him from the station Cinaruco’s voicein Arauca, to fill a vacant position for two weeks. He stayed there for seven years. He arrived insecure and left with a job. He learned to work at a daily pace, to cover local institutions without losing sight of the paths and to separate statements, rumors and facts. He was entrusted with his first sensitive notes – a kidnapping, a two-week power outage, an attack in Saravena – and he understood that journalism requires rigorous reporting without neglecting the consequences that a news item can have on those who read or listen to it. He also understood that Arauca, despite its distance from the center of the country, was a place that had a decisive influence on the national agenda. “I asked myself: why not do journalism that matches the importance of Arauca?” he remembers.
The passage through the station has defined its way of working. He has become accustomed to investigating in the field and making decisions in a few minutes: to trust a source or not, to disseminate information or to wait for additional verification, even if it means publishing it last. In 2021, I already had a wide network of contacts, knew all areas of the department and understood which stories were going unnoticed in the national media.
In 2021, he created Jet-Set Creole on Facebook, where daily conversations took place. He later opened a YouTube channel and a website. I recorded, edited and published. Their bet was simple: investigate and explain what is happening without losing pace in a region where information circulates through informal channels and where the absence of data is compensated for by rumors or lies. His style was defined by contrast. Gamboa avoids press conferences and prefers to follow the jet set local: observing those who were present, listening to comments on the sidelines, recording tensions that did not appear in official statements. In a short time, the medium became a point of reference for an audience who could not find a faithful reading of their environment elsewhere.
The project soon reached its climax. After months of conversations, alias Antonio Medina – commander of the 28th FARC Dissident Front, confidant of Iván Mordisco and considered a high-value target by the military forces, accused of extortion, kidnappings, armed attacks and management of illicit economies on the border with Venezuela – agreed to grant him an interview. Gamboa entered the jungle with a camera, a cap with the legend “press” and a shirt with his project logo. In front of the commander and three uniformed guerrillas, he sat down at a table on which there was a rifle and some notebooks. In the video, a clear contrast can be seen: a young man with glasses and gelled hair in front of a commander several decades older, escorted by armed men and women.
He presented the interviewee with the same calm as in his other shows. Then he questioned him about the difficult issues, those which mark life in the department: the recruitment of minors, homicides, control of the territory and a possible ceasefire. He interrupted when necessary, but he didn’t raise his voice or try to create tension. He closed the conversation by thanking us for the meeting: “I came to the jungle because I am tired of the communications sent to us by groups that do not open these channels of dialogue. Thank you for allowing this interview.”
The video circulated on national channels, reached journalists in Bogotá and accumulated hundreds of thousands of views. This also earned Gamboa the 2024 Simón Bolívar Prize in the Interview category.
But the negative impact of this conversation on Gamboa’s life was immediate. After publication in March 2024, the ELN launched attacks on the interview on social media and WhatsApp channels, and circulated leaflets with his name and image. Then came the threat in the streets of Arauca and the urgent departure for Bogotá. In the days that followed, Gamboa faced a campaign of complaints that led to the deletion of his YouTube channel and the temporary removal of several videos from Facebook. The authorities gave him a bulletproof vest and the Foundation for Press Freedom (FLIP) supported him in the partial restoration of the archives and in the steps to formalize his case.
Since his new life, Gamboa has maintained more attentive media coverage, but with the same conviction. He does not give up the possibility of returning to Arauca in complete safety or that Jet-Set Creole be strengthened beyond its presence. He is convinced that the department can be counted accurately without sacrificing its complexity. “In Arauca there was an orphan community of independent journalism and, with Jet-Set CreoleI helped her get out of that orphanage,” he says.
His case reveals a reality that is little visible in the national debate: information coming from many regions depends on journalists who build their profession with intuition and with a handmade capacity for investigation and analysis, often without university training. Gamboa is one of them. Arauca’s departure marked a break, but it did not change his motivations. “I’m not going to stop doing journalism. I refuse!” he explains, because his work does not depend on where he is, but on the need to keep asking.
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