Velásquez had hoped at one point to be named a justice himself, and the court had considered him as a candidate, but had not selected him. According to Justice María del Rosario González, who had continued to support Velásquez, it was his very success that prevented the other justices from supporting him: “Iván Velásquez has had a heroic role,” she said. “He has put his life on the line for the cause of Colombia and for justice, with no recognition. On the contrary: when you mess with the political and economic classes, doors close.… Without him, nothing would have been done, and what little has been achieved has required fighting with everybody.”
Meanwhile, the politicians who had been convicted by the court were continuing to charge that they had been treated unfairly. One of their main points of contention was that they had no way to appeal the Supreme Court’s ruling. Velásquez, who believes in the right to an appeal, was sensitive to this issue, but it was a complicated matter. Though people convicted by ordinary criminal courts had the right to appeal, members of Congress in Colombia could only be investigated and tried by one of the four high courts, and in criminal matters, that was the criminal chamber of the Supreme Court. The arrangement was originally considered to be a privilege. But that meant that no appeal was possible, unless the defendant was claiming that his or her constitutional rights had been violated, which would involve the Constitutional Court. Eventually, the Constitutional Court would require that the code of criminal procedure be changed to establish an opportunity for defendants tried by the criminal chamber of the Supreme Court to appeal their rulings to the entire Supreme Court. That decision did not apply retroactively, however, so the politicians’ convictions stood.
More broadly, some of the politicians and commentators sympathetic to them were continuing to sow confusion in the public by making vague claims that there was a “cartel of witnesses” being run by the court (or by Velásquez) to persecute them. A couple of years later, a group of politicians would go all the way to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights alleging various due process violations. They argued that the “fight” between Uribe and the Supreme Court had politicized the investigations against them, rendering their convictions unfair and invalid. As of this writing, those petitions were apparently still pending.
In 2014, Luis Gustavo Moreno, a young lawyer who had represented several of the politicians accused of links to paramilitaries, would publish a book, El falso testimonio (False Testimony), in which he would make the case that there was a systematic problem with false witnesses in Colombia’s criminal justice system. Pundits and commentators seized on the opportunity to argue that there had been a vast conspiracy to go after the “parapoliticians” with false witnesses. Whatever the broader situation in the country, however, Velásquez did not feel that the investigations he had led were tarnished: “Whenever you have evidence based on witnesses, it’s easy to make arguments of this type, because it’s a fact that witnesses can lie or be persuaded to lie,” he said. “Naturally, there can be false witnesses, but not in the way they’ve presented it.… In the court we were always very careful not to use testimony unless we had strong reasons to believe it was credible. There were many witness statements against members of Congress that we never used because there was no way to corroborate them.” In 2017, the author of El falso testimonio, who had by then become the anticorruption unit director at the Office of the Attorney General, would be arrested by Colombian authorities with the help of the US Drug Enforcement Administration. According to news reports, he allegedly solicited a bribe in Miami from a Colombian politician who was under investigation.
AT THE SAME TIME, more details were coming to light about the various plots against Velásquez and the court.
In October 2010, Ricardo Calderón published a story with additional details about what had happened with Ferney Suaza, the associate of Job’s who had publicly claimed that someone was bribing him to accuse the president of crimes. On an audio recording from the day Suaza made his accusation (around the same date that Job had entered the Casa de Nariño with his videos), Job and Suaza could be heard discussing Suaza’s statements: “Did you see the news? There’s an interview, brother, and everything… on Caracol, RCN, Teleantioquia [TV news stations], everything, brother,” said Suaza. Job praised Suaza, and then asked: “When do you meet with Uribe?” President Uribe had announced that he wanted to talk to him directly. Suaza replied, “In the afternoon the high commissioner is coming… and later they say they’ll do something to get me close to the president.” Job then warned Suaza, “Don’t tell the commissioner what you and I discussed, just the president, do you hear?” Later in the call, Suaza said he needed to see how he could get his family out of where they were. Job told him to go ahead and “look for a house, and tell me how much it costs.” Suaza insisted that he needed to get them out right away, and he didn’t know how to handle the cost of the plane tickets and other things, but Job told him not to worry, that he should go ahead and get them out and just tell him later how much it all cost.
Months later, Calderón wrote, Suaza ended up in “the worst of both worlds,” as he was unable to back up the serious claims he had made. When he had finally gone before prosecutors, he had not identified any specific individuals as having been behind the supposed attempts to bribe him to testify against the president. According to Calderón, that bothered some administration officials, who had expected him to give a more “explosive” statement. Soon afterward, he lost the security detail the administration had been providing him. With Job now dead, Suaza had nobody to protect or speak for him, and he fled the country. Semana learned that Suaza had told other people that he had been part of a “strategy” organized by Job and government officials.
In February 2011, another dramatic scandal erupted when Ramón Ballesteros, an attorney representing some of the members of Congress accused of paramilitary links, was arrested in the middle of a Supreme Court hearing in the case of former senator Luis Alberto Gil. One of the witnesses in the hearing, David Hernández (also known as “Diego Rivera”), was a former paramilitary leader who had provided testimony against the defendant in the case. Hernández had gone to the United States a few years before and was apparently collaborating with the US Drug Enforcement Administration when—as he stated during the hearing—Ballesteros had contacted him to offer him US$100,000 to take back his accusations against Gil and other politicians, and instead claim that Iván Velásquez had improperly pressed him to make false statements. A US official present at the hearing submitted a video reportedly recorded at a restaurant in Dulles Airport, outside Washington, DC, in which Ballesteros appeared to seal the deal with Hernández. In the recording, according to news reports, Ballesteros could be heard saying to Hernández: “You’re going to become the parapoliticians’ ‘star’ and I’m going to charge whatever honoraria I want. Get money out of those sons of bitches.” Ballesteros eventually pled guilty to bribery charges.
OVER THE COURSE of the following year or so, several DAS officials would also provide testimony about their involvement in surveillance of the court and other questionable activities. These included not only the “Mata Hari of the Supreme Court,” Alba Luz Flórez, who confirmed what Semana had reported, but also William Romero, Flórez’s supervisor, who provided detailed testimony about Flórez’s mission, which he claimed started in May 2007. Romero corroborated much of Flórez’s testimony about the sources she had developed within the court and around the justices, the pressure to get case files and recordings of the court’s discussions, and the substantial sums of money that the DAS had paid their sources in the court. In October 2008, Romero said, a few months before Calderón broke the story, Intelligence Director Fernando Tabares had ordered him and others to get rid of all information they had collected about the court: somebody had “made a mistake,” and they “should not leave a trace.” Romero described an elaborate operation to disguise or destroy evidence.
Velásquez found a statement to prosecutors by Martha Leal,
the deputy director for intelligence at the DAS, working directly under Tabares, to be particularly valuable, as it confirmed to him that he had been right to be raising questions about how the Tasmania letter got to the presidency, and when the letter was even written. Leal had said little to investigators when the scandal first broke. But after some of the agents working under her were arrested and started talking, Calderón later recalled, it became clear that she would have to disclose what she knew. Otherwise, she might end up facing serious charges, and lose the opportunity to get sentencing benefits in exchange for her testimony.
According to Leal, on Saturday, September 29, 2007, the DAS director, María del Pilar Hurtado, informed her that someone in the presidency had told her that Sergio González, Tasmania’s lawyer, had some very sensitive information about a situation involving Tasmania and Velásquez. As a result, Hurtado needed Leal to travel to Medellín that very day to pick up a document from González. Leal flew to Medellín and met with González, who told her his version of the Tasmania events and gave her a photocopy of the Tasmania letter to Uribe, with Tasmania’s signature and fingerprint on it. But two days later, on October 1, Hurtado sent her back to Medellín, because Mario Uribe had to deliver something to her. Leal said Mario Uribe’s driver gave her a sealed envelope at the airport in Medellín. She then boarded the plane back to Bogotá and delivered the envelope to Hurtado, without knowing the contents. Her boss, Fernando Tabares, later told prosecutors that the document was the original copy of the Tasmania letter.
President Uribe had first called Velásquez about Tasmania on September 11—the day after Velásquez met with Tasmania, and the same day that the letter was supposedly written. So why was the presidency suddenly sending the DAS to get the letter more than two weeks later? The only intervening event was the September 26 decision to indict Mario Uribe. Velásquez had to wonder: Had the letter in fact only been written after the decision to indict, to allow the government to attack the court in retaliation? Was the president’s call to Velásquez a way to lay the groundwork, taking advantage of Velásquez’s meeting with Tasmania, and maybe to give the assistant justice an implicit warning not to mess with Mario Uribe? And was sending the DAS to get the letter a way to formalize and create an apparent independence in what had been a very intimate process? The fact that Tasmania’s transfer to the much more comfortable Patio 1 of Itagüí prison was only ordered on October 1, after Mario Uribe’s indictment, also suggested that the decision to use the Tasmania letter and reward the paramilitary had only been made after the indictment. There were still questions, and they would remain unanswered.
LEAL’S TESTIMONY ALSO pointed to an unusual level of collaboration between the DAS—and even the presidency—and two of the paramilitaries’ lawyers, Sergio González and Diego Álvarez.
According to Leal, after she picked up the Tasmania letter, González called her again, but she ignored the calls, thinking they were unimportant. Hurtado confronted her about it soon after, saying the presidency had asked why Leal wasn’t taking González’s calls. Whenever he called, Hurtado impressed upon her, the deputy should pick up the call, and meet with him if necessary. So began a series of interactions between Leal and González—on several occasions, she had to travel to Medellín to meet with him and “receive messages that he was sending to the Casa de Nariño, and which were sent there through the director of the DAS.” Among these messages, she recalled, was one where González asked her to tell Hurtado that he had learned that Francisco Villalba, the paramilitary who had accused President Uribe and his cousin Mario of involvement in El Aro, was receiving psychiatric treatment, which could be used to challenge the admissibility of his testimony in court. She also said that González suggested that Villalba be transferred to Itagüí prison, where the paramilitary leaders were staying, from the prison where he was at the time.
In December 2007, Leal said, Hurtado and Tabares ordered her to visit Diego Álvarez, the lawyer for Don Berna (Diego Murillo Bejarano, former head of the Envigado Office and the Cacique Nutibara Block of the AUC), who needed “technical support” to record Henry Anaya on video. According to Álvarez, Anaya was supposedly trying to extort money from Berna on behalf of the Supreme Court—Leal said she was later surprised to learn that Anaya didn’t even work for the court. After the recording was completed, both Hurtado and Tabares were eager to get the video, apparently because the president’s office was also following events closely. Leal also recalled having had to purchase a recorder for Don Berna to record his conversations in prison with Rafael García, after Álvarez requested it—though she didn’t specify who instructed her to make that purchase.
Tabares, the intelligence director—and Leal’s boss—was also a witness. He described a breakfast meeting that he and Hurtado had in early September 2007, when Hurtado had just taken over as DAS director, with Bernardo Moreno, President Uribe’s chief of staff, at the upscale Metropolitan Club in Bogotá. At the meeting, Tabares said, Moreno told them that President Uribe was interested in having the DAS keep him informed about four subjects: the Supreme Court, Senator Piedad Córdoba, Senator Gustavo Petro, and journalist Daniel Coronell (who had broken the Yidis Medina story on the scandal involving Uribe’s reelection bill, and had previously had to go into exile because of death threats against his family, which Coronell had attributed to a former congressman who was close to Uribe). Hurtado agreed, and, according to Tabares, instructed the various branches of the DAS to carry out work in accordance with Moreno’s instructions, though Tabares claimed they did not monitor Coronell.
Both Leal and Tabares talked about being ordered to monitor the activities of the Supreme Court president, César Julio Valencia, and his lawyer, Ramiro Bejarano, after Valencia’s falling-out with President Uribe. And both recalled that the DAS made payments to a journalist who—soon after the Yidis Medina scandal—claimed that Medina had links to the ELN guerrillas.
BY OCTOBER 2010, prosecutors were saying they had enough information to indict Hurtado, who had been replaced as DAS director in January 2009, when Felipe Muñoz had been named to the post. But within weeks, she had fled to Panama, which granted her asylum. On June 17, 2011, prosecutors charged Hurtado and Bernardo Moreno, the president’s chief of staff, with “organizing, directing and promoting a conspiracy to commit crimes” against justices of the Supreme Court and some members of Congress, “who were categorized and treated as ‘political targets,’ as well as against one journalist [Daniel Coronell] and one lawyer [Ramiro Bejarano].” Specifically, the goal of the conspiracy, according to prosecutors, was to use the intelligence services to illegally obtain information that could be used to discredit these individuals, and handing this privileged information over to third parties and to the media. Prosecutors also charged Hurtado with ordering intelligence activities with no justification, among other offenses.
Another case that would come to an end soon afterward was the investigation of the slander and insult (known in Spanish as injuria) charges that President Uribe had started against Supreme Court president César Julio Valencia. The Accusations Committee closed the case in May 2012, after failing to find any merit to the president’s charges. The president had brought in two key witnesses who he said could back him up, Claudia Blum and Carolina Barco, the Colombian ambassadors to the United Nations and the United States, respectively, but they had failed to do so. Blum’s statement was full of gaps: she said she had overheard Uribe as he had made several calls that day, but didn’t know who they were with; she recalled that he had mentioned Tasmania in one of the calls, but did not recall him mentioning Mario Uribe. Meanwhile, Barco said that she had been near Uribe when he was speaking to Valencia, but that she had arrived after the call had already started, and that out of “respect and good manners, I didn’t pay attention to the conversation.”
In August 2010, the attorney general’s office charged Sergio González, Tasmania’s attorney, with slander against Velásquez. The assistant justice had testified in the case, as had Ta
smania and Iván Roberto Dugue, repeating the same facts that had been made public when Tasmania first confessed to Velásquez. In January 2012, González would be convicted and sentenced to nearly six years in prison.
But Velásquez was disappointed in the way the investigations had been conducted. González’s sentence seemed disproportionately long for the crime for which he was convicted, and that offended Velásquez’s notion of justice. Yet the charges against González only scratched the surface of what Velásquez felt he had done. More importantly, prosecutors had shown little interest in pursuing other people who might have been involved in plotting against him—for example, Tasmania had repeated his claims about Mario and Santiago Uribe, but prosecutors had not investigated that angle.
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