There Are No Dead Here

by Maria McFarland Sánchez-Moreno

  JESÚS MARÍA VALLE’S murder, which came only a few days after the natural death of Velásquez’s father, had also left Velásquez reeling with the anger and sorrow attendant to grief and flooded with an overwhelming sense of impotence. “It was about feeling very small in the face of it all, because you clearly knew who the enemies were,” he would remember years later. To him, it was obvious that the paramilitaries had killed Valle, possibly with military backing. The meticulously planned, efficient operation also showed that the paramilitaries were no small-time groups roaming the countryside; this was a highly sophisticated criminal enterprise, and its reach extended deep into the city. By killing Valle, they were not just eliminating a problem; they were sending the message that anyone who got in their way—who exposed their atrocities or interfered with their expansion—would pay with their life. And, at that moment, Velásquez was facing the mammoth challenge of investigating their crimes.

  But Velásquez’s indignation at the injustice of Valle’s murder won out over his fear. Valle, Velásquez was now convinced, had been right all along—the paramilitaries were an existential threat to the country’s democracy and people. So instead of backing away, the prosecutor doubled down on his office’s investigations of the paramilitaries. Besides, as he would write years later, he and his team in the prosecutor’s office were “in the best moment of ‘functional optimism,’ that reaffirming feeling that makes us believe that it is possible to put an end to impunity, and not even the painful murder of… Valle… put the brakes on the almost frenetic momentum we had.”

  Velásquez had a way of putting the risks he might be running out of his mind, rationalizing that when his time came, that would be the end—there was not much he could do about it. Whenever he was asked whether he was afraid of getting killed, he would shrug, recalling what one of Pablo Escobar’s men had said to him years before, when Velásquez was inspector general for Medellín: “If you’re alive, it’s not because we haven’t been able to kill you, but because we haven’t wanted to. If you have five guards, we’ll send ten after you. If you have ten, we’ll send twenty. If you have twenty—which is very unlikely—we’ll send fifty, and you won’t be able to resist.” The bottom line was that if every public official who might come under threat resigned, then no change would ever be possible, and that, to Velásquez, would be intolerable.

  COLOMBIA’S PARAMILITARY PROBLEM, Velásquez was also beginning to understand, extended well beyond Valle’s beloved Ituango, and even beyond the borders of Antioquia. As Valle had said in a speech a few months before his murder, Antioquia was “exporting” paramilitarism to other Colombian states. And these paramilitaries seemed like different kinds of groups from those of the past.

  There had been talk of “self-defense” groups backed by the military since the 1970s, and in the 1980s it was well known that at least some of them had forged strong ties with drug traffickers. One particularly infamous group was Death to Kidnappers (Muerte a Secuestradores, MAS), which members of the Medellín cartel established after members of the M-19 guerrillas kidnapped Martha Nieves Ochoa, sister of the cartel’s Ochoa brothers. In the early 1980s, the MAS was believed to have killed more than two hundred people who in one way or another got in the way of their interests. But in those years, it had never been clear to Velásquez whether the groups involved in all these different activities were part of a single movement, or were operating independently of one another. It was also unclear what connection they had to the shadowy death squads that killed many activists—including Valle’s predecessors at the Permanent Human Rights Committee—in the 1980s. The case files he was now reading pointed to a far larger and more organized force.

  The group that was terrorizing its way across Antioquia and neighboring states, the Peasant Self-Defense Forces of Córdoba and Urabá, or ACCU, in the Spanish acronym, was named for the regions where it had started—Urabá is an area around the Gulf of Urabá that encompasses the northwest of Antioquia as well as parts of the states of Córdoba and Chocó. The ACCU’s leader Carlos Castaño, was a short man, taut like a pitbull, with a crazed look in his eye. In a book he’d publish in 2001, My Confession, Castaño said that when he was a teenager, the FARC kidnapped and then killed his father, despite the family’s payment of a substantial ransom. Castaño and his brothers Fidel and Vicente had then taken up the cause of arming ordinary Colombians so they could defend themselves against the guerrillas. While experts have later raised serious questions about Castaño’s account of his father’s death and the brothers’ motivations, it’s fairly clear that at some point in the 1980s they were working closely with the Medellín cartel, though eventually they turned on Pablo Escobar and joined Los Pepes, the death squad that targeted Escobar’s people. By then, under Carlos’s brother Fidel’s leadership, the Castaños had also formed their own paramilitary group, named after their property, Las Tangas. “Los Tangueros,” as they were known, committed a string of killings and massacres in the 1980s and 1990s in and around Córdoba. When Fidel was killed in 1994 under mysterious circumstances—Carlos blamed guerrillas—Carlos took over the group.

  But they had now expanded much farther, across Antioquia and Córdoba and well into other regions. Sometimes known as the “head-splitters” (mochacabezas), the paramilitaries became famous for their gruesome and cruel tactics: tying someone up and dismembering them alive in front of their families; decapitating their victims and playing soccer with their heads; raping women with clubs while forcing their relatives to watch; scalping, burning, strangling, hanging—nothing seemed too vicious or too extreme for the ACCU.

  Now in his mid-thirties, Castaño regularly exploded into lengthy tirades, barking orders and sermonizing about his war on the left. Yet the paramilitaries’ motives were not purely political: it was widely rumored that the ACCU was involved in drug trafficking and organized crime. After Pablo Escobar’s death, the former members of Los Pepes had been quick to pick up the reins of Escobar’s drug-trafficking operations—as well as to continue applying his brutal tactics. By 1997, Castaño and his cronies might have been able to claim an even greater number of victims to their name than Escobar ever did. And based on what Velásquez was seeing in his office, law enforcement was doing little to stop them.

  WHAT WORRIED VELÁSQUEZ the most was his own office: How could he ensure that his team of prosecutors, and the criminal investigators with whom they worked, was clean? Even before he started, people in the attorney general’s office in Bogotá had warned Velásquez about possible corruption in the Medellín office. The lack of progress on the paramilitary cases raised real questions about whether some prosecutors and investigators might have ties to the very groups they were investigating.

  So as a condition for taking the job, Velásquez had insisted that the attorney general allow him to name some of the senior prosecutors who would work directly with him. In addition to asking J. Guillermo Escobar to oversee the paramilitary cases, Velásquez asked Laureano Colmenares, a very respected senior judge who had already retired, to take over the equally sensitive drug-trafficking cases—despite Pablo Escobar’s death, other traffickers had filled his shoes, and the number of murders in the city remained high.

  Velásquez transferred more than a dozen other prosecutors he didn’t trust or didn’t know well out of the office. The transfers, he knew, had a cost: many of those prosecutors were well connected in Medellín, and he wasn’t scoring any popularity points by getting rid of them. But he couldn’t take any chances. So he hired a new batch of young lawyers recommended to him by friends and close colleagues. Among them was the cheerful and chatty Javier Tamayo, who was still in his late twenties and single, and who managed to thoroughly enjoy Medellín’s nightlife even while pouring himself into his work. Another, Carlos Bonilla, was also young but already married and with small children. Bonilla had suffered polio as a child and walked with a limp as a result. Velásquez assigned him and J. Guillermo to the investigation of Valle’s murder.

  The situation with
the criminal investigators was even trickier. Earlier that year, two investigators from the CTI—the special agency attached to the attorney general’s office and charged with conducting criminal investigations alongside the prosecutors—had been killed. Another CTI agent, Diego Arcila, a sweet and shy young man who had been in a seminary, in training to be a priest, before becoming a wiretapping expert at the CTI, had given sworn statements to prosecutors in which he described evidence that paramilitaries had infiltrated the CTI: CTI agents may have given the assassins information about the dead agents’ investigations and movements.

  Velásquez had no authority over the CTI, which had its own regional director, who worked alongside Velásquez and answered to Bogotá. So he was relieved when, only a few weeks after he started, the CTI in Bogotá named a new regional director for Antioquia, Gregorio Oviedo. The forty-three-year-old Oviedo was a funny, outgoing guy, small, copper-skinned, and square-jawed, whose striking light blue eyes behind thick glasses suggested a quick intelligence. The two men hit it off right away—Oviedo could even get the usually impassive Velásquez to laugh at his jokes. Also, Velásquez knew Oviedo’s wife, Amelia Pérez, who was doing good work as a prosecutor in the specialized Human Rights Unit in Bogotá that the attorney general’s office set up in 1995 to handle major human rights cases.

  A soft-spoken woman with brown eyes and hair and thick glasses, Pérez looked more like a librarian than a tough prosecutor who faced down organized crime, though there was a firmness about her chin and gaze that hinted at some hidden well of strength. Starting the previous year, Pérez had quietly been spearheading one of the Human Rights Unit’s most difficult and dangerous investigations—the one that first brought the corruption within the Antioquia CTI office to the surface.

  The case had started with the 1995 disappearances of three young men in different parts of Medellín, after men dressed in black and wearing ski masks had seized them from their homes. They also seized the wife and baby girl of one of the young men, but later released them. In interviews with the authorities, the young woman recounted being surprised at how one of the leaders of the kidnappers had treated her: he had given her money for her cab ride home, and clothes for herself and her little girl, and told her something like “Don’t worry, he won’t bother you anymore.” The girl’s husband had sometimes mistreated her, and she would often complain to her mother about it over the phone. Pérez took the exchange as an indication that whoever had carried out the operation had been tapping the family’s lines. The father of two of the young men had also been killed after he gave a statement to prosecutors, in which he said he believed that members of the CTI and the UNASE, the elite kidnapping squad, were involved in the disappearance. Other evidence already collected by investigators, such as the descriptions of the cars of the kidnappers, also pointed to the involvement of government agents.

  Another prosecutor had initially handled the matter, so when it got reassigned to Pérez, CTI agents in Medellín had already made some progress investigating the case. Their basic theory was that the disappearances were an act of retaliation: the young men who had disappeared were suspected of being involved in the kidnapping of another young man. The hostage’s father, they said, had sought help from Gustavo Upegui, a wealthy soccer team owner from Envigado, a municipality on the outskirts of Medellín, who was said to have once handled Pablo Escobar’s finances. People in Medellín whispered that Upegui was still involved in some of the assassinations that were happening all the time in Medellín, and that he was working with the fearsome criminal gang known as “La Terraza” and the infamous “Envigado Office,” a drug-trafficking operation where, it was said, people in the underworld could hire the services of killers to settle scores and mediate disputes. But Upegui had never been convicted of a crime. The investigators believed that Upegui had arranged the disappearances with the help of members of public security forces—which would explain the hints of wiretapping in the case.

  During an initial trip to Medellín, around April 1997, Pérez met the CTI team on the case: Jaime Piedrahita, Manuel López, Fernando González, and the former seminarian Diego Arcila, or “Dieguito,” as she called him, whom J. Guillermo Escobar would later describe as “the smartest investigator” he had ever met. Pérez was taken aback when a more senior CTI official, after introducing Pérez to them, said that the CTI was transferring one of them—Jaime Piedrahita, a skinny young man with huge dark eyebrows and a slim moustache—out of town. He and the others, Pérez recalled the official saying, were “kind of crazy little guys,” with strange ideas, off running investigations on their own. Pérez liked the investigators, and she found the comment troubling: Why was this official putting down good investigative work?

  On July 4, 1997, a little after 5 p.m., as Piedrahita was leaving the office on his red Yamaha motorcycle, two men drove up to him on another motorcycle. Before he could react, in the middle of the busy street, they poured six bullets into his head and sped off. The night before, Piedrahita had called one of the other investigators, Fernando González, and told him that he had identified the armed gang through which Upegui was carrying out his criminal activities in the municipality of Itagüí, just outside Medellín.

  Convinced that Piedrahita had been killed because of the Upegui investigation, Pérez went back to Medellín and met with the investigators. The problem, they told her, was that all of Medellín was under the thumb of the same criminals who had once belonged to Los Pepes, and who were close to the paramilitaries. One of them was Upegui. The investigators said they were especially concerned because they had evidence that some of their own CTI colleagues were on the payroll of organized crime.

  Pérez agreed that they should look into it further, and in the next couple of months they sent her written reports. They described a store in a Medellín mall where current and former government officials who were on Upegui’s payroll received bribes of as much as US$500 a month. They said a former CTI agent, Carlos Mario Aguilar, who was now working with the paramilitaries and Upegui, was in charge of recruiting CTI agents. Pérez also learned that the investigators suspected that Uber Duque, who had only just resigned as head of the investigations unit for the Medellín CTI in mid-1997, and was now setting up his own private practice as an attorney, was working with Upegui. Arcila noted that Duque had “expressed interest in the paramilitaries; he told me, literally, that in his view [and that of another official]… when it came to investigations, you had to play dumb, as that was a good way of collaborating with them.” Duque was now in private practice as a lawyer in Medellín, but apparently he stayed in close contact with many of his former CTI colleagues.

  In the first week of September, CTI agent Manuel López excitedly told Arcila that he had had another breakthrough: he had obtained incriminating recordings of Uber Duque, their former colleague, whom they now suspected of working closely with Upegui. He needed to meet with Pérez to share them with her. He never did: on September 5, López, like Piedrahita before him, was shot to death by unknown assassins; for López, it happened near a shopping mall as he was about to head to his office.

  Shortly after López’s death, the central CTI office in Bogotá changed the leadership in the Antioquia office—and that was how Gregorio Oviedo, Pérez’s husband, ended up starting there as the regional CTI chief in late 1997, around the same time that Velásquez started as the regional chief prosecutor.

  Aware of the infiltration of the CTI office, Oviedo and Velásquez selected Arcila and a few other CTI agents whom they believed to be trustworthy and started to channel all especially sensitive matters to them.

  BY THE TIME Valle was killed, the team was already starting to make progress. It had all started a couple of months before, when Oviedo had given Velásquez some surprising news from the CTI office in Bello, right outside of Medellín. A young man had come into the Bello office saying he had recently joined the paramilitaries but was now terrified: he had overheard the paramilitaries talking about how they were planning to kill
his grandfather, with whom he lived. So, he said, he had deserted the paramilitaries, and he was now seeking protection from the authorities. The head of the Bello office, Sergio Humberto Parra, interviewed the young man, who said he knew of a safe house where a lot of the paramilitaries stayed in Bello. Parra got the young man to give him the house’s phone number.

  Oviedo had jumped at the opportunity—now that they knew of at least one place where the paramilitaries were living, they could try to monitor their activities, and maybe start to build a solid case. Velásquez’s prosecutors made sure they got the necessary warrants, and they entrusted Arcila with the sensitive task of wiretapping the paramilitary safe house. They asked a few others to help: one was Fernando González, who had worked closely with Pérez, Arcila, and the two murdered CTI agents, and whose specialty was investigating paramilitary crimes. His colleagues had jokingly nicknamed him “Paraco,” a slang term for a paramilitary. González was also daring: working with Pérez on the Upegui investigation, he had taken a video recorder to the office of Upegui in Envigado wearing only sunglasses to make him harder to place, and had taken footage of the soccer magnate.

  Oviedo also promoted Parra, appointing him to be his right-hand man as chief of the regional CTI’s investigations unit. Despite his atrocious spelling—about which Oviedo teased him mercilessly—the chatty, slightly overweight, and perpetually disheveled forty-year-old Parra was the agent who had first obtained the phone number to the paramilitary safe house, and there seemed to be few doubts as to his honesty and commitment to the work.

  The wiretaps started to produce results right away—the paramilitaries, it seemed, were so confident that nobody would pursue them that they talked endlessly on the phone about planned operations. They even mentioned individual members of the group (though always by their aliases), as well as the addresses they used. According to Arcila’s reports, a bunch of the paramilitaries in the safe house were former army members—which was alarming but also made sense. The paramilitaries could afford to pay handsome salaries to people with military training, and many of the military men viewed the paramilitaries, in turn, as allies in their counterinsurgency campaign. Plus, Arcila found out through the wiretaps, the group in the safe house had contacts in multiple military units throughout Antioquia.