There Are No Dead Here

by Maria McFarland Sánchez-Moreno

  So when Velásquez had to decide what to do with the complaint about the paramilitaries’ influence in Congress, he didn’t really have to think about it much. He started to investigate.

  SITTING BEFORE Supreme Court Justice Álvaro Pérez, Vicente Castaño did not look like a sinister figure. Unlike his younger brother, Carlos, he had avoided the spotlight, and before the interview with Calderón that was published in Semana, only one photo of him was publicly known. But he was said to be one of the more ruthless and powerful of the paramilitary commanders—and deeply involved in the drug trade. He was also said to be behind the mysterious disappearance of Carlos, who had gone missing in April 2004, in the midst of the paramilitaries’ negotiations with the Colombian government. A month later, Double Zero, the only other paramilitary commander who had taken Carlos’s side on the issue of whether the paramilitaries should break with drug trafficking, had been killed.

  But that day, there was nothing about Vicente Castaño’s appearance or manner that hinted at the terror that he and his fellow commanders had inflicted on much of Colombia. He was mild mannered and looked like an ordinary man, of medium build, tan, with a balding head and stern gaze that made him look older than his forty-eight years. Salvatore Mancuso, who, along with Castaño, had flown in a private jet to Bogotá for the interview with the Supreme Court justice, appeared even more smooth than Vicente. He had dressed for the occasion in an expensive suit and tie—Pérez recalled that the court’s secretaries seemed to swoon when he arrived.

  Once Velásquez had secured Pérez’s approval to start investigating the complaint, one of their first steps had been to call Castaño and Mancuso to explain their statements. But, not surprisingly, they extracted little in the way of new information from the commanders, who spoke in generalities and cast themselves as heroes. While Vicente Castaño repeated what he said to Semana about the 35 percent of members of Congress who were the paramilitaries’ “friends,” he refused to name any specific individuals who were collaborating with the paramilitaries, or to explain what he meant by calling them friends. The two men seemed unconcerned by the investigation: if the Justice and Peace Law was passed, they would soon get to wipe their records clean, with little more than a slap on the wrist, and without having to tell the truth about their crimes. The Uribe administration seemed to be in no rush to rein them in: labeling Mancuso and Castaño as “peace negotiators,” it was still allowing them to move around the country freely.

  If the court was going to make progress in these investigations, Velásquez would have to find other leads. With Pérez’s backing, Velásquez began to go back over old case files in the court—complaints that were unresolved, cases that were stalled, unfinished investigations. All he needed was one loose thread, one concrete allegation that he could follow up, or one witness from inside who would talk.

  IT WAS MERCIFULLY warm when Velásquez arrived in Canada that summer—he had never been in Canada before, but he knew of many people who lived there. The country to the north had for years been a top destination for Colombian refugees, including, in recent years, several former prosecutors who had attempted to investigate the paramilitaries. These included Velásquez’s old friends from Medellín days, the investigations chief Gregorio Oviedo and his wife, the human rights prosecutor Amelia Pérez, who were struggling to get by, and whom he managed to see for lunch in Quebec at the end of his visit. But Velásquez was not in Canada to see his old friends; instead, he was there to interview a former paramilitary member, Jairo Castillo Peralta. Also known by his alias as “Pitirri,” Castillo had been living there since 2002, when he fled Colombia after offering extensive testimony to a local prosecutor about paramilitary activities in his home region of Sucre, Colombia. When Velásquez dug up Castillo’s testimony, he had also found statements about several politicians’ links to paramilitaries in the area.

  The sweltering, cattle-ranching, coastal region of Sucre and the neighboring state of Bolívar had been the scenes of a savage paramilitary onslaught throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, including multiple large-scale massacres in the lush stretch of small mountains known as the Montes de María, which straddles the two states, and which guerrillas and paramilitaries had long used as a strategic corridor to the Caribbean coast. Some of the cases were so grotesque that they were infamous throughout the country, such as the 2001 massacre in Chengue, Sucre, in which paramilitaries systematically killed twenty-four men on the town plaza, bashing their heads in with a sledgehammer, and then bringing their families out to witness the carnage.

  Nor did the paramilitaries just swoop in, commit massacres, and leave. The local paramilitary commander in Sucre, Rodrigo Mercado Peluffo, also known as “Cadena” (or “Chain” in English), disappeared mysteriously in July 2005 as he was leaving the paramilitary leadership’s negotiation site in Santa Fe de Ralito. His car was later found burned by the side of the road. In subsequent months, some of his victims started to come forward to speak out about the horrors he had inflicted on them—particularly in the municipality of San Onofre, where he had a vast farm called “El Palmar.” Tips led criminal investigators from the attorney general’s office to go to the farm, where they found more than seventy bodies in mass graves. Community members, however, claimed that the investigators had done an incomplete job, and that hundreds of their “disappeared” family members were also buried there. Victims described Cadena or his men regularly showing up in small towns, pulling young men from their homes, and shooting them on the spot or taking them away. The killers were said to have chopped up their victims’ bodies and thrown them into rivers, left them on the sides of roads, or buried them in El Palmar. Cadena was also rumored to have abused large numbers of young women, whom his men would rape or hold as sex slaves.

  In his culling of old case files, Velásquez had found an anonymous complaint stating that in Plan Parejo, a small town in San Onofre, Cadena’s men had forced the inhabitants to attend a rally in support of a couple of congressional candidates, Jairo Merlano and Muriel Benito. One of Cadena’s lieutenants had also participated in the rally. The same complaint claimed that the paramilitaries had later driven the inhabitants to their voting locations, instructing them on how to vote; Merlano and Benito were both now in Congress. Here was a concrete allegation of paramilitary manipulation of elections to favor politicians—exactly the sort of thread Velásquez had been looking for—so he decided to dig into the region further.

  First, though, Velásquez had to talk to Justice Álvaro Pérez: Velásquez and the two other assistant justices working for Pérez could not conduct a massive investigation into Sucre on their own. Remembering how in Medellín he had created a separate team of trusted investigators to focus on the paramilitary cases, Velásquez suggested contacting the attorney general’s office to see if the court could borrow a couple of investigators; he insisted that the court should be able to pick the investigators and should have full authority over their investigations. Pérez reached out to Attorney General Mario Iguarán, who agreed, and now Velásquez had two criminal investigators working with him who could travel to Sucre, conduct interviews, and start building a case.

  Velásquez had also found another investigation pending in the court into Sucre senator Álvaro García’s alleged involvement in the 2000 massacre of Macayepo, in which paramilitaries clubbed and stoned fifteen peasants to death. In 2002, in Semana, Ricardo Calderón had reported on a recording he had obtained of a phone call that had taken place a few days before the massacre between the senator and a prominent Sucre landowner, Joaquín García, in which they appeared to be discussing plans to move paramilitary troops into the area of Macayepo. The court’s investigation had failed to focus on the recording and was on the verge of being closed—but Velásquez reactivated it.

  Eventually, Velásquez and his team also found a couple of other investigations, long ago forgotten, in which a witness had talked to prosecutors about politicians organizing a paramilitary group in Sucre in the late 1990s, and even order
ing the murder of a young elections monitor, Georgina Narváez, to keep her from reporting voting irregularities in local elections in 1997. That witness was Castillo.

  A skinny, small man with a scraggly mustache and elfin features, Castillo was still in his thirties, but he had a serious, tired cast to his face, as though he had seen too much in his life already. Castillo spoke extremely quickly, jumping from one issue to another and going down multiple tangents in an overwhelming flood of information. He was illiterate, but Velásquez was impressed by his memory for details like names, dates, and places, and by his consistency. What Castillo told Velásquez in Quebec—and expanded upon in later statements—was almost exactly what he had told investigators and prosecutors in Colombia six years earlier.

  Castillo had grown up poor in Majagual, Sucre, but had had to flee his hometown because of extortion by the guerrillas. Later, in the regional capital of Sincelejo, he met some military officers who convinced him to become an informant for them, since he came from an area with a strong guerrilla presence and knew what they looked like and how they operated. They also recommended him as a guard to a powerful local landowner, Joaquín García, who had repeatedly been the target of guerrilla attacks and kidnapping attempts, and who also happened to be one of the primary backers of paramilitary groups in the region. García was also close to many prominent politicians in the region, funding their campaigns. Through García, Castillo became privy to meetings between paramilitaries such as Salvatore Mancuso; local politicians, including Salvador Arana and Álvaro García; and members of the military and other officials. Eventually, he also began to run errands for Joaquín García, Arana, and the paramilitaries, taking messages back and forth and collecting financial contributions for the paramilitary group.

  According to Castillo, in the 1997 elections Joaquín García had backed Eric Morris, now a member of Congress, as a candidate for governor of Sucre. When initial results indicated that Morris was losing, Joaquín García and Senator Álvaro García made arrangements to fix the results. But Georgina Narváez, an elections monitor for the opposing candidate, reported irregularities in the voting in her region, which could have thrown the results and gotten them into trouble. To keep her from testifying about them, Castillo said, Álvaro García and Joaquín García had ordered her murder. An assassin killed her outside her home shortly afterward. Morris went on to become governor.

  Castillo also said that in 1998 he had been present for a meeting at a popular steak restaurant called Carbón de Palo in Sincelejo, the capital of Sucre, at which Joaquín García met with several senior paramilitary leaders and well-known political figures, such as Salvador Arana—who would later replace Morris as governor of Sucre, and whom President Uribe would eventually name as ambassador to Chile. At the meeting, the men agreed to create a new paramilitary unit to operate in specific areas, including Majagual; Castillo said they agreed that Álvaro García would get financing for the group with the help of the governor, Eric Morris. Castillo later provided a copy of a check for thousands of dollars related to a municipal contract that he said he was asked to cash, to help finance the group.

  Around the same time, Castillo said in other statements, he was asked if he would lead a local paramilitary group. He refused, but Mancuso grew angry and—according to Castillo—ordered his murder. Fearing for his life, Castillo approached the CTI in Sincelejo and began to give them information about the paramilitaries in exchange for protection. Soon thereafter, he began to speak with prosecutor Yolanda Paternina, sharing detailed information, including names and phone numbers of paramilitary commanders and politicians involved in massacres and other crimes, the names of ranchers who contributed money to them, and evidence about police officers, prosecutors, and members of the military who were cooperating with the paramilitaries. With his testimony, the investigators began to carry out a number of successful operations against the paramilitaries in Sucre.

  But the paramilitaries caught on to what was happening and killed three CTI investigators who had been working with Castillo. In October 2000, assassins shot Castillo himself in front of his house, puncturing a lung—but he survived. After the attack, Paternina got him into a witness protection program and moved him to Medellín. She also began to receive threats herself, and repeatedly wrote to her supervisors in 2001, pleading with them to protect her or transfer her to another office. In one letter she said that the local paramilitary commander, Cadena, had given orders that she be kidnapped and brought before him. Her supervisors ignored her repeated requests or turned them down until August, when she was finally assigned a bodyguard. On August 29, however, she called her children from the office, saying that she couldn’t find her bodyguard and would have to take a taxi home. As she arrived, two men approached on a motorcycle, and one shot her to death at her front door. Castillo left Colombia a few months later.

  After Paternina’s murder and Castillo’s departure, the cases in which he had testified stalled under Luis Camilo Osorio’s leadership of the attorney general’s office, and the part about the politicians’ involvement—which was pending in the Supreme Court—gathered dust.

  To Velásquez, it was clear that the statements Castillo had made were so serious, and so detailed, that they could only have been ignored for so long through gross negligence or outright corruption. In one case, the investigators working with him looked up a case file in Sincelejo that involved the congressmen and found that the entire file had disappeared. It seemed as though the paramilitaries and their “friends” in Sucre controlled everything that happened in the state.

  THE INVESTIGATION of Sucre was the Supreme Court’s first major step toward scrutinizing paramilitary influence in the political system. But if what Castaño and Mancuso had said about 35 percent of Congress was true, then Sucre was just the tip of the iceberg. And now there was an analysis of how that might have happened: a few months after Velásquez received the complaint about Castaño’s and Mancuso’s statements, a tiny, determined thirty-five-year-old political analyst named Claudia López (no relation to Clara, the author of the complaint) published an article in Semana pointing to highly unusual voting patterns in the regions where paramilitary violence had been most acute. With a detailed slideshow of maps showing voting patterns in regions with high rates of paramilitary massacres, López explained how her analysis suggested that paramilitaries had backed specific pairs of candidates—one for the Senate, and one for the Chamber of Representatives—in each electoral district where they exercised control. In those districts, she found, the pair of candidates backed by paramilitaries won by highly atypical majorities of as much as 98 percent. She went on to provide a list of names of members of Congress who had obtained their seats in the irregular elections. López pointed out that “the [paramilitaries’] political consolidation was not achieved by giving out kind pieces of advice so that people could ‘freely’ decide, as Mancuso has cynically stated before the Court and the media.… The pattern that appears to repeat itself is that of entering with massacres, carrying out selective homicides, securing military control, going into the political system and local economies and consolidating their political hegemony in elections, and economic hegemony in multiple businesses spanning the use of public resources, the state lottery, palm [oil], contraband in gasoline and drug trafficking.”

  López’s analysis was not hard evidence of corruption, but the patterns she identified were extremely suspicious, and they offered a useful lens through which to look at the problem. So, early on, the court called on López to testify, and Velásquez began to take a closer look at some of the regions she had highlighted.

  As the 2006 elections approached, López’s article in Semana was causing enough of a stir that members of the opposition to Uribe began accusing some of the political parties affiliated with him of including politicians who were closely tied to the paramilitaries. In particular, they named congresswomen Rocío Arias and Eleonora Pineda, who openly and proudly spoke about their friendship with Mancuso and other
paramilitary leaders, and had been among the strongest proponents of the demobilization process. Public pressure led Juan Manuel Santos and Germán Vargas Lleras, then the leaders of two pro-Uribe parties, the Social Party of National Unity (Partido Social de Unidad Nacional, known as “la U,” for Partido de “la U,” or Party of the U), and Cambio Radical (Radical Change), respectively, to announce in early 2006 that they were purging the parties of a handful of candidates who were suspected of having paramilitary ties. But the changes were small, and they were far from accounting for the percentages that Mancuso and Castaño had mentioned.

  BY EARLY NOVEMBER 2006, Velásquez and his team had compiled enough evidence to issue arrest warrants against three members of Congress from Sucre, Senators Álvaro García and Jairo Merlano and Representative Eric Morris, on charges of conspiring with paramilitaries. García was also charged with aggravated homicide in connection with the Macayepo massacre and the murder of Georgina Narváez.

  Soon afterward, the attorney general’s office also issued an arrest warrant for Salvador Arana—over whom the court had no jurisdiction—in connection with the 2003 murder of Eudaldo Díaz, a former mayor in Sucre. Díaz had opposed the paramilitaries in his state and had publicly said that Arana and others in the state government wanted to kill him. A few weeks before his murder, Díaz had even told President Uribe, at a televised community meeting at which Uribe was seated next to then governor Arana, that he was going to be killed for reporting on corruption within the state government. Uribe had then asked him to be quiet, saying that the attorney general’s office and inspector general’s office would take his complaint. But Díaz never received an answer to his complaint, and on April 10, his tortured body was found with several bullet wounds in it. His body was arranged in the shape of a crucified man, with the identification documents for his mayorship thrown on his face.