Marked for Death. Terry GouldЧитать онлайн книгу.
Bravo decided instead that after he graduated La Salle he wanted to become an actor. It was 1956, and the Liberals and Conservatives were working toward a truce, negotiating a deal to alternately rule Colombia in four-year terms, with the Liberals to be given the presidency in 1958. There was still political violence in the countryside, and rural banditry had become endemic, so Vega thought Bogotá would be a safe place for a Conservative-leaning young man to establish himself as a thespian. He paid to enroll Bravo in Bogotá’s Colón Theater School.
Bravo graduated in 1960, but instead of pursuing a life on the stage or in film, he decided that what he really wanted to be was a singer. Again Vega paid, this time to enroll his son in Mexico’s Monterrey Academy of Music, where Bravo spent a year learning to sing rancheros, modeling his style on the famous balladeer José Alfredo Jiménez. When Bravo couldn’t make a living in the crowded field of Mexican ranchero singers, his father enrolled him in the Cabral Academy to train as a professional radio announcer. After the six-month course, however, Bravo, now twenty-three, couldn’t find work, and his father’s patience at last ran out. Vega suggested Bravo return to Huila, where this time Vega would find something for him to do.
Despite his artistic cravings, Bravo had always received his highest marks in mathematics. Vega used his contacts in Neiva to get his son a job as an accounts manager and bookkeeper at Neiva’s police headquarters. At this job Bravo very likely ran across some of the odd financial transactions endemic to policing in Huila but, his son says, “he was not political at that time and he got along well with the policemen at his station. He was courting my mother and so needed the work.”
Bravo had first met the upper-class Angela at a church dinner held to introduce marriageable men and women of the region. Antonio Vega approved of the relationship, and, in early 1962, the couple were married in a ceremony at Neiva’s grand Campo Nuñez church. Angela soon became pregnant with Juan Carlos’s older brother, Guillermo, and, over the next several months, Bravo compliantly served the police. Had he given them any trouble, he would have endangered himself and his young family
The tensions of La Violencia were still unsettled in regions like Huila, and were exacerbated that spring because the Liberals were set to yield the presidency to the Conservatives. The police in Neiva were on the side of the Conservatives, and so, from all accounts, was Bravo. Then, as Juan Carlos said, “something happened that changed his entire life.”
It was during the San Pedro carnival, held in Neiva Centro each year at the end of June. As usual, a baubuco band played the music of Huila, filling the square with the fiesta yelps of vocalists accompanied by drums, guitars and sour brass. There was a lot of aguardiente drinking, the townsmen whooping it up and young women dancing the sanjuanero in peasant costume. At the corners of the square, platoons of police stood ready to deal with any fights that might break out between Liberal and Conservative factions. Bravo and his brother-in-law were standing around with policemen friends, the two as drunk as anyone else on the square. A couple of the police officers walked into a crowded cantina to use the toilet and Bravo and his brother-in-law followed them. “Evidently some of the patrons in the bar were opposed to the police,” Juan Carlos said, “because when my uncle and the policemen went to use the toilet, one officer left his gun on top of the bar so my father could protect himself.” At one of the tables a heated political discussion was in progress. “My father might have said something cutting, but he was very drunk and never remembered,” Juan Carlos said. “In any case, it turned into a confrontation, and one of the working men at the table made a pun on his name: ‘If you’re so brave, man, kill me.’ So my father picked up the gun and shot him dead.”
The policemen rushed back from the toilet to find a man shot between the eyes, and Bravo standing with the gun in his hand. They hustled Bravo to the station, and when he sobered up, they advised him to insist that he was so drunk when he pulled the trigger that he was in a state of what they termed “mental unconsciousness”—which would absolve him of any intention or guilt in the murder. Bravo went along with this defense at first, telling an investigator that he couldn’t remember killing the man and that he was aiming at the jukebox behind him. But then he admitted that if he couldn’t remember killing the man, how could he remember he was aiming at the jukebox? The police witnessing his statement told him if he couldn’t stick to a story he should run away, or perhaps get Antonio Vega to fix things. “In the end, my father made no excuses and asked no favors,” Juan Carlos said. “He was soon to be a father, but he resisted the urging of others. He told everyone he should be punished and pled guilty to murder.”
When Bravo went to prison, he also turned his back on Antonio Vega and everything that Vega represented. All at once he seems to have realized that ever since his mother had been killed, he himself had been practicing the art of getting something for nothing.
The Neiva jail was filled with feuding Liberals and Conservatives incarcerated during La Violencia, but instead of crossing to the Liberals, Bravo walked farther left, to a group of trade unionists and socialists jailed by the Conservatives for “syndicalism.” They were running a literacy program for their fellow prisoners, and Bravo spent his days in jail as an arithmetic teacher and his nights discussing trade unionism and socialism with his new friends. During conjugal visits with Angela, he talked about land distribution and bank reform, topics she’d never heard him mention before.
In 1968, after he’d served more than five years, the newly installed Liberals reviewed the file of the now left-wing Bravo and pardoned him, expunging his record—which was soon forgotten by all but Bravo himself, his family, and the family of the victim. Out of jail, Bravo became one of the local leaders of the leftist National Popular Alliance Party (ANAPO), and for a brief period served in the state legislature as an ANAPO representative. At the same time he began outlining a novel, which he eventually published as Morir de Pie (Die Standing). It was a political (and polemical) tale involving the left’s bloody fight against the fascist Gómez after the assassination of Jorge Gaitán. In the book, Bravo clearly tries to identify the cause of the anger that had plagued him since the death of his mother, and that finally drove him to commit a mindless murder. “The Conservatives passed their sins to the sons,” he wrote. “One day, the sons gave birth to everlasting consequence.”
A few months after Bravo’s release from jail, the son of the man he had killed tracked him down; he followed Bravo down a side street and confronted him with a gun. Juan Carlos related what happened next: “My father said, ‘Yes, you can kill me, but if you let me live, I will make up for my crime, I promise you. For my beliefs, I am ready to die standing.’”
The man let him live, and Guillermo Bravo Vega was as good as his promise. He committed the rest of his life to a quest for redemption.
In 1971, Bravo set himself a grand goal to expiate his sin: change Colombia, and perhaps the world.
That year he won a scholarship in economics to a university in Bogotá, and for his thesis he chose to examine the coffee industry—coffee being the most heavily traded commodity in the world after petroleum. Bravo believed that if he could explain the business of coffee, which accounted for the livelihood of 15 percent of Colombia’s population and was controlled in Huila by the Opitas Mafia, he could get at the mechanism of injustice that kept the rich in their haciendas and the poor in their hovels.
For producing nations, coffee had always been the quintessential boom-and-bust commodity, fueling inflation when world prices were high (usually for brief periods) and crushing economies when world prices were low (for much longer periods). During high-price cycles, speculators on the coffee futures market bought up beans and held them until increased scarcity sent prices even higher; at the first hint that the market was about to turn, they dumped their beans, creating oversupply and driving prices to the bottom.
Reaping none of the profits of the boom years and suffering the effects of the bust years were millions of people whose lives resembled that of Bravo’s mother. Coffee is a labor-intensive industry, particularly in Colombia, where coffee trees do not ripen all at once and workers must search individual branches repeatedly for ripened beans. Plantation owners like Antonio Vega had always used the cost of production as an excuse to pay bean pickers starvation wages, even during inflationary