Questioning Uribe would only get more difficult over time, as official statistics pointed to substantial drops in violence. In a 2004 op-ed in the Boston Globe, the Colombian ambassador to the United States, Luis Alberto Moreno, reported that “since 2002, homicides have declined by 25 percent; kidnappings have declined by 45 percent; and incidents of terrorism have declined by 37 percent.” Uribe’s popularity rating was hitting 78 percent. Colombia, it seemed, was turning a corner. And after all those decades of tragedy and despair, who was to question the man who had made that possible?
IN THE AFTERMATH of the US indictments of Castaño and Mancuso, Calderón began receiving numerous invitations to meet with the paramilitaries, who were obviously on a charm offensive, trying to convince the public that they were heroes. One of the leaders he got to know was Rodrigo Tovar Pupo, also known as “Jorge 40,” who was said to head the “Northern Block” of the paramilitaries, which operated primarily in the coastal states of Atlántico and Magdalena, as well as the state of Cesar, on the border with Venezuela. The bearded, strident, compact Jorge 40 was a member of the elite in Valledupar, the capital of Cesar, and had even worked for the city government before joining the paramilitaries in the early 1990s—like Mancuso, he told Calderón that he had joined in response to the guerrillas’ increased presence in the region, which included threats, kidnappings, and extortion against members of his landowning family. He gave Calderón a long and whitewashed story about himself, telling him that both he and Ricardo Palmera (aka “Simón Trinidad,” a FARC commander) had been members of the Valledupar Club, where they had known each other. Although they had taken different paths, they had both, he said, been forced by war to abandon their families. Unlike Mancuso, though, Jorge 40 made no effort to come across as a gentleman; instead, he had a harsh, almost militaristic manner of speaking. Calderón first met him at a small farm, and they spoke for about five hours. Calderón asked Jorge 40 about some of his block’s massacres, which by then numbered in the dozens, and included the particularly gruesome February 2000 massacre at El Salado, in which 450 paramilitaries had killed 60 townspeople, scalping, raping, dismembering, torturing, and beheading them on and around the soccer court. But Jorge 40 pushed back hard, blaming the guerrillas for his actions. Like other paramilitary leaders whom Calderón met in those days, Jorge 40 tried to convince him that the paramilitaries were a force for good. They would trot out community members to tell Calderón that, thanks to the AUC, they now had water, or other benefits. It was time-consuming to sit for the inevitable dog-and-pony show. But it was worth it for Calderón: he knew that if he stuck around long enough, he would pick up bits of information that were useful.
That included information about the rising tensions among the paramilitary leaders negotiating with the government. In the eyes of Castaño, and of some officials, a number of the leaders at the negotiating table in Santa Fe de Ralito, including El Tuso Sierra and Francisco Javier Zuluaga (aka “Gordolindo”), were not paramilitary leaders at all, but rather drug traffickers who had bought franchises within the AUC, and who should be excluded from the process. Castaño was anxious for some kind of deal to work out soon, as he had recently had a baby daughter who suffered from a serious genetic disease known as the cri du chat—ideally, it was rumored, Castaño wanted to get her care in the United States. He feared that the inclusion of drug traffickers would doom the peace negotiations. But he and Double Zero were increasingly alone in their purist position, and many of the other commanders had started to view them with hostility.
Calderón also continued to see more evidence of the tight relationship between the paramilitaries and public officials, including during what became fairly regular visits to The Eagle, which Calderón set up through the commander’s lawyer. A big fan of deceased Medellín cartel member Gonzalo Rodríguez Gacha, aka “The Mexican,” The Eagle sported a thick mustache and a heavy gold chain with an Eagle on it. The Eagle’s group was not yet within the AUC, but he had joined the negotiations at Santa Fe de Ralito.
The day that Calderón was getting a tour of the anthill by The Eagle’s ranch, Calderón saw a helicopter touch down filled with about thirty paramilitary troops. The Eagle later explained that his men had been in a battle with the guerrillas, and had been having trouble, so Castaño had sent him reinforcements. The strange thing, Calderón realized later, was that to get to that location, the helicopter would have had to refuel at the air force base of La Dorada. Another source close to The Eagle told him that the paramilitaries eventually defeated the guerrillas with support from a sector of the army.
During another visit to The Eagle, Calderón was surprised to see some people he knew—members of Colombia’s intelligence service, the DAS (for Departamento Administrativo de Seguridad, or Administrative Department of Security)—arrive at The Eagle’s campsite. “They almost had a heart attack when they saw me,” recalled Calderón. The DAS members had come to sell stolen weapons and vehicles to the paramilitary commander, whose son, they said, wanted a new Ford Explorer. They didn’t speak to Calderón at the time, but a couple of days later, he walked to his office in the afternoon and found them in the lobby, where they had been waiting for him for almost six hours. “Look, you know, intelligence people need to get together with the bad guys,” Calderón recalled them saying. He knew that they were lying to him, but decided not to publish anything at the time. These people could be good sources, and, he suspected, there was a lot more to the story.
CHAPTER 10
THE COMMANDERS’ “FRIENDS”
IVÁN VELÁSQUEZ READ THE FEW words on the piece of paper and considered his next move. Outside his window on the fourth floor of the dilapidated Palace of Justice, where the Supreme Court sat, he could just make out through the gray haze the bulky silhouette of the yellowing congressional buildings, and then the expansive grounds of the Presidential Palace in the heart of downtown Bogotá. In the narrow streets below, cars were snarled in the never-ending traffic. Government and service industry workers, professionals, and students made their way around in a glut of ramshackle buses, taxis, and the occasional gleaming SUV with tinted windows shielding the passengers from potential attackers.
If he could have seen farther, into the southern margins of the landlocked city, he would have glimpsed the bleak and crowded slums stretching endlessly into the distance. Many of their residents were peasants who, having lost everything to the country’s war, had sought refuge in the large city’s anonymity and relative safety. To the north, there were wealthier residential districts, with block after block of modern red-brick buildings and comfortable, stately houses where the affluent lived. Restaurants and cafés, ever more luxurious malls (with the greater security, they were increasingly opening boutiques for Louis Vuitton purses, Hermès scarves, and Dior jewelry), beauty salons, and bookstores lined the streets, which were shaded by tall ash, oak, and walnut trees. Dark green mountains towered all around the city, a lush yet forbidding landscape spreading out for miles along the Andes Mountains that cut across the whole of South America’s western flank, until they descended to the Caribbean or Pacific coasts to the north and west on one side, or the plains and then the Amazon rainforest on the east.
Velásquez had been in Bogotá for five years, leading a quiet life and working as one of three assistant justices supporting Justice Álvaro Pérez in the criminal chamber of Colombia’s Supreme Court. Mainly, his job consisted of supporting Pérez in reviewing appeals from lower courts, but on rare occasions, he worked on criminal investigations against members of Colombia’s Congress, over whom the court had jurisdiction. The position had a lower profile than his job as chief prosecutor in Medellín, but Velásquez enjoyed working with the sharp and straightforward Pérez. It was also a much less dangerous job, at least so far.
The complaint Velásquez had received that morning in June 2005 was not much to go on, really—“insignificant,” Velásquez told himself, and “impossible to prove.” The content was so simple it was almost laughable: Cla
ra López—a lawyer, academic, and left-leaning politician who had dated President Uribe in her youth—was asking the Supreme Court to investigate the truth of recent statements by paramilitary leaders Salvatore Mancuso and Vicente Castaño, in which they claimed that they controlled a substantial portion of Congress. That was it. The complaint referred to a lengthy interview that Semana magazine had just published with fearsome paramilitary chief Vicente Castaño, Carlos’s brother, in which, in response to a question by the interviewer about the paramilitaries’ connections to politicians, Vicente had stated that the paramilitaries had “as friends” more than 35 percent of Congress, “and in the next elections, we will increase that percentage.” Mancuso had made similar statements around the time of the 2002 elections, claiming that the paramilitaries had exceeded their goal of winning 35 percent of the seats in Congress.
Velásquez knew better than most that the paramilitaries had friends in powerful places. The hundreds of names in the Padilla files were proof enough, even though that case had fallen apart. But it also stood to reason: for all the thousands who had died at their hands, there must be many others who had gained a great deal from their control, from their theft of land, and their killings of union and community leaders. That had to include politicians, at least at a local level. A member of Congress from the opposition party Polo Democrático Alternativo (Alternative Democratic Pole), Gustavo Petro, had given an impassioned speech on the floor of Congress just a few weeks earlier in which he accused a number of prominent politicians from the region of Sucre of having conspired to create paramilitary groups, and even to carry out massacres. Citing evidence buried in old case files and media reports, he painted a picture of an entire region under the thumb of what he called “local mafias,” which combined “economic elites, political leaders, and criminals who had been turned into commanders of private armies” with “one goal: to control through terror… the society in which it is based,” and ultimately, to secure “their illegal enrichment… the capture of public resources, natural resources, land, and cocaine.”
Vicente Castaño’s statement, while far from clear, could be read to suggest that the dynamic Petro had described was in place not only in Sucre, but in more than a third of the country. If the paramilitaries in effect controlled that many congressmen, it meant they had a big say in the passage of legislation: it might help to explain why Congress seemed poised to pass the so-called “Justice and Peace Law” that President Uribe was backing.
Under international pressure, Uribe had backed off his original proposal to give the paramilitary leaders a complete pass on their crimes, but, in Velásquez’s mind, the newly revised bill he had now put on the table was still deeply flawed: it would allow paramilitary commanders who entered a “demobilization” process to serve as little as three to five years for all their crimes, apparently on farms rather than in prisons. It would be one thing if, to get these benefits, the paramilitaries had to take apart their powerful criminal networks, give up their illegally acquired wealth, and tell the full truth about their crimes and accomplices. But as written, the bill required none of those things—and given Uribe’s history of minimizing military-paramilitary links and endorsing the Convivirs, many viewed the bill as a gift to the paramilitaries rather than a serious effort to demobilize them. Victims’ groups and critics of the government, including Senators Rafael Pardo and Gina Parody, who had once been Uribe supporters, had repeatedly pointed out the bill’s flaws. Even in the United States, senators from both sides of the aisle—Republican Richard Lugar and Democrats Patrick Leahy, Edward Kennedy, Christopher Dodd, Russell Feingold, and Joe Biden—were calling on Uribe to reform the bill. In a letter to Uribe, Lugar insisted: “We want to see the armed groups demobilize, but this law rewards some of Colombia’s worst terrorists and drug traffickers without any assurance that their criminal organizations will be dismantled.” But the US ambassador to Colombia, Bill Wood, seemed to support the bill, and it was now sailing through congressional review. The thought that the paramilitaries might have corrupted Colombia’s democracy to such a degree that they could even get the government to wipe their records clean was alarming, but not, to Velásquez at least, surprising.
Still, the comments by Mancuso and Castaño did not directly accuse anyone of illegal acts. So even if Velásquez wanted to investigate, where would he begin? The Supreme Court also had limited resources—unlike the prosecutors in the attorney general’s office, Velásquez had no support from professional investigators to track down leads and interview witnesses. Virtually all the work would have to fall on his shoulders. And what was the point? After Velásquez’s attempt to go after the paramilitaries in Medellín, he had ended up feeling like Don Quixote, a sculpture of whom stood next to the crucifix in his home office—not that he had been tilting at windmills, but perhaps he had been naive to believe that the justice system could really rein in the paramilitaries. And the price had been so high.
It would be easy enough to just set the complaint aside, concluding there wasn’t enough to go on. In any case, with the majority of Congress belonging to the president’s party, it would be next to impossible to get any real movement on an investigation like this. Many others would have done exactly that. Not Velásquez.
SINCE HIS DAYS as inspector general of Medellín, in the early 1990s, Velásquez had carried in his memory the image of a young man he met one day at his offices. He first caught sight of the youth sitting alone on a battered metal chair in the worn, bare office of the Human Rights Unit, his blackened cheekbone swollen so badly that it looked as though he had two cheekbones on one side of his face, his wrists a mess of deep, raw gashes, still wet with blood. He could not have been older than twenty-five, a skinny kid in tattered jeans, staring at his sneakers as he waited. He looked up when Velásquez walked in and eagerly started telling him the story: “I just got away from the UNASE,” Velásquez recalled the young man saying, as he lifted his T-shirt. “Look at what they did to me.” Long welts like red ribbons, some bright and fresh, others older and darker, ran up and down his back, from where he had been whipped with the side of a machete. He had caused the wrist injuries himself when he had slipped out of the knots tying him to the floor.
In a short time, the UNASE, the elite anti-kidnapping unit, had developed a stellar reputation for quickly finding and rescuing hostages, and the Colombian government liked to tout UNASE’s successes as proof of the effectiveness of its security policies. The UNASE’s headquarters were three blocks from Velásquez’s office in downtown Medellín.
“I want to file a complaint against those hijueputas,” swore the victim, his voice thick and raspy. Velásquez said he would take it down and investigate, but warned the young man that it was risky. The victim’s response stuck in his mind: “Yes, I know. They’ll kill me,” he said, matter-of-factly. “But they’re going to kill me anyway, and if I report this I can keep them from doing to others what they did to me.” It was true: chances were that whoever had been torturing this boy would eventually track him down and kill him. Realistically, Velásquez knew he could do little to protect him, especially if the UNASE really was behind this. All he could do was put all his energy into finding the torturers and trying to keep them from doing it again. And that was a very long shot. But this sort of case really got under Velásquez’s skin: when officials who were supposed to be protecting people instead became yet another threat. So he promised to investigate.
To Velásquez’s surprise, he and one of his colleagues, Guillermo Villa, had very quickly made progress—they located a space that the UNASE was using as a torture chamber, and then collected enough evidence to file disciplinary charges against several UNASE members. The case seemed to be going extremely well, until one day Velásquez read a shocking story in the paper: Villa, whom he had known since law school, was under investigation for secretly leaking information to the Cali cartel. Immediately, the national inspector general’s office announced that all the cases Villa had worked on would be put on h
old. Eventually, the office decided, against Velásquez’s wishes, to shutter the investigation into the UNASE’s practices, despite the strong evidence they had collected.
Velásquez later looked up the tortured young man who had sought his assistance in the case. When he introduced himself to the woman who opened the door to the youth’s house, she grew enraged: “You! It’s your fault!” he recalled her saying. “My son is dead. They killed him, and it’s all because of you!”
Throughout his life, Velásquez had repeatedly heard people in Colombia say: “La justicia, pa’ que?” (Justice, what’s the point?). He had always pushed back, saying it was important to have hope and try. What happened with the UNASE investigation, like what happened later with his investigators in Medellín and the Padilla parking-lot case, had sometimes made him despair and wonder whether others were right to be cynical. But ultimately, Velásquez was an idealist. He did not believe things would always turn out well, but he believed that justice was at least possible, and that it was still worth fighting for. He wanted to give others—like the mother of that young man—a reason to believe. To give up was, in his mind, a betrayal. “I act out of conviction, and having to act against those convictions would be a denial of myself that would be very complicated,” he later tried to explain. “If I got to that point, I might as well just sit around and read all day. I would lose all authority before myself. Fortunately, I don’t think too much about that. It’s something you just live.”
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