David Murcia Guzmán is often disparaged as the Madoff of Colombia, after Bernard L. Madoff, the New York financier accused of creating a $50 billion investment fraud. But to some in the lower classes in one of Latin America’s most stratified of countries, he is a folk hero, and his government-shaking arrest recently was just another example of the extent to which the rich will go to keep the poor in their place.In some ways, the rise and fall of Mr. Murcia, a child of Bogotá’s slums who clawed his way into Colombia’s elite, may be even more exceptional than Mr. Madoff’s. Nowadays, Mr. Murcia ponders the events that delivered him to a cell at La Picota, a prison situated amid the shantytowns of this city’s southern fringe.
At 28, Mr. Murcia has been charged with creating a hydra-headed enterprise based in Panama that laundered money and enticed thousands of Colombians into a pyramid scheme known by his own initials, D.M.G.
The accusations are common enough in these times of bewildering international financial ruses. But only in Colombia, perhaps, with its history of charismatic outlaws who chafe at the conservative status quo, could Mr. Murcia emerge not as a Madoff-like villain but a folk hero with a legion of followers from coca-growing regions.Mr. Murcia revels in this transformation into an anti-establishment idol. “My only flaw was that I dared to dream,” he said in a meandering interview at La Picota under the gaze of three guards armed with machine guns. “What is criminal about dreaming?” Just a couple of months ago, Mr. Murcia was wining and dining provincial governors. He flew to different cities aboard a private jet. Visitors to his home in Panama marveled at his fleet of exotic cars, including a Ferrari, a Maserati and a Lamborghini. Then it all collapsed as the global financial and economic crisis pinched the markets. Several pyramid schemes in Colombia collapsed in November. The authorities here shut down D.M.G. while the Panamanian police rounded up Mr. Murcia. He was quickly extradited to Colombia, where a prison barber awaited at La Picota to cut off his trademark ponytail. But there was a twist to this Icarus-like story: many of the small investors in D.M.G. saw Mr. Murcia not as a swindler but as their savior and protested his capture in almost a dozen cities. They claim the government’s intervention in D.M.G., not the nature of its activities, caused the loss of their savings. A hunger strike by his most die-hard supporters, who want his release and the reopening of D.M.G., persisted well into January in the colonial heart of Bogotá. “David Murcia was only trying to redistribute the wealth a little in Colombia,” said Norberto Escobar, 47, an impoverished D.M.G. investor from Putumayo, the southern coca-growing department, or province, where Mr. Murcia’s investment schemes first gathered speed about four years ago. “He was simply too much of a threat to the system,” said Mr. Escobar, interviewed recently alongside others clamoring for Mr. Murcia’s release at a hunger strike here. For a visitor, they broke into a chant: “Crea en Dios y en David Murcia” (“Believe in God and in David Murcia”). The mixture of popular outrage and scandal that followed Mr. Murcia’s capture has shaken Colombia. Claims surfaced that D.M.G. tried to curry favor with President Álvaro Uribe’s allies in the Colombian Congress; others said officials moved against Mr. Murcia because his power was coming to rival that of the country’s established banking families. This opened a rare window of dissent in a war-weary society against a president whose success against leftist rebels had shielded him from earlier scandals. A plan by Mr. Uribe’s supporters to let him run for another term unraveled, as the D.M.G. collapse did what no other crisis had done before: make Mr. Uribe, Colombia’s most powerful president in recent memory, tremble. “Not since the time of Pablo Escobar, when he acted like a philanthropist and won popular acclaim, has Colombia seen such an enigmatic and controversial figure as David Murcia Guzmán,” the respected weekly news magazine Semana said.
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