Six months after the assassination of Colombian journalist Rafael Moreno, 30 journalists, coordinated by Forbidden Stories, pursue his investigations into allegations of wide-scale corruption in the province of Córdoba. Part two of TheRafaelProject:
Andrea Rincu00f3n , Edier Buitrago , Ivonne Rodriguez , Claudia Duque , Juan Diego , Felipe Morales , among others
Since the 2016 Peace Accords between the Colombian government and the rebel group Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia , Moreno had made reporting on corruption and drug trafficking his specialty. An obsession, even., launched in 2018, spared no one – from local politicians to mining companies to paramilitary groups. Sometimes bordering on the excessive, Moreno’s tone and the rising number of followers on his page – about 56,000 – did not go unnoticed.
As he predicted, Moreno was killed. But thanks to documents and instructions left behind by the journalist, he was not silenced. The first thing that stood out was a heap of administrative documents on the table, the result of hundreds of freedom of information requests Moreno had filed asking for details about public contracts. In Colombia, these types of requests are a powerful tool for obtaining public interest information.
Despite these activities, he also found the time to share videos and content on two Facebook pages he ran: “Rafael Moreno investigator” and “Voces de Córdoba.” On these pages, no one was untouchable. Councilors, mayors, governors, even fellow journalists, found themselves in Moreno’s line of fire. “You’re going too far,” Moreno’s sister Maira remembers telling Moreno. “You’d even be willing to denounce your own sister.” Moreno’s response: “Yes, if you did bad things.
Moreno posted the video on his Twitter page, tagging Gabriel Calle’s son Andrés, the interior minister, the prosecutor’s office, an environmental protection agency and the president of Colombia, Gustavo Petro. In the video, he denounced the resource pilfering scheme, gesturing toward a distant backhoe. The video amassed about 1,600 views – not a ton, but enough to potentially sully the image of the powerful family.
Yamir Pico, Moreno’s cousin, who is also a journalist, considered Moreno’s last investigation to be “extremely sensitive,” especially in the context of the ongoing election campaign season. “Rafael had gone to the private property of the Calles, a family that most tread lightly around because we know what they’re capable of,” Pico said in an interview with Forbidden Stories.
When Moreno first came across Duque, the charming politician was selling a rags-to-riches story of lemon picker to political candidate. A man of the people, he spoke of social justice and decent treatment of the poor and destitute. Moreno lapped it all up. In time, he became a bit of a second son to Duque, and brought his family to work on Duque’s campaign, too.
Several years later, reflecting on this experience in a Facebook post, Moreno wrote: “At the time of victory, I remember kissing Espedito Duque’s mother and thanking her for having brought to the world our source of hope. But I was wrong, and it pains me to even think about it. He made us believe he was going to change things, but he surrounded himself with the same people we had so long criticized and who slowed down our hope of getting elected.
Behind the scenes, local functionaries say, the former mayor was nonetheless pulling the strings. “Duque is the one who decides what’s important in the municipality,” one local official said, requesting anonymity for fear of reprisals. “He welcomes visitors to his home starting around 11 pm and often until 3 in the morning. Everyone goes there to ask for favors: contracts, nominations, recommendations.
In total, more than $100 million has been invested in the five municipalities of the region since the 2016 Peace Agreement. In principle, these resources were earmarked for use on more than 130 public works projects, including road repairs, education, and health care, as well as housing and energy infrastructure projects. However, activists say many were never completed.
But this type of reporting also led to threats from local armed groups. These groups regularly take a cut of the money invested into public works, a sort of keep-the-peace tax Moreno called “la vacuna,” or “the vaccine,” in conversations with Forbidden Stories. Moreno denounced “the vaccine” for what it was – corruption – which in turn led to an increase in threats starting around 2019.
According to the Colombian constitution, any citizen can lodge this type of complaint. But Moreno’s was particularly thorough. The 21-page document describes the mayor’s methods in great detail and alleges “various types of crimes against the public administration.” Moreno specifies the operative mechanism Duque put in place: creating “a certain number of structures” for his close friends and family and then contracting with them in order to “facilitate the appropriation of public resources.
At the end of the document, Moreno signed his name, which Forbidden Stories verified the authenticity of by matching with other freedom of information requests publicly shared by the journalist. To this day, the document has not received a response. The consortium’s investigation revealed that this company, too, was under the influence of the Duque “clan.” In the years since his election as mayor, this company has been owned by three people close to Duque, all of whom worked on his election campaigns. During this period, Agualcas benefitted from 13 public contracts worth around $800,000 dollars.
Moreno was known for his impatience. As soon as he discovered suspicious elements, he immediately published them on his Facebook page. But by the time he was assassinated, these bits and pieces were coming together to tell a story of vast corruption and cronyism in Córdoba. The threats, in turn, also went up a notch.
Moreno must have known that the case was highly sensitive, but he didn’t shy away from writing about it. Specifically, Moreno had started looking into a rental contract for an apartment between Duque and the wife of Carlos Escobar Zapa, one of the prosecutors in charge of the case.
In an interview, Carlos Escobar Zapa, the prosecutor, told Forbidden Stories that he has been separated from his wife since 2015 and that he “never knew about” the contract with the mayor. “She rented it without my knowledge,” he said. “I don’t know how she did it.”
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