Vicky Davila is arguably one of Colombia’s worst journalists and one of the most powerful mafia infiltrators into the media.
The daughter-in-law of one of the Caribbean region’s most feared mafia matriarchs got her journalism degree more than 25 years ago already, but can still not conduct an interview or spell correctly.
On top of that, Davila screwed up the only scoop in her career and even porn star Nacho Vidal questioned her intelligence.
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Davila invents Mafia TV
Nobody knew what a Colombian version of the US television program would look like back in April, but two months later Davila had turned it into a narco plaything.
The investigation into the alleged 2018 election rigging that implicated her in-laws went nowhere and the promised evidence President Ivan Duque would be involved in this fraud conspiracy never appeared.
Instead, Davila made the front page of her own magazine filing criminal charges against the maker of “Matarife,” a hugely popular online series about the criminal past of former President Alvaro Uribe.
The alleged crime of journalist and attorney Daniel Mendoza was to retweet an article about the decades-long criminal history of her in-laws, the Gnecco family.
The notoriously criminal in-laws of one of Colombia’s most famous journalists
Deja vu of national embarrassments
The vast majority of Colombians would find any association to drug trafficking embarrassing, but they don’t own Semana, the magazine that introduced late drug lord Pablo Escobar to the public as the “Robin Hood” of Medellin in 1983.
Most Colombians are also not called Gilinski, like the family that bought the magazine’s majority share.
This family owned part of the country’s largest bank, Bancolombia, which is possibly loathed more than Davila, but the go-to bank for drug money launderer David Murcia Guzman until his arrest in 2008.
Semana TV upholds a long tradition of what journalism professor Omar Rincon calls “Vicky-Journalism,” the now-matured bastard child of journalism and Davila.
“In Colombia it seems common practice, but that doesn’t make it normal,” another journalism professor, María Paula Martínez, said about the phenomenon in 2016.