In El Banco Magdalena, a city in the Colombian province of Magdalena, where Hernando Rangel Moreno worked as a journalist and editor of the publications Magdalena 30 días, Sur and Región, news of a murder was expected, as it was every day.

The rumor through town of the existence of a death list containing the names of the organizers of a strike by municipal workers against administration of Mayor Fidias Zeider Ospino. According to the rumor, the threat said, "the strike leaders have to be shot."

The rumors grew stronger and on April 8, 1999, Fernando Pisciotti, the protest organizer, sent a letter to the mayor warning him about a possible attack and holding him responsible for whatever might happen to him.

Several days later, the story of the power struggle in El Banco Magdalena less to loss of life – of journalist Hernando Rangel Moreno. Although the city was used to killings (in 1997, the then mayor, Cálix Martínez, was slain), the murder of Rangel on April 11, 1999, shook the city to its core.

Rangel was a lawyer by profession. He was married with two children. He worked as a freelance journalist. Since early January 1999 he had been calling for a municipal strike against the city administration. It was nothing new for Rangel to stir up protests and strikes through editorials in his newspapers. What was new was that they killed him 24 hours before the strike he was urging against Mayor Fidias Zeider Ospino.

Rangel had been a political supporter of Mayor Ospino, who had funded one publication of his, and was producing another on the achievements of the mayor’s administration. The latter, according to figures from the National Attorney General’s Office, was published in December 1998 at a cost of 3 million pesos ($1,685).

In his publication Región, Rangel ran a page one headline saying, "Deep Crisis in City Hall." The mayor responded, "I am not responsible." In fact, in his editorial in that issue, Rangel still voiced support for attempts by the mayor to clean up city finances and accused the city commission of not backing the mayor. In 1998, the city’s budgetary deficit exceeded 1.5 billion pesos ($842,696).

Climate of tension

Ospino was suspended form his duties on November 12, 1998, accused of a number of irregularities in public contracts. He had been elected on the slogan, "It is the people’s turn now."

Ospino had succeeded Pablo Acuña Garcés as mayor. He was voted into office with the support of Liberal Party members Miguel Pinedo Vidal, a national senator, and Armando Pomárico, a congressman suspended for corruption.

But Ospino lost the local people’s support because of his failure to provide public services. This is when Pisciotti appeared. A commission member in 1976, he was named mayor in 1984, was elected to that office in 1988, then to Congress in 1993 and finally as Ospino’s replacement as mayor when the latter was suspended again on February 1, 1999, this time on orders from the national Attorney General’s office.

Pisciotti, also Liberal Party member, handed the mayor position back to Ospino when his period of suspension ended. But once back in office, Ospino fired Nhora Ospino as director of public enterprises, a post to which Pisciotti had appointed her.

The situation at city hall only got worse. In March 1999, graffiti started appearing all over town, with such anti-mayor slogans as "Fidias rat. Fidias murderer." It was then that group of community leaders met to call for a strike. Among them were Nhora Ospino, Luis Fernando Vanegas and Rosario Martínez, along with Hernando Rangel Moreno and fellow journalist Gustavo Reyes, who wrote a column in Rangel’s publications titled "When the River Sounds" under the pen-name The Scorpion.

Also in the group were Elías Bolaños, Ramiro Morón, Alvaro Padilla, Argemiro Rojas and Jorge Beleño, among others.

As the anti-mayor graffiti began appearing, the strike organizers received threats of various kinds. Nhora Ospino had to change address. Argemiro Rojas, the promoter of a protest demonstration who was to be in charge of announcing the date and time of the strike, was followed. Reyes was accused of being an informant for the guerrillas. And, coincidence or not, Rangel was murdered.

The story

Despite the climate of tension due to the political infighting and the activities of paramilitary groups and guerrillas in the area, people went about their normal routines that April 11, 1999. Rangel, a dark-haired, bushy-eyebrowed, spectacled six-footer, had a breakfast of fish, took a nap and in the afternoon went to the Los Moralitos cafe to chat with some friends – Alvaro Padilla, Ramiro Morón and the owner of the place, Jorge Beleño.

With the excuse of having a few beers, they got together to finalize details of the strike they were organizing for the following day, April 12. Their meeting started around 6:00 p.m.

Two hours later, Mayor Ospino arrived at Los Moralitos to look for Beleño, whom he warned to stop being involved in organizing the strike, declaring, "Come over to our side, because otherwise things will go against you." The mayor called Beleño outside and subjected him to an interrogation. He asked him why a motorcycle had been outside Pisciotti’s house, to which Beleño replied that he had lent it to him.

The questioning over, Ospino left Beleño at the home of Alvaro Padilla, where he collected his motorcycle. Rangel was at Padilla’s home. There, they planned to watch a boxing match being broadcast that evening. However, Beleño did not stay to see the fight and left without anyone learning of the intimidation to which he had been subjected earlier in the evening. At 12:15 a.m. that night, a man arrived at Padilla’s home and shot at Rangel. The journalist died on the spot. Bullets had perforated his larynx and jugular vein.

Nearly one hour earlier, at 11:00 p.m., in another neighborhood of El Banco Magdalena, Jaime Pérez Ospino, the mayor’s chauffeur, accompanied by three people and riding in a city automobile, threatened Elías Bolaños for organizing the protest which never materialized.

After the murder

The man elected by the people of El Banco Magdalena, Fidias Zeider Ospino, turned out to be the same person that on December 7, 1999, the District Attorney’s Office had ordered arrested as principal suspect behind the murder of Rangel, and who month later, on January 6, 2000, after being deposed, was ordered held in preventive custody.

Friends and foes of the mayor alike have given their versions to the District Attorney’s Office. Statements by the strike organizers point to Ospino as the person behind the homicide, as borne out by the fact that on December 7, 1999, eight months after the murder, it formally charged the mayor , who by then was suspended from his duties again over alleged irregularities in public contracts, as a result of action by the national Attorney General’s Office on October 12, 1999.

The former mayor was held in jail in the provincial capital until March 10, 2000, when he was freed for lack of evidence. The case had gone to the Attorney General’s Office in July 1999. From Apriol until then it had been handled by the El Banco Magdalena district attorney, Oreste Sangregorio Gutiérrez, and two officials of his office.

Gutiérrez was accused by the Attorney General Office official in Bogotá who took up the case of having dragged his feet. Between July and November, Rangel’s widow contacted the IAPA Press Freedom Committee regional vice chairman for Colombia, Enrique Santos Calderón, who in turn contacts the national assistant attorney general, Jaime Córdoba Triviño. The latter sent him to the Attorney General Office’s Human Rights Unit, headed by Pedro Díaz, who put an investigator on the case.

On March 10, 2000, Ospino’s preventive custody order was revoked and he resumed his role as mayor of El Banco Magdalena. This was possible thanks to the defense argument to the Attoreny General’s Office that Pisciotti could have killed his friend Rangel so as to incriminate the mayor. The mayor’s attorney had offered as evidence the close relations his client had with Rangel.

However, Napoleón Rangel, the dead man’s brother, and his wife, Nancy Blanquiset Gutiérrez, both say that Hernando Rangel was a foe of the Ospino administration and was even one of the organizers of the strike.

The mayor has told investigators that he had a warm friendship with Rangel. But several other people questioned say that some years ago, when Ospino was working as a doctor in the town of Guamal, he had threatened Rangel. Rangel’s colleagues also testified that Pablo Acuña Garcés, the former mayor and friend of Ospino, beat up Rangel several years ago to punish him for what he published in his newspaper about him.

All this was confirmed by Rangel’s widow, who was told by him before he died that the Acuñas had met with paramilitaries and he feared for Pisciotti’s life. But it was not Pisciotti who was killed.

Pisciotti and Rangel had a friendship that became warmer, according to the strike organizers, when Rangel decided to act as secretary at all the meetings to organize the stoppage that her held at Pisciotti’s home.

One month after Ospino was freed from jail, the Attoreny General Office’s Human Rights Unit set up a mission to El Banco Magdalena to look for new evidence.