Marked for Death. Terry Gould
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