Marked for Death. Terry Gould

injunction preventing publication. Or worse. Big landowners had been hiring paramilitary guards to protect themselves against guerrillas, and it was no secret that the guards could be hired for other purposes.

      The article, which he titled “Proceso Confamiliar,” arrived in the city “like an avenging angel,” Cirdenas told me. “Bravo gave an accountant’s analysis of where all the money disappeared.” Bravo alleged that the officials and their partners in Confamiliar had received kickbacks from subcontractors, forged receipts for work that was never done, issued fraudulent pay stubs for laborers who were never hired, paid themselves bonuses and, all in all, gouged the taxpayer for funds that could, in fact, have been used for capital projects and to increase security measures—the original justifications for Confamiliar.

      “Retract your document. Silver if you do. Lead if you don’t.”

      Bravo received the crayoned note—his first death threat as a journalist—a month after the publication of his big article. Plata o plomo notes, offering the choice between a bribe and a bullet, were as common in Colombia as cocaine, and Bravo told both his wives he didn’t take this one seriously. “If they kill me, who will retract the article?” he said with a laugh. Two months later, the General Prosecutor’s Office, known as the Fiscalia, opened an investigation into the Confamiliar affair. Ten businessmen and municipal officials were eventually charged with corruption—something of a miracle in Neiva.

      In the midst of the official investigation, Bravo was crossing the street in Neiva Centro when he saw a motorcycle with two people on it bank steeply around the corner and accelerate toward him. Bravo focused his eyes on the hands of the back-rider, an instinctive reaction for a Colombian, since motorcycle back-riders had a local name that had become synonymous with assassin: parillero. So many murders had been committed by parilleros in Bogotá that the capital had banned them. As the screaming motorcycle approached Bravo, the parillero drew a machine pistol. Bravo dove through the door of a cantina, landing on the wooden floor as bullets sprayed above him.

      In the wake of the shooting, Bravo redoubled his attacks in Eco Impacto against the men charged in the Confamiliar scandal. As the group went to trial, a local government official named Jamie Lozada Perdomo accused Bravo of being a “moral sicario.” Lozada was destined to be the future governor of Huila, a man whom Bravo would one day characterize as the “autore intellettuale” of the state’s corruption. The mastermind.

      I interviewed Lozada in his luxury suite atop the Mira Flores condo tower in Neiva, just south of where Bravo had escaped the parillero twenty years earlier. He did not seem to mourn the journalist’s death. “You cannot imagine the chaos in our country in the 1980s,” Lozada told me. “At the same time as Bravo came out with his articles, twelve of our Supreme Court justices were killed by guerrillas in Bogotá. Maybe thousands of politicians and businessmen suffered the same fate. Kidnapping and bombings were common. Bravo had an inclination to declare people guilty before they were even tried, and that caused the guerrillas to target them. We had a mayor some years later whom Bravo accused of crimes. Not accused—declared guilty.” That mayor, Gustavo Penagos, was murdered, a deed for which Lozada felt Bravo bore some moral responsibility. “It is unreasonable to stir up such emotion against those who have not yet seen their day in court, but that is what Bravo did.”

      Lozada was an obese, silver-haired man in his late sixties, wearing a green golf shirt that barely covered his belly and loose gray trousers that left room for his thighs. In the spacious living room with us were an assembly of important-looking men talking quietly. Beyond them, the view from Lozada’s balcony looked across the Upper Magdalena Valley to the eastern mountains, glowing orange in the sunset. Somewhere on the other side of the mountains, Lozada’s wife, Gloria Polanco, was being held captive by the Teófila Forero. In 2001, at the height of Bravo’s attacks against Lozada, she had been kidnapped from this very apartment.

      Like Bravo, Lozada had received an advanced degree in economics; but unlike Bravo, he had used his education to procure an executive position at the Chemical Bank in New York, and then the First National Bank in Milwaukee. He moved back to Neiva in the late 1970s and was serving as Huila’s finance secretary in the Conservative administration when Bravo returned in 1981. Because of their common profession, the two men were on respectful terms until Bravo “mounted a high horse,” as Lozada put it, over the Confamiliar affair.

      I reminded Lozada that the trial of the Confamiliar Ten eventually ended in convictions and jail terms.

      “I don’t say his investigation was incorrect,” Lozada said. “The judges agreed that in Confamiliar, Guillermo had uncovered bad deeds committed by several private and official persons. But you cannot declare a person guilty before trial. His crusades afterwards became even more ideological and less journalistically sound.”

      “Was he a communist?” I asked.

      “More or less. He was definitely leftist. He became an official adviser to the unions. He put himself in opposition to legitimate free enterprise in the department. I am the head of the Conservative Party in Huila and am pro-free enterprise. After Confamiliar, he worked with the unions to socialize our oil industry—a very bad mistake for the state of Huila.”

      Bravo began investigating the oil industry in the early 1990s, when a conglomerate of foreign oil companies, known as Hocol, applied to renew its thirty-five-year lease in Huila, due to expire November 18, 1994. Having mortified the city government for its graft-ridden partnership with private enterprise, Bravo took a hard look at how Huila’s most profitable resource was being exploited by the federal government and a big multinational. Hocol was then paying 13.5 percent royalties to the state on oil extracted on its 49,000 acres, and the ever-suspicious Bravo wrote an article in Eco Impacto that questioned whether the royalties being paid reflected the actual amount of oil being pumped. In early 1993, the oil workers’ union asked the Liberal government of President César Gaviria to increase the royalties to 20 percent in the new lease agreement and provide more government oversight at the wellheads. If Hocol refused, they said, the rights to the oil fields, plus all the infrastructure, should be “reverted” to the state-owned oil company, Ecopetrol.

      “Bravo always said, ‘Oil is the new El Dorado,’” Juan Carlos Cirdenas told me in his oil-union office. He was a bull of a man, now in charge of interunion affairs, and his friendship with Bravo, which began during the Confamiliar affair, was cemented during the dangerous period when they joined forces to battle Hocol. “There was terrible poverty in the region,” Cirdenas said. “Many of the small towns within the leases had no electricity or running water, and yet the Hocol rigs and trailers all had generators and wells. We wanted that extra revenue for the workers in the towns.”

      Because of guerrilla activity in the area, the drilling rigs were protected by security guards—men the union alleged were paramilitaries. Hocol, like many other multinational companies working in Colombia at the time, never acknowledged that the guards at its operations might be connected to a network responsible for some of the worst human rights violations in Latin America. Nor did Hocol acknowledge that, in the words of Cirdenas, “every union member is a target of paramilitaries.” The day after Cirdenas filed his petition with President Gaviria, Hocol fired him and nine other union organizers, who were then informed that henceforth they were banned from the rigs. Roadblocks were set up on the routes to the Hocol leases. The union organized a protest near the rigs, and a few days later two union members were shot on the road back to their pueblo.

      In the next eighteen months, eleven journalists were murdered in Colombia, many by suspected paramilitaries. Between the launch of the union protest and the expiration of the lease, Bravo was ordered to get out of town two times and survived another assassination attempt. Nevertheless, at least once a week Bravo drove to the oil fields. He checked the research the union accumulated and went to Bogotá to examine the books of the state-owned Ecopetrol. He interviewed government officials involved in the lease negotiations, and put together a dossier of Hocol’s pressure tactics in the capital, its activities in Huila and the company’s long-running relations with some officials at Ecopetrol—which