Luis was the director of a local radio station in Tarazá, Colombia. On August 12, he was shot dead as he picked up his son from school. Tarazá is one of six municipalities that make up the region of Bajo Cauca in the state of Antioquia. The Andean mountains on either side are covered with plantations of coca leaf, the raw material for cocaine. Whoever controls this region of 400,000 people controls access to the coca harvest and drug smuggling routes north to the Caribbean and west to the Pacific Ocean. It is home to leftist rebels and criminal gangs. Luis had been receiving death threats since 2010. His reporting on the violence and corruption that is so endemic in Tarazá had made him many enemies. It also made him many friends and admirers. His determination to pursue stories that most reporters in these circumstances do not dare to touch had made him a popular character in his community. In fact, his radio station is the only media outlet in the town, but in the past year, Luis gave up "doing news" as he put it. This decision gave him an overwhelming sense of guilt. He believed he was not only failing his profession but also society. "If I want to stay alive, or more importantly, if I want my family to be safe, this is just something I have to live with. But it's hard," he told me in June. For two years Luis had permanent armed security provided by the Colombian government. However, this protection was revoked two weeks ago. The body in charge of assessing the threat to Luis decided armed guards were no longer necessary for his security. There are now some awkward questions to answer. Fortunately, the number of slain journalists in this country has fallen quite dramatically in recent years, but let us not be fooled by the statistics. According to the Foundation for Press Freedom in Bogotá (FLIP), fewer murders are not a result of improved security, but testimony to the silence and self-censorship which have become a reality for hundreds of reporters in Colombia's conflict zones. The cowards who killed Luis have taken the life of a brilliant man, husband and father. I wish I could say that such a thoughtless and callous act of violence would not help whoever killed my friend achieve their goals. But the fact of the matter is that it will. The truth of the matter is that it already has. Luis's assailants had managed to silence him without having to pull the trigger. It makes his murder all the more painful. Tarazá, like so many other towns and villages in Colombia, is a town without journalism, without reporters, without news. Corruption, crime and conflict are left unquestioned and unexposed. In these towns and villages, ignored by the national mainstream media, there is only silence. And the silence, as they say, is deafening. Mathew Charles is a freelance journalist based in Bogotá and a PhD candidate at Cardiff University. His thesis examines the role of regional journalism in Colombia's conflict zones. Photo: (AP) Police officers stand guard over seized packages of cocaine in Cartagena, Colombia