government official, and every journalist “allied” with the government, was an acceptable target for assassination. The second, “Miracle Fishing,” meant that the guerrillas had the right to troll the country and kidnap anyone they could squeeze for tribute. To additionally finance their attacks on Colombia’s infrastructure, the FARC commanders decreed that because most of the country’s cocaine ended up in the hated United States, it was acceptable for the FARC to take part in the drug trade.
In the summer of 1998, the FARC persuaded the recently inaugurated president, Andrés Pastrana, to call a truce and allot them a sixteen-thousand-square-mile “safety zone”—essentially a state within a state—on the jungle plain just east of Neiva. The sanctuary was immediately and sarcastically labeled FARClandia by opposition politicians, who doubted the wisdom of the truce. The FARC, in fact, used the ensuing peace talks to build up its forces while continuing its attacks, making Pastrana look like a fool. In May 2002 Pastrana’s successor, Álvaro Uribe, reversed course and declared all-out war. The FARC went underground in towns near Neiva and hung on in camps in its erstwhile safety zone, its ambushes, kidnappings and targeted murders conducted by the Teófila Forero, a battalion of shock troops named after a dead rebel. The Teófila Forero had violated the truce in 2001 by invading Neiva Centro and kidnapping fifteen civilians, including the wife and children of the former governor, Jaime Lozada. In 2003 they set off a bomb in Bogotá’s Club El Nogal on a crowded Friday night, killing thirty-six people. When I arrived in Neiva, they were still on the attack, blowing up a downtown electronics store, ostensibly because the proprietor had refused to pay them vacunas—the “vaccination” fee they charged businesses to inoculate them against mishaps.
Bravo’s reaction to the atrocities committed by the guerrillas was to condemn the perpetrators, but with an excuse. He believed the guerrillas were the result of the country’s problems, not the cause. In Huila, the causa última was the corrupt Opitas Mafia, and it did not surprise Bravo when they allied themselves with the paramilitaries, whose atrocities, Bravo felt, greatly exceeded those committed by the FARC.
The paramilitaries, who went by the righteous-sounding name United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, or AUC, had originated in the early 1980s as bands of mercenaries hired by land barons in the north to fight the guerrillas. While the Colombian army looked the other way, the AUC massacred trade unionists and human rights workers, wiped out an entire left-wing political party—the Patriotic Union—and was by far the greatest killer of journalists. By the end of the 1990s, it had become a big player in the $7-billion-a-year cocaine trade and had accrued enormous political influence up and down the Magdalena Valley.
The death threats that Bravo received came mainly from the paramilitaries who served the Opitas Mafia. In theory, he could seek the protection of an FBI-like arm of the government called the Administrative Department of Security, or DAS. Under the direct control of the president, DAS was responsible for gathering intelligence on all illegal sides in the armed conflict and for guarding public figures. Bravo, however, never thought of DAS as anything more than another arm of the corrupt government in league with the AUC. When I arrived in Neiva, paramilitaries were being exposed in the press as working within DAS—some as fully sworn agents. In regions where they weren’t actual DAS agents, they still had access to classified DAS files, and cases were coming to light in which DAS had conducted intelligence operations on behalf of the AUC. In 2006, President Uribe’s highest DAS commanders and sixty of his closest allies in the legislature were criminally charged for collaborating with paramilitary death squads.
All of this left Bravo facing certain murder if he ignored the warning of the sicario and returned to his journalism career in Neiva. And yet that is exactly what he did.
To gain an insight into the character and childhood of Guillermo Bravo, I took a taxi to the edge of town to meet the people who loved him most. Army trucks patrolled the ring road and sandbag emplacements were manned by soldiers pointing heavy-caliber machine guns at the farm fields. Bravo’s second eldest son, Juan Carlos, lived in hiding in the district with his mother, his wife, and his children. They had retreated here after Juan Carlos had published an article with the Inter American Press Association in early 2005. Entitled “A Crime of Hate,” it detailed the conflicts Bravo had had with various public figures before his murder and complained that there had been no police investigation of the possible masterminds of the crime.
“My father had a very complicated upbringing that caused him to have a harsh and angry personality,” thirty-five-year-old Juan Carlos told me in his tiny apartment. “The circumstances of his youth were very bad.”
Bravo, he said, was born in the rural town of Gigante, about fifty miles south of Neiva, on September 2, 1938. His mother was a teenage coffee picker who went home to a hovel in an alley, but his father was Antonio Vega Lara, one of the most wealthy and powerful men in the state. Vega owned coffee plantations and businesses and often made overtures and promises to the poor and illiterate women in his employ. “He had a lot of very young mistresses, many of whom bore his children out of wedlock,” Juan Carlos said of his paternal grandfather. “My grandmother was one of them.”
Juan Carlos only knew the barest details of his grandmother’s life. The first was that she herself was the child of a young woman who bore her out of wedlock to a wealthy man. A more disturbing detail was that Bravo’s mother was murdered when she was twenty-five—poisoned to death, like her own mother before her, who had been murdered at seventeen. “The wealthy in Huila have always been able to do what they want,” Juan Carlos said, painting a picture of disposable women.
Juan Carlos’s mother, and Bravo’s legal wife of forty years, Angela Ortiz Pulido, said that Bravo, who was twelve when his mother died, never directly accused Antonio Vega of killing her, but it seemed likely she had either demanded support from him or had sought support from another man, making Vega jealous. “Whatever the reason for her murder, I know Guillermo was scarred by the episode terribly,” she said.
Antonio Vega had been a rare visitor to his mistress’s dirt-floored hovel, and Bravo had never even seen the Vega hacienda. Left on his own after his mother’s poisoning, the boy believed he’d been orphaned. But his circumstances were about to change.
The year was 1950, and the bodies of men were filling the streets of Gigante, casualties of civil war. Two years previously, in April 1948, a popular leader of the Liberal left, Jorge Gaitán, had been assassinated in Bogotá, which had touched off street rioting between Liberals and Conservatives that had killed two thousand people—the opening battle of La Violencia. After an election that the Liberals boycotted, an ultra-rightist president named Laureano Gómez had been installed. An admirer of Hitler and Franco, Gómez ruled as a fascist dictator, unleashing his army and police against his opposition. The fighting spread to the countryside and soon the cruelty and mass slaughter of La Violencia arrived in Gigante. As a backer of Gómez and a member of what would soon be known as the Opitas Mafia, Antonio Vega helped organize the Conservative forces. When they caught a Liberal leader, they gave him “a red necklace,” slitting his neck and esophagus just enough that the victim was forced to try to hold his throat together until he suffocated or bled to death.
This was no time for a motherless boy to be making his way in the streets of Gigante—waifs such as he were being recruited to fight for the Liberals. That would have been an unappealing prospect for Antonio Vega, who decided it was time to provide for his son and give him a proper Criollo education. He paid for him to move into Gigante’s exclusive Elias Seminary to begin Catholic studies. No one knows how Bravo felt about this sudden paternal interest, but as Juan Carlos says, “he was so young and for him it was obvious in which direction his safety lay. He knew Antonio Vega was well positioned. It would have been best not to let his mind be seized by thoughts that alienated him from that protection.”
In 1951, Vega sent Bravo away to Conservative-controlled Bogotá to attend the exclusive La Salle Academy, where it seems Bravo began to accept himself as part of the establishment. At sixteen he announced an ambition to become an airline pilot, and wrote Antonio Vega for financial support to attend flight-training school. Vega wrote back that “a man with wings cannot help but find success in service to our nation,” and enclosed a check. But Bravo never became a pilot: he loaned the tuition money