Daniel Coronell

Daniel Alfonso Coronell Castañeda (Bogotá, October 25 of 1964) is a Colombian journalist and columnist. He has been news director for RCN, Noticias Uno and president of Univision News, the news division of Univision, until August 1, 2021. In September 2021 he was appointed as president of the weekly news magazine Cambio. In October 2021, Coronell started working for W Radio Colombia.

For fourteen consecutive years he has been chosen as the most read columnist by opinion leaders in Colombia according to a 2020 poll carried out by the agency Cifras y Conceptos. His op-ed column, the most widely read in Colombia, used to be published in Semana, but following his departure from the weekly magazine it started being published in the online portal Los Danieles, which he co-created with Daniel Samper Ospina, and which features op-eds by Antonio Caballero (until his death in 2021), Ana Bejarano, and Daniel Samper Pizano.

In 2009 he was granted the highest award for a TV investigative report by the Fundación Nuevo Periodismo Iberoamericano - Cemex, for "Un crimen casi perfecto" (An Almost Perfect Crime) together with a team of journalists from Noticias Uno. The program was broadcast in 2007. In 2009, he was honored with an Oxfam Novib/PEN Award.

Coronell and his family decided to come back to Colombia in July 2007, where a few months later, as a result of his op-eds and news reports critical of President Uribe's government, he had an improvised argument with the latter on-the air, through La FM, a national radio network.

In August 2005 he had to go into exile with his wife, journalist and anchorwoman María Cristina Uribe (who at the time presented Noticias Uno), and their daughter. His loved ones had been persistently threatened through phone calls, funeral wreaths and anonymous e-mails. According to Coronell's own research, confirmed by the authorities, the former congressman Carlos Náder Simmonds, who resides in Spain and is mentioned by Fernando Garavito.

Coronell was the victim of multiple threats that forced him into exile. In the 2002 received threats after publishing that, in 1984, a helicopter belonging to President Álvaro Uribe's father had been found in a coca laboratory in Tranquilandia. The aircraft had obtained its license when Álvaro Uribe was director of the Civil Aeronautics. In September 2005, Coronell had to leave the country and live in exile for two years for r death threats made to him and his family.