There Are No Dead Here

by Maria McFarland Sánchez-Moreno

  Abad’s death was only the beginning. In December, Abad’s successor as president of the committee, Luis Fernando Vélez, was kidnapped, tortured, and also murdered. Another senior committee member, Carlos Gónima, was shot to death in February 1988.

  The killings sparked a large exodus from the committee. Some of those who quit, such as Carlos Gaviria, left the country under threat. Others simply resigned. “There was a huge and widespread fear, because in that environment, the committee was being portrayed as a communist stronghold,” Gaviria later said.

  But Valle, then forty-four years old, refused to leave. He was grieving—that was evident to his family, from his stony silence—but he was also unwilling to be cowed. The group decided not to name a new president, so they wouldn’t have a visible head to be targeted, but in practice, Valle took on the committee’s leadership. Along with a few remaining members—mostly women who volunteered their time, including a lawyer, María Victoria Fallon; an insurance agent, Patricia Fuenmayor; and Beatriz Jaramillo, a teacher whose family Valle had helped when Jaramillo’s cousin, Luis Fernando Lalinde, had been forcibly “disappeared” a few years earlier—Valle brought the group back to life. He poured himself into causes large and small, from fighting for justice for the police murder of nine children in the neighborhood of Villatina in 1992, to organizing protests over forced evictions of displaced persons in the most miserable parts of Medellín, to providing free legal representation to low-income persons he believed were wrongfully accused. And while he was sympathetic to many of the concerns of the political left, he was fiercely independent, refusing to join any political organization.

  Jesús María Valle receiving a document honoring him at an Antioquia Bar Association event, 1993. © Jairo León Cano.

  In Valle’s view, the mission of a lawyer should be to serve the poor. Even though he could have made large sums of money as a defense attorney, he spent much of his time on his activism and working for the people of Ituango. He lived extremely frugally—that was why he had never bothered to update or replace the manual typewriter in his office, or to install a security camera outside its door, even when there were threats against him. He gave most of his money to his family, buying a house where he lived with many of his siblings, and, once his parents retired, a plot of land near Medellín, where they could grow some of their own food and raise animals, more for fun than out of need. He had a habit of giving money and things away—once in a while, decorative items around the house would disappear. His sister Magdalena would ask Valle about them and he would explain: “Oh, so-and-so was here and really admired it, and she’s very poor, while you have lots of things, so I gave it to her.” Another time, he organized and paid for festivities in Ituango to celebrate International Women’s Day, arranging for several women professionals to travel from Medellín to Ituango to give Ituango’s women classes on their rights.

  Valle’s colleague and friend Beatriz Jaramillo was struck by one incident in particular around 1997, when he called her at 5:30 a.m. to tell her that they needed to go to Blanquizal, a squatter community on the outskirts of Medellín, because the city government was about to evict its residents to make way for a highway construction project. They had to protect those people, he told her. Once in Blanquizal, he called the community together to talk about the problem. Seated on a modest little bed in one of the houses, “he spoke to them so beautifully, making them feel important, telling them that they were Colombia, that they had rights,” she recalled. Repeatedly, he asked them “not to respond to violence with violence.” Eventually, the police and the bulldozers arrived and started to demolish the precarious little houses. It was tragic, Jaramillo recalled, to see how they loaded the municipal garbage bins with the pieces of wood the residents had used to cobble together their homes, “knowing that the wood was the fruit of enormous efforts to get some way to protect themselves from the elements at night.” Meanwhile, Valle, Jaramillo, and fellow committee member Patricia Fuenmayor accompanied the residents and organized a quick census of the population, so that Valle could later help them find some kind of solution to their housing situation. At one point, a young pregnant woman, with a toddler in her arms, came out of one of the few houses in the community that was built out of bricks. She started to cry, wondering what she would do now. As the bulldozer approached, Valle sat in front of the house: if they wanted to bulldoze the house, they’d have to drive over him. The police chief overseeing the demolition ordered the bulldozer to retreat, and the house was temporarily left alone. Over time, Valle would represent the entire community in proceedings against the city, and he ultimately succeeded in getting them resettled in good housing elsewhere in town. It wasn’t the first time he had done something like that: in the early 1990s, Valle, Fuenmayor, and other committee members spent years working with the residents of another community, La Playita, who had also been evicted by the city. They organized sit-ins, and Valle filed suit; together they built up so much pressure that they got the city to build a whole new neighborhood from scratch for the displaced residents.

  Jesús María Valle at a party for children in the El Cucaracho shelter, with displaced persons from the community of La Playita, Medellín, 1992. © Patricia Fuenmayor, Grupo Interdisciplinario de Derechos Humanos.

  Although Valle could be passionate when it mattered, his general demeanor was calm and optimistic. “A positive mental attitude” was one of his mottos—it was the only way, he said, to deal with adversity. His sister Magdalena recalled that once, in the middle of the night, when Valle was in law school, their mother had overheard him crying out in pain. When she went to see what was wrong, she discovered that his hand was badly swollen from an injury he had sustained playing soccer earlier that day. He had gone to the hospital for treatment, but he had not told his family about it so as not to worry them, instead keeping the pain to himself.

  Valle became known for his oratorical skills: “His language was that of a lawyer, but it was always charged with great feeling,” remembered one of his friends. He told incisive jokes, and he enjoyed dancing, though he was not exactly the best dancer. On his long drives to Ituango, he would listen to cassette tapes of Argentine tango music, which had been popular for years in Medellín—ever since the famous tango performer Carlos Gardel had visited the city in the 1930s (Gardel later died in an airplane accident there).

  COLOMBIA’S WAR DRAGGED on throughout the late 1980s and 1990s, though for a while it was overshadowed by another conflict, the parallel war on drugs between the Colombian state, backed by the United States, and the Medellin cartel, led by cocaine kingpin Pablo Escobar. The drug war littered Medellín’s streets with bodies for years, until Escobar was killed in 1993. A few things seemed to change for the better: some of the guerrilla groups, including the M-19 and the Popular Liberation Army (Ejército Popular de Liberación, EPL), demobilized in the late 1980s as part of a peace process with the government. And in 1991, in part as a result of a student movement demanding political reforms to make the government more participatory and open, the country adopted a new, more progressive, constitution. Valle had been involved in some of the activism around the constitution, alongside his friends and fellow lawyers J. Guillermo Escobar and Iván Velásquez, and had even run for a seat on the constituent assembly. After the spate of killings of activists, leftist leaders, and others in the mid- to late 1980s, human rights groups knew they needed to watch their security, but for a while, it looked like the dark forces behind those assassinations might be taking a step back.

  Then, in the mid-1990s, things started to take a turn for the worse once again. Valle started hearing reports that in remote rural regions, including in his beloved Ituango, groups of armed men were killing peasants. Unlike the anonymous killers of the mid-1980s, who committed targeted, high-profile killings, these groups of paramilitaries seemed like small armies. In Antioquia, they would often wear camouflage and introduce themselves as members of the Peasant Self-Defense Forces of Córdoba and Urabá (Autodefensas Ca
mpesinas de Córdoba y Urabá, or ACCU, in Western Antioquia). They seemed intent on committing very visible, gruesome killings, often of shopkeepers and bus drivers, whom they accused of assisting the guerrillas. But they were also seizing land, replacing local officials with their own people, and effectively asserting their control of entire regions. And nobody, it seemed, was stopping them.

  URIBE RESPONDED TO Valle’s November 20, 1996, letter by meeting with him and several colleagues on Monday, December 9. At the meeting, Valle once again described his concerns about the increasing violence by paramilitaries in Ituango, stressing that he had unquestionable evidence of collusion between the paramilitaries and members of the security forces in the region. Among other examples, he noted, when the heavily armed paramilitaries had passed by an army base in the municipal capital of Ituango on their way to the only road leading to La Granja, later coming out the same way, the army had done nothing to stop them. According to a witness, Uribe looked unsettled, got up from the meeting table, went into a neighboring office, and picked up the phone. They overheard him say that Valle was making “false” statements by claiming that there was collusion between the paramilitaries and the state, and that he probably should be sued for slander. Uribe then looked at Valle and asked whether he would be willing to repeat his statements the next day to General Alfonso Manosalva, the commander of the Fourth Brigade of the army, based in Medellín. Valle calmly agreed—he later told his friends that if he was sued for slander, it would be fine, because it would give him a chance to present his evidence in court. He then continued talking to the governor, stating that he knew where the paramilitaries had dug some mass graves to bury their victims. Uribe immediately made arrangements for Valle to travel by helicopter to Ituango with a number of officials, so that Valle could show them where the graves were. But on the morning of the following Saturday, the appointed day of the expedition, Valle received a call before 5 a.m.: the caller informed him that he would no longer be allowed to go on the helicopter—it was full, and there was no longer room for him. He considered driving, but quickly abandoned the idea: the trip would have taken seven hours by car, and by the time he got there, the committee would have left.

  A few months after Valle had first written to Uribe about the paramilitaries’ activities in Ituango, another attack in the region offered further proof. The army reported that on July 7, 1997, FARC guerrillas had attacked one of the brightly painted rural buses known as chivas on one of the roads leading to Ituango, killing one Colombian soldier and injuring another. At the same time, media reported, several individuals had been admitted to a nearby hospital for similar injuries, though the military denied that they were in any way related to the attack.

  A few days later, Valle announced that the military was lying: the additional injured people were in fact paramilitaries who had been riding in the bus with the military. Only the driver, Valle said, was a civilian, and in fact he was a well-known resident of the area—the military had forced him to drive them around. He was now seriously injured. “This proves the collusion [between the military and paramilitaries] that I’ve been reporting for nearly a year and which the Governor of Antioquia and the Commander of the Fourth Brigade have not wanted to believe,” he said. “The civilian population,” he added on a TV news program, “is defenseless.” Since September 1996, he charged, more than 150 people in Ituango had been killed. These included most of the shopkeepers in the small towns—whom the paramilitaries accused of feeding the FARC. A paramilitary group was operating in the center of Ituango and the military and the police knew it.

  Valle stressed that he was speaking out on the basis of solid information, and because he had no choice—he had gone to every government office he could think of to beg them to protect the civilian population, but he had received no answer. “I’m not motivated by hatred against the Governor or the commander of the Fourth Brigade… or because of political interests,” he said. “I’m doing this because these are my people and I don’t want them to keep suffering. I do it because too many of my people have died, unjustly, in the middle of the public plaza, while everyone remains silent. Because one has to tell the truth, whatever the cost.”

  Valle’s explosive charges drew a quick retort from the bland-faced and droopy-eyed Fourth Brigade commander, Carlos Alberto Ospina, who drily snapped back that the allegation was simply false, because everyone in the vehicle belonged to the military.

  Uribe backed Ospina: “The reports of doctor Jesús María Valle don’t match those given by the Brigade or the Police.… As governor, I have to support our security forces.” A young army major filed a civil suit on behalf of the Fourth Brigade against Valle for libel.

  A few days later, Uribe went further, accusing Valle of being “an enemy of the Armed Forces,” recalled the lawyer María Victoria Fallon. According to one of Uribe’s advisers, José Obdulio Gaviria, Uribe believed Valle’s allegations were inappropriate because any such charges should be made before the inspector general’s office and the military justice system; Valle, he said, was simply trying to discredit the armed forces. But given the history of assassinations of people perceived as being enemies of the military, Valle’s friends viewed Uribe’s statements as a veiled threat. Acquaintances began to avoid him, sometimes crossing the street out of fear of being seen with him.

  CHAPTER 2

  EARLY WARNINGS

  IVÁN VELÁSQUEZ DIDN’T LIKE TO drive, so his wife, María Victoria, usually took the wheel. That Saturday in October 1997, she was driving Velásquez and their three kids on a day trip out of Medellín. Catalina, then seventeen; Víctor, fourteen; and Laura, nine, had piled into the back of the car, and the family had started to make its way along the Las Palmas highway, snaking up the tall mountains embracing Medellín.

  Except during the rainy season, Medellín was nearly always sunny and warm, a messy, heavily trafficked, polluted city sitting in the bright green Aburrá Valley, which was dotted with shiny yellow guayacán trees and luxuriant bougainvillea vines. Butterflies and a large variety of birds—egrets and crakes, osprey and kestrels, warblers, various hummingbirds, cuckoo birds, and even macaws and occasional flocks of parakeets—regularly visited the city’s many gardens and parks, which provided much-needed relief from the concrete jungle at Medellín’s center. Today was another bright day, and Velásquez was enjoying being with his family again.

  Velásquez had just started a new job as chief prosecutor for Antioquia and the neighboring states of Córdoba, Caldas, Risaralda, and Chocó. He had not, at first, been at all interested in the job. Regional prosecutors at the time were known as “prosecutors without a face,” meaning that—for their own security—they operated anonymously; neither defendants nor witnesses knew their names. To Velásquez, the idea of anonymous prosecutors seemed deeply unfair; defendants should be able to see those who were accusing them of crimes.

  But he had been living far from his family, working eight hours away, in Bogotá, for over a year. María Victoria’s job was in Medellín, and she didn’t want to quit and have to hunt for new employment in a strange city. Velásquez would sometimes meet María Victoria and the kids in a relative’s cottage halfway between Bogotá and Medellín for a weekend, and then, on Sunday afternoon, wave longingly through the window as Catalina, Víctor, and Laura settled into María Victoria’s car to drive back to Medellín. When the kids were smaller, he had always been deeply involved in caring for them: preparing their food, taking them to school, playing with them. But more and more, Velásquez feared his kids were growing up without a father, and he worried about the harm the distance might do to his relationships with his children and wife. So when a colleague had suggested him for this position, he had agreed to consider it—and eventually accepted.

  Velásquez’s office had assigned him the bulletproof car they were in, saying he must use it for his own security: any number of people could want the chief prosecutor dead. Velásquez had agreed without thinking too much about it; security concerns wer
e not new to him.

  ONLY A FEW years earlier, Velásquez had been stuck between two warring factions during some of the worst violence Medellín had ever experienced. He was serving as inspector general for the city, charged with monitoring abuses by public officials, in the final years of the drug war that cocaine kingpin Pablo Escobar was waging against the Colombian government.

  Even as Colombia’s war between guerrillas and the government churned, during the 1970s and 1980s, Colombia had become the epicenter of the world’s thriving cocaine business: enterprising black-market businessmen like Escobar, who had grown up in the Medellín suburb of Envigado, saw in marijuana, and then cocaine—derived from coca grown in neighboring Peru and Bolivia—an opportunity to reap profits beyond their wildest dreams. That opportunity lay in processing and shipping the drugs to US shores. By the early 1980s, Escobar, along with Gonzalo Rodríguez Gacha and the brothers Jorge Luis, Juan David, and Fabio Ochoa Vásquez, had formed a powerful narco-trafficking syndicate, commonly known as the Medellín cartel, which at its peak some sources estimated to have supplied as much as 80 percent of the global cocaine market, bringing in billions of dollars a year. When Forbes magazine published its first list of world billionaires in 1987, both Escobar and Jorge Luis Ochoa made the list. Escobar stayed on it for another seven years.

  From the start, the cartel used savage means to achieve its goals: torturing and executing competitors or opponents, threatening or bribing officials to achieve its aims. Colombia’s government was slow to take action against the drug business—in the 1970s and early 1980s there was even some debate, led by a prominent politician (and future president), Ernesto Samper, about legalizing drugs. Samper pointed out that the drug business was rapidly becoming too powerful for the state to control, and that they needed to find an alternate way of regulating it: “We are, at the end of the day, faced with a choice of either recognizing and redirecting the mafias, or having them… take us all down the wrong path.”