There Are No Dead Here

by Maria McFarland Sánchez-Moreno

  TO VELÁSQUEZ, much of what Don Berna said confirmed what he had already suspected for years. If in his early days as a lawyer and prosecutor Velásquez had been naive about the criminal networks operating around him, his experiences in Medellín and then Bogotá had cured him of that. Nevertheless, having one of the killers make these statements before prosecutors and judges vindicated his pursuit of justice through law. And in May 2012, Don Berna offered new evidence in the case that had, in a way, started Velásquez down this frustrating, endless search for the truth: the murder of Jesús María Valle.

  In the intervening years, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights had found the state of Colombia liable for the death of Valle and its failure to adequately investigate his murder, and it recommended that the government conduct an exhaustive investigation in the case. In response, in 2011, the Supreme Court annulled the ruling acquitting the brothers Jaime Alberto and Francisco Antonio Angulo, the landowners whom Velásquez’s team in Medellín had originally charged in connection with the killing. That cleared the way for prosecutors to reopen that investigation, though there were no public reports on the status of the case. It also remained unclear whether anyone within government had played a role in Valle’s death. Don Berna’s statements offered new evidence on that front.

  According to Berna, AUC leader Carlos Castaño had ordered the Medellín-based gang “La Terraza,” which answered to the paramilitaries and was run by a man known as “Elkin,” to carry out the killing of Valle because Castaño believed that the human rights defender was helping the FARC. Berna said that he was part of the conversations about this, and that he was the person who had summoned Elkin to talk to Castaño about the planned murder. Elkin then sent a woman who worked for La Terraza to Valle’s office to pose as a prospective client and collect intelligence on him. Based on that information, she and two other La Terraza members eventually went to his office and executed him.

  But Berna also made another point: “I want to add that this action was a request by Dr. Pedro Juan Moreno, because he [Valle] was conducting an investigation of the events in El Aro.” Specifically, he said, in early 1998 Pedro Juan Moreno had gone to a ranch where Carlos Castaño often met with officials, and told Castaño that Valle was conducting “an investigation” that was affecting members of the military and the government. “Carlos believed that whoever made that kind of accusation against the military was collaborating with the guerrillas.” And so he agreed to have Valle assassinated. According to Berna, Castaño gave the assassination orders to Elkin, explaining that Valle was “uncomfortable” for members of the state because of his accusations over cases like the El Aro massacre.

  AT THE PODIUM in Dubai, back in November 2011, Velásquez read a passage from Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. It described character José Arcadio Segundo’s efforts to tell his disbelieving neighbors about a massacre that he had just witnessed, in which thousands were killed. Velásquez paused. He had known many José Arcadio Segundos in Colombia, he said, but he wanted to mention one of them: Jesús María Valle, who told the truth, and who paid for it with his life. “We didn’t believe in José Arcadio Segundo,” Velásquez went on: “We never believed him. Perhaps because the blood that was spilled by the assassins in the night was cleaned in the morning and the bodies thrown into the river.” In giving him this award, Velásquez said, the International Bar Association was recognizing all the José Arcadio Segundos who were fighting for the truth, those who “even today, choke on the question—‘why?’—stuck in their throats.”

  AFTERWORD

  PEACE?

  COLOMBIAN PRESIDENT JUAN MANUEL SANTOS walked with a small girl up to a giant door on an immaculate white stage, pulled out a large key, and opened it. Heads of state from around the region walked in, including the presidents of Venezuela, Ecuador, Peru, Chile, Mexico, and Argentina, as well as King Juan Carlos of Spain; the US secretary of state, John Kerry; and the UN secretary-general, Ban Ki-moon. A team of government peace negotiators, and then representatives of the FARC guerrillas, followed. All the people on stage, as well as the approximately 2,500 members of the audience, were clad in white. White flags joined the leaves of tall palm trees, waving in the breeze, and the late-afternoon sunlight glinted off the waters of the Caribbean Sea that were lapping the concrete edges of the convention center. It was September 26, 2016, and they were in the balmy, brightly colored, ancient port city of Cartagena. The audience and the dignitaries on stage had come to witness what they believed would be the end of the longest-running war in the Western Hemisphere.

  For the past four years, the Santos government and the FARC, now under the leadership of the heavily bearded, round-faced Rodrigo Londoño Echeverri (aka “Timochenko”), had been engaged in peace talks in Havana, Cuba, and they had recently finished a final draft of a 297-page peace agreement.

  On the stage in Cartagena, after performances of the national anthem and of a song commemorating the event, Timochenko walked up to a table, tripping once on the way, and, grabbing a pen made from recycled bullet pieces, signed the peace agreement on behalf of the FARC. He was then joined by Santos, who, after signing on behalf of the government, took a pin off his lapel—a white dove of peace that he had been wearing for years—and handed it to Timochenko, who affixed it to his own lapel. They then clasped each other’s shoulders and shook hands.

  Later on, they each gave speeches about their hope that the agreement would set the country on a path toward reconciliation. Near the end of Timochenko’s speech, he added, to enormous cheers from the audience: “In the name of the FARC-EP, I offer sincerely our desire for forgiveness from all the victims of the conflict, for all the pain we may have caused in this war.” Santos, for his part, stressed that “what we are signing today is a declaration of the Colombian people before the world that we are tired of war, that we do NOT accept violence as the means to defend ideas, that we are saying—strongly and clearly: No more war! No more war!”

  By that time, Colombia’s Center for Historical Memory had reported that more than 220,000 people had died in Colombia’s fifty-two-year war with the FARC and other guerrillas, though some estimates were much higher. Millions had been forcibly displaced from their homes by war. Hundreds of thousands had been forcibly “disappeared.” Countless more had had their lives ruined by kidnappings, extortion, torture, the loss of their limbs from antipersonnel landmines, the loss of their land, livestock, and livelihoods, and the loss of their loved ones. Could it finally be over? Millions hoped so.

  Six days later, on October 2, their hopes were dashed when, surprisingly, around 6 million Colombians voted “No” in a national referendum on the peace agreement, just barely defeating the “Yes” vote and throwing the peace process into disarray. The overwhelming majority of voters—around two-thirds—didn’t vote at all.

  What had happened? In the days leading up to the plebiscite, polls suggested that the “Yes” vote would easily win. There were endless analyses in the aftermath: a hurricane on the Caribbean coast had dampened voter turnout in one of the strong “Yes” regions. Perhaps the Santos government had grown overconfident, had relied too much on campaigning for the “Yes” vote through major media, and had not done enough to campaign on the ground, talking to people. The “No” campaign, led primarily by the former president, Álvaro Uribe, had ably convinced evangelical Christians that language in the agreement about the rights of women and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people was bad for “families.” Maybe the “Yes” campaign had underestimated the hatred that many Colombians felt toward the FARC, and their discomfort with parts of the agreement, including some of the concerns that Uribe was raising—in particular, that FARC leaders would serve no prison time, and that they were guaranteed to get some seats in Congress.

  TO IVÁN VELÁSQUEZ, the outcome was a grave disappointment. He had felt conflicted about the agreement with the FARC; initially, in fact, he had been very critical of it, because essent
ially it gave the FARC a pass for its worst crimes—the massacres, the murders, the rapes, the massive use of children as soldiers. When Uribe had proposed a similar pass for the paramilitaries, Velásquez had opposed it, and he acknowledged that, in a way, it was “incoherent” for him to oppose such a deal for the paramilitaries and then accept one for the FARC, just as it was incoherent for Uribe to support a deal for the paramilitaries and oppose one for the FARC. After all, Velásquez believed in justice, including some form of punishment for serious crimes, and he thought it was deeply problematic to simply give that up in the name of peace. Plus, the peace agreement contained some provisions that were absolutely unjustifiable; they would let members of the Colombian military responsible for murders—the thousands of “false-positive” cases under investigation, in which members of the military killed civilians and then claimed them as guerrillas killed in combat—off the hook for their crimes.

  But ultimately, Velásquez had supported the FARC agreement. Unlike Uribe’s initial proposal for the demobilization of the paramilitaries, he reasoned, the FARC deal included mechanisms, such as a Truth Commission, that he felt could, if effectively implemented, finally contribute to uncovering many truths. “As a victim, I’ve come to the belief that truth has to come ahead of justice. As a victim of the DAS, it would have been more important for me to know who ordered [the persecution] than to have a captain sentenced to eight years in prison,” he said. Plus, Velásquez felt that this agreement could actually lead to an end to the war—and, even more important, to an end to the war serving “as an excuse for the lack of social progress.” If Colombia’s government no longer had a war to justify pouring all its resources into the military, perhaps now it could finally address the country’s millions of other injustices—the devastating poverty of many regions, the lack of education and health care, the hunger and social marginalization of so many of its people. The war had also served as an excuse for the harsh repression of all sorts of people—trade unionists, activists, community leaders—who had opposed the powerful in the country. If a peace agreement took away that excuse, then perhaps the country could finally put the persecution of dissidents behind it. Of course, there was no guarantee that the agreement would lead to any of these outcomes; but, in the end, perhaps, more than anything else, Velásquez’s support of the agreement had more to do with his innate idealism.

  RICARDO CALDERÓN saw things differently: “Obviously, the end of the war: everyone supports that,” he said, “but not like this.” In his view, the government had made many more concessions than it needed to; it was in too much of a rush to complete the agreement before the next presidential elections took place. The deal was going to lead to a “false peace,” he said. Much as the paramilitary negotiations had left behind scores of “new” groups led by former midlevel paramilitaries, who were still threatening people, killing their foes, and running their drug businesses, he thought it was likely that many FARC members would return to criminal activity. “There’s a lot that sounds good on paper, but I don’t see how they’ll implement it, or with what resources.” The government had no way of ensuring sufficient resources to fulfill all the promises it had made to those who demobilized. Particularly in coca-producing areas, it was hard to imagine what incentives the government could possibly put in place that would keep demobilized guerrillas from returning to their profitable illicit activities. And the lack of prison terms for the worst crimes, he believed, almost guaranteed that there would be new outbursts of violence.

  Calderón was also disturbed by the agreement’s provisions allowing the military to evade justice for its atrocities. What would members of the military who had been under prosecution do once they got released? Their careers were over, so Calderón thought the likeliest scenario was that these men would simply join criminal groups.

  THE FAILURE OF the peace deal was an enormous victory for former president Álvaro Uribe. Since leaving the presidency, the image of the former head of state had lost some of its luster. After backing Juan Manuel Santos’s candidacy for the presidency in 2010, Uribe had quickly turned against the new president once Santos had started peace talks with the FARC. In the 2014 presidential elections, Uribe had backed another candidate, Óscar Iván Zuluaga, who was running against Santos, but Zuluaga had lost. Uribe himself had won a Senate seat in 2014, and from that perch, he had been vociferously criticizing the Santos government—but his stridency hadn’t seemed to match the public’s mood.

  Uribe’s image had also been tarnished by numerous scandals. His former chief of security, Mauricio Santoyo—with whom he had worked since the 1990s, when Santoyo was in the Medellín police force and Uribe was Antioquia’s governor—pled guilty in the United States to providing material support for terrorism for having collaborated with paramilitary groups from 2001 to 2008. He was sentenced to thirteen years in prison. Moreover, the attorney general’s office had charged Uribe’s younger brother, Santiago, with homicide and conspiracy, partly on the basis of the testimony of a former police officer, Juan Carlos Meneses, who had testified that the younger Uribe had been one of the leaders of the paramilitary group known as the “Twelve Apostles,” which was said to have committed numerous killings in the mid-1990s in Yarumal, Antioquia, where Santiago had a ranch known as “La Carolina.” The Supreme Court had convicted Uribe’s former minister of agriculture, Andrés Felipe Arias, on corruption charges. Former DAS chief María del Pilar Hurtado, who had sought asylum in Panama, was extradited back to Colombia in 2015; she was sentenced to fourteen years in prison in connection with offenses committed while she ran the DAS. Uribe’s former chief of staff, Bernardo Moreno, was also convicted in connection with the DAS scandal; his sentence was eight years of house arrest. In its decision convicting Moreno and Hurtado, the Supreme Court formally communicated to the Accusations Committee of the Colombian Congress a request by the victims that Uribe be investigated in connection with the DAS scandal. Jorge Noguera, Uribe’s first DAS chief, had already been convicted in 2011 and sentenced to twenty-five years in prison; José Miguel Narváez, who worked in the DAS under Noguera, would also be convicted in 2016 for his involvement in wiretapping. The Supreme Court also convicted the former president’s cousin, Senator Mario Uribe, in 2011 for conspiring with the paramilitaries. In total, more than sixty members of Congress or candidates—nearly all of them from Uribe’s coalition—had been convicted in connection with the Supreme Court’s parapolitics investigations, and many other officials had been convicted in cases brought by the attorney general’s office. On June 22, 2017, the Colombian attorney general’s office announced that it had charged former presidential legal counsel Edmundo del Castillo; César Mauricio Velásquez, the former press secretary; and the lawyers Sergio González and Diego Álvarez with conspiracy. The charges were based on their alleged involvement in a plot to smear the Supreme Court, and particularly Iván Velásquez, in retaliation for the parapolitics investigations.

  Former president Uribe himself was facing the possibility of new investigations, in addition to the one involving the DAS. These included an investigation into the death of his former right-hand man in Antioquia, Pedro Juan Moreno, in a 2006 helicopter crash. Moreno and Uribe had grown distant in the years before Moreno’s death: according to one of Uribe’s advisers, Moreno had expected Uribe to establish and allow him to control a new agency overseeing all of the government’s intelligence services, and had felt betrayed when Uribe did not do so. During his presidential campaign, Uribe had also become closer to other advisers, such as the wealthy entrepreneur Fabio Echeverri, who disliked Moreno. Perhaps as a result, after Uribe’s presidential election, Moreno had become harshly critical of people near the president, routinely lambasting Uribe’s team through his magazine, La Otra Verdad (The Other Truth), and writing stories or bits of gossip that seemed designed to undermine the administration. When Moreno died, the official results of the investigation said there had been a technical malfunction in the helicopter, and that no evidence of foul play
had been found. But rumors had swirled about Moreno’s death ever since.

  In 2010, General Rito Alejo del Río—whom Uribe had honored during a ceremony in 1999, after the Pastrana administration had cashiered the officer—stated to prosecutors that the helicopter crash that had led to Moreno’s death had been no accident. Moreno, Del Río claimed, had been murdered (Del Río was later convicted of homicide in an unrelated matter, and as of this writing he remained under investigation for a paramilitary massacre in Mapiripán, Meta, in 1997). In February 2016, after a former paramilitary known as “Don Mario” claimed that Uribe had been involved in Moreno’s death, the attorney general’s office asked the Supreme Court and the Accusations Committee of the Colombian Congress to investigate.

  In response to written questions for this book, Don Berna also stated that Pedro Juan Moreno had died as a result of “sabotage” to the helicopter he was riding in—“an action that was carried out on Uribe’s orders.” However, he offered no way to verify his claim or evidence to back it up. When pressed on the basis for his statement, Don Berna only said that “in the world of illegality, one knows many things, but because they are illegal they cannot be proven. It’s like when a policeman ask[s] you for a bribe, he will never give you a receipt.”

  Uribe has forcefully denied these allegations. He stated that Moreno had never given any signs of closeness to paramilitary groups. “With the cowardice of criminals,” Uribe said, people had started to accuse Moreno of links to paramilitaries after his death, but not when he was alive. In a 2016 radio interview, Uribe expressed pain at the possibility that the new investigation might make Moreno’s family wonder whether he was involved in his former chief of staff’s death. He challenged the credibility of Don Mario, noting that during his administration he continually pressed for the former paramilitary’s arrest until it was achieved. He didn’t respond to written questions for this book about Don Berna’s statements, though he has repeatedly questioned the credibility of the extradited paramilitary leaders.