Date of murder: September 16, 1999

Facts: Quintero was in a bar at the Los Cardones Hotel with two colleagues. A hitman came in and shot him four times. Quintero died on his way to hospital. The hitman made his getaway on a waiting motorcycle.

Background: They same year he was killed, two months earlier, Quintero published three page one stories in El Pilón. The first, on May 10, was headlined, "Army Kills Two Women." In the story, he alleged that a patrol from the Rondón Mechanized Unit fired on a bus traveling in the Conejo district of the Guajira peninsula, killing three women, including one who was pregnant, and eight children in it. The soldiers, the story said, had mistaken the vehicle for part of a guerrilla convoy due to pass through the area at 9:00 a.m. that Saturday. Quintero alleged that once they realized their mistake, the soldiers tried to place weapons in the bus to justify their attack. The unit commander declined to comment to El Pilón.

Two months later, in July, Quintero ran two more stories headlined "Army Shoots Outside of Firing Range" and "Four People Murdered in Patillal and Río Seco." The story is this: in a practice shoot at the firing range, soldiers fired at a house in the Patillal district, 20 minutes from
Valledupar, killing a child and injuring several animals there. The child’s mother, Saida Maestre, a food vendor, went to El Pilón for advice. Quintero advised her to sue the army.

The following week, in the early hours of Tuesday, July 6, three people were ordered out of their homes and shot dead in Patillal, and Maestre went missing. According to residents there, she was forced to get into a vehicle barefoot and still in her nightwear. Her body, with several gunshot wounds and signs of torture to her breasts, was found four days later. Quintero reported on this. He himself for some time had been receiving death threats, along with his colleague Fernando Oviedo of El Tiempo of Barranquilla. Quintero and Oviedo in 1995 had together published in El Heraldo and El Tiempo an article titled "Sons of the Mountains," in which they attacked paramilitary groups.

The case file: Arrested on charges of having carried out Quintero’s murder are Jorge Eliécer Espinel Velásquez and Rodolfo Nelson Rosado. The district attorney ordered seizure of copies of El Pilón and El Heraldo. When Rosado, nicknamed El Pichi (The Kid), was arrested, he was carrying a 38 caliber revolver and a fake firearms license. The district attorney took sworn statements from Quintero’s widow and colleagues. In March, before winding up the initial phase of the investigation, the two suspects were put in an identity parade and duly identified by eye-witnesses.

Irregularities in the case: The key eye-witness to the murder, who gave several statements, was not allowed to take advantage of the witness protection program, because he used a false name. The Attorney General asked Fernando Ibarra in the President’s Office for the two suspects to be transferred, but Ibarra did not cooperate, the Attorney General’s Office said. The fact is that the Attorney General’s office conducted the investigation regarding the actual killers correctly, but no investigation has yet begun to determine who was behind the murder.

The inquires carried out by the IAPA so far implicate members of the Army in the Cesar region due to the threats made to Quintero for what he wrote. Statements made by the editor of El Pilón and the Valledupar police chief indicate this.

Other matters: It is known that the murderers belonged to a paramilitary group. Five years ago they were expelled from the organization for having gone too far. And at the time of the murder they were assassins for hire.

The investigation of the Guzmán Quintero case

These are the facts as related by Oscar Martínez, a colleague of Quintero who was with him when he was murdered: "…It was Thursday, September 16. It was two days before my birthday. Guzmán wanted to celebrate it with me in advance. It was an excuse to go and have a couple of beers after the paper was put to bed. That Thursday, as every other day, Guzmán held a story conference. It began around 7:30. That day he was not as combative as usual. The meeting ended early and we went out at around 8:30 to look for the news of the day. Guzmán also went out. He came back at midday. He was in a bad mood. They hadn’t paid him some money he needed. He went out again in the afternoon. He came back around 4:00, in an even worse mood. He had had a run-in with the police. They had locked up his motorcycle because the papers were not in order. He said he had told the police to go to Pueblo Bello, a place with a serious crime problem, where they were needed more. But within a few hours he had calmed down and was smiling. he did not write anything that day, though, not even the lead stories as he would normally do. He only dictated a page one cutline. ‘I Want Peace,’ it said. Around 7:00 at night as we were finishing up, he said to me, ‘Let’s go for a beer, professor!’ – that is what we used to call each other. As I did not feel too well, I said OK, but only one. We left the newspaper on my motorcycle, Guzmán riding pillion. Joining us, also on a motorbike, was Edgard de la Hoz, the photographer who had taken the first page one picture which Guzmán was delighted with. As always, Guzmán took with him a copy of the next day’s paper with a blank page one, which he would use to write his critique and the subjects to be discussed at the next day’s editorial conference. We arrived at the bar of the Los Cardones Hotel, which Guzmán liked. We sat at our usual table and he sat in his usual chair, looking out toward the street. We talked about the day’s paper. He convinced to have a second beer. And a third. As the waiter was finishing setting them down on the table, a man came in and shot at him. I think eight times. Guzmán put up his hands to try and stop the bullets. I ran out. Edgar stayed paralyzed. Guzmán tried to run, but couldn’t. When I looked at him, I saw blood streaming from his throat and mouth…. There were three guys in the place, from Maicao, I think. And a couple from Bogotá. They were tourists. The police arrived quickly, some two minutes later…."

What Guzmán Quintero wrote

The same year he was killed, two months earlier, Quintero published three page one stories in El Pilón. The first, on Monday, May 10, was headlined, "Army Kills Two Women." In the story, Quintero alleged that a patrol from the Rondón Mechanized Unit fired on a bus traveling in the Conejo district of the Guajira peninsula, killing three women, including one who was pregnant, and eight children in it. The soldiers, the story said, had mistaken the vehicle for part of a guerrilla convoy due to pass through the area at 9:00 a.m. that Saturday. Quintero alleged that once they realized their mistake, the soldiers tried to place weapons in the bus to justify their attack. The battalion commander declined to comment to El Pilón.

Two months later, in July, Quintero ran two more stories headlined "Army Shoots Outside of Firing Range" and "Four People Murdered in Patillal and Río Seco" (attached). The story is this: in a practice shoot at the firing range, soldiers fired at a house in the Patillal district, 20 minutes from Valledupar, killing a child and injuring several animals there. The child’s mother, Saida Maestre, a food vendor, went to El Pilón for advice. Quintero advised her to sue the army.

The following week, in the early hours of Tuesday, July 6, three people were ordered out of their homes and shot dead in Patillal, and Maestre went missing. According to residents there, she was forced to get into a vehicle barefoot and still in her nightwear. Her body, with several gunshot wounds and signs of torture to her breasts, was found four days later. Quintero reported on this.

The consequences

According to what the IAPA was able to establish, soldiers of the San Juan Battalion asked the people running El Pilón to apologize for the headline "Army Kills Two Women" concerning reserve units in the Guajira peninsula. "A general paid us a call," the newspaper’s editor, Dickson Quiroz, said. "We talked a lot about the matter. We argued about whether it was up to us to do anything about it." No apology was given. Quintero was killed on September 16, 1999, at 10:30 p.m.

The authorities

As soon as the murder occurred, the police department in Valledupar, headed by Col. Hernando Chitiva, circulated a description of the hitmen and offered a ward of 10 million pesos. Two men were arrested on the statement of an eye-witness to whom the district attorney’s office denied access to the witness protection program because he had given a false name. The witness handed over to police the bullet casings that the hitmen had dropped when the motorcycle they were using fell over as they sought to evade the police.

When the IAPA took up the investigation into Quintero’s murder in late February, the district attorney in the case was attempting to establish a motive, saying it could have to do with an article Quintero had written five years before about a paramilitary group he labeled "The Sons of the Mountains." The DA was looking for the eye-witness before concluding the initial part of the investigation on March 30. The witness was supposed to attend an identity parade to identify the two arrested suspects – two men with a paramilitary background also believed to have been implicated in the murder of another journalist, Amparo Jiménez.

Who was Guzmán Quintero?

A journalism graduate of the Caribbean Autonomous University in Barranquilla and adjunct professor at the UNAD open university, he worked as a correspondent for Caracol Radio, Televista del Caribe, NTC News, El Heraldo and Radio Macondo. He was the second of five children born to a low-income family. His father, also named Guzmán Quintero, works for the Cesar farm cooperative.

Married to psychology teacher Alcira Vitola, he was the father of two sons – Camilo, 2, and Sebastián, 7. He was 5’10" tall, thin, with a well-groomed moustache. "He used to wake up at 5:00 a.m. every day," his widow told the IAPA. "He would read the newspapers, listen to the radio and often left his breakfast uneaten to go to work. He took on the parties to the civil strife. They threatened him on 1995 while he was working at El Heraldo. He received two phone calls which forced him to quit. I saw him become worried again last year over a new item about the Army and a reserve unit in the Guajira." She insisted that Quintero’s companions, Oscar Martínez and Edgard de la Hoz, have not told the district attorney everything, out of fear.

The District Attorney’s Office located its key witness, in the end managing to get his true identity and thus provide him with protection, obtaining a statement from him identifying the two arrested hitmen. A new, second witness was found. He had been at a cockfight two days after Quintero’s murder when one of the two hitmen, known as El Parce, had arrived and met with another person He overhead them talking, one of them asking, "How did it go with that hiding you gave the journalist?" The witness went to the police in Valledupar, made a statement and was given a motorcycle by Police Chief Hernando Chitiva to go and find them. He did, and identified them – corroborating what the other witness had said.