There Are No Dead Here
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The arrest warrants were an unheard-of step and a blow to Uribe’s coalition in Congress, of which Álvaro García, Merlano, and Morris were a part. But Uribe’s initial reaction to them was positive: a US embassy cable from the time reported that at a November 17, 2006, event commemorating the Supreme Court’s anniversary, Uribe said that Colombia “had to proceed with ‘more severity’ when public officials were accused of violating the law.” Uribe had “stressed [that] ‘where there are congressmen, political leaders or Executive officials involved in crime, they must go to jail,’” and that “the GOC [Government of Colombia] supported the Justice system’s ongoing investigations ‘without hesitation.’”
Still, Velásquez knew that the “parapolitics” investigations had the potential to be much bigger, and that he needed more help. Velásquez and Justice Pérez had made progress on Sucre by trying to concentrate all of the court’s investigations involving that state in Pérez’s office, but going forward, they would face difficulties: it would be hard to be efficient and make consistent progress if different justices kept handling different cases. So they proposed an ambitious and novel approach: creating an investigative commission within the court made up of one assistant justice from each justice’s chambers. The commission would be dedicated exclusively to investigating paramilitary infiltration of the political system, with support from CTI investigators borrowed from the attorney general’s office. The criminal chamber agreed, and they designated Velásquez as the coordinator. The court also asked the government for more resources to fund the team of investigators for these new cases. Uribe, expressing support for the investigations, approved the increased funding. It was an encouraging start.
CHAPTER 11
CLOSE TO THE BONE
JOURNALISTS STOOD EXPECTANTLY AT THE February 19, 2007, press conference at the Casa de Nariño, the presidential palace, wondering what was about to happen. The attractive, elegantly dressed young foreign minister at the podium, María Consuelo Araújo, had been under pressure to resign for months, ever since the Supreme Court announced in late 2006 that it was investigating her brother, Álvaro Araújo, a former soap-opera star and now a senator representing the state of Cesar, for colluding with paramilitaries. The foreign minister had a good reputation and was rumored to be very close to President Álvaro Uribe, who spent weeks defending her even as he attempted to distance himself from her brother, who had been part of Uribe’s coalition in Congress. The investigations against Senator Araújo and other members of that coalition were starting to raise questions about Uribe’s choice in political allies. Meanwhile, the scandal involving the Araújos had snowballed, with news stories and investigations implicating other members of the Araújo family, including the siblings’ father.
Four days earlier, the court, building on Iván Velásquez’s investigations, had ordered the senator’s arrest, along with that of four other members of Congress from the states of Cesar and Magdalena. The “parapolitics” investigations, as they were now known, had begun to make waves not only within the country, but also outside—Defense Minister Juan Manuel Santos pointed out to the media that he was trying to raise international funding for Colombia, but that at “every meeting [with foreign dignitaries], we had to explain the foreign minister’s situation.” Ultimately, the political pressure for her resignation overwhelmed even Uribe’s objections, with not only opposition parties, but also leaders of “la U,” one of the main political parties supporting Uribe in Congress, calling for her to leave.
At the press conference, the foreign minister briefly announced her departure: “My certainty of the innocence of my father and brother forces me to leave so I can be free to be by their side and support them.” She took no questions.
BECAUSE OF HER closeness to the president, María Consuelo Araújo’s resignation was by far the worst blow yet to the Uribe administration stemming from the parapolitics scandal. It had all started, in a way, with a series of articles by Ricardo Calderón.
In late 2005, Calderón had published a front-page story in Semana titled “The DAS and the Paras,” based in part on the information he had been slowly drawing from the intelligence agency sources he had met at The Eagle’s home. The article started by reporting on the recent exit from the DAS of the agency’s head, Jorge Noguera; his deputy, José Miguel Narváez; and the intelligence director, Enrique Ariza, after Noguera and Narváez had a falling out over allegations of corruption and ties to the paramilitaries within the agency. Calderón cited claims that Ariza had been trying to set up a DAS office that would work for drug-trafficker-turned-paramilitary-leader Carlos Mario Jiménez, aka “Macaco.” But, Calderón reported, far from being the exception, corruption like what was being described in the Ariza case was “the norm” at the DAS. Calderón described how the DAS was providing armed guards to protect a paramilitary known as “El Pájaro” (The Bird) as he went about his business in Bogotá; how DAS officials had established “satellite offices,” where they would meet regularly with paramilitaries or drug traffickers to share information, and even to conduct wiretapping on their behalf; how senior DAS officials had warned The Eagle of imminent raids on his house on two occasions, allowing the paramilitary leader to escape; and how the DAS had shared intelligence information with one of the notorious heads of the Norte del Valle cocaine cartel, Diego Montoya.
A few months later, in April 2006, Calderón published even more details about paramilitary infiltration of the intelligence service, based on interviews with Rafael García, a former IT director for the DAS. A tubby, round-faced, brown-skinned man with a very open, frank manner of speaking and a strong costeño accent (the accent of people from the Caribbean coast), García came across as a cheerful and sharp man, despite his sordid history: he had been arrested for allegedly tampering with DAS databases and erasing the records of arrest warrants for various criminals. García felt that former DAS director Jorge Noguera, who had been his friend, had made him a scapegoat, so García turned on him.
According to García, the paramilitaries’ influence in the DAS had extended to the very top of the agency. Under Noguera, he said, the DAS, since 2002, had collaborated extensively with paramilitaries under the command of Rodrigo Tovar Pupo, or “Jorge 40.” This collaboration had included sharing lists of names of labor union leaders and academics with the paramilitaries, so that they could be threatened or killed. Among the names García mentioned was that of Alfredo Correa de Andreis, a prominent sociologist who had been researching the plight of displaced people in the states of Bolívar and Atlántico. Assassins had killed Correa de Andreis as he was walking down the street in Barranquilla in 2004.
García also described an elaborate process by which, he said, the paramilitaries from the Northern Block of the AUC had carried out massive electoral fraud in the 2002 congressional elections. García confirmed Claudia López’s analysis about the paramilitaries dividing up the municipalities and backing specific pairs of candidates in each one. He said that politicians allied with the paramilitaries had illegally purchased a copy of the registrar’s office’s records of all the voters for each voting site in the states of Cesar, La Guajira, Magdalena, and Bolívar. The paramilitaries had threatened local populations, ordering them to vote for the specific pairs of candidates they had selected for that municipality. They had also forced the local registrars’ offices to appoint certain individuals as voting officials in each voting site. Many voters, terrified of the paramilitaries, either followed their orders or stayed home. So at the end of election day, the paramilitaries had their handpicked voting officials use the registrars’ records of voters for each site to fill out ballots in the name of all the voters who never showed up. In Magdalena, the fraud had been so blatant that in some cases more than 90 percent of the votes in a given municipality went to a particular pair of candidates. If what he said was true, it could mean that the congressional representatives of four states had been installed there by the AUC.
Not only that, but before joining the DAS, Nog
uera had been Uribe’s presidential campaign manager for the state of Magdalena, and García said that he had worked for Noguera on the campaign. Because the paramilitaries supported Uribe, he said, they decided to use the same techniques that they had used in congressional elections to conduct fraud in favor of Uribe during the presidential elections in Magdalena. Calderón and his colleagues followed up with other sources and found witnesses who confirmed García’s claims with respect to several municipalities. Calderón wrote about the example of the impoverished and tiny municipality of El Difícil, Magdalena, where Uribe supposedly got 9,858 votes, and his main opponent, Horacio Serpa, got 1,102. A voting official told one of Calderón’s colleagues that at the table he was manning only forty people cast ballots. However, at the end of the day, the local paramilitary boss ordered him to fill out another four hundred ballots for the other people who were registered to vote at that table. Another official said they were also made to damage the ballots cast for Serpa, so they would be voided. In yet another municipality, El Pozo, Semana reported, out of seven hundred people who were eligible to vote, all seven hundred were recorded as having voted—a highly unusual outcome in a municipality where there had always been people who abstained.
Calderón’s articles, including an extensive interview with García in Semana, as well as coverage by other media, sparked a major scandal: How did Noguera get to that position? The head of the DAS worked directly for the president—how much did Uribe know about what was happening within the agency? And how much did he know about the electoral fraud?
Noguera, whom Uribe had recently named Colombia’s consul in Milan, denied all the charges, though he admitted to having met with paramilitary commander Jorge 40 “for institutional reasons.” Uribe also denied all the allegations. He stood by his former intelligence chief and lashed out against the media with fury, calling it “dishonest and malicious” and saying that Semana had published a “frivolous and silly” story.
García provided extensive testimony before the Supreme Court, which, combined with Claudia López’s analysis, and an anonymous 2002 complaint about fraud in the congressional elections in Magdalena, allowed Velásquez to move forward with investigations into the members of Congress from some of the northern states. In the state of Cesar, the court zeroed in on the two senators who won during those elections: Mauricio Pimiento, a former governor of Cesar, and Álvaro Araújo, the brother of the foreign minister.
Investigating Araújo meant taking on one of the state’s most powerful political families: Álvaro’s father, also named Álvaro, was a former congressman; the senator’s uncle, Jaime, had served on the Constitutional Court; and his sister, María Consuelo, of course, was foreign minister. His aunt, Consuelo (better known by her nickname, “La Cacica”), had been a journalist and then minister of culture under President Andrés Pastrana. She was also famous for having founded—alongside former President Alfonso López Michelsen and the Vallenato music composer Rafael Escalona—the “Festival of the Vallenato Legend,” a beloved celebration of the region’s trademark Vallenato music that every year drew thousands visitors from around the country to Cesar’s capital, Valledupar. Many members of Bogotá’s political and economic elite had enjoyed attending the festival’s four days of music, contests, and parties. Still, Cesar had not escaped Colombia’s war, which had ravaged the Arhuaco, Wayuu, Kogui, Wiwa, and Kankuamo indigenous peoples who made their homes in the nearby Sierra Nevada Mountains, as well as many other communities in the region. La Cacica herself had been kidnapped by the FARC in 2001, and was killed during a rescue attempt. Her surviving husband, Edgardo Maya, was now inspector general of Colombia.
But when Velásquez and the other investigators looked into the voting patterns in Cesar, they found serious irregularities, including two unusual concentrations of votes, with the bulk of municipalities in the south of the state voting for Araújo, and those in the state’s mining region voting for Pimiento. Together the two candidates received more than 38 percent of the votes in the state—no other candidate got more than 3 percent. Velásquez and his team started to look for witnesses, and soon they began turning up local politicians and others who testified about the pressure that members of the Northern Block of the paramilitaries had put on them during the elections. For example, Cristian Moreno, a candidate for governor, told them he had been forced to withdraw on account of the threats by Jorge 40’s men against him—the paramilitaries, he said, were backing candidate Hernando Molina (another member of the Araújo family) for the office.
Another politician, Alfonso Palacio, from the municipality of La Jagua de Ibirico, said that it was widely known that the paramilitaries or local leaders close to them were giving instructions to communities about which candidate to vote for, based on a predetermined division of municipalities. As a result, even though most of the inhabitants of La Jagua de Ibirico would have naturally voted for Álvaro Araújo, they were instead forced to vote for Pimiento, because that municipality was supposed to go for Pimiento, based on the paramilitaries’ map. Voters who did not follow instructions would suffer the consequences.
Velásquez was particularly moved during Palacio’s testimony before the court, when he reminded everyone in the courtroom of the very real human costs of parapolitics by speaking of the paramilitaries’ murder of community leader Jorge Arias shortly after the elections. Turning to Mauricio Pimiento, he said: “Jorge Arias was killed for not voting for your candidacy, Dr. Pimiento. As a liberal, he voted for Álvaro Araújo.… That cost him his life.”
EVEN AS THE parapolitics investigations gathered steam, Calderón was looking at the paramilitary demobilization process with concern. Multiple drug traffickers who had had little connection to the paramilitaries had managed to sneak into the negotiations, hoping to get off the hook for their crimes. As early as 2004, Calderón had reported on major drug traffickers, including Francisco Javier Zuluaga (“Gordolindo”) and the “Mejía Múnera” twins, who had managed to purchase paramilitary blocks so they could have a seat at the negotiating table. He was also tracking the behavior of the leaders still in the “negotiating zone” of Santa Fe de Ralito, who seemed to be free to move around the country and go shopping and partying.
Part of the problem was the lax terms of the demobilization process, which had been proceeding at a brisk clip on two tracks: On one hand, there were the demobilizations of low-ranking paramilitary members, which had started in 2003 with a ceremony at which more than eight hundred members of the “Cacique Nutibara Block” of the paramilitaries, under the command of Don Berna (Diego Murillo Bejarano), supposedly demobilized. On the other, paramilitary commanders or members who were already facing charges for serious crimes were applying for reduced sentences under the country’s Justice and Peace Law, which had sailed through Congress in July 2005.
The demobilizations of troops were questionable, because all the authorities did was take down the young men’s identifying information, without conducting any meaningful investigation to determine if they had been involved in crimes other than membership in the group. They were pardoned for their membership in the group, however, and by mid-2006, the Uribe government claimed that more than 30,000 paramilitary members had demobilized in 37 different ceremonies, turning over 17,000 weapons.
The number of individuals demobilizing was surprising, given that just a couple of years earlier the Ministry of Defense had believed there were only 12,000 paramilitaries in the country. One possible explanation for the discrepancy was that the paramilitaries were inflating their numbers by recruiting nonmembers to demobilize—and possibly disguising the fact that some of the real members were staying active. One blatant example was the Northern Block of the paramilitaries, under the command of Jorge 40. Shortly after nearly 5,000 members of the block supposedly demobilized, in March 2006, CTI investigators arrested a man known as “Don Antonio,” one of Jorge 40’s henchmen, who had participated in the demobilization ceremony but was apparently still running his group’s operations on
the Atlantic Coast. The investigators seized multiple digital files, including numerous emails and instant messenger discussions saved on CDs or USB drives. Some of the discussions apparently involved Jorge 40: he was ordering his men to recruit as many poor peasants as possible to pose as paramilitaries for purposes of their block’s demobilization ceremony in exchange for money, and to train them in how to answer questions from prosecutors. For example, they should make clear, if asked, that there were no “urban” members of the Northern Block, even though that was obviously not true. Don Antonio’s files made clear that Jorge 40 and his men were exerting tight control of towns on the Atlantic, including Barranquilla; they also included records of more than five hundred murders by the group just in the state of Atlántico, several of them committed after the Justice and Peace Law’s approval. But the Uribe administration rarely said anything in response to concerns about fraud in the demobilizations: when asked about the evidence of fraud in Jorge 40’s computer at a congressional hearing in October 2006, the minister of the interior, Carlos Holguín, insisted that the official number of demobilized individuals was correct, and that the high numbers were due to the fact that many of those demobilizing were not paramilitary troops, but rather collaborators of the paramilitaries. He also denied reports of killings, insisting that the homicide rate was substantially down according to official figures.