Читать книгу Marked for Death - Terry Gould - Страница 7

ONE

SMALL TOWN, BIG HELL

Guillermo Bravo Vega, Colombia

I SAW GUILLERMO BRAVO VEGA for the first time in a photograph his colleagues showed me in a newsroom in Neiva, the Colombian town where he’d declared war on corruption. Under the headline “Journalist Assassinated” was a large-boned handsome man with rugged features, heavy brows and a full head of salt and pepper hair. Everything about him looked rough-cut, from his logger’s-sized hands gripping a microphone to his towering height against the backdrop of a cheering crowd. He was standing in a local union hall, announcing his latest exposé, a doubly defiant act in a country where three thousand trade unionists and three dozen journalists had been murdered. Bravo himself had narrowly escaped several assassination attempts, ignored countless death threats and been ordered to leave Neiva six times. Then, on April 28, 2003, after refusing to obey the seventh order, Bravo was murdered in his home. He was sixty-four years old.

Neiva is a heavily garrisoned coffee town in the Upper Magdalena Valley, about 150 miles southeast of Bogotá. Two ranges of the Andes flank the valley, with the eastern slope dropping to a jungle plain. In Bravo’s last years, the region from the valley to the plain was the main battleground of Colombia’s forty-year civil war, earning Neiva the sobriquet Pueblo chico, infierno grande—“Small Town, Big Hell.” Marxist guerrillas launched daily raids from a Switzerland-sized territory they controlled in the jungle, and right-wing paramilitaries roamed the valley, assassinating anyone whose left-wing politics offended them.

Bravo, an avowed leftist, blamed the unending conflict on what he called Colombia’s feudal injustices. The state of Huila and its capital Neiva, he wrote, were “shrouded by conquistadorean darkness.” Land, industry and government were in the grip of a tiny group of families, known as the Opitas Mafia, who were descended from the original Spanish colonizers and who had maintained their overlord status for three hundred years. Putting an end to their crony capitalism and criminal impunity was Bravo’s burning mission in life.

For most of his career that mission had been a lonely one. Bravo had quit or been fired from every newspaper he’d worked at, usually leaving in a rage after being forbidden to investigate the paper’s advertisers. He eventually began self-publishing a little magazine called Eco Impacto and then privately produced a half-hour TV show called Facts and Figures (Hechos y cifras). Over the years his independent journalism had sent ten people to jail and wreathed him in laurels, including a Simón Bolívar Award—the nation’s equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize. Despite his renown, Bravo’s journalism had never earned him more than a few hundred dollars a month.

“Guillermo never cared about money, he was obsessed with corruption,” a reporter named Diógenes Cadena told me as we sat in the lineup room of La Nación, one of the newspapers that had considered Bravo irrefrenable (uncontrollable). Cadena had worked for two years on the set of Facts and Figures, and said it felt as if he were inside a tornado that was willfully trying to turn the town upside down—or right side up. “Man, he had a temper. If he found out someone was up to something and covering it up, he’d come to the studio, he’d bang the table, he’d scream, ‘I’ll get that guy!’”

“Self-censoring was not one of his traits,” added Carlos Mora, the legal affairs reporter for the paper. “Even if it would save his life, he would not change a word.”

Neither man knew precisely when Bravo had become obsessed with exposing corruption, only that he’d been born poor in a nearby rural area and hadn’t even become a journalist until he was forty. He’d left Neiva as a relatively young man and been away for a long time, returning in 1981 with his Bolívar Award and an advanced degree in economics. He almost immediately accused the town’s reporters of selling flattering coverage to businessmen, which did not endear him to the local press corps. As a result, Bravo was wary of being too frank about himself with other journalists. Then, during his last decade, he’d become part of the news himself: he feuded on television with top officials, took on a multinational oil company and ran for mayor. He also gained a reputation as a lady’s man, juggling one legal wife, two common-law wives and a string of glamorous mistresses, along with the needs of five sons. His union allies called him “Viejo loco y enamorado”—an old lunatic in love with life—and Mora and Cadena had punnishly nicknamed him Loco Bravo.

Bravo received his last death threat on March 8, 2003, when a sicario—a hired assassin—paid a visit to the bungalow he shared with his most recent common-law wife. The sicario told him to leave town or be killed. Bravo checked the veracity of the threat with his own sources and then told Mora and Cadena, “This time they’ll get me.” For the first time in his life, he fled to the capital. But after only two weeks in Bogotá, he came home.

A few weeks later he was working alone at night in his bungalow when an intruder surprised him at his desk and shot him dead. The killer simply walked in from the street. Earlier that evening his wife had gone out to work, locking the door behind her, but after she had left the house Bravo got up and opened the door. She’d found him alone at his desk with the door open every night since he’d come back from Bogotá, and had screamed at him for recklessly ignoring the threat. His excuse for such blatant courting of death was always the same: “I wanted the breeze.”

In 1998, five years before he was murdered, Bravo celebrated a landmark issue of Eco Impacto. “After 13 years we have reached edition No. 50,” he wrote in the lead article. “Many times we have had to confront being kidnapped, assassinated or driven into exile by dark masterminds whom everyone knows but no one will denounce.”

In honor of his milestone edition, Bravo offered a summary of the exposés he’d published over the years. Most concerned the theft of public assets by Huila’s Opitas Mafia, the members of which, he said, were part of the national fabric. At the time, brazen deals between Colombia’s highest public officials and its wealthiest businessmen and criminals were commonplace, the level of corruption profound. In its 1998 Corruption Index, Transparency International gave the nation a dismal rating of 2.2 out of a possible 10, making it the seventh most corrupt country in the world, below Russia and just above Nigeria.

As an economist, Bravo took the long view in explaining his country’s bottom-ranked status, tracing Colombia’s systemic problems to the sixteenth-century Spanish conquistadors who had crossed the sea in search of El Dorado and seeded the land with their greed and criminality. Bravo used a slang term to describe the economics the conquistadors had practiced: regalame. Loosely translated, regalame means “give it to me for nothing.” The conquerors had slaughtered their way up the Magdalena Valley with regalame in their hearts, and their descendants in the Opitas Mafia had been raised on it.

Over the centuries, regalame had tainted every strata of Colombian society. In Neiva, for instance, it was acceptable to ask for a meal at a restaurant by saying “Regalame”—half-hoping the waiter would take the tip and forget the bill. Judges and bureaucrats offered positive treatment in exchange for some regalias (“gifts to the deserving”). Paramilitaries and guerrillas said “Regalame” when they shook down politicians or landowners. Narcotraffickers uttered “Regalame” when they bid goodbye to a ton of cocaine headed north. And speculators on the coffee market mentioned regalame in their prayers for a bonanza (another Spanish word).

“Bravo was a fanatic about regalame,” his best friend, Juan Carlos Cirdenas, an oil union official, told me in his Neiva office. “We’d be sitting in a cantina, somebody would ask for a doble anis and say, ‘Regalame.’ Everyone says it here as a joke, to pretend you’re a boss, but Bravo would shout, ‘Shut up! Don’t use that word around me. You want a drink, say, ‘Please!’”

In his 1978 economics thesis, Bonanza Capitalism and the Culture of Exploitation, Bravo stated that the lust for something-for-nothing “leaves no room for honest enterprise, less for social fraternity and ethical behavior. . . . Neither law nor morality can co-exist with the pathological quest for El Dorado.” When the conquistadors failed to discover their fantastical City of Gold, they “turned cruelly on the natives to make themselves as wealthy as they believed they had a royal right to be.” They all but enslaved the local population and set them to work. Immediately, two economic classes were born, with no in-between: the high-living few and the low-living many. In the early development of Colombia, the two classes became both economically and geographically distinct, and Bravo blamed the grasping upper classes for keeping them that way.

Flying into western Colombia from the north you follow the same route the conquistador Jiménez de Quesada took in 1536 in his search for El Dorado. Between the green Andean ranges of the Cordillera Oriental and the Cordillera Central lies the thousand-mile-long Magdalena Valley, its patchwork of yellow-green pastures melding into dark green coffee plantations on the slopes. To the west a third range, the Cordillera Occidental, enfolds the narrower but equally fertile Cauca River Valley. To escape the equatorial heat and diseases of the lowlands, the royal officials who followed the conquistadors built their regional capitals on plateaus high in these ranges, where they could live in eternal springtime. Bogotá sat at 8,500 feet in the Oriental Range, Medellín almost a mile high in the Central Range, and Popayán overlooked the Cauca Valley from an altitude of 5,700 feet. The Spaniards in these cities forcibly recruited the local Indians to cultivate the mountain flanks around them, while in the lowlands and vast Llanos plains to the east, they established huge cattle ranches and plantations worked by thousands of indentured peons and African slaves. This arrangement left the literally high-living rulers of the three cities insulated from the laboring Colombians beneath them.

Throughout Colombia’s modern history, the Spanish upper-class minority, the Criollos, ruled the vast majority of blacks, mestizos and mulattos mainly from their mountaintop capitals, sharing ownership of the lowlands only with fellow Criollos such as the Opitas Mafia. In Bravo’s day, 61 percent of Colombian land—the best farmland in the country—was owned by 4 percent of the population. The top echelons of the two political parties, the Liberals and the Conservatives, came from that same 4 percent. Ten percent of the population controlled more than half of the total wealth, and they were almost all white Spanish. Meanwhile, half the country’s population of forty million lived in poverty, 15 percent were illiterate, a quarter had no running water or electricity, and there was an acute lack of schools and hospitals to handle the needs of the rural population.

All this inequality and regional separation had combined with the ethos of regalame to produce unending internal conflict. Since the founding of modern Colombia in 1831, there have been eleven civil wars and sixty violent insurrections. Between 1948 and 1958, 300,000 people were killed in the aptly named La Violencia, a civil war fought between Liberals and Conservatives. Between 1964 and Bravo’s murder in 2003, a quarter million died in a civil war that was simply called “the armed conflict.” In Bravo’s last decade, the fighting between guerrillas, paramilitaries and government forces had cost the country almost US$50 billion, at least two million people had been displaced from their homes, and over thirty thousand had been kidnapped.

The guerrillas traced their lineage to the extreme left wing of La Violencia, and had never accepted the peace settlement worked out between Liberals and Conservatives in 1958. Led by a Castroinspired group of Marxists seeking to violently overthrow the Criollo-run government, they launched their revolution when Bravo was in his twenties and Neiva was still recovering from La Violencia. The largest faction of the guerrillas to survive the decades was called the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia—the FARC. Its commanders decreed two methods of terror as legitimate: Plan Pistola and Pesca Milagrosa. The first tactic meant that every government official, and every journalist “allied” with the government, was an acceptable target for assassination. The second, “Miracle Fishing,” meant that the guerrillas had the right to troll the country and kidnap anyone they could squeeze for tribute. To additionally finance their attacks on Colombia’s infrastructure, the FARC commanders decreed that because most of the country’s cocaine ended up in the hated United States, it was acceptable for the FARC to take part in the drug trade.

In the summer of 1998, the FARC persuaded the recently inaugurated president, Andrés Pastrana, to call a truce and allot them a sixteen-thousand-square-mile “safety zone”—essentially a state within a state—on the jungle plain just east of Neiva. The sanctuary was immediately and sarcastically labeled FARClandia by opposition politicians, who doubted the wisdom of the truce. The FARC, in fact, used the ensuing peace talks to build up its forces while continuing its attacks, making Pastrana look like a fool. In May 2002 Pastrana’s successor, Álvaro Uribe, reversed course and declared all-out war. The FARC went underground in towns near Neiva and hung on in camps in its erstwhile safety zone, its ambushes, kidnappings and targeted murders conducted by the Teófila Forero, a battalion of shock troops named after a dead rebel. The Teófila Forero had violated the truce in 2001 by invading Neiva Centro and kidnapping fifteen civilians, including the wife and children of the former governor, Jaime Lozada. In 2003 they set off a bomb in Bogotá’s Club El Nogal on a crowded Friday night, killing thirty-six people. When I arrived in Neiva, they were still on the attack, blowing up a downtown electronics store, ostensibly because the proprietor had refused to pay them vacunas—the “vaccination” fee they charged businesses to inoculate them against mishaps.

Bravo’s reaction to the atrocities committed by the guerrillas was to condemn the perpetrators, but with an excuse. He believed the guerrillas were the result of the country’s problems, not the cause. In Huila, the causa última was the corrupt Opitas Mafia, and it did not surprise Bravo when they allied themselves with the paramilitaries, whose atrocities, Bravo felt, greatly exceeded those committed by the FARC.

The paramilitaries, who went by the righteous-sounding name United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, or AUC, had originated in the early 1980s as bands of mercenaries hired by land barons in the north to fight the guerrillas. While the Colombian army looked the other way, the AUC massacred trade unionists and human rights workers, wiped out an entire left-wing political party—the Patriotic Union—and was by far the greatest killer of journalists. By the end of the 1990s, it had become a big player in the $7-billion-a-year cocaine trade and had accrued enormous political influence up and down the Magdalena Valley.

The death threats that Bravo received came mainly from the paramilitaries who served the Opitas Mafia. In theory, he could seek the protection of an FBI-like arm of the government called the Administrative Department of Security, or DAS. Under the direct control of the president, DAS was responsible for gathering intelligence on all illegal sides in the armed conflict and for guarding public figures. Bravo, however, never thought of DAS as anything more than another arm of the corrupt government in league with the AUC. When I arrived in Neiva, paramilitaries were being exposed in the press as working within DAS—some as fully sworn agents. In regions where they weren’t actual DAS agents, they still had access to classified DAS files, and cases were coming to light in which DAS had conducted intelligence operations on behalf of the AUC. In 2006, President Uribe’s highest DAS commanders and sixty of his closest allies in the legislature were criminally charged for collaborating with paramilitary death squads.

All of this left Bravo facing certain murder if he ignored the warning of the sicario and returned to his journalism career in Neiva. And yet that is exactly what he did.

To gain an insight into the character and childhood of Guillermo Bravo, I took a taxi to the edge of town to meet the people who loved him most. Army trucks patrolled the ring road and sandbag emplacements were manned by soldiers pointing heavy-caliber machine guns at the farm fields. Bravo’s second eldest son, Juan Carlos, lived in hiding in the district with his mother, his wife, and his children. They had retreated here after Juan Carlos had published an article with the Inter American Press Association in early 2005. Entitled “A Crime of Hate,” it detailed the conflicts Bravo had had with various public figures before his murder and complained that there had been no police investigation of the possible masterminds of the crime.

“My father had a very complicated upbringing that caused him to have a harsh and angry personality,” thirty-five-year-old Juan Carlos told me in his tiny apartment. “The circumstances of his youth were very bad.”

Bravo, he said, was born in the rural town of Gigante, about fifty miles south of Neiva, on September 2, 1938. His mother was a teenage coffee picker who went home to a hovel in an alley, but his father was Antonio Vega Lara, one of the most wealthy and powerful men in the state. Vega owned coffee plantations and businesses and often made overtures and promises to the poor and illiterate women in his employ. “He had a lot of very young mistresses, many of whom bore his children out of wedlock,” Juan Carlos said of his paternal grandfather. “My grandmother was one of them.”

Juan Carlos only knew the barest details of his grandmother’s life. The first was that she herself was the child of a young woman who bore her out of wedlock to a wealthy man. A more disturbing detail was that Bravo’s mother was murdered when she was twenty-five—poisoned to death, like her own mother before her, who had been murdered at seventeen. “The wealthy in Huila have always been able to do what they want,” Juan Carlos said, painting a picture of disposable women.

Juan Carlos’s mother, and Bravo’s legal wife of forty years, Angela Ortiz Pulido, said that Bravo, who was twelve when his mother died, never directly accused Antonio Vega of killing her, but it seemed likely she had either demanded support from him or had sought support from another man, making Vega jealous. “Whatever the reason for her murder, I know Guillermo was scarred by the episode terribly,” she said.

Antonio Vega had been a rare visitor to his mistress’s dirt-floored hovel, and Bravo had never even seen the Vega hacienda. Left on his own after his mother’s poisoning, the boy believed he’d been orphaned. But his circumstances were about to change.

The year was 1950, and the bodies of men were filling the streets of Gigante, casualties of civil war. Two years previously, in April 1948, a popular leader of the Liberal left, Jorge Gaitán, had been assassinated in Bogotá, which had touched off street rioting between Liberals and Conservatives that had killed two thousand people—the opening battle of La Violencia. After an election that the Liberals boycotted, an ultra-rightist president named Laureano Gómez had been installed. An admirer of Hitler and Franco, Gómez ruled as a fascist dictator, unleashing his army and police against his opposition. The fighting spread to the countryside and soon the cruelty and mass slaughter of La Violencia arrived in Gigante. As a backer of Gómez and a member of what would soon be known as the Opitas Mafia, Antonio Vega helped organize the Conservative forces. When they caught a Liberal leader, they gave him “a red necklace,” slitting his neck and esophagus just enough that the victim was forced to try to hold his throat together until he suffocated or bled to death.

This was no time for a motherless boy to be making his way in the streets of Gigante—waifs such as he were being recruited to fight for the Liberals. That would have been an unappealing prospect for Antonio Vega, who decided it was time to provide for his son and give him a proper Criollo education. He paid for him to move into Gigante’s exclusive Elias Seminary to begin Catholic studies. No one knows how Bravo felt about this sudden paternal interest, but as Juan Carlos says, “he was so young and for him it was obvious in which direction his safety lay. He knew Antonio Vega was well positioned. It would have been best not to let his mind be seized by thoughts that alienated him from that protection.”

In 1951, Vega sent Bravo away to Conservative-controlled Bogotá to attend the exclusive La Salle Academy, where it seems Bravo began to accept himself as part of the establishment. At sixteen he announced an ambition to become an airline pilot, and wrote Antonio Vega for financial support to attend flight-training school. Vega wrote back that “a man with wings cannot help but find success in service to our nation,” and enclosed a check. But Bravo never became a pilot: he loaned the tuition money to a friend at La Salle, who never paid him back.

At eighteen, Bravo decided instead that after he graduated La Salle he wanted to become an actor. It was 1956, and the Liberals and Conservatives were working toward a truce, negotiating a deal to alternately rule Colombia in four-year terms, with the Liberals to be given the presidency in 1958. There was still political violence in the countryside, and rural banditry had become endemic, so Vega thought Bogotá would be a safe place for a Conservative-leaning young man to establish himself as a thespian. He paid to enroll Bravo in Bogotá’s Colón Theater School.

Bravo graduated in 1960, but instead of pursuing a life on the stage or in film, he decided that what he really wanted to be was a singer. Again Vega paid, this time to enroll his son in Mexico’s Monterrey Academy of Music, where Bravo spent a year learning to sing rancheros, modeling his style on the famous balladeer José Alfredo Jiménez. When Bravo couldn’t make a living in the crowded field of Mexican ranchero singers, his father enrolled him in the Cabral Academy to train as a professional radio announcer. After the six-month course, however, Bravo, now twenty-three, couldn’t find work, and his father’s patience at last ran out. Vega suggested Bravo return to Huila, where this time Vega would find something for him to do.

Despite his artistic cravings, Bravo had always received his highest marks in mathematics. Vega used his contacts in Neiva to get his son a job as an accounts manager and bookkeeper at Neiva’s police headquarters. At this job Bravo very likely ran across some of the odd financial transactions endemic to policing in Huila but, his son says, “he was not political at that time and he got along well with the policemen at his station. He was courting my mother and so needed the work.”

Bravo had first met the upper-class Angela at a church dinner held to introduce marriageable men and women of the region. Antonio Vega approved of the relationship, and, in early 1962, the couple were married in a ceremony at Neiva’s grand Campo Nuñez church. Angela soon became pregnant with Juan Carlos’s older brother, Guillermo, and, over the next several months, Bravo compliantly served the police. Had he given them any trouble, he would have endangered himself and his young family

The tensions of La Violencia were still unsettled in regions like Huila, and were exacerbated that spring because the Liberals were set to yield the presidency to the Conservatives. The police in Neiva were on the side of the Conservatives, and so, from all accounts, was Bravo. Then, as Juan Carlos said, “something happened that changed his entire life.”

It was during the San Pedro carnival, held in Neiva Centro each year at the end of June. As usual, a baubuco band played the music of Huila, filling the square with the fiesta yelps of vocalists accompanied by drums, guitars and sour brass. There was a lot of aguardiente drinking, the townsmen whooping it up and young women dancing the sanjuanero in peasant costume. At the corners of the square, platoons of police stood ready to deal with any fights that might break out between Liberal and Conservative factions. Bravo and his brother-in-law were standing around with policemen friends, the two as drunk as anyone else on the square. A couple of the police officers walked into a crowded cantina to use the toilet and Bravo and his brother-in-law followed them. “Evidently some of the patrons in the bar were opposed to the police,” Juan Carlos said, “because when my uncle and the policemen went to use the toilet, one officer left his gun on top of the bar so my father could protect himself.” At one of the tables a heated political discussion was in progress. “My father might have said something cutting, but he was very drunk and never remembered,” Juan Carlos said. “In any case, it turned into a confrontation, and one of the working men at the table made a pun on his name: ‘If you’re so brave, man, kill me.’ So my father picked up the gun and shot him dead.”

The policemen rushed back from the toilet to find a man shot between the eyes, and Bravo standing with the gun in his hand. They hustled Bravo to the station, and when he sobered up, they advised him to insist that he was so drunk when he pulled the trigger that he was in a state of what they termed “mental unconsciousness”—which would absolve him of any intention or guilt in the murder. Bravo went along with this defense at first, telling an investigator that he couldn’t remember killing the man and that he was aiming at the jukebox behind him. But then he admitted that if he couldn’t remember killing the man, how could he remember he was aiming at the jukebox? The police witnessing his statement told him if he couldn’t stick to a story he should run away, or perhaps get Antonio Vega to fix things. “In the end, my father made no excuses and asked no favors,” Juan Carlos said. “He was soon to be a father, but he resisted the urging of others. He told everyone he should be punished and pled guilty to murder.”

When Bravo went to prison, he also turned his back on Antonio Vega and everything that Vega represented. All at once he seems to have realized that ever since his mother had been killed, he himself had been practicing the art of getting something for nothing.

The Neiva jail was filled with feuding Liberals and Conservatives incarcerated during La Violencia, but instead of crossing to the Liberals, Bravo walked farther left, to a group of trade unionists and socialists jailed by the Conservatives for “syndicalism.” They were running a literacy program for their fellow prisoners, and Bravo spent his days in jail as an arithmetic teacher and his nights discussing trade unionism and socialism with his new friends. During conjugal visits with Angela, he talked about land distribution and bank reform, topics she’d never heard him mention before.

In 1968, after he’d served more than five years, the newly installed Liberals reviewed the file of the now left-wing Bravo and pardoned him, expunging his record—which was soon forgotten by all but Bravo himself, his family, and the family of the victim. Out of jail, Bravo became one of the local leaders of the leftist National Popular Alliance Party (ANAPO), and for a brief period served in the state legislature as an ANAPO representative. At the same time he began outlining a novel, which he eventually published as Morir de Pie (Die Standing). It was a political (and polemical) tale involving the left’s bloody fight against the fascist Gómez after the assassination of Jorge Gaitán. In the book, Bravo clearly tries to identify the cause of the anger that had plagued him since the death of his mother, and that finally drove him to commit a mindless murder. “The Conservatives passed their sins to the sons,” he wrote. “One day, the sons gave birth to everlasting consequence.”

A few months after Bravo’s release from jail, the son of the man he had killed tracked him down; he followed Bravo down a side street and confronted him with a gun. Juan Carlos related what happened next: “My father said, ‘Yes, you can kill me, but if you let me live, I will make up for my crime, I promise you. For my beliefs, I am ready to die standing.’”

The man let him live, and Guillermo Bravo Vega was as good as his promise. He committed the rest of his life to a quest for redemption.

In 1971, Bravo set himself a grand goal to expiate his sin: change Colombia, and perhaps the world.

That year he won a scholarship in economics to a university in Bogotá, and for his thesis he chose to examine the coffee industry—coffee being the most heavily traded commodity in the world after petroleum. Bravo believed that if he could explain the business of coffee, which accounted for the livelihood of 15 percent of Colombia’s population and was controlled in Huila by the Opitas Mafia, he could get at the mechanism of injustice that kept the rich in their haciendas and the poor in their hovels.

For producing nations, coffee had always been the quintessential boom-and-bust commodity, fueling inflation when world prices were high (usually for brief periods) and crushing economies when world prices were low (for much longer periods). During high-price cycles, speculators on the coffee futures market bought up beans and held them until increased scarcity sent prices even higher; at the first hint that the market was about to turn, they dumped their beans, creating oversupply and driving prices to the bottom.

Reaping none of the profits of the boom years and suffering the effects of the bust years were millions of people whose lives resembled that of Bravo’s mother. Coffee is a labor-intensive industry, particularly in Colombia, where coffee trees do not ripen all at once and workers must search individual branches repeatedly for ripened beans. Plantation owners like Antonio Vega had always used the cost of production as an excuse to pay bean pickers starvation wages, even during inflationary boom years. Workers thus earned a living “according to two wage scales,” Bravo wrote, “low and zero.”

In Bravo’s view, the coffee market was ruled by the immorality of regalame and the lust for El Dorado. He thought there was a logical alternative, which he presented in his thesis. After offering a hundred pages of history and social economic theory, he used graphs, tables and structural charts to lay out a blueprint for an international coffee agreement between producing nations that would set up export quotas to create price stability. Floating quotas would be governed by an export board; coffee pickers would be guaranteed a minimum wage commensurate with a stabilized market; and exporters would establish a fund that would direct a portion of their profits to social welfare programs in the coffee zones.

In 1978 Bravo successfully defended his thesis then used his background and further research to write an article called “Bonanza: The Boom and Bust of the Economy,” which he published in the liberal newspaper La República the next year. Overnight, the article made him famous in the halls of academe and in journalism. It even garnered praise from right-wing nationalists, who were deeply resentful that big American coffee buyers seemed always to be searching for ways to collapse the local market. Bravo was hailed as one of South America’s most brilliant economists, won the Simón Bolívar Award and was invited into the parlors of the wealthy to discuss his findings. Job offers poured in from universities and the mainstream media, and multimillionaire coffee magnate Jorge Cárdenas Gutiérrez offered Bravo an executive position in his international company.

But converting his prize-winning article into his own bonanza was not Bravo’s goal. “I wanted a free voice in the midst of all the political deal-making and cronyism of Bogotá,” Bravo recollected twenty years later. “I chose journalism to give me the opportunity for that free voice.”

He accepted a job at La República, but the voice they gave him turned out to be less free than he’d anticipated. He soon ran into problems with other Bogotá journalists and then with his editors. This was in part because in Colombia many journalists supplemented their meager income by soliciting advertisements for their papers, a practice that appalled Bravo because, of course, the advertisers then expected (and received) positive coverage.

“He said, right to his colleagues’ faces, ‘You have sold out for a plate of beans,’” the Neiva journalist Diógenes Cadena told me. “That was why he never lasted long at any job. He fought with every editor. Every time they tried to tone down his work, he thought they were giving in to corruption. He thought corruption the worst cancer of society.”

Bravo left La República and freelanced articles while he lobbied for his reforms. In 1981, inspired in part by his thesis, Latin American coffee growers drew up a plan that became known as the International Coffee Agreement, and that eventually implemented much of the regulation Bravo had called for. In addition, Jorge Cárdenas established a social welfare fund to build schools, hospitals and housing for Colombian pickers.

After that success, Bravo decided to move back to his home province to see if he could turn Neiva on its head the way he had the national coffee industry.

Bravo’s homecoming in 1981 was a little complicated on the personal front. He moved back with Angela and their two sons, but he also set up house in the city with a beautiful Bogotá schoolteacher named Ismery Gómez, who happened to be pregnant with the first of three children they were to have together in the space of four years. He divided his domestic time between his two families, and did so completely openly.

When I met with Angela, she told me, “We were never divorced, we were married to the end!”—but from the way she stared at the floor after she said this, her thin lips set, I suspected that Bravo’s sexual betrayals had not been as easy for her to live with as for him. I asked her if Bravo, who had denounced his father’s ways, was uncomfortable about following in Antonio Vega’s womanizing footsteps. Angela had no comment, but her son, Juan Carlos, argued that there was a crucial difference between the two men. “My father was not exploitative,” he said. “He always had a loyal relationship with his wives and his five sons, loving all equally and with devotion. He was a caring, supportive man, an open and honorable man.” That explanation sounded a little too forbearing to my ears, and as I dug further into Bravo’s work and life, I came to learn how inextricably intertwined his wide-open affairs were with his dangerous crusades, and how complex his motivations for philandering were.

Bravo got his first job in Neiva with Diario del Huila, then the town’s only newspaper. He did a “lifestyle check” of the town councilors and discovered that they were living in split-level homes and driving big American cars on salaries of a hundred dollars a month. He pursued the councilors’ business relationships with the paper’s main advertisers, and when the story he handed in about the councilors’ conflicts of interest was spiked, he exploded at the entire newsroom, accusing his fellow journalists of “hablar con sus bocas llenas”—talking with their mouths full. That was the end of his short tenure at Diario. For an income he turned to doing part-time accounting for a construction union, which led him down another avenue of investigation that brought him back to his first, setting him on an independent path of publishing he would follow for the rest of his life. Years later, he would advise journalists who were just starting out: “Call the unions. They know everything.”

At the beginning of 1983 a group of wealthy businessmen proposed a shopping center—Neiva’s first—on Calle 21, south of Centro. The site of the development, eventually called the Confamiliar, was on land owned by the city. The directors of the Confamiliar Corporation sought the support of two city officials, who quickly persuaded the mayor and councilmen to hand over the land to the developers and support the project with tax dollars. The project was announced at a council meeting as a lucrative public-private partnership that would eventually pay for big capital projects and enhanced security measures against the guerrillas.

Bravo knew the support of city politicians was usually procured through the payment of regalias, and at the council meeting he called for an independent board of auditors to oversee the development. The council considered his proposal and ruled that the auditing currently in place would be adequate.

Construction began in 1984, and Bravo worked with the union to monitor the huge cost overruns the city soon began paying out. He hounded the municipal officials who were approving most of the payments to Confamiliar. When the city auditor did attempt to block a payment, he was overruled by the officials, who explained to Bravo that it wasn’t in the public interest to jeopardize a project in which so much had already been invested.

In 1985, Bravo wrote a ten-thousand-word forensic investigation of the shopping center, although he had no idea where he would publish it. The big Bogotá dailies were then showing some interest in Huila because of its burgeoning oil industry, but Bravo didn’t trust them not to cut the heart out of his story. His union friend, Juan Carlos Cirdenas, told me that Neiva’s big businessmen and officials were thought to be untouchable. “Journalists were very afraid of being jailed for criminal defamation by a judgment in Neiva’s corrupt court system,” Cirdenas said. “Bravo, though, wasn’t afraid to call those guys Opitas Mafiosos.”

The word Opitas itself was not a pejorative in Neiva; it was how Colombians referred to people from Huila, harkening back to the indigenous tribe of the Upper Magdalena Valley, which had long since disappeared through conquest and interbreeding. The city’s flag, in fact, sported a distinctive arrow with five vanes at the base that was once used by the Opitas aboriginals. But linking the word Mafia to Opitas was another matter. In his article, Bravo defined the Opitas Mafia as “a brotherhood of Huilanese bandits who rule us like tribal chiefs.” The members of that brotherhood thought they were entitled to receive government contracts in closed or rigged bidding, the economic wheels always lubricated “with bribes and kickbacks that are ultimately borne by the taxpayer.” If he could get it published, Bravo’s article would mark the first time anyone had sought in print to accuse the rulers of Huila of being a mafia.

This was when Bravo came up with his idea for an independent magazine. He called it Eco Impacto—a pun on the echoing impact of the economy. Bravo himself would do all the writing for the magazine, and the union would take out ads to help defer printing costs. To keep the issue under wraps, the union secured a printing press in another town and swore the printers to secrecy—if copies of the article leaked out before the issue was printed and distributed, Bravo could expect an injunction preventing publication. Or worse. Big landowners had been hiring paramilitary guards to protect themselves against guerrillas, and it was no secret that the guards could be hired for other purposes.

The article, which he titled “Proceso Confamiliar,” arrived in the city “like an avenging angel,” Cirdenas told me. “Bravo gave an accountant’s analysis of where all the money disappeared.” Bravo alleged that the officials and their partners in Confamiliar had received kickbacks from subcontractors, forged receipts for work that was never done, issued fraudulent pay stubs for laborers who were never hired, paid themselves bonuses and, all in all, gouged the taxpayer for funds that could, in fact, have been used for capital projects and to increase security measures—the original justifications for Confamiliar.

“Retract your document. Silver if you do. Lead if you don’t.”

Bravo received the crayoned note—his first death threat as a journalist—a month after the publication of his big article. Plata o plomo notes, offering the choice between a bribe and a bullet, were as common in Colombia as cocaine, and Bravo told both his wives he didn’t take this one seriously. “If they kill me, who will retract the article?” he said with a laugh. Two months later, the General Prosecutor’s Office, known as the Fiscalia, opened an investigation into the Confamiliar affair. Ten businessmen and municipal officials were eventually charged with corruption—something of a miracle in Neiva.

In the midst of the official investigation, Bravo was crossing the street in Neiva Centro when he saw a motorcycle with two people on it bank steeply around the corner and accelerate toward him. Bravo focused his eyes on the hands of the back-rider, an instinctive reaction for a Colombian, since motorcycle back-riders had a local name that had become synonymous with assassin: parillero. So many murders had been committed by parilleros in Bogotá that the capital had banned them. As the screaming motorcycle approached Bravo, the parillero drew a machine pistol. Bravo dove through the door of a cantina, landing on the wooden floor as bullets sprayed above him.

In the wake of the shooting, Bravo redoubled his attacks in Eco Impacto against the men charged in the Confamiliar scandal. As the group went to trial, a local government official named Jamie Lozada Perdomo accused Bravo of being a “moral sicario.” Lozada was destined to be the future governor of Huila, a man whom Bravo would one day characterize as the “autore intellettuale” of the state’s corruption. The mastermind.

I interviewed Lozada in his luxury suite atop the Mira Flores condo tower in Neiva, just south of where Bravo had escaped the parillero twenty years earlier. He did not seem to mourn the journalist’s death. “You cannot imagine the chaos in our country in the 1980s,” Lozada told me. “At the same time as Bravo came out with his articles, twelve of our Supreme Court justices were killed by guerrillas in Bogotá. Maybe thousands of politicians and businessmen suffered the same fate. Kidnapping and bombings were common. Bravo had an inclination to declare people guilty before they were even tried, and that caused the guerrillas to target them. We had a mayor some years later whom Bravo accused of crimes. Not accused—declared guilty.” That mayor, Gustavo Penagos, was murdered, a deed for which Lozada felt Bravo bore some moral responsibility. “It is unreasonable to stir up such emotion against those who have not yet seen their day in court, but that is what Bravo did.”

Lozada was an obese, silver-haired man in his late sixties, wearing a green golf shirt that barely covered his belly and loose gray trousers that left room for his thighs. In the spacious living room with us were an assembly of important-looking men talking quietly. Beyond them, the view from Lozada’s balcony looked across the Upper Magdalena Valley to the eastern mountains, glowing orange in the sunset. Somewhere on the other side of the mountains, Lozada’s wife, Gloria Polanco, was being held captive by the Teófila Forero. In 2001, at the height of Bravo’s attacks against Lozada, she had been kidnapped from this very apartment.

Like Bravo, Lozada had received an advanced degree in economics; but unlike Bravo, he had used his education to procure an executive position at the Chemical Bank in New York, and then the First National Bank in Milwaukee. He moved back to Neiva in the late 1970s and was serving as Huila’s finance secretary in the Conservative administration when Bravo returned in 1981. Because of their common profession, the two men were on respectful terms until Bravo “mounted a high horse,” as Lozada put it, over the Confamiliar affair.

I reminded Lozada that the trial of the Confamiliar Ten eventually ended in convictions and jail terms.

“I don’t say his investigation was incorrect,” Lozada said. “The judges agreed that in Confamiliar, Guillermo had uncovered bad deeds committed by several private and official persons. But you cannot declare a person guilty before trial. His crusades afterwards became even more ideological and less journalistically sound.”

“Was he a communist?” I asked.

“More or less. He was definitely leftist. He became an official adviser to the unions. He put himself in opposition to legitimate free enterprise in the department. I am the head of the Conservative Party in Huila and am pro-free enterprise. After Confamiliar, he worked with the unions to socialize our oil industry—a very bad mistake for the state of Huila.”

Bravo began investigating the oil industry in the early 1990s, when a conglomerate of foreign oil companies, known as Hocol, applied to renew its thirty-five-year lease in Huila, due to expire November 18, 1994. Having mortified the city government for its graft-ridden partnership with private enterprise, Bravo took a hard look at how Huila’s most profitable resource was being exploited by the federal government and a big multinational. Hocol was then paying 13.5 percent royalties to the state on oil extracted on its 49,000 acres, and the ever-suspicious Bravo wrote an article in Eco Impacto that questioned whether the royalties being paid reflected the actual amount of oil being pumped. In early 1993, the oil workers’ union asked the Liberal government of President César Gaviria to increase the royalties to 20 percent in the new lease agreement and provide more government oversight at the wellheads. If Hocol refused, they said, the rights to the oil fields, plus all the infrastructure, should be “reverted” to the state-owned oil company, Ecopetrol.

“Bravo always said, ‘Oil is the new El Dorado,’” Juan Carlos Cirdenas told me in his oil-union office. He was a bull of a man, now in charge of interunion affairs, and his friendship with Bravo, which began during the Confamiliar affair, was cemented during the dangerous period when they joined forces to battle Hocol. “There was terrible poverty in the region,” Cirdenas said. “Many of the small towns within the leases had no electricity or running water, and yet the Hocol rigs and trailers all had generators and wells. We wanted that extra revenue for the workers in the towns.”

Because of guerrilla activity in the area, the drilling rigs were protected by security guards—men the union alleged were paramilitaries. Hocol, like many other multinational companies working in Colombia at the time, never acknowledged that the guards at its operations might be connected to a network responsible for some of the worst human rights violations in Latin America. Nor did Hocol acknowledge that, in the words of Cirdenas, “every union member is a target of paramilitaries.” The day after Cirdenas filed his petition with President Gaviria, Hocol fired him and nine other union organizers, who were then informed that henceforth they were banned from the rigs. Roadblocks were set up on the routes to the Hocol leases. The union organized a protest near the rigs, and a few days later two union members were shot on the road back to their pueblo.

In the next eighteen months, eleven journalists were murdered in Colombia, many by suspected paramilitaries. Between the launch of the union protest and the expiration of the lease, Bravo was ordered to get out of town two times and survived another assassination attempt. Nevertheless, at least once a week Bravo drove to the oil fields. He checked the research the union accumulated and went to Bogotá to examine the books of the state-owned Ecopetrol. He interviewed government officials involved in the lease negotiations, and put together a dossier of Hocol’s pressure tactics in the capital, its activities in Huila and the company’s long-running relations with some officials at Ecopetrol—which led Bravo to believe the officials were not unbiased stewards of the nation’s petroleum reserves.

He published his findings in Eco Impacto, and when the articles did not sway the government, he launched another magazine in early 1994, Café Petrolio, which he distributed in Bogotá and which was devoted exclusively to the oil and coffee industries. At the same time he launched a local radio show, Radio Café Petrolio, its baubuco music and his own ranchero singing interspersed with editorials he read from his magazine in his deep actor’s voice. All this media combined to give one-man blanket coverage to the oil story in the run-up to the government’s decision on the extension of the Hocol lease.

Hocol reached into its bottomless pockets to pay for a counter-campaign. The company offered politicians free vacations in lakeside cabins. It staged rock concerts at which sexy PR women gave away thousands of T-shirts emblazoned with the words Hocol le pone el hombro al Huila (“Hocol cares for the people of Huila”). It backed pro-oil candidates leading up to the state and federal elections, to be held in May. In the midst of the campaign, Bravo revealed on Radio Café Petrolio that Hocol had hired two lobbyists. One was the daughter of the general prosecutor of Huila. The other was a candidate for the Colombian senate.

The federal election installed a gruff Liberal president named Ernesto Samper, who had bragged during his campaign that he bore eleven bullet wounds from his crusade against the Medellín cocaine cartel. Shortly before his inauguration in August, however, tape-recorded phone conversations between Samper and members of the Cali cartel were leaked to the Bogotá press; they seemed to imply that Samper had fought his crusade against the Medellín traffickers on behalf of the Cali traffickers, who had given his presidential campaign $6 million. Caught in a scandal at the very start of his administration, Samper turned for political salvation to the uproar Bravo was making over the Hocol lease and ordered Ecopetrol to terminate the lease and return the underground reserves to the government. Just after the announcement, at a Sunday victory celebration held by the oil union, Bravo recited the poetry of Cuban revolutionaries and acted in a play depicting the lives of “los campañeros del lucha”—the word lucha (“struggle”) being used in its old Castroite fashion as code for revolution.

As I sat with Cirdenas and a couple of equally burly union organizers in their dimly lit, paint-chipped office—adorned with a mural of Che and protected by armed guards outside the front door—I posed the question I’d put to Jaime Lozada. “Was Bravo ever one of the guerrillas?” I asked. “Was he a communist in league with them?”

Absolutely not, they replied in chorus. Bravo did join the far-left Patriotic Union party (UP), which got its start in the 1980s as the political arm of FARC; but by the time he became a member, the UP had renounced violence and the FARC had renounced the UP. “He was a nationalist, and many of Neiva’s small-businessmen supported his economic programs,” said Cirdenas. “He wanted to radically change things, but not so radically as the guerrillas wanted, and by peaceful means. Maybe some of them saw him as a voice in their struggle, but so did we.” He laughed heartily and called Bravo “Viejo loco y enamorado, ” then parsed the expression to explain what he meant: “‘Crazy old man’ because he was maximally energetic and passionate for his age. ‘In love’ because he was in love with everything about life: women, nature, politics, art, journalism, truth, his wives—”

When I interrupted Cirdenas to joke that he had just mentioned a lot of mujeres there, he smiled and said, “‘In love’ describes him well.”

Males in Huila are not inclined to make an issue over the sex lives of men whom they deeply admire (or whom they don’t admire, for that matter). From my conversations around Neiva, it seemed to be culturally acceptable for husbands to openly cheat when opportunities arose, even though their wives suffered emotionally and sometimes financially. Men with a lot of money, of course, had more opportunities to cheat than poor men. Bravo had almost no money—but he had as many affairs as the richest of men. Since his Confamiliar exposé, he’d not only split his time between two wives but had engaged in a train of affairs with beautiful women he met at union rallies. Then, in the midst of his Hocol exposés, he began yet another affair that would lead to his third household, which he maintained to the end of his life. Were all these women an important part of Bravo’s motivations for risk taking, or just an added benefit? Did he use his reputation as a fearless crusader to draw women to him? Did he, at least in part, take those risks in order to get that reputation?

Bravo’s third wife, Ana Cristina Suárez, came walking up the block to the Peter Pan ice cream parlor in Neiva Centro, her high heels clicking on the cement. She was forty-five, statuesque and tanned, with dyed blonde hair and wearing a blue peasant blouse off the shoulders that matched her electric blue eye shadow and set off her hot pink headband and hot pink earrings.

“It was right around this corner,” she said, pointing to Parque Central. “The eve of the festival of San Pedro, June 24, 1993. There was a beauty queen pageant and Guillermo was videoing it. He approached me carrying his camera. ‘Can I sit with you?’ he asked. I was with my sister, a neighbor and her child. My sister is much older than me and I thought he was actually interested in her, because I was only thirty-three then and he was twenty years older. I wasn’t attracted to him at all because of the age difference.”

“How did he make it clear you were the one he was attracted to?” I asked.

“He said he was looking through his video camera and saw these two beautiful eyes jump out of the crowd and he had to come up to film them. He introduced himself as Guillermo Bravo Vega, the publisher of Eco Impacto. He asked if I’d heard of him, but I hadn’t, because in those days I had nothing to do with politics, I was just involved with being a mother, a schoolteacher and a housewife.”

“You were married?”

“Yes, but my husband and I were not getting along so well. Guillermo said he was an investigator of economic corruption, he had a radio show, too—he exposed the corruption of the dangerous Opitas Mafia. He explained to us the power structure of Huila, the tentacles of power. All of it concerned topics I’d never heard before or cared about. I was raised by nuns, I never questioned anything socially and I grew up always having everything I needed. But I can say from that moment on, my life started changing. From that night, he began to raise my consciousness to the dark forces he fought, and we soon became lovers. Four months later I told my husband, ‘I’m in love with another man.’ Then Guillermo and I moved to a rented place together with my daughter.”

“Did you get divorced?” I asked.

“Yes, of course, but Guillermo was very loyal to his legal wife, Angela Ortiz Pulido. They were married in the church when they were young, thirty years before, and he didn’t want to hurt her with divorce. He was a very loyal man that way.”

That definition of “loyalty” still sounded strange to my ears, so I sought out another woman who knew quite a bit about Bravo’s private life and motivations, meeting her at her home near the airport. Her name was Irma Castaneda, and she worked as a litigator on behalf of people who said they’d been unfairly dismissed from municipal positions because of their politics. For fifteen years, in exchange for being mentored by the master investigator, Castaneda had served as Bravo’s researcher and assistant. Although she said her own relationship with Bravo was platonic, she’d had a bird’s-eye view of the romantic comings and goings in his life from 1988 until his murder.

“There were many women,” Castaneda admitted, laughing. “He was a very flirtatious person and women loved him. They were aware of his work, the dangers he bravely faced, his ideals, and found his attentions irresistible. If they hadn’t heard of his work, he would let them know about it. He was not a shy man with women, although at the end, of course, he was slowing down.”

On a podium in her living room sat a book, displayed like a Bible, whose cover featured the Statue of Liberty holding an M16. The title was United States: Intervention of the Imperial Power in 40 Countries of the World. Beside it was a primitive painting done by a co-worker of Castaneda’s: Jesus Christ reached down from the cross to a female guerrilla, over the inscription “I was also persecuted. They called me a guerrilla.” Castaneda said this was Bravo’s favorite painting and that he would often stand before it when he was seeking inspiration for his writing.

Bravo’s incongruities and paradoxes seemed legion to me. He wrote that he did not believe in violence, but he had a soft spot in his heart for guerrillas who were ravaging the country in ways that were not much better than the paramilitaries he hated. He was scarred by what privileged men had done to his mother and grandmother, but he flagrantly hurt the women who loved him most, and possibly many other women who were only permitted to love him at his convenience.

What, then, were the true forces that drove him to take the risks that would eventually lead to his murder? There were his ideals—ending corruption and stopping the powerful from exploiting the weak—and I’d found out when those had been born. There was his relationship to women: he had clearly used his reputation as a risk-taking investigator to impress them. The payoff in sex is quite often a motivation for male accomplishment, and, God knows, a lot of women are attracted to men who accomplish great things by living dangerously—just read any biography of Che Guevara. Finally, Bravo was attracted to martyrdom, if his favorite painting was anything to go by. Here was a liberation-theology Jesus blessing a guerrilla who would, in all likelihood, soon share His suffering death.

Before I’d traveled to Neiva, I’d read that martyrdom was a Big Idea among leftists in Catholic Colombia, where, since the days of the Great Liberator Simón Bolívar, hundreds of thousands had been slain for their beliefs. I’d come across this quotation from the diary of the president of the Patriotic Union, Bernardo Jaramillo, written before he was assassinated in 1990: “When the things that we fight for and believe in—what we’ve always believed in—dissolve into the reality of the world, men seem to find, almost happily, death.”

Bravo fought heroically for his ideals, but for profoundly complex reasons. He had become filled with anger after his mother’s murder, then filled with self-loathing when that anger had driven him to an act of drunken homicide. He had then redirected the anger at its cause: the wealthy and authoritarian Opitas Mafia, who were responsible for his own misery and the misery of Huila. That anger drove him to fight the corrupt brotherhood in a social cause that also expiated his sin. But it additionally drew him to the kind of heroic martyrdom suffered by the men he admired most, causing him to take at least some risks that could have been avoided. And all the while, the wound he had borne at such a tender age remained with him. Perhaps to salve the pain of his motherless childhood, he sought the comfort of numerous women, paradoxically imitating the father he’d set out to defeat. He was then driven to take even greater risks to fight the injustice of the oppressors, using the hazards he faced as sexual selling points to attract more women.

But even if becoming a martyr for a cause was the Colombian way, the idea of martyrdom is one thing and the reality another. Why, nine years after his victory over Hocol, had he left his door open to his killers?

Jaime Lozada was elected governor of Huila in the spring of 1995. At the time, the three most profitable (legal) industries in the region were oil, coffee and liquor. Thanks in part to Bravo’s efforts, oil profits were now being shared with the remote regions and coffee prices were regulated to prevent the boom-and-bust cycle. The liquor industry, meanwhile, was in the control of a government corporation called Industria Licorera del Huila, whose ups and downs Bravo had been monitoring for some time.

Three months after Lozada moved into the governor’s mansion, Bravo conducted his usual quarterly examination of the corporation’s books and discovered that it was losing a lot of money. He checked with the liquor union, whose members told him that Licorera’s production of its most popular products—Doble Anis, Cocosol and Kanoh—was actually up. Further investigation revealed that the company was engaged in a campaign of “product enhancement,” allotting a higher number of free samples to distributors, which seemed to account for increased production costs and commensurate loss of revenue. As the corporation’s revenue continued to decline, Lozada proposed a bill to the State Assembly: the company should be leased to a private investor for ten years, relieving the taxpayer of the burden of subsidizing an enterprise that was sinking further and further into the red. Lozada blamed the reversal in the company’s fortunes on the shenanigans of out-of-control union members, who were “turning it into their own gold mine.”

Bravo reached the opposite conclusion: he believed Lozada’s administration was making the company look unprofitable as an excuse to privatize it. He made the charge in an article in Eco Impacto called “The Big Hit,” which eventually won Huila’s top journalism prize, the Reynaldo Matiz Award. Nevertheless, at the beginning of 1997, the State Assembly passed Lozada’s bill and Licorera was “opened up” for bidding. The government kept the bidding open for only one day, and just two companies had time to make offers: one was a Miami-based firm whose owners Bravo couldn’t track down and which he called “a ghost company”; the other was a newly formed company called Licorsa (Industria de Licores Global S.A.), which, after some investigation, Bravo discovered was owned by a man he alleged was Lozada’s friend and business partner, Orlando Rojas Bustos. A frequent commuter between his homes in Colombia and Miami, Rojas owned large tracts of real estate in downtown Neiva and a Chevy SUV dealership, and was about to become the largest shareholder of Huila’s soccer team, of which Lozada was the president.

Licorera del Huila was soon awarded to Rojas, with almost no oversight from the government auditor and no criticism in the mainstream press. “A day after the announcement, Bravo looks around and he sees key people in the decision-making process driving Chevy SUVs,” Juan Carlos Bravo told me. The inside deal was so glaring to Bravo that in “The Last Drink,” his summary of the affair (also awarded a Matiz prize), he demanded an investigation by the Fiscalia—the main prosecutor’s office. The liquor contract, he said, violated Colombia’s Federal Law 80, which states that government companies must be open to public bids for a reasonable period of time. Bravo had other questions about the deal as well. He alleged that in return for taking on the money-losing company, Rojas was given the inventory of free samples for minimum charge, along with a tax exemption on a portion of the profits for a number of years. Bravo calculated that if his allegations were true, over the course of the ten-year lease Rojas would garner revenues of $50 million. He alleged that Governor Lozada would share in those revenues.

Spurred by Bravo’s exposés, the Fiscalia launched an investigation into Licorsa for illegal profits, false documentation and nonpayment of taxes. The investigation dragged on for years and eventually found no wrongdoing.

After he published “The Big Hit,” Bravo received another plata o plomo note in an envelope that also contained a squashed spider. Ana Cristina Suárez suggested that perhaps they should quietly move out of their rented flat in the center of town. Since Bravo had no money, she used her savings to make a down payment on a stuccoed bungalow in the suburban district of Virgilio Barco, north of the city. They made the move on April 13, 1997.

Carrera 5 was immaculately clean and tree-lined, and Bravo was delighted with the neighborhood. Their bungalow was just up the street from a forested cul de sac and a couple of blocks from a basketball court where he could shoot hoops with the local boys at the end of his workday. There was so little traffic that every motor scooter and car that entered the lane drew the attention of neighbors.

Bravo set up his office behind a curtained and barred window that faced the street, a position he chose so he could observe anyone who knocked at the door. The door itself was hardwood and reinforced with a dead bolt, above which Bravo added a slide bolt. A cooling breeze blew into the bungalow from its walled backyard, in the middle of which the couple planted an organ pipe cactus that reminded them of their vacations to the Guajiran Desert in the north.

“Immediately, neighbors started talking about seeing strange people around the house,” Suárez remembered. “Everybody thought there would be retribution from his denouncements of the governor, but he said, ‘If self-censorship is what they demand, self-censorship is not what they will get.’”

Bravo kept up his broadsides against Lozada and Rojas, to the point where the subject was featured in almost every edition of the now bimonthly Eco Impacto. Many workers were being laid off in the privatized liquor company and Bravo emblazoned the cover of issue 47 with the words “The Night of the Hate.” He was alluding to the title of a metaphorical novel he’d just published, which takes place during La Violencia and centers on a plane crash in the jungle east of Huila. The chances for the survival of the passengers on the plane are torpedoed by a group of thieving Conservatives who bear a strong resemblance to the Opitas Mafia of modern Huila. Reflecting the book’s theme of corruption, he titled the magazine’s lead article about the liquor industry “From the Patrimony of the Huilanese to the Patrimony of ‘The Family.’”

After Lozada left the governor’s mansion in 1998, Bravo included in his repertoire of targets Neiva’s mayor, Gustavo Penagos, whom he accused of pocketing funds meant for road building. Penagos was murdered shortly after Bravo’s exposé was published; his assassins were suspected to be Teófila Forero guerrillas. Bravo’s critics, such as Jamie Lozada, blamed the personal tone of the journalist’s attacks for inciting the guerrillas.

Bravo was accumulating so many enemies during this period that it was impossible for him to tell who was responsible for the barrage of death threats he was receiving. He dealt with the threats by publicizing every one of them on his radio show, a poor tactic according to Neiva’s most prominent radio journalist, Roberto Castaño, who had received his own share of death threats from both the FARC and paramilitaries. “It gives license to a murderer,” he told me. “If there are so many publicized threats to this one person, then a mastermind might be tempted to act. He will think, ‘They will not know whom to arrest among the crowd of people with a motive.’”

On April 16, 1998, a thirty-seven-year-old colleague of Bravo’s named Nelson Carvajal was murdered in Pitalito, just south of Gigante, where Bravo had grown up. Carvajal had worked as an investigative journalist and news editor at a radio program called Momento Regional. Like Bravo, Carvajal had specialized in exposing political corruption, and he had been a thorn in the side of a former mayor of Pitalito, Fernando Bermúdez. Carvajal was leaving a school where he moonlighted as a teacher when he was shot ten times by a parillero on a motorcycle. Shortly after the murder, a local DAS investigator claimed that the FARC had been behind the assassination.

Along with several other journalists, Bravo drove to Pitalito, where he learned from Carvajal’s colleagues and family that the radio journalist was going to accuse Bermúdez of being an arms trafficker in his next broadcast. Bravo also discovered an eyewitness to the shooting, a prostitute named Carmen Raigoza, who identified by name the two paramilitary hitmen.

Bravo gave his information to the Fiscalia’s investigative team, and on January 5, 1999, Bermúdez and the paramilitaries were arrested. A succession of four separate prosecutors came and went on the case over the next several months. As the wheels of justice ground slowly, another journalist, Pablo Medina Motta, was killed in Gigante, this time verifiably by FARC guerillas who machine-gunned him as they attacked the town, killing six other civilians and wounding twenty. When the FARC apologized to Medina’s boss for the killing, Bravo called them “mindless fools” for launching the attack to begin with. “You don’t save the country by mowing down its innocent sons,” he said on the radio. A couple of days later he received a note from Gigante: “We know your heart, but don’t like your mouth.” Bravo read the note aloud on air, retorting, “Pablo knew your hearts but didn’t like your bullets.”

In December 2000, the three men accused in the murder of Carvajal were acquitted, based on the finding by the court that their motives were not proven and that the testimony of the eyewitness was not credible because she was a prostitute. Carlos Mora, the La Nación legal affairs reporter who covered the trial, was threatened with death for questioning the verdict, but neither Mora nor anyone else I spoke to remembers Bravo publicly commenting on it. By then he’d become fully engaged in a battle with Rojas and Lozada that every journalist in Neiva thought would cause him the biggest trouble of his life.

The battle had begun in early 2000, when Orlando Rojas announced he was running for mayor against a veteran politician named Javier Osorio. Bravo, having exposed Mayor Penagos, could not bear the thought that the city might now be handed over to the clutches of the Rojas/Lozada clique. He decided to run for mayor himself, and on February 4, 2000, he called a press conference.

“I am campaigning against impunity, corruption and the assault of the public by the powerful,” Bravo declared. He described Huila as “a feudal society run for the illicit enrichment of hereditary lords, pirates, thieves and criminal liars.” The problem with the rulers was that they were psychologically incapable of feeling the pain they caused. “They do not see the suffering of the motherland in the tears of its hungry and abandoned children. On the contrary, they promote the selfish injustices that cause the tears.” In place of the organized theft practiced by the city administration, Bravo offered “an ethical belief system. . . . We are a tightly structured social organization, a pole upon which the flag of human dignity shall fly. We will be the fulcrum of personal, economic and political development.”

When a reporter asked him how he would implement this lofty ideal of development, Bravo replied, “By applying the law to everyone, without exception! Is this not common sense? We have the law! Simply by applying it we will eliminate the historical privileges and corrupt and disreputable influence of the hereditary class. . . . Businessmen, workers, professionals, laborers and farmers; blacks and whites, religious people and atheists alike are tired of the yoke around their necks, tired of their impotence. They have been treated like domesticated beasts in a backward land dominated by impunity and run for the benefit of the political master class.”

He concluded with a rousing peroration: “Get up, look at the new morning! It is filled with life and strength! Breathe the light of the sunrise! You have the strength of your own energy! Wake up! Walk, fight, come with me! Make the decision and, with love and faith in life, you will triumph with me!”

It turned out to be an election filled more with anger and curses than with love and faith, according to a Diario del Huila reporter named Germán Hernández. “Most of the anger was between Rojas and Bravo,” Hernández told me in his office. “They called each other all kinds of names—you can imagine.”

Until Bravo decided to run for mayor, Hernández had thought his journalism was accurate and groundbreaking, and he’d agreed with much of Bravo’s criticism of the local press corps. (Indeed, when Hernández became editor of Diario in 2005, one of his first edicts was to ban the solicitation of ads by reporters.) But he thought the three-month campaign marked a dividing line in Bravo’s career. “Bravo erased the border between his politics and his journalism,” he said, referring to the fact that the liquor, oil and construction unions financed Bravo’s campaign and helped him to launch his half-hour afternoon TV show, Facts and Figures. Bravo used the show to reiterate the findings in all of the articles he had published in Eco Impacto, but with quite a bit of editorializing that ignored the show’s title.

In the middle of the campaign, a mano a mano TV debate took place between Bravo and Rojas. A moderator who looked like Groucho Marx sat between them. “I am for the patrimony of the people!” Bravo shouted, throwing his arms around. “He is for the patrimony of his family and cronies.” Rojas, about twenty years younger than Bravo, half his size and with coal black hair to Bravo’s speckled gray, took this broadside slumped in his chair. In the clip I saw, his most cutting riposte was that “the citizens of Neiva understand Señor Bravo has affiliations he needs to deflect attention from.”

Osorio won the election, Rojas placed second, and Bravo third. He took it hard. “After his years of trying to reverse the Licorera deal and losing the fight, he now lost the election he hoped would change the city,” Germán Hernández told me. “He also permanently lost his journalistic objectivity.”

After he’d been defeated, Bravo submitted a blistering editorial column to La Nación. The paper rejected it as libelous, defamatory and malicious. Still, La Nación couldn’t resist publishing it when Bravo resubmitted it as a paid ad. The column dropped the jaws of every Huilan between Neiva and Pitalito. It recapped the entire history of the partnership between Lozada and Rojas, alleging in unusually direct ways (even for Bravo) how their relationship had benefited both men to the detriment of Huilans. To describe the exact relationship Rojas had to Lozada, Bravo called Rojas a testaferro. Colombian Spanish offers no worse epithet for a public figure than this.

“Rojas sued,” Hernández said, “and Bravo was charged with criminal defamation. He showed up for the judgment expecting to go to jail; he brought flip-flops with him. But for one reason or another, the judge gave him a last chance. He wouldn’t send him to jail if he retracted his column.”

To the surprise of everyone (including me as I listened to the story), Bravo accepted the deal. But he executed it on his own ornery terms, publishing another ad in La Nación that summarized his original charges and concluded with the news that the judge was forcing him to retract the column and so, under duress, he was doing so. Rojas could have demanded more contrition but, announcing that he was the bigger man, decided not to go back to court to jail the journalist. Bravo then returned to railing against Rojas and Lozada in his magazine and on his TV show.

Jaime Lozada had by then become a senator, and Bravo attacked his voting record as being perfectly congruent with a politquero—a lying politician who serves his own interests. Bravo also attacked Lozada’s wife, Gloria Polanco, a candidate for the Colombian House of Representatives. He attacked Lozada’s lavish lifestyle on the top floors of the Edificio Mira Flores, demanding to know where he got the money to live in such splendor. On July 26, 2001, the guerrillas launched their own attack—Teófila Forero-style. At 11 p.m., twenty gunmen raided the tower and went straight to Lozada’s eleventh-floor suite, broke down the door and grabbed Lozada’s wife and their two teenage boys, then began breaking into other luxury suites, kidnapping a total of fifteen people and hustling them off in vehicles to the jungle. They missed Lozada by one day. He was in Bogotá.

Lozada eventually negotiated a ransom of $300,000 that would free his sons, but during the negotiations the guerrillas insisted on holding onto his wife. Lozada told the media that, according to his intermediaries, money wouldn’t help: the guerrillas would release her only in a prisoner exchange. Indeed, after the boys were finally let go, on July 14, 2004, the guerrillas included Polanco on a list of fifty-nine hostages—politicians, soldiers and three Americans—whom they were willing to exchange for five hundred jailed guerrillas. Long before then, however, in an off-the-cuff remark on his TV show, Bravo infuriated Lozada by cracking that Lozada most likely was too cheap to pay for the release of his wife.

In November 2002, Bravo published one more lead story in Eco Impacto, titled “The Selling of Neiva: The Concealments of Licorsa and Its Double Dealing,” attacking Lozada’s and Rojas’s reputations. But his colleague, Diógenes Cadena, says that his heart wasn’t in it: “After so many years of laying out how these two were getting richer and richer off what he said should have been going to the people, he became very discouraged, very depressed. He said it was like ‘planting in the desert.’” It was the last edition of Eco Impacto that Bravo published.¹

Two weeks later, on December 1, 2002, another radio journalist, Gimbler Perdomo, was shot to death in Gigante. Bravo, in a eulogy on his TV show, incriminated “the whole structure of this lost department, corrupt from top to bottom. Nothing ever changes because those who raise their voices above a whisper are silenced, either by fear or by murder.” He then launched into a rambling monologue about his long struggle to defeat the liquor deal and then to expose its principal beneficiaries. “Confronting this latest act of slaughter,” he said, “I personally feel no fear. My face is half in shadow, but the other half remains a mirror to events past and present.”

“There’s a man who enters the picture now,” Germán Hernández told me in his office at Diario del Huila. That man was Yesid Guzmán Guitiérrez, an official with an elite federal forensics unit called the CTI. “He was known around town as ‘The Fiscal,’” Hernández said, “but Guzmán’s rank was nowhere near the rank of a chief prosecutor.” Guzmán received his nickname, Hernández explained, because of his reputation for arbitrarily wielding the power of the state, as if he were a chief prosecutor. “Guzmán was either a paramilitary himself or served them closely,” Hernández said.

Around this time, Guzmán was approached by a person or persons in his circle and informed that Bravo needed to be liquidated. “We have a general picture of what happened next,” Hernández said, “from people lower down the ladder, but the masterminds are still a matter of some conjecture.” Guzmán assigned subordinates to take care of the murder, and they contacted a paramilitary sicario who went by the nom de guerre Carlos Humberto. Arrangements were made for an agreed-upon amount to be paid to Humberto, who was left with the impression that his payment would be a fair portion of the thirty million pesos (about $15,000) he was told the mastermind had paid to Guzmán to organize the assassination. Humberto surveilled Bravo’s neighborhood and studied his habits. However, on the day the deed was to be done, March 8, 2003, Guzmán’s agents informed Humberto that their client had only given them two million pesos for the job, or about a thousand dollars, part of which they would keep. This proved to be a counterproductive move.

Bravo wasn’t home when Humberto rolled up to the bungalow on a big motorcycle. Ana Cristina Suárez heard the rumble and went nervously to the door. The stranger standing on her doorstep gave her his name and said that he had to speak to Guillermo Bravo. “I immediately knew that this guy was there to kill my husband,” she told me. “He wore boots and had a paraco”—the haircut worn by paramilitaries, shaved on the side and with a brush cut on top. “‘Señora, I need to tell your husband something very important. I came to warn him that he is going to get killed.’ I asked, ‘Who are you!?’ He said, ‘I am an agent of the AUC.’” Suárez recalled her despair: only hours before, eating breakfast with Bravo, she’d felt a glimmer of hope that the threats might soon end. “Guillermo was getting very tired of the whole thing in Neiva,” she recollected. “He said people deserved their own destiny. And now, here was his destiny.”

Ten minutes later, Bravo came around the corner on Ana Cristina’s scooter. “The man just stood there,” she said. “I went to Guillermo. I told him, ‘The man there says they are going to kill you. He says he’s here to warn you.’

“Guillermo walked right up to him and said, ‘Are you armed?’ Guillermo lifted his shirt right up over his belt. And when he saw he wasn’t armed, he said, ‘Well, come in and tell me your story.’”

“He wasn’t frightened?” I asked.

“He was just very tired,” Ana Cristina replied. “Very weary that now, here, there was another threat. And we sat down at the table, me, Guillermo and my daughter, and Guillermo just looked at this young man, without saying anything. And the sicario looked back at him. So I asked the sicario, ‘Why are you warning us?’ and he said to Guillermo, but not to me, ‘Because I also have a family.’ I asked, ‘Who sent you?’ He said, ‘They told us it is someone from Cali, but usually they tell us lies.’ I asked, ‘Why is he going to get killed?’ He said, ‘I don’t know, I think it is a debt thing.’ I said, ‘A debt? You don’t know who this man is!? He’s a journalist, and if they are going to kill him, it’s because he exposes them! I know who sent you! He exposed the last governor, who’s a thief!’ Guillermo said, ‘Shut up, dear,’ but not to me—he was still looking at the sicario, and the sicario was looking back at him. The sicario said to him, ‘The guy who is after you is an expert killer, studying you. You were playing basketball last week when the guy drove around and studied you. He was going to try today. But for one reason or another, the guy has changed his mind.’ Guillermo said to him, ‘I am lucky.’ And the sicario said, ‘My advice is that you keep your windows and door shut and that you get out of town. You should stop your work immediately.’ Guillermo said, ‘Then I suppose they will leave me alone.’ He said, ‘Señor Bravo, I’ve done this before. I’m a businessman, but I also have a father. It will do you no good to ask for protection from DAS, because over there are the same people who are against you.’ Guillermo said, ‘If it’s money, I don’t have anything; the only thing I have is my computer and this.’ Guillermo took out a twenty-thousand-peso bill, and the guy took it! Guillermo said— he laughed—he said, ‘Don’t they give you money for gas?’ When they said goodbye at the door, they shook hands and Guillermo asked, ‘Well, will we see each other again?’ and the guy said, ‘Probably. Until then, heed what I say. Because it will not be me who comes here next.’”

It’s likely that Bravo could thank the greed of the middleman Guzmán for being given this warning, Hernández told me. Guzmán had held back so much of the actual payment “that the shooter became resentful. But because of the way the shooter portrayed himself to Bravo, he became publicly known as a man with a conscience.” The press called him Sicario arrepentido—the Regretful Shooter.

Bravo verified what the Regretful Shooter had told him through his sources among the left, who had a double agent on pay in the AUC. When he heard what they had to say, he told his friend Carlos Mora at La Nación, “This time they’ll get me.” The next day, Sunday, March 9, he took the bus to Bogotá.

In the capital, he looked up some old friends from his university days who had influential contacts in the government who might be able to help him. All of them advised him to stay in Bogotá and start his career over. President Uribe was then on the offensive throughout the country against the guerrillas, with considerable backing from the public, and the current anti-left climate did not look good for journalists of Bravo’s reputation outside the city. Indeed, nine days after his arrival, the papers carried headlines that yet another crusading journalist, Luis Alfonso Parada, had been murdered in Arauca, a remote town on the eastern plains. The details of the killing were both sad and horrifying, a testimony to the sadism of the paramilitaries who were thought to have been behind the murder. The thirty-three-year-old Alfonso was just five feet tall, weighed 250 pounds and had legs so abnormally bowed that he rocked and swayed on the outside of his soles when he walked. Defying death threats, he had returned to radio reporting after paramilitaries had kidnapped his co-host Efraín Varela, tortured and shot him. Now, nine months later, the AUC had caught up with the malformed Alfonso, shooting him as he begged for his life outside his radio station.

Neither these gruesome killings nor the urgings of Bravo’s friends could convince him to remain in Bogotá. Five days later, on March 23, he wrote a last note to an old friend—“See you soon, if the killers allow it”—and took the bus back to Neiva.

Given that he had fled Neiva for his life, Bravo returned as if sicarios were not on his mind. Instead of going home and staying there, he made the rounds of all the spots in Neiva Centro that were being watched by paramilitaries, including the downtown headquarters of the oil and liquor unions. From the liquor union he phoned his son, Juan Carlos, and a nephew, both of whom had worked with him for over a decade. He told them to report at his home office as usual the next morning. Then he visited Carlos Mora at La Nación and announced that he had come home to continue his investigations . He explained that his situation was “extremely grave,” but he used an ironic tone, as if he wasn’t afraid. “Truly, he joked about the death threat,” his nephew Eduard Ortiz told me. “When we went to work at the computer the next morning, he said, ‘Move over so they shoot you and not me.’”

Privately, however, he was deeply depressed. “He went back to work, but not with his heart,” Ana Cristina told me. “When something about corruption came on the TV, he shouted, ‘Turn it off! I can’t live with this anymore! It’s useless to struggle against it. In six years I will be seventy and still struggling!’”

The first TV program he chose to produce after he got back had nothing to do with municipal corruption. It was a global feature on the dangers posed by the herbicides that military helicopters were using to spray Colombia’s coca plants—an important topic, but not the subject he’d been dealing with before the visit of the Regretful Shooter.

That evening, Ana Cristina made Bravo swear he would keep the door locked when she went to her job teaching night school in the town of Sena, forty minutes away. He promised, but when she got back at eleven that night, she found the door wide open. The next night, the same thing happened. And the next. “Ai! I got tired of telling him to close that door!” she told me. “Guillermo knew that closing the door was sacred to me! He sat in his office with the door to the house open! I always told him as I left, ‘Keep the door locked!’ When I got back he always said, ‘Nothing is going to happen to me, I wanted the breeze.’ But he knew something would happen to him. The Regretful Shooter told him something would happen!”

“And you kept the door shut when you were in the house?”

“Always! Shut, locked, and I was always going to the window when I heard a motorcycle. He left it to me to be his guard. But when I was not there, he had no guard.”

During the week of April 26, Bravo and Eduard Ortiz worked on a program they were putting together as a memorial to the thousands of Colombians murdered by paramilitaries. Bravo taped the introduction to the show on April 27. It is the last video clip of him alive. Watching it in Juan Carlos’s apartment, I was struck by how haggard he appeared compared with the vigorous fellow I had seen in the mayoralty debate with Rojas. Everything he had been through in those last three years showed: his failure to reverse the liquor deal between Rojas and Lozada; the moral blow he had sustained when the citizens of Neiva gave more votes to Rojas than to him; his loss in the criminal defamation suit; and the public humiliation he’d had to endure by saying no to jail and retracting his article. With those burdens written all over him, the women of Bogotá could not have paid him the kind of attention he’d been used to for most of his life.

At 5 p.m., April 28, 2003, Ana Cristina left for her teaching job in Sena. She pulled the door shut and locked it. As she was getting on her scooter, Bravo got up from his desk, went into the foyer, unlocked the door and pulled it open. Ana Cristina was so furious that as she made a U-turn on Carrera 5, she didn’t wave goodbye.

“Do you think he opened the door because he wanted the breeze?” I asked her.

She didn’t answer at first, just gazed at her hands that were gripping a napkin tightly. Two tears welled onto her cheeks and then she began to weep, without lifting the napkin to wipe the tears away.

“He knew the closed door was sacred to me!” she said when she could finally speak. “Guillermo violated my trust every night by leaving that door open!”

The sun sets in Neiva at 6 p.m. year round. By 6:30, the sky is black. Walking home from the market, Bravo’s neighbor across the street, Dianna La Rotta, saw him sitting at his desk in his office, lit and framed like a picture through the open doorway—an old, gray-haired writer hunched at his computer, finishing a script about murder. Over the next hour she prepared dinner in her kitchen, which faced the street, but she does not remember hearing an engine. The motorcyclist on the big Yamaha must have cut the power half a block away and coasted to Bravo’s door. As the bike came to a halt, La Rotta did not look up to see the parillero who got off the back. She did not notice his silhouette as he entered Bravo’s home.

“Bravo would have known then that this was his moment,” Germán Hernández said. “The shooter must have held the gun on him as he walked through the doorway, because Bravo swiveled in his chair as the killer came around the divide into his office. He was shot with his back to the computer, spraying his keyboard with blood. I have written that it seems he was shot with some forethought.” Guillermo Bravo was shot near his heart, in the jaw and in his forehead, as if, Hernández wrote, “to erase his thoughts, his feelings and his voice.”

Hearing the three shots, Dianna La Rotta looked up from her sink to see a man leaping onto the back of the Yamaha. The bike roared to life and then headed fast up the block. Witnesses later told police they saw Yesid “The Fiscal” Guzmán rendezvous with two men on a Yamaha at the basketball court a couple of blocks away. “One assumes that Guzmán believed in his impunity to such an extent that he felt bold enough to pay them for the deed right then,” Hernández said.

La Rotta ran across the street and found Bravo sprawled in his chair, his head lolling back. She raced back to her house to call for help. Ana Cristina was laughing with her students over a slide show she was presenting when La Rotta reached her by phone. She arrived at the hospital to find a crowd of reporters and police in front of it. Inside, talking with doctors, were Bravo’s legal wife, Angela Ortiz, his son Juan Carlos and his nephew Eduard Ortiz. Eduard took Ana Christina aside and told her Bravo was dead; his body was being transferred to the morgue to be autopsied by the CTI—the forensics unit for which Guzmán worked.

The next morning, Eduard edited the memorial to the victims of paramilitary murder on Bravo’s bloodstained computer. There was a hole in the desk’s drawer from which detectives had extracted the bullet that had passed through Bravo’s mouth. “I never thought I would have to include Guillermo on that night’s show,” Eduard told me. “We made him the main subject, but we included the others, as he would have wanted.”

Watching the video of Bravo, and of the many murdered trade unionists and journalists, I tried to imagine what was going through his mind as he wrote his last words, “The martyrs of our land say, ‘Don’t be a Judas, don’t. . . . ’” For a lot of intricate reasons, he’d wanted to transform Neiva, and when it looked like he would enter old age without seeing the city change, he’d simply waited for the killers to enter his house—“almost welcomed by the door he left open to let the breeze in,” as the Bogotá press phrased it.

The funeral was held April 30, at Neiva’s Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception, attended by hundreds of union members, journalists and small-businessmen from Neiva Centro. “They murdered the man, but not his ideas,” Juan Carlos said in his eulogy beside his father’s flower-bedecked coffin. “We demand that there be no impunity. We will find and prosecute these rats who are infesting Neiva!”

As the mourners filed by the coffin and paid their condolences to the family, three men pulled Eduard Ortiz and Juan Carlos Bravo aside. “They informed us they were Teófila Forero,” Ortiz told me. “One said, ‘We have come to pay our respects to a brave man and to tell you we did not kill him. We inform you that we will take vengeance for the murder of Guillermo Bravo Vega.’”

“Aside from using them as sources,” I asked them, “did Guillermo ever have anything to do with the Teófila Forero?”

“No, he didn’t,” Juan Carlos said. “During the time of FARCLANDIA, they invited him to come to their main camp and lecture on economic theory, but he refused. After his violent act as a young man, he was opposed to all violence. The only act of violence he was connected to was the violence done to him.”

Bravo was buried in the nearby Gardens of Paradise Cemetery, after which Ana Cristina gave an emotional interview to Germán Hernández of Diario del Huila. “Guillermo Bravo was killed by people who saw they were at risk of losing the goose who laid the golden egg,” she said. “And when I say ‘goose’ and ‘golden egg,’ a lot of people in Huila know which goose and which egg.”

In its subsequent coverage of the murder, the respected Bogotá news magazine Semana gave considerable space to Bravo’s dogged investigation of Governor Lozada’s transfer of Licorera del Huila to Orlando Rojas. “All of this made Bravo believe—and tell his family after the visit of the Regretful Shooter—that the threats against him could be related to his exposure of the liquor industry case,” Semana stated. “Addressing this issue, Rojas said, ‘No one can say, or even imply, that I’ve ever been involved in any public quarrel, or that I’ve committed a violent act. The differences I had with Guillermo Bravo were solved through legal means.’ Lozada agrees with Rojas, saying that Bravo’s murder was not related to the articles that he published, but to the fact that ‘he had gained a lot of enemies and that he had a leftist ideology.’”

Germán Hernández co-authored the Semana article, even though he had been warned off the case by an anonymous murder threat. “At every turn, Yesid Guzmán frustrated the police investigation,” Hernández told me. “He had the power to do it. They found the motorcycle, but were there fingerprints? We don’t know: that is the CTI’s responsibility. The suspects who were identified as being on the motorcycle that night were shortly found, and shortly released.” After the release of the suspects, the Regretful Shooter, who had betrayed his mission to kill Bravo, was hunted down, shot in the face and left for dead. He survived, however, and showed up wounded at DAS to offer his testimony against both the shooters and Guzmán.

“Yet Guzmán only became ‘a preliminary suspect,’” Hernández went on. “He was fired from his post—officially for other reasons, his connections to paramilitaries and possible drug dealing—but he was never arrested. With so much evidence, how can an investigation stay in its preliminary stages? But it did. Then they moved the investigation to Bogotá, and it has been there ever since, with no progress. It is still in its ‘preliminary stages’”—where it remains at this writing.

“What happened to Guzmán after he was fired?” I asked Hernández.

“About eight months later, January 14, 2004, two farmers found his body near Algeciras, about fifty kilometers south of here, Teófila Forero territory. He was tortured before he was shot in the head and chest. They found another corpse with him, also tortured, Jesús Alexander Rojas. It is possible Jesús Alexander was the shooter of Bravo. A third person was also later found murdered, possibly the driver of the motorcycle. The Regretful Shooter was ultimately hunted down too.”

“So the Teófila Forero took revenge for a journalist they thought was on their side?” I asked.

“I suspect the Regretful Shooter was shot by his own side,” Hernández said. “As for the others, they were probably tortured to find out who was the mastermind of the crime.”

“I have two dreams in my life,” Jaime Lozada told me. “One dream is to get the championship for my soccer team, Atlético Huila. And the other dream, to get the freedom of my wife. Two dreams.”

I wrote the dreams down, in the order he listed them.

“Where exactly did they take your wife and boys?” I asked.

“Somewhere to the FARC territory, fifty miles from here, no more. It was easy for them. They knew where to come. It was like a movie. They were dressed as soldiers, they blew open the door, took everybody and ran to their territory. They asked for money for my children, but not for my wife. The only possibility that she could return to us, they said, was a prisoner exchange.”

He called one of his freed sons into the room and introduced him. Then he led me across the living room into his home office, paneled in dark teak and illuminated by antique electric lamps with green glass shades. “These are my military decorations,” he said, opening his palm in the green glow to indicate a large display case filled with ribbons, citations and sunburst medals. “The army gives me honors. And you can see here, my friends in Colombia.” He pointed to two trophy walls of photos, Lozada arm in arm with the presidents of Colombia for the last fifty years, from a teenage Lozada with Mariano Ospina Perez to a mature and hefty Lozada with Álvaro Uribe. “When I was the governor of Huila State, Uribe was the governor of Antioquia; and when I was in London as the general consul for Colombia, Uribe was in Oxford studying. So we are acquainted, you could say. The governor of Huila is a very good friend of mine, too. He’s a Liberal. But he got the job thanks to me, because of my work for him. I met Bill Clinton, too. I love America.”

Above these photos was an old, ornate diploma—his economics degree, from the same university Bravo had attended.

“You got along with Bravo once,” I said.

“I did, a long time ago,” he agreed. “Because we were both economists. Then we became neutral to one another, and then we became opponents, because Bravo was with the unions. When I became governor, he declared himself my enemy. But you see, politicians, we don’t hold rancor at each other.” He hunched his big shoulders, squinched his face and gave me an old-boy look of mutual understanding. “It’s a game, you know that.”

“But for journalists it’s not a game,” I said.

“No, but for us—” This time he physically nudged me. “It’s a game.”

“Yes, politicians pretend,” I said, then asked if I could take a picture of him on the balcony.

As we strolled out to the view, I asked Lozada if he was worried for his safety.

“I don’t need to protect myself,” he replied. “The people protect me. And God. Many people—excuse me for saying it myself—but many people love me in this state. Of course, I have competitors, because I am a public man. Right? But many people, they love me.”

Six weeks later, on December 3, 2005, the Teófila Forero finally caught up with Jaime Lozada. He was en route from Gigante to Neiva after a well-publicized celebration for his eldest son, who had just been elected an executive of the Huila Conservative Party. The guerrillas ambushed Lozada, his son and their bodyguards with hand grenades and machine-gun fire. Lozada was shot four times and killed. The son was wounded by the two grenades but survived. The car was destroyed, but when it rolled to a halt, the guerrillas stopped long enough to check inside, then sped away, letting the others live. They’d got the man they wanted.