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Storied Paper Bets on a Daily Future in Colombia
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Having worked at El Espectador in the 1990s, then elsewhere, Padilla said he could not imagine himself anywhere else now. "You have journalism in your blood and El Espectador is journalism in Colombia," he said.
The paper's history is so rich that the French daily Le Monde in 1994 declared it one of the world's eight best dailies.
Fidel Cano, great grandfather of the current editor, founded the paper on March 22, 1887, in what was then a sleepy Medellin.
Soon after, the government shut it down. Cano, a historian and poet who translated the works of Victor Hugo into Spanish, was jailed for a year. The paper started its presses again and was shut down again. So it has been for 121 years, with El Espectador becoming a symbol of press freedom along the way.
The paper's most trying times were during the drug wars of the 1980s, when its reports on the cocaine trade led Pablo Escobar, chief of the Medellin cartel, to order Guillermo Cano's assassination in 1986.
Three years later, having been unable to stop the presses, the cartel bombed the paper's Bogota headquarters, leaving it a shambles. El Espectador published the next day.
Returning to daily publication, then, is only the latest challenge.
"If this does not work," said Fidel Cano, Guillermo's nephew, "we cannot go back to being a weekly again."
