Facts: As he watched a boxing match on television on a neighbor’s front porch, a man approached from behind and shot him four times in the head. The hitman made off.

Background: Hernando Rangel Moreno had been associated with the mayor of the town of El Banco Magdalena, Fidias Zeider Ospino. The former mayor had even funded one or two publications on his administration’s achievements. The latest came out in December 1998 and cost 3 million pesos. But Rangel "turned coat." A strike against the local government organized by Rangel was to have taken place on April 12, the day after he was murdered.

Case file: The State Attorney’s Office instructed the El Banco district attorney to initiate appropriate inquiries as well as take statements at the Barranquilla newspaper El Heraldo. On January 6, Fidias Zeider Ospino was indicted in connection with Rangel’s murder. His lawyers appealed and on March 10 the case was dismissed and he was freed from jail. He had served as mayor of El Banco Magdalena until being suspended for alleged mishandling of the public government.

Irregularities in the case: From April until July, when the case was sent to the attorney general, the investigation was at a standstill. The district attorney handling the case was taken off it and is now under investigation himself. The El Banco Magdalena district attorney, Belisario Moreno Rey, had been collecting statements and evidence implicating Ospino, who nevertheless was not arrested.

The facts

On April 11, 2000, Hernando Rangel Moreno was on a neighbor’s front porch watching a boxing match on television when a young man approached him from behind. He shot him four times in the head and made off. The journalist died on the spot.

Rangel was a lawyer by profession. He was married with two children. He worked as a freelance journalist. From early in January Rangel had been organizing a strike against the city government. It was nothing new for Rangel to call for protests and strikes from the editorial columns of the Sur 30 and Región local newspapers, of which he was the editor. What was new was that he did so against Fidias Zeider Ospino Fernández. And that he would be killed 14 hours before the planned strike.

Rangel had been a political supporter of the mayor. Ospino had even providing funding for one or two publications on the achievements of his administration. The latest one, according to information from the National Attorney General’s Office, had come out in December 1998 and cost 3 million pesos. In Región, the paper he edited, Rangel ran the headline "The Municipality in Deep Crisis." The mayor countered, "I am not to blame." Even in that day’s editorial Rangel expressed support for steps the mayor had taken to clean up city finances and accused members of the City Commission of not backing his policies. The city showed a deficit to the tune of more than 1.5 billion pesos in 1998.

Ospino was suspended from office on November 12 that year over a series of irregularities in the award of public contracts. He had been elected mayor on the slogan "Now it is the people’s turn." And indeed he was voted into office by a community tired of the way local political chieftains imposed candidates who were cronies of theirs. But the man the voters chose turned out on December 7, 1999, to be the one the state attorney wanted arrested and who a month later, on January 6 this year, was indicted.

The former mayor was held in jail in the Atlantic state capital on charges of ordering Rangel’s murder, but was freed on March 10 for lack of evidence.

The case had been sent to the national Attorney General’s Office in July. From April until then it had been handled by the El Banco district attorney and two local prosecutors. The DA was accused by the Attorney General’s Office in Bogotá of unduly bogging the investigation down. Between July and November, Rangel’s widow contacted the IAPA regional vice chairman for Colombia, Enrique Santos, who in turn got in touch with Assistant Attorney General Jaime Córdoba Triviño. Cordóba forwarded the case file to the attorney general’s Human Rights Division, headed by Pedro Díaz, who put a prosecutor onto the case.