My patience with the Obama Administration has been running thin on numerous issues for quite some time now but on the subject of human rights my patience is, well, just plum exhausted. Hollman Morris is an award-winning Colombian journalist, television producer and a defender of human rights. His reporting has been seminal to documenting the serial abuses of the Uribe Administration and of its ties to right wing death squads that have claimed an estimated 20,000 lives in the last eight years. Mr. Morris' work has earned him the sobriquet of "an ally of terrorism" from President Uribe.

This past June, Hollman Morris applied for a US visa at the American embassy in Bogotá in order to come to take up his place as an International Neiman Fellow at Harvard University, the oldest and one of the most prestigious programmes for mid-career journalists. Being named a Neiman Fellow is recognition of the incredibly important, and frankly dangerous, investigative research that Hollman Morris has performed in documenting the ties of members of the Colombian government and the Colombian armed forces have to paramilitary and drug trafficking groups. His being denied a visa by the Obama Administration is an affront to human rights groups and suggests that the Administration is not interested in having the many crimes of Alvaro Uribe aired in public.

Cecilia Zarate-Laun, a founder of the Colombia Support Network, told The Progressive that the visa suspension was “a prime example of ideological exclusion by the U.S. Government premised on the sensitivity of a foreign government to valid critical reporting.” It is an embarrassment that the Obama Administration is choosing to sweep under the rug the countless abuses of the Colombian people by the Colombian state and its armed forces. Here's a man who has risked his life to uncover human rights abuses and who has been a target of a comprehensive spying campaign by the Colombian state and the Obama Administration denies him a visa and the opportunity to join an academic mid-career development programme? The denial of the visa sends a dangerous message that journalists who defend are fair game and that the Obama Administration will look the other way when it comes to human rights abuses.

Below is a short three minute interview from October 2007 when Mr. Morris came to Washington to receive an award from Human Rights Watch as its 2007 Human Rights Defender. In the interview, Mr. Morris talks about the "other Colombia" - the fact that for ethnic minorities in Colombia life under Uribe has been deadly. In case you missed it, the Bush Administration granted Mr. Morris a visa. The Obama Administration did not. Funny that.

Here's more background on Hollman Morris' award-winning television programme Contravía from the Center for Investigative Reporting:

ABOUT CONTRAVIA Our first segment features Colombian journalists Hollman Morris and Juan Pablo Morris, who created a series on Colombian television that is unearthing the largely hidden history of the country’s long-running guerilla wars. The series, called Contravía, airs on Colombia’s third public channel and online www.contravia.tv.

While the violent tactics of the left-wing guerilla movement, the FARC, have generated considerable press attention—most recently after the release of kidnapped former congresswoman Ingrid Betancourt and other hostages in July 2008—a major component of that violence, by right-wing paramilitary groups, has gone largely unreported. Founded some twenty years ago by landowners to combat the guerillas, the paramilitary groups have transformed into violent criminal enterprises financed through cocaine exports and kidnappings—much like the FARC itself. Over more than two decades, the paramilitary squads have been responsible for the deaths and disappearance of as many as 20,000 people, according to the National Movement of Victims of State Crimes, a human rights group established to protest paramilitary abuses.

The Morris brothers take their cameras deep into the Colombian countryside to probe into the disappearance of thousands of individuals kidnapped over the past decade, and track efforts to unearth their graves far from the cosmopolitan capital city of Bogotá or the eyes of the international or global press. “Our aim,” Juan Pablo told us, “is to reconstruct the memory of those atrocities…. Many of the people who followed the paramilitaries in the 1980s and 90s are running the country today.”

Contravia has uncovered links between paramilitary leaders and high officials in Colombian politics and finance. Thirty senators and representatives in the Colombian Congress have been imprisoned because of their ties to the paramilitary death squads; another sixty have been investigated. That’s a third of Colombia’s 268 member Congress, giving rise to a new term—‘para-politica’—to describe the ongoing crisis as one top politician after another is accused of complicity with the para-military squads. Most of those accused represent political parties that are part of the governing coalition led by President Alvaro Uribe.

Hollman Morris was given the Human Rights Defender Award by Human Rights Watch in 2007. He’s been forced to leave Colombia several times for extended periods after the airing of Contravía revelations. The show does not receive commercial backing; subsidies come from the Open Society Institute, the European Union and other international sources.

In February 2009, Contravía’s reporting prompted a denunciation by the government: Colombia’s Minister of Defense, Juan Manuel Santos, accused Hollman Morris on national radio of being “close to the guerillas,” after he conducted several interviews with FARC hostages who were later released. Uribe himself denounced Morris to the national press, and implied he was a member of the “intellectual bloc” of the FARC.

Such accusations in Colombia can have fatal consequences. Death threats followed. Shortly thereafter, Morris defended himself from the government’s charges on one of Colombia’s most popular morning talk shows; Contravía filmed Morris’ part of the conversation with the host Julio Sanchez and produced an English translation of the interview.

The government's accusations prompted a protest by the Committee to Protect Journalists and Human Rights Watch, which claimed in a letter to President Uribe that there was no evidence for such a statement, which could lead to “serious threats” of violence, and “undermines … freedom of expression” in Colombia.

The Inter-American Human Rights Commission (IAHRC) of the Organization of American States issued a statement criticizing the Colombian government’s effort to vilify the journalists and link them to the guerillas. On March 23, attorneys for the Committee for Free Expression in Colombia and other free press advocates publicly challenged the Colombian government’s version of events, and described the potentially corrosive effects the personal attacks were having on the willingness of Colombian journalists to pursue controversial human rights stories.

Two days after that presentation, Juan Pablo Morris commented by phone from Bogotá that Contravía will continue to defy efforts by Uribe to “link journalists who question the government to ‘terrorists’.”

In the segment below filmed earlier this year before the visa denial, Mr. Morris speaks to the hope that the Obama Administration might engage in the Colombian peace process and take a different tack on drug issues.

If you understand Spanish, you can watch some of Contravía's programming on Morris Productions YouTube channel.