In Velásquez’s view, it was one thing to say the government had to protect its people and fight the guerrillas. It was something else entirely to let the military hand out military-grade weapons to civilians and get them directly involved in the conflict. And he agreed with many in the human rights community that the Convivirs could easily be used as cover for paramilitary groups.
Some, like Valle, even spoke interchangeably of the paramilitaries and the Convivirs, as though they were the same thing. In an August 25, 1997, speech commemorating the ten-year anniversary of the murder of Valle’s predecessor, Héctor Abad, Valle described how he saw the situation in small towns across Antioquia:
Dark forces appeared that replaced the mayor.… [T]hey were paramilitaries, Convivirs, self-defense forces. And the concept of public authority became ambiguous: people became friends or enemies of the Convivir, friends or enemies of the paramilitaries, friends or enemies of the guerrillas.… Today I can say that the meridian of violence courses through Antioquia. We are exporting, through a mistaken conception of public order, violence to other peaceful states… [and] to the whole country. And the paramilitaries and the Convivir[s] are confused in their uniforms, their headquarters, the vehicles they use.… I have seen it with my eyes, I have witnessed it with the people of my land, my towns.… Those people I saw born, those people with whom I heard the whistle of misery in the mountains, have been killed. And I have gone everywhere invoking the rights… of the peasants, and I haven’t received a positive answer.
Velásquez took Valle’s comments seriously. But he had yet to grasp their full implications.
AS MARÍA VICTORIA drove the car up the Las Palmas highway, climbing the tall, densely forested mountains embracing Medellín, on that Saturday in late October 1997, the brakes gave out. “Stop,” the normally serene Velásquez said, growing alarmed. But she couldn’t stop, and the vehicle kept powering farther up the slope. If they continued, they’d soon be driving alongside a cliff.
But then Velásquez spotted a side street. María Victoria swerved onto it. “We’re going to die,” María Victoria thought, as she lost control of the car, hurtling down the steep incline. They turned upside-down as the car rolled, until finally it stopped, smashing against a wall.
“Is everyone okay?” Velásquez and María Victoria breathlessly asked, turning to each other and their children in the back. Catalina had a deep gash in her leg, and Laura was in pain: they’d later learn that one of her kidneys was bruised.
To this day, María Victoria grows enraged as she tells the story: “First they give him a car without brakes, then they tell him that he doesn’t have a right to a driver [on Saturdays], and when we call the traffic police, people from the office beg us not to report that I was driving or that they had given us the car that way. Because there was, in fact, a driver for us to use.”
It was evident to her that someone in Velásquez’s office had sabotaged the car and deliberately arranged things so that Velásquez or his wife would be driving the car on Saturday. Someone wanted him dead.
Velásquez wasn’t so sure about that. In any case, ever since his days as inspector general, his view had been that there was no point in worrying about security. In Colombia, if someone really wanted to kill you, they would.
CHAPTER 3
DEATHS FORETOLD
MILADIS TRIED NOT TO CRY. The paramilitaries had warned her that they would kill anyone who cried. But when she recognized Wilmar’s limp body, tied to the mule the paramilitaries were leading to the church door, she couldn’t stop herself. Disgusted, the armed men in camouflage pulled the boy off the mule and threw him to the ground. “Guerrilla! Your brother is a guerrilla,” they cursed at Miladis, as they kicked the fourteen-year-old’s corpse with their boots. When they finally let her get close to him, she saw machete grooves cutting into the center of her little brother’s chest. One of his delicate hands looked broken. His teeth were clenched tightly on the Catholic scapular their mother had given to him, as though he’d prayed until the last instant to be saved. That was two decades ago, but Miladis and her sister, Maryori, remember it like it was yesterday.
“El Aro was a really good place, very calm. Everyone was very close,” Miladis said of the three-hundred-person town in rural Antioquia, Colombia. She remembered the town square—the heart of the community—fondly; it looked like a painting, she said, with its coconut and lime trees, and the lush mango tree on the corner closest to her home. A statue of national hero Simón Bolívar, who liberated Colombia from Spain, stood in the middle, near another of the Virgin Mary. The large white church with its solid wooden doors sat at the top of the square, next to the priest’s house and the police station. Also just past the square was the main town store, owned by Marco Aurelio Areiza, a friendly sixty-four-year-old man who seemed to have been there forever, selling meats, beans, cleaning supplies, beer, coffee, and whatever else townspeople needed. Small mud homes squatted along narrow paths of overgrown grass radiating out from the town square, at the foot of which a single dirt road connected El Aro to the rest of the world.
October 25, 1997, had been shaping up to be a beautiful Saturday. The sun had finally burned off some of the clouds hugging the mountaintops, easing the morning’s chill. But a somber mood had taken hold in the town. Other than the odd mule grazing or chicken pecking about the soil, little moved outside—everyone was staying indoors.
For days, Miladis had been hearing reports that paramilitaries were coming into the region. She didn’t know much about them, except that they claimed to be fighting the left-wing guerrillas that roamed the countryside and occasionally came into town to buy food or supplies, or to press community members to pay the vacuna, or tax. The community members knew not to cross the guerrillas, or the army, which sometimes came through and stole a cow to eat. But the stories Miladis had heard about the paramilitaries were even more terrifying: it was said they carved people up with chainsaws, made their victims drink acid, and tied men, women, and children to the backs of cars, dragging them until they died.
Miladis, her mother, and younger siblings had discussed leaving, but now it was too late: early on Saturday, people from nearby farms called El Aro’s telephone office to warn them that dozens of armed men were making their way up the road leading through the densely forested sierra to the town. If the family ran across them on their way out, the paramilitaries might get suspicious and accuse them of being affiliated with the guerrillas. And who knew what would happen then? At this point, there was little they could do but keep going about their business as usual. So Miladis helped her mother cook lunch for the town’s schoolteachers in their wood stove—one of the many ways the family scratched out a living.
By noon, lunch was ready, but the teachers didn’t arrive. Instead, “we started to hear shooting all over the place,” Miladis recalled. They locked the door and huddled in the darkest corner of the back room, where the women normally slept. Distraught, they waited all day and night, listening to intermittent shooting outside, and sick with worry over Wilmar, the baby of the family, who had left that morning to work at a nearby farm.
He hadn’t returned.
THE NEXT MORNING, while the rest of Colombia voted in local elections, Miladis jumped at the sound of men pounding on the front door. She had not slept all night, terrified and hoping that the paramilitaries would leave and not notice them. But the men hammering away at the door would not stop. Miladis opened it before they could break it.
Three paramilitaries stood in front of her, in full military attire and ski masks, and carrying huge weapons. Before Miladis knew it, they had shoved the family, still in their pajamas, out of the house and down the dirt path to the town square. “What a herd of guerrillas. How come we missed them yesterday?” Miladis recalled one of them hissing, mocking the family.
Soft-drink cans, rolls of surgical tape, beans, rice, toilet paper, medicine bottles, and more littered the streets. The paramilitaries had looted the town store and the pharmacy. As t
hey walked by, the family saw three bodies on the square, shot to death under the mango tree. One was Luis Modesto, a municipal worker who had been drinking beer at the house next door to theirs just a few hours earlier.
When the men pushed the family into the church, Miladis was surprised to find it packed. It seemed like the whole town was there; people were crying, shaking, comforting each other, or simply silent. Miladis asked to go to the bathroom, and the paramilitaries directed her to the priest’s home, next to the church.
As she walked from the church to the priest’s home, Miladis had to step over a body, which she thought might belong to a paramilitary. From the church, she could also make out another corpse in camouflage on another corner of the square; it looked like it might belong to one of the guerrillas. “He was missing a piece of his head, and someone had cleaved a machete into him,” she remembered.
As she moved through the crowd, Miladis kept asking about her brother, but nobody had heard from Wilmar. Finally, she found one of the teachers. “It’s lucky you weren’t here earlier,” she remembers the teacher whispering. “They were raping the women.” Another woman told Miladis that the paramilitaries had sent away some of the town’s men to deliver soft drinks to their troops deeper in the woods, so the paramilitaries could do as they wished with their women. It sounded like they had raped some of the teachers, too, but in their very traditional community, it was too painful—not to mention frightening—for the victims to talk about it directly.
As the morning wore on, Miladis’s mother asked a male cousin to approach the paramilitaries and ask for permission to go search for Wilmar. The cousin said they should wait, but Miladis couldn’t wait any longer. She decided to go up to them herself.
One of the male teachers accompanied Miladis to the telephone office, where the troops gave her a hard look. “You can go look for your relative, as long as you don’t cry,” they said. “The first one who cries pays with their head.”
They instructed her to talk to one of their bosses, a man called “Junior.” Frightened but determined, Miladis walked across the square and found him. Except for his military fatigues, the twenty-five-year-old baby-faced man with thick brows and full lips looked like any other young man from the countryside, not a hardened killer.
“What does your brother look like?” asked Junior, businesslike, when she explained what she wanted to do. She described the skinny, fragile-looking Wilmar.
“Oh, son of a bitch,” Junior said, looking at some of his men. “That’s that kid who got killed.”
“He was running away,” said Junior, unapologetically, when he saw Miladis’s reaction. “Yeah, you can go pick him up.”
Junior ordered a couple of his men to collect the body. Miladis waited at the door to the church with her sisters while their mother prayed inside.
AFTER THE PARAMILITARIES brought Wilmar’s body back, Miladis begged them to let the family leave town to bury his body. The paramilitaries said yes—a few could leave. Miladis walked out of El Aro with her mother, one of her sisters, her niece, and Miladis’s small son that afternoon. The family mule carried Wilmar’s ruined little body as they climbed down the steep mountainside, across a hanging bridge, and past empty farms where abandoned dogs barked at them. After several hours, they finally made it to the town of Puerto Valdivia, where they buried the boy.
The paramilitaries stayed in the town for five more days. Miladis later heard from other townspeople who fled to Puerto Valdivia that the day she left, they killed Marco Aurelio Areiza after accusing him of selling food to guerrillas. Ignoring the pleas of Areiza’s domestic partner, who insisted that he had only sold the food under guerrilla threat, the paramilitaries had dragged him away. His body was later found tied to a tree near the town cemetery with his eyes gouged out, deep knife wounds in his ribs, and his testicles cut off and stuffed in his mouth.
She also heard that paramilitaries had forced a young woman to lead them to a guerrilla campsite nearby—Miladis heard that the young woman might have once belonged to the guerrillas but had deserted them. Later on, Miladis said, people found only the bottom half of her body. It was rumored that the paramilitaries had thrown explosives at her.
The paramilitaries raped more women after the family left, though the victims remained too afraid or ashamed to tell the authorities. Survivors did report that the paramilitaries had gang-raped Elvia Rosa Areiza, a woman who did domestic work in the priest’s house. They had then dragged the young mother of five through the streets, transforming her face into a purple, bloody mess before tying her up in a pigsty, where they left her to die of thirst.
People said that the paramilitaries laughed as they talked about how they had killed Miladis’s little brother. He kept crying, they said, calling for the Virgin Mary to protect him and for them to let him go back to his mother.
By the time they left, the paramilitaries had killed fifteen people. They finally ordered the remaining residents to leave as they burned down most of the town, leaving only eighteen houses and the church standing. In total, more than seven hundred people fled El Aro and the surrounding region as a result of the operation.
Over time, one of Miladis’s aunts—an elderly woman whom the paramilitaries had forced to cook for them during their incursion—would tell her that she had seen a helicopter arrive nearby. Another young man talked about how the paramilitaries had forced him to tie the bodies of dead combatants to the legs of a helicopter.
During that entire hellish week, nobody—neither the military nor law enforcement—responded to pleas for help from the community. Nor did anyone stop the paramilitaries as they left, taking with them as many as 1,200 head of cattle that they had forced townspeople to herd for them from neighboring farms.
El Aro, Antioquia, a few days after the massacre, October or November 1997. © Rainer Huhle.
Twenty years later, we know that senior military commanders—far from trying to stop the paramilitaries’ expansion—assisted them and helped to plan the massacre. With the paramilitaries’ enormous drug profits, it was easy for them to buy off public officials. But many members of the military were eager accomplices who equipped, funded, and jointly plotted operations with the paramilitaries, viewing them as essential partners in a dirty war against the guerrillas that they could not legally conduct.
Over the following years, El Aro became a typical example of the paramilitaries’ operations during their massive expansion campaign in the late 1990s. The paramilitaries claimed to be going after the guerrillas, and in some cases, as in El Aro, there was evidence that they had engaged in combat with them. But in town after town, they committed gruesome massacres, apparently aimed at terrorizing the civilian populations near where the guerrillas were operating. Then top paramilitary chief, Carlos Castaño, later described the El Aro incursion as part of the paramilitaries’ counterinsurgency strategy in the region, where many guerrillas were operating at the time: “Either the guerrillas come out of their sanctuaries or we will go in.”
Years later, it became clear that there was another dynamic at play, too, though it was less obvious to Colombians at the time: as they wiped out entire communities, paramilitaries were seizing their land, keeping it for themselves or their cronies, or selling it—often to friendly landowners and businesses—at a profit. They placed friendly politicians in key local government positions, ensuring that nobody would interfere with their activities. And slowly, they asserted their control over key transit routes to seaside ports, which were essential for drug-trafficking operations and the movement of arms shipments. A decade later, another paramilitary commander who had been involved in the El Aro massacre, Salvatore Mancuso, would explain that one of their main reasons for wanting to seize control of the region was that it was in the middle of a key strategic corridor for transporting cocaine.
But none of this was evident yet in 1997, even to the people—including Velásquez—who were investigating the paramilitaries’ crimes.
EL ARO SPAWNED an even gre
ater rift between Jesús María Valle and the army’s Fourth Brigade, joined by the office of Antioquia’s governor, Álvaro Uribe. El Aro belonged to Valle’s home region of Ituango—the very same region that he represented as a councilman, and which he had been pleading with the military and state government for over a year to protect.
Two days before the massacre happened, one of Valle’s contacts from Ituango, Amparo Areiza, had called to tell him that she had heard that the paramilitaries were coming into town. Amparo was the daughter of the El Aro shopkeeper, Marco Aurelio Areiza, but she had moved to the town of Yarumal years before and married a lawyer who knew Valle professionally. She had been worried for months because of reports that paramilitaries had started to go through the region, sometimes with members of the army, and it was said they were planning to go into El Aro. She had begged her father to leave town, but he had refused, telling her not to worry: he was an honest man, and he didn’t feel he should have to run away like a criminal. The guerrillas sometimes forced him to sell them groceries, but he had always done so under coercion. The Thursday before the massacre, Amparo learned that the paramilitaries had been seen traveling through Puerto Valdivia on their way to El Aro, and that they had killed her cousin, Omar Gutiérrez, when they had stopped at his farm at the edge of the river. Amparo had once again called her father and asked him to leave, but he still refused. She had then called Valle.
There Are No Dead Here Page 6
