The offices of Riodoce were the victim of a grenade attack. What happened there?
It was a message for the newspaper to quiet down, to scare them. Sometimes the narcos get their intel wrong and it can have lethal consequences. They threw a grenade into the building where Riodoce has their offices. It went off in the printing press there, which doesn’t even belong to Riodoce, though it was clearly aimed at them. I was talking to the director of Riodoce and he was saying that to find out who had perpetrated the attack they would have to open 500 lines of investigation because of all the different stories they have printed. Of course, there was no investigation, and to this day nobody knows who or how or why.
Could you tell me what happened to your brother?
My older brother was murdered a year and a half ago. They got the wrong guy. He went to get an ice-cream with his wife, and when they got back in the car, a pickup pulled up in front of them and two kids got out with guns. They were about to open fire when one of them, the first one who got there, pulled his gun back and said “this isn’t him”. But then the second kid came up and opened fire. They killed him in front of his wife. Nothing happened to my sister-in-law, thank God.
What was it like dealing with the authorities?
The soldiers came, so did the detectives. To start with, they didn’t even talk to my sister-in-law. They didn’t say anything. They just took some fingerprints, removed the body and took him to the morgue. We went to the police station to make a declaration. All they did was ask if he had a girlfriend, a lover; insinuating it was probably a “skirt problem”. That was it. A while later I went down there and spoke to one of the public prosecutors and he said: “Do you have money? No. Do you know how to use a gun? No. Do you have any powerful friends? No. Then don’t bother, stop snooping around, they’ll probably kill you.” That was his answer. What can you do?