Marked for Death - Terry Gould

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      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

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