Marked for Death. Terry Gould
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