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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