Gossip Be-Gone

I wonder how this would work?:

TULUA, COLOMBIA -- Mayor Juan Guillermo Angel got tired of the gossip swirling around this farm town that has been famous for rumormongering for nearly three centuries. So he outlawed it.

...Semantics aside, at his urging the town council passed a law this year that imposes fines of up to $1,100 or two months in jail for anyone spreading "calumny that injures or dishonors."

...Angel says the law is part of his campaign to improve Tulua's quality of life. The city simultaneously adopted measures to bolster pedestrian rights, care for senior citizens, facilitate conflict resolution and create stricter control over public spaces, he said in an interview.

But some observers contend that the law is a heavy-handed effort to muzzle the mayor's critics, particularly former Mayor Gustavo Alvarez Gardeazabal, who regularly pokes fun at politicians, including Angel, on his nationally broadcast radio show, "The Firefly."

"It's an attack on free expression more or less designed to shut me up," Gardeazabal said. The mayor, he said, was nettled by Gardeazabal's broadcast insinuations of ballot box irregularities when he was elected in 2003 and ever since by allegations of his administration's mishandling of public transit and of the proceeds from the sale of the municipal television station.

Gardeazabal's complaint is bolstered by the fact that on the day the law took effect, he was hauled before a prosecutor in Tulua to answer slander charges lodged by a "city functionary." He pleaded not guilty, saying he had been misquoted in an interview. The case is pending.

Angel responds that Gardeazabal is "paranoid. . . . The law was an official, not a personal, decision."

Observers expect the law to have little effect on gossip in a town that has loved its tittle-tattle for centuries.

"We have a reputation as gossipmongers," said Omar Franco Duque, a local historian and professor at Central Cauca Valley University here. "It's our custom and it's not going to disappear easily, because it's a way of life."