Luis Guillermo Restrepo, current editorial pages editor of the Cali daily El País, continues to be amazed at the judicial inertia surrounding the investigation into the murder of Bedoya, his predecessor. “The attorney general’s office did not want to look into what happened,” he said. “When a crime is not investigated right away, 60% stays unsolved. And that was what they did.”

Restrepo is not the only one to point out irregularities in the attorney general’s office in this case, or at least to assert that the theories it is pursuing are not the right ones. The newspaper’s editor, Eduardo Fernández de Soto, declared, “I hope that what happened a year ago does not occur with this investigation. Some guys came from the attorney general’s office and asked for all Gerardo’s medical insurance records.”

Diego Martínez Lloreda, El País managing editor, agrees that the inquiries have shown no movement, as the investigators appear to have only been pursuing one theory about Bedoya’s alleged homosexual orientation, “because not satisfied with killing him, they want to do away with his good name,” he said.
The three volumes containing questions to Bedoya’s friends and relatives, now sitting at the human rights unit of the attorney general’s office, are full of references to his possible homosexual conduct, as well as findings of the medicine he was taking and visits to his doctor. But, surprisingly, there is no question about how his columns had upset drug traffickers in the Cayca Valley and government leaders at the time involved in the scandal of the notorious Process 8000.

María Eugenia Arango, the woman who was with Bedoya the day he was killed and with whom he went to look at an apartment in Unit 5 of the Multicentro block in Cali when a hitman fired at him, has been interrogated by investigators from the attorney general’s office, whom she describes as “ignorant people.” Furious, she said, “six months ago an investigator came and asked me if Gerardo was a drug trafficker. They sent investigators who didn’t even know who Gerardo was.”

One year before Bedoya was killed, one of every two of his columns published in El País was against the government and drug traffickers or about Proceso 8000. On February 27, 1996, he wrote the paper’s lead editorial under the headline “The Threatening State,” denouncing the administration of the then Colombian president, Ernesto Samper Pizano, which he described as an authoritarian police regime that persecuted citizens and journalists and harassed the opposition.

Five days earlier he had said in his column that the protest mechanisms had not been able to oust the president elected by the drug barons. In other columns in January, he had charged that the regime feared freedom of the press. On top of all these were the columns in which he called for the extradition to the United States of the drug traffickers. One of the most famous was headlined, “I Prefer Them to Call Me Pro-Yankee.”

Three months before his murder, Bedoya, at the home of fellow journalist José Pardo Llada, ripped into Generals Manuel José Bonnet and Harold Bedoya - a cousin of his. He criticized them because he believed both of them had protected the drug traffickers when Bonnet was in the Third Brigade.

Loose Ends

Relatives, colleagues and friends of Bedoya are not satisfied with the results of the official investigation. In the official follow-up inquiry into the murder, the IAPA detected a number of leads that should be considered in the case.

On April 8, 1998, only one year and one month after the murder, the attorney general’s office asked Clara Bedoya, the victim’s sister, to talk about the man that she said had given him a manuscript containing an organizational chart of the organized crime family that surrounded Bedoya’s farm, Santa Clara, in Guachinte, Jamundí district, where drug traffickers Helmer Pacho Herrera and Phanor Arizabaleta also have properties, known as San Cayetano, La Novillera, La Luisa and La Carolina ranches.

Fingerprints have not been lifted from the manuscript, in which its author says that Bernardo Tova, the Colombian national shooting champion, was the one who trained the mobsters’ bodyguards at the El Muro ranch owned by Miguel Angel Rodríguez and Armando Vélez, and that in that area also was Gustavo Patiño, father of Víctor Patiño.

Both Ximena Palau and María Eugenia Arango, the women who used to accompany Bedoya prior to this death, say that he feared becoming a target of the guerrillas. They do not accept that the focus in Bedoya’s murder has been on his alleged homosexuality, and on this point another unanswered question emerges - why did five men from the DAS (Security Department) 15 days after the murder visit Palau’s Bogotá apartment and tell her that the motive was Bedoya’s homosexuality, only because the hitman who shot him at the time had shouted out “That’s for being a queer!”?

Why did the investigators take three and a half years to dispel doubts they had about the identity of María Eugenia Arango, who according the statement of a relative of Bedoya’s was thought to be the girlfriend of a man named Gómez, the brother of drug trafficker Denis Gómez? Why did the investigators not confirm with her daughter’s doctor a report that she had asked Bedoya for 20 million pesos (about $10,000 at that time) for an operation on her little girl? Why was the Cali Bullring not asked - as the IAPA has - for information on how Arango obtained a seat there alongside Bedoya’s?

Why was Edgar José Astaiza, the only person to be accused of having carried out the murder by the attorney general’s office investigators and who Arango identified from photos as the hitman, allowed to go free?

The only answer for now is, as El País’ Restrepo puts it, that Bedoya committed the same mistake as his hero Alvaro Gómez Hurtado - “to say what he thought about the regime, denounce corruption, and that is the point that has not been looked into.”