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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