Rafael Moreno Garavito, the investigative journalist killed in October 2022, had lived in a turbulent region in north-western Colombia, where illegal armed groups, drug trafficking and large- and small-scale mining have mixed. He spent his life documenting the misuse of public resources and denouncing abuses. An international journalistic alliance continued his work in an attempt to thwart the attempt to silence him.
Rafael Moreno Garavito was an intrepid journalist, former frustrated political candidate, and peace mediator. Many times, he had felt death trailing behind him. But one day he felt it was upon him, and unprotected and exhausted, he left his town, Puerto Libertador. He could not escape it. An enemy he had made in his quixotic battles and whose identity the justice system has not yet clarified, had him shot in front of Rafo Parrilla, the fast-food restaurant he had set up in the neighboring town of Montelibano, where he had taken refuge. He was 37 years old and of late, a friend says, he had seemed tired, as if he knew he would not avoid that tragic end.
It was his destiny to live in the south of Córdoba, an unsettled region, far from large cities, seven hours by road from touristic Cartagena and three from the departament’s capital Montería. Worried about missing public funds, Rafael had submitted requests for public information to the authorities in order to document through his outlet Voces de Córdoba and sound the alarm through social media about the broken veins through which the budgets of those towns were disappearing. He denounced corruption in his native Puerto Libertador, mining companies in neighboring Montelíbano, where ferronickel is extracted, and abuses of authority in San José de Uré. “He wouldn’t sit still,” his friend said of him, even after he had resolved to stop snooping around, but his temper wouldn’t let him.
Rafael’s work speaks on itself about his heroism. Rafael handed over his notes to Forbidden Stories to continue his investigations, fearing he could no longer do it. It pained him that mining money was being lost in bad contracts and abuse of power, that miners were destroying rivers and that justice was limping. He thundered every day in social networks, even though he knew the danger he was in. He was a canary in a coal mine; the one they used to put in tunnels as a warning for the miners: if the canary died, it meant the deadly gases had leaking out.
At the initiative of Forbidden Stories and in alliance with several national and international media outlets, Cuestión Pública and the Latin American Center for Investigative Journalism (CLIP) joined forces to point the spotlight at those who wanted to silence the journalist, and to take a closer look not only at the contracts he denounced, but also at the main contractors in southern Córdoba.
Together, we downloaded from the public contracting portal Secop the contracts of the six municipalities – Puerto Libertador, Montelíbano, San José de Uré, Buenavista, Valencia and Tierralta – from 2016 to January 2023, extracted, cleaned, and analyzed the data and investigated the judicial, fiscal, and political background of the contractors. What we found was a few players accumulating much of the contracting; direct contracting abounds, avoiding open competition, and there are too many contractors who have been sanctioned by various control bodies or are being investigated by the Prosecutor’s Office. (See story: Tan ricos y tan pobres in Sourthern Córdoba) [MR1] We also found in two cases abused administrative agreements in order to give contracts to friends and relatives of the mayors in Puerto Libertador (See story: Los Duques de la contratación en el sur de Córdoba[MR2] ) and Montelíbano (see story Al Sur de Córdoba los dejaron en la Calle[MR3] ).
We also downloaded and cleaned the data from the Mining Cadastre, investigated companies and interviewed activists who are resisting mining that has damaged their environment to the point that, as one of them said, the hot water thrown by Cerro Matoso mine in Montelíbano into El Tigre stream was cooking the fish while still in the water. We reviewed judicial files to learn how the land restitution petitions of Zenú, Embera Katío, Afro, and farming communities have been limping along, while the State hastily hands out mining titles that overlap with territories claimed by the victims of the conflict.
We also discovered that a huge mining company, Minerales Córdoba, is emerging as the big player for the coming years. It currently holds the largest number of mining titles in the region, and plans to develop one of the largest copper mining complexes on the continent. The owners, as far as the documents we analyzed reveal, are a partnership of a Colombian subsidiary of a Canadian company linked to Robert Friedland, an American wealthy businessman, and to the Chinese company JCHX (See story: The San Matías dilemma: to extrat the copper or to restitute victims).[MR4]
But first, to understand Rafael Moreno Garavito, the time he lived in, and the hot waters where he moved, a brief history of Córdoba is necessary.
Murky rivers
Cordoba, a hot, jungle-like land of wide saman trees, ceibas stretching towards the sky and happy people, crossed by two rivers, the Sinu and the San Jorge, is one of those places in Colombia where violence has deep roots. Drug traffickers from other parts of the country began their fortunes there by buying farms in the 1980s, as was documented by academic Alejandro Reyes. For four decades, guerrillas of various acronyms sowed a hatred that was harvested by paramilitary, a sort of warlords, half drug trafficker half politician, commanding troops of thugs. They had their camps in Valencia and Tierralta, also in southern Córdoba, and they killed at will.
One figure alone tells the story of the horror experienced by the people of those towns: 290,000 people were violently expelled from their lands in those six municipalities of southern Córdoba – Buenavista, Montelíbano, Puerto Libertador, San José, Tierralta and Valencia – between 1985 and 2022. That is a larger number than the 253,000 people living in those municipalities today.
In November 2016, the Colombian government signed a peace agreement with the FARC, the oldest guerrillas on the continent. Homicides dropped, as public data show. Towns all over the country that had been under the yoke of that army breathed a sigh of relief, and there was a feeling that this third negotiation with outlawed armed groups would be the last one. Now this country, with a stable medium-sized economy and relatively robust democratic institutions, could heal its wounds and get down to development. A few years earlier, in 2005, there had been another arms surrender pact with paramilitaries and various drug traffickers grouped under the umbrella of the AUC – many of them based in Córdoba -. In the 1990s there had been another peace agreement that led thousands of guerrillas to cease their armed struggle and Colombia to write a new, more inclusive Constitution.
However, the world’s most lucrative enterprise, drug trafficking, remains intact in Cordoba. People have the fear of the past still fresh in their minds, and that makes them more vulnerable to surrender to new criminal groups. “In Córdoba there were 405 homicides last year”, said a source to this journalistic alliance. “There is much fear”. From January 2023 until last April 5th, another 91 homicides had been committed, according to Cordobexia, a local NGO. Meanwhile, State authorities have been lazily fulfilling the commitments made with the communities in the Peace Deal. “ Duque’s government (2018-2022) left the National Program for Illicit Crops Substitution (PNIS, for it Spanish Acronym) without enough budget and they left our organizations to fend for themselves”, said a campesino leader in interview with this alliance. “This made it easier for paramilitaries to discredit us and the Peace Agreement and to say it was all a charade”.
For all these reasons, small criminal cells left over from the wars of the past were able to mutate, expand, connect with each other quickly under new names, such as the Gaitanista Self-Defense Forces of Colombia and the dissidences of the 18th front. This cancer revived well-financed by unstoppable cocaine exports and by new sources of funding, such as the illegal gold mining. According to the United Nations, the illegal and highly polluting exploitation of alluvial gold in Cordoba’s rivers and streams totals more than 4,500 hectares and coincides with coca crop areas, which amount to another 34,000 hectares.
The crops are camouflaged in this region by a huge park, the Nudo de Paramillo National Natural Park, and its extensive forest reserves. This is also where they hide the improvised sheds where they process the coca into coca paste and then into cocaine crystals for export. The southern part of Cordoba is also an ideal corridor for the transfer of this and other clandestine trafficking, as explained in the 2019 Early Alert of the Ombudsman’s Office.
Through these jungle routes, from Antioquia’s Bajo Cauca and the municipalities of southern Cordoba to the Caribbean coast of Cordoba itself or other departments, such as Sucre, or to the Gulf of Urabá, neighboring Panama, armed and dangerous groups take illicit drugs and the chemicals needed to process them, as well as illegally mined gold, as documented also by Fundación Pares, a national NGO. They bring their weapons through the same route. Through this same protected corridors they also take their products to the opposite end of the border, to Venezuela.
There are two criminal structures in this region that recruit young people with no future in these poor towns and threaten and kill those who dare try to stop their business. The first has its central area of operation in Cordoba and Uraba, but has tentacles in several territories and is considered the largest criminal organization in the country. The authorities call it Clan del Golfo, and they call themselves the Gaitanista Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (Autodefensas Gaitanistas de Colombia), pretending to give a political face to their criminal structure. Further south, tucked in the thick tropical rainforest of Paramillo and the San Jeronimo and Ayapel mountain ranges, which have jurisdiction in Tierralta and Puerto Libertador, there are dissidents who call themselves the 18th Front, led by former guerrillas who did not join or reneged on the peace agreement.
For this reason, in those lands where Rafael Moreno lived, few people have ever seen the face of peace. Since the signing of the 2016 deal and until last February, these groups have killed 56 men and women in southern Cordoba who played some social or political leadership role in their villages, according to the NGO Indepaz. This year of 2023 they have already killed Andrés Alfonso Arteaga Cuadrado and Jorge Luis Jaraba Plata, activists from the Farming Association for the Development of Alto Sinú (Asodecas), in Tierralta. They had opted to replace their coca crops with legal crops in one of the programs that emerged from the 2016 Peace Deal. Apparently they were killed to send the message that the owners of the drug trade will not allow the business to end.
The violence, crime and easy illegal money flowing around these lands has not left the common people richer. Fifty-eight out of every hundred Cordobeses are in poverty, according to the DANE in 2021. Nor is the licit money, which is also abundant in this region, well distributed. To Córdoba, the General Royalties System allocated 228 billion pesos between 2020 and 2023 (equivalent to about 51 million dollars today[1]). These are funds that are allocated to the department for being a producer of ferronickel, gold, coal, silver, and other minerals.
These towns received an additional 500 billion pesos (equivalent to around 112 million of today) in recent years as these have been prioritized for building peace (Development Programs with a Territorial Approach, PDET).
Hence, public budgets are not small. According to the cleaning and analysis of data on public contracting information between 2016 and January 2023 carried out by Cuestión Pública together with CLIP, the six municipalities in the south signed contracts for 1,3 billion pesos (equivalent to about 293 million in today’s dollars). But these did not mean people lived better.
That was what Rafael Moreno was fighting for, that the wealth would go to people like him, ordinary citizens, workers. We hope that with these stories we will raise the cost of killing journalists for those responsible.
Research: Centro Latinoamericano de Investigación Periodística, CLIP and Cuestión Pública
Data engineering: Rigoberto Carvajal and Armando Mora
Production: Luisa Fernanda López and Adriana Kong
Web development: Diego Arce
Illustrations: Miguel Méndez
Design: Heidy González Suárez
Audiences: José Luis Peñarredonda, Martha Irene Sánchez y Laura Sofía Polanco
Social media: Natalia Gómez Quesada
Translation: Matías Godoy Ronderos
Legal review: El Veinte
The Rafael Project is a collaborative investigation lead by Forbbiden Stories in which 30 journalists participated across different platforms, including el Centro Latinoamericano de Investigación Periodística – CLIP and Cuestión Publica, supported by La Liga Contra el Silencio