Marked for Death. Terry Gould

When he heard what they had to say, he told his friend Carlos Mora at La Nación, “This time they’ll get me.” The next day, Sunday, March 9, he took the bus to Bogotá.

      In the capital, he looked up some old friends from his university days who had influential contacts in the government who might be able to help him. All of them advised him to stay in Bogotá and start his career over. President Uribe was then on the offensive throughout the country against the guerrillas, with considerable backing from the public, and the current anti-left climate did not look good for journalists of Bravo’s reputation outside the city. Indeed, nine days after his arrival, the papers carried headlines that yet another crusading journalist, Luis Alfonso Parada, had been murdered in Arauca, a remote town on the eastern plains. The details of the killing were both sad and horrifying, a testimony to the sadism of the paramilitaries who were thought to have been behind the murder. The thirty-three-year-old Alfonso was just five feet tall, weighed 250 pounds and had legs so abnormally bowed that he rocked and swayed on the outside of his soles when he walked. Defying death threats, he had returned to radio reporting after paramilitaries had kidnapped his co-host Efraín Varela, tortured and shot him. Now, nine months later, the AUC had caught up with the malformed Alfonso, shooting him as he begged for his life outside his radio station.

      Neither these gruesome killings nor the urgings of Bravo’s friends could convince him to remain in Bogotá. Five days later, on March 23, he wrote a last note to an old friend—“See you soon, if the killers allow it”—and took the bus back to Neiva.

      Given that he had fled Neiva for his life, Bravo returned as if sicarios were not on his mind. Instead of going home and staying there, he made the rounds of all the spots in Neiva Centro that were being watched by paramilitaries, including the downtown headquarters of the oil and liquor unions. From the liquor union he phoned his son, Juan Carlos, and a nephew, both of whom had worked with him for over a decade. He told them to report at his home office as usual the next morning. Then he visited Carlos Mora at La Nación and announced that he had come home to continue his investigations . He explained that his situation was “extremely grave,” but he used an ironic tone, as if he wasn’t afraid. “Truly, he joked about the death threat,” his nephew Eduard Ortiz told me. “When we went to work at the computer the next morning, he said, ‘Move over so they shoot you and not me.’”

      Privately, however, he was deeply depressed. “He went back to work, but not with his heart,” Ana Cristina told me. “When something about corruption came on the TV, he shouted, ‘Turn it off! I can’t live with this anymore! It’s useless to struggle against it. In six years I will be seventy and still struggling!’”

      The first TV program he chose to produce after he got back had nothing to do with municipal corruption. It was a global feature on the dangers posed by the herbicides that military helicopters were using to spray Colombia’s coca plants—an important topic, but not the subject he’d been dealing with before the visit of the Regretful Shooter.

      That evening, Ana Cristina made Bravo swear he would keep the door locked when she went to her job teaching night school in the town of Sena, forty minutes away. He promised, but when she got back at eleven that night, she found the door wide open. The next night, the same thing happened. And the next. “Ai! I got tired of telling him to close that door!” she told me. “Guillermo knew that closing the door was sacred to me! He sat in his office with the door to the house open! I always told him as I left, ‘Keep the door locked!’ When I got back he always said, ‘Nothing is going to happen to me, I wanted the breeze.’ But he knew something would happen to him. The Regretful Shooter told him something would happen!”

      “And you kept the door shut when you were in the house?”

      “Always! Shut, locked, and I was always going to the window when I heard a motorcycle. He left it to me to be his guard. But when I was not there, he had no guard.”

      During the week of April 26, Bravo and Eduard Ortiz worked on a program they were putting together as a memorial to the thousands of Colombians murdered by paramilitaries. Bravo taped the introduction to the show on April 27. It is the last video clip of him alive. Watching it in Juan Carlos’s apartment, I was struck by how haggard he appeared compared with the vigorous fellow I had seen in the mayoralty debate with Rojas. Everything he had been through in those last three years showed: his failure to reverse the liquor deal between Rojas and Lozada; the moral blow he had sustained when the citizens of Neiva gave more votes to Rojas than to him; his loss in the criminal defamation suit; and the public humiliation he’d had to endure by saying no to jail and retracting his article. With those burdens written all over him, the women of Bogotá could not have paid him the kind of attention he’d been used to for most of his life.

      At 5 p.m., April 28, 2003, Ana Cristina left for her teaching job in Sena. She pulled the door shut and locked it. As she was getting on her scooter, Bravo got up from his desk, went into the foyer, unlocked the door and pulled it open. Ana Cristina was so furious that as she made a U-turn on Carrera 5, she didn’t wave goodbye.

      “Do you think he opened the door because he wanted the breeze?” I asked her.

      She didn’t answer at first, just gazed at her hands that were gripping a napkin tightly. Two tears welled onto her cheeks and then she began to weep, without lifting the napkin to wipe the tears away.

      “He knew the closed door was sacred to me!” she said when she could finally speak. “Guillermo violated my trust every night by leaving that door open!”

      The sun sets in Neiva at 6 p.m. year round. By 6:30, the sky is black. Walking home from the market, Bravo’s neighbor across the street, Dianna La Rotta, saw him sitting at his desk in his office, lit and framed like a picture through the open doorway—an old, gray-haired writer hunched at his computer, finishing a script about murder. Over the next hour she prepared dinner in her kitchen, which faced the street, but she does not remember hearing an engine. The motorcyclist on the big Yamaha must have cut the power half a block away and coasted to Bravo’s door. As the bike came to a halt, La Rotta did not look up to see the parillero who got off the back. She did not notice his silhouette as he entered Bravo’s home.

      “Bravo would have known then that this was his moment,” Germán Hernández said. “The shooter must have held the gun on him as he walked through the doorway, because Bravo swiveled in his chair as the killer came around the divide into his office. He was shot with his back to the computer, spraying his keyboard with blood. I have written that it seems he was shot with some forethought.” Guillermo Bravo was shot near his heart, in the jaw and in his forehead, as if, Hernández wrote, “to erase his thoughts, his feelings and his voice.”

      Hearing the three shots, Dianna La Rotta looked up from her sink to see a man leaping onto the back of the Yamaha. The bike roared to life and then headed fast up the block. Witnesses later told police they saw Yesid “The Fiscal” Guzmán rendezvous with two men on a Yamaha at the basketball court a couple of blocks away. “One assumes that Guzmán believed in his impunity to such an extent that he felt bold enough to pay them for the deed right then,” Hernández said.

      La Rotta ran across the street and found Bravo sprawled in his chair, his head lolling back. She raced back to her house to call for help. Ana Cristina was laughing with her students over a slide show she was presenting when La Rotta reached her by phone. She arrived at the hospital to find a crowd of reporters and police in front of it. Inside, talking with doctors, were Bravo’s legal wife, Angela Ortiz, his son Juan Carlos and his nephew Eduard Ortiz. Eduard took Ana Christina aside and told her Bravo was dead; his body was being transferred to the morgue to be autopsied by the CTI—the forensics unit for which Guzmán worked.

      The next morning, Eduard edited the memorial to the victims of paramilitary murder on Bravo’s bloodstained computer. There was a hole in the desk’s drawer from which detectives had extracted the bullet that had passed through Bravo’s mouth. “I never thought I would have to include Guillermo on that night’s show,” Eduard told me. “We made him the main subject, but we included the others, as he would have wanted.”

      Watching the video of Bravo, and