in Eco Impacto, and when the articles did not sway the government, he launched another magazine in early 1994, Café Petrolio, which he distributed in Bogotá and which was devoted exclusively to the oil and coffee industries. At the same time he launched a local radio show, Radio Café Petrolio, its baubuco music and his own ranchero singing interspersed with editorials he read from his magazine in his deep actor’s voice. All this media combined to give one-man blanket coverage to the oil story in the run-up to the government’s decision on the extension of the Hocol lease.
Hocol reached into its bottomless pockets to pay for a counter-campaign. The company offered politicians free vacations in lakeside cabins. It staged rock concerts at which sexy PR women gave away thousands of T-shirts emblazoned with the words Hocol le pone el hombro al Huila (“Hocol cares for the people of Huila”). It backed pro-oil candidates leading up to the state and federal elections, to be held in May. In the midst of the campaign, Bravo revealed on Radio Café Petrolio that Hocol had hired two lobbyists. One was the daughter of the general prosecutor of Huila. The other was a candidate for the Colombian senate.
The federal election installed a gruff Liberal president named Ernesto Samper, who had bragged during his campaign that he bore eleven bullet wounds from his crusade against the Medellín cocaine cartel. Shortly before his inauguration in August, however, tape-recorded phone conversations between Samper and members of the Cali cartel were leaked to the Bogotá press; they seemed to imply that Samper had fought his crusade against the Medellín traffickers on behalf of the Cali traffickers, who had given his presidential campaign $6 million. Caught in a scandal at the very start of his administration, Samper turned for political salvation to the uproar Bravo was making over the Hocol lease and ordered Ecopetrol to terminate the lease and return the underground reserves to the government. Just after the announcement, at a Sunday victory celebration held by the oil union, Bravo recited the poetry of Cuban revolutionaries and acted in a play depicting the lives of “los campañeros del lucha”—the word lucha (“struggle”) being used in its old Castroite fashion as code for revolution.
As I sat with Cirdenas and a couple of equally burly union organizers in their dimly lit, paint-chipped office—adorned with a mural of Che and protected by armed guards outside the front door—I posed the question I’d put to Jaime Lozada. “Was Bravo ever one of the guerrillas?” I asked. “Was he a communist in league with them?”
Absolutely not, they replied in chorus. Bravo did join the far-left Patriotic Union party (UP), which got its start in the 1980s as the political arm of FARC; but by the time he became a member, the UP had renounced violence and the FARC had renounced the UP. “He was a nationalist, and many of Neiva’s small-businessmen supported his economic programs,” said Cirdenas. “He wanted to radically change things, but not so radically as the guerrillas wanted, and by peaceful means. Maybe some of them saw him as a voice in their struggle, but so did we.” He laughed heartily and called Bravo “Viejo loco y enamorado, ” then parsed the expression to explain what he meant: “‘Crazy old man’ because he was maximally energetic and passionate for his age. ‘In love’ because he was in love with everything about life: women, nature, politics, art, journalism, truth, his wives—”
When I interrupted Cirdenas to joke that he had just mentioned a lot of mujeres there, he smiled and said, “‘In love’ describes him well.”
Males in Huila are not inclined to make an issue over the sex lives of men whom they deeply admire (or whom they don’t admire, for that matter). From my conversations around Neiva, it seemed to be culturally acceptable for husbands to openly cheat when opportunities arose, even though their wives suffered emotionally and sometimes financially. Men with a lot of money, of course, had more opportunities to cheat than poor men. Bravo had almost no money—but he had as many affairs as the richest of men. Since his Confamiliar exposé, he’d not only split his time between two wives but had engaged in a train of affairs with beautiful women he met at union rallies. Then, in the midst of his Hocol exposés, he began yet another affair that would lead to his third household, which he maintained to the end of his life. Were all these women an important part of Bravo’s motivations for risk taking, or just an added benefit? Did he use his reputation as a fearless crusader to draw women to him? Did he, at least in part, take those risks in order to get that reputation?
Bravo’s third wife, Ana Cristina Suárez, came walking up the block to the Peter Pan ice cream parlor in Neiva Centro, her high heels clicking on the cement. She was forty-five, statuesque and tanned, with dyed blonde hair and wearing a blue peasant blouse off the shoulders that matched her electric blue eye shadow and set off her hot pink headband and hot pink earrings.
“It was right around this corner,” she said, pointing to Parque Central. “The eve of the festival of San Pedro, June 24, 1993. There was a beauty queen pageant and Guillermo was videoing it. He approached me carrying his camera. ‘Can I sit with you?’ he asked. I was with my sister, a neighbor and her child. My sister is much older than me and I thought he was actually interested in her, because I was only thirty-three then and he was twenty years older. I wasn’t attracted to him at all because of the age difference.”
“How did he make it clear you were the one he was attracted to?” I asked.
“He said he was looking through his video camera and saw these two beautiful eyes jump out of the crowd and he had to come up to film them. He introduced himself as Guillermo Bravo Vega, the publisher of Eco Impacto. He asked if I’d heard of him, but I hadn’t, because in those days I had nothing to do with politics, I was just involved with being a mother, a schoolteacher and a housewife.”
“You were married?”
“Yes, but my husband and I were not getting along so well. Guillermo said he was an investigator of economic corruption, he had a radio show, too—he exposed the corruption of the dangerous Opitas Mafia. He explained to us the power structure of Huila, the tentacles of power. All of it concerned topics I’d never heard before or cared about. I was raised by nuns, I never questioned anything socially and I grew up always having everything I needed. But I can say from that moment on, my life started changing. From that night, he began to raise my consciousness to the dark forces he fought, and we soon became lovers. Four months later I told my husband, ‘I’m in love with another man.’ Then Guillermo and I moved to a rented place together with my daughter.”
“Did you get divorced?” I asked.
“Yes, of course, but Guillermo was very loyal to his legal wife, Angela Ortiz Pulido. They were married in the church when they were young, thirty years before, and he didn’t want to hurt her with divorce. He was a very loyal man that way.”
That definition of “loyalty” still sounded strange to my ears, so I sought out another woman who knew quite a bit about Bravo’s private life and motivations, meeting her at her home near the airport. Her name was Irma Castaneda, and she worked as a litigator on behalf of people who said they’d been unfairly dismissed from municipal positions because of their politics. For fifteen years, in exchange for being mentored by the master investigator, Castaneda had served as Bravo’s researcher and assistant. Although she said her own relationship with Bravo was platonic, she’d had a bird’s-eye view of the romantic comings and goings in his life from 1988 until his murder.
“There were many women,” Castaneda admitted, laughing. “He was a very flirtatious person and women loved him. They were aware of his work, the dangers he bravely faced, his ideals, and found his attentions irresistible. If they hadn’t heard of his work, he would let them know about it. He was not a shy man with women, although at the end, of course, he was slowing down.”
On a podium in her living room sat a book, displayed like a Bible, whose cover featured the Statue of Liberty holding an M16. The title was United States: Intervention of the Imperial Power in 40 Countries of the World. Beside it was a primitive painting done by a co-worker of Castaneda’s: Jesus Christ reached down from the cross to a female guerrilla, over the inscription “I was also persecuted. They called me a guerrilla.” Castaneda said this was Bravo’s favorite painting and that he would often stand before it when he was seeking inspiration for his