In a February 2015 ruling by the Justice and Peace Tribunal of Medellín, the court instructed the attorney general’s office to investigate Uribe in connection with the reports that a helicopter from the Antioquia governor’s office had been seen flying overhead as the El Aro massacre happened.
And in a September 2015 ruling signed by a different judge from the same tribunal, the court ordered that Uribe be investigated for promoting, supporting, or conspiring with paramilitary groups and the Convivirs linked to them, either as governor or as president. The court mentioned the many examples of people around Uribe who had links to the paramilitaries, as well as situations and cases involving the paramilitaries or public officials—such as the El Aro massacre—that occurred when he was governor of Antioquia. “It can’t be the case that he did not know everything that was happening in these cases, or that all of these actions were committed behind his back,” said the court, noting that “it’s not a matter of testimony. It’s about logic and reasons. As the director of the newspaper El Espectador Fidel Cano Correa once said, it’s not possible to be in a swimming pool and not get wet.”
Uribe argued that many of these issues—such as the presence of a helicopter from the governor’s office during the El Aro massacre—had been thoroughly investigated before. And he continued to insist that the charges were part of a political vendetta against him and his allies, now led by the pro-Santos camp, and that the paramilitaries’ statements against him were in retaliation for their extradition.
While there have been many allegations against former president Uribe, and in some cases these may result in investigations, as of this writing he had not been indicted in connection with any offense, and he may never be. Uribe remained a very high-profile and influential politician and a polarizing figure who sparked intense feelings, both positive and negative. Many people close to him have been convicted of serious crimes, but it is up to Colombia’s institutions of justice to determine what, if any, knowledge or role he may have had in them. So far, there have been no public reports about the Accusations Committee of the Colombian Congress or the attorney general’s office moving forward on any of these investigations.
WITH THE VOTE against the peace deal in 2016, Uribe was once again in the thick of things, claiming to represent the opposition. Many of his critics were concerned that, now that his hand was strengthened, he would make any renegotiation of the peace deal impossible—or, at best, that he would do irreparable damage to some of the positive elements of the agreement, such as the provisions allowing for some measure of land reform. With new presidential elections only eighteen months away, Uribe might have another chance to put one of his close allies in office.
On November 24, 2016, President Santos—who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize a few days after the plebiscite—and Timochenko signed a new peace deal, again using a pen made out of bullets, though this time, there was less fanfare. Santos claimed that they had made adjustments to the agreement that addressed the concerns of its critics: the new deal didn’t allow foreigners to participate in special peace tribunals, limited the period during which investigations could be conducted, and required FARC members to disclose all the information they had about drug trafficking and reveal all their assets. However, as expected, Uribe dismissed the changes as cosmetic and demanded that the government hold another plebiscite. Santos refused, instead taking the deal directly to the Colombian Congress, which approved it on November 30. The Colombian Constitutional Court later ruled that Congress had been authorized to approve the deal; as a result, there was no longer any need to submit it to a plebiscite.
DESPITE THEIR DIFFERING positions on the original peace agreement, both Ricardo Calderón and Iván Velásquez agreed that the failure of the plebiscite had created a much more precarious situation than had previously existed in the country. Former president Uribe and his allies would continue to claim that the final version lacked legitimacy because the public had not approved it. The true outcome of the process would probably not be known for years: Would the FARC truly demobilize? If they followed through, would other groups and individuals fill their shoes? Would Colombia’s war ever end?
Both men were also appalled by an adjustment to the deal that Santos made after the FARC signed off on it, apparently under pressure from the Colombian military. That change distorted the international concept of “command responsibility” as it applied to the military, meaning that in thousands of pending criminal cases involving military killings of civilians, troops might be held accountable, but their commanders could be completely off the hook.
In the first few weeks after the deal was finalized, the FARC announced that five of its commanders in the state of Guaviare had gone into “dissident” status: they were still at war. There was also a spike in reported killings of activists and community leaders, which appeared to be tied to their promotion of the peace process. Dozens were killed in 2016, and many local organizations were blaming groups calling themselves paramilitaries that were increasingly turning up in small towns.
It was not a surprise. As both Velásquez and Calderón knew from experience, whenever things looked like they might be improving, their country had a way of smacking people back into reality. But whatever the outcome of this particular negotiation, neither Velásquez nor Calderón had given up on the hope that through their work they could make a difference for others.
Since 2013, Velásquez had been serving as the new head of the United Nations Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala, where he had been leading groundbreaking investigations into organized crime linked to that Central American country’s security forces and political establishment. In September 2015, one of his joint investigations with a special prosecutor’s office into high-level corruption in the country’s customs office contributed to massive nationwide protests, which ultimately led to the resignation and then jailing of the president of Guatemala at the time, Otto Pérez Molina. Pérez Molina’s vice-president and dozens of other officials were also prosecuted and jailed. In the aftermath of Pérez Molina’s downfall, Velásquez continued his investigations, although—as in Colombia—he was facing constant efforts by the targets of his investigations to smear, discredit, and remove him.
In August 2017, Guatemala’s new president, Jimmy Morales, declared Velásquez persona non grata and ordered him to leave the country after Velásquez’s office and Guatemala’s attorney general’s office sought to have Morales’s immunity lifted so they could investigate him for alleged campaign finance law violations. As of this writing, the country’s Constitutional Court had invalidated Morales’s decision, allowing Velásquez to remain in the country.
Iván Velásquez at his office in Bogotá in late August 2013. © Rainer Huhle.
Life in Guatemala was difficult for Velásquez. He slept in the same dark bunker where he worked, 24/7, and he could not step outside of his offices without a heavy armed guard. He had to live far from his family, as María Victoria couldn’t leave her job in Colombia, so he was lonely—though he made a point of flying back to Bogotá every few weeks and talking with his wife and children as often as he could. María Victoria hated the fact that he was away so much, but she knew that most doors in Colombia were closed to him, and she understood his need to continue doing work that was meaningful to him.
And so far, Velásquez felt that his work in Guatemala was producing results. He wanted to see how far he could take the investigations. After that, he hoped to make it back to Colombia. He had many enemies waiting for him there, but that was, after all, home.
Calderón was still doing investigative work at Semana and continuing to uncover big scandals. He had done a series of stories about corruption in the military prison of Tolemaida, which he had labeled the “Tolemaida Resort.” He had found that many of the 269 members of the military in prison there, who had been convicted of terrible crimes, were enjoying extraordinary privileges: getting paid when they shouldn’t be, organizing parties, having their relatives spend the night,
and even being allowed to leave the prison to go on vacation or to nightclubs in the area. One of the cases Calderón highlighted involved a sergeant who had been sentenced to forty years for having killed four people, including two children and a six-month-old baby. The sergeant, Calderón reported, had his family living on the military base where he was imprisoned. He was also permitted to leave the base once a month on “medical visits” to Bogotá that lasted for several days. Calderón’s stories had upset the military establishment and forced some reforms within the prison, but he kept writing about how many of the abuses continued.
On May 2, 2013, Calderón drove out of town to meet with a source in connection with his ongoing Tolemaida investigation. He waited all day, but, after receiving a number of strange phone calls, realized the source was not going to show up. At dusk, Calderón started to head home. It was a new road, with lots of traffic but few stores or rest stops. So at one point, Calderón, who needed a bathroom, pulled over on the side of the road and got out of his car. As he approached the front of his car, he heard another car pull up next to him, and someone called his name. Calderón turned around and saw only the two hands that started to shoot at him. He ran and rolled into a grassy ditch, holding his breath. Was this the end? After a while, he heard the other car drive off, but he stayed in the ditch for several minutes, waiting. He had left his phones in the car, so all he could do was lie there. Finally, he crawled up and looked around. The driver’s side window of his car was shattered. Calderón got in and drove until he found the highway police. He stopped, but he could barely get out of the car to talk to them—he had not been hit but could not feel his legs from the shock of the attack. The police officers pointed at his car: he had not even noticed the five bullet holes in it. Subsequent investigations pointed at the involvement of members of the military, working with paramilitaries, in the attack.
After the attempt on his life, Calderón received several offers to leave the country and work elsewhere, but he didn’t want to abandon his investigations. He continued publishing.
Later that year, at age forty-two, Calderón became perhaps the youngest journalist ever to receive the Simón Bolívar Award for Lifetime Achievement (Vida y Obra), Colombia’s highest journalism honor. Calderón had received other awards in the past, and usually he had ignored them—throwing certificates into his fireplace and letting his secretary keep the little trophies—because he believed that one shouldn’t do journalism for awards. “It’s like being a priest: you don’t go out there to say, ‘Look at what I did.’ You have to do your work in silence and not expect anything in exchange.” But this time, he agreed to overcome his tremendous fear of public speaking to give a speech, mainly because he viewed this award as a way of recognizing other journalists around the country who have worked quietly, and anonymously, in the face of grave danger. “Many of them,” he said, “… would not have been able to climb onto this stage to receive this award if they had won it. In this country, where the press is corralled by the pressure of criminal groups and local and national powers, I’m privileged to be able to be here. That’s why this award is not mine. It belongs to all journalists.”
As for the value of his own work, to Calderón it was all very simple: “It has helped to expose the bad guys.” Even with all the problems, that fact, that he had ultimately been able to expose what was going on in the DAS, which in his opinion was “the darkest thing” that had happened in government, mattered.
Velásquez had a similar take on the parapolitics investigations: “It was like telling the people that despite all that power [against us], it was possible to confront crime.” In a society where there were hardly any critical voices, “the fact that the court stayed firm, persistent, acting like it was supposed to, probably gave heart to many people.” He acknowledged that “justice does not transform reality,” but believed in what it could do: “help to create some different conditions in a country so that the government and people can work better, have greater participation and better construct democracy.” Ultimately, the “fight against corruption” should not be fought for its own sake; instead, its value should be measured in “the extent to which it contributes to creating dignified social conditions for people.” In that sense, the true impact of his work, both in Colombia and Guatemala, had yet to be seen.
Still, Colombians now know much more than in years past—not only about the horrors that paramilitaries perpetrated in the name of counterinsurgency, but also about the deals that many politicians were striking with killers. And even if, deep down, they suspected the truth, the efforts of Valle, Velásquez, and Calderón—as well as their closest colleagues, family, and friends, and so many anonymous, forgotten Colombians over the years—have made them begin confronting it. Colombia has not, as paramilitaries like Rodrigo Zapata warned, “fallen apart” as a result of these disclosures. Instead, its government has been forced, however imperfectly and partially, to begin a conversation about how it will address its worst crimes and injustices.
MEANWHILE, in Jesús María Valle’s birthplace of La Granja, Ituango, in a school named after the activist, teachers regularly tell their students about the noble man who twenty years ago gave his life for their rights. Armed men calling themselves paramilitaries passed through the community of about 1,500 people again in early 2017. Nobody was hurt—this time. But the courage and commitment that Valle exemplifies might well be needed again. So may the conviction he shared with them: that even in the darkest of times, as long as some people insist on telling the truth, there will be a reason for hope.
Acknowledgments
This book belongs to the many Colombians who shared their stories with me.
Iván Velásquez and Ricardo Calderón spent countless hours talking to me, in person, on Skype, on the phone, going over events again and again, and digging up long-lost documents and materials. I owe them my deepest gratitude for their trust and time. Special thanks are also due to María Victoria, Catalina, Víctor, and Laura Velásquez; Calderón’s wife, “Mónica”; Miladis and Maryori Restrepo; Amparo Areiza; and Nelly, Magdalena, and Darío Valle, as well as Gloria Manco, Patricia Fuenmayor, María Victoria Fallon, Amelia Pérez, Gregorio Oviedo, J. Guillermo Escobar, Beatriz Jaramillo, Carlos Elías Muñoz, Jorge Núñez, Rainer Huhle, Judge Rubén Darío Pinilla, Darío Arcila, Juan Diego Restrepo, Ramiro Bejarano, Daniel Coronell, and the survivors of the Antioquia CTI and Fiscalía of the late 1990s. I am also grateful to the many other people in Colombia who shared memories, photographs, documents, advice, and books. Many would not want to be named.
My agent, Larry Weissman, was an enthusiastic believer in the project, knew exactly how to help me shape and sell the book proposal while staying true to my vision, and was a fierce advocate on its behalf. My editors Katy O’Donnell and Alessandra Bastagli at Nation Books were thoughtful and wonderful partners in this project. Katy’s suggestions and questions improved the book immensely. Kathy Streckfus did a terrific job copy editing it, and Sandra Beris, project editor, was a helpful guide through the production process.
My able and dedicated research assistant, Pamela van den Enden, did a tremendous amount of work chasing down news articles, cables, history books, and other sources and drafting summaries of her findings to help me verify or flesh out various parts of the book.
Human Rights Watch allowed me the time to write this book, despite the world’s ever-increasing demands on the group’s resources. I am especially grateful to Alison Leal Parker, with whom I codirected the US Program, who supported the project even when my repeated absences significantly added to her workload. Deputy Program Director Joe Saunders, my direct supervisor, and Executive Director Ken Roth were also both supportive of the project and of allowing me to take the necessary time to complete it. I am greatly indebted to José Miguel Vivanco, executive director of the Americas division, who introduced me to Colombia and taught me an enormous amount about the country and about human rights activism; and to Daniel Wilkinson, managing director of the
Americas division, who in 2002 first mentioned to me that there was a job opening I might want to look into in the division.
The board and staff of the Drug Policy Alliance, my new professional home, embraced this project and gave me the space to finish it.
Photojournalist Stephen Ferry, who has taken some of the most powerful images of Colombia I know, contributed many of the photos in this book. Journalist and author Sibylla Brodzinsky offered sage advice and critical insights. Above all, I am grateful to both of them for their support and friendship.
Jairo and Ricardo were always helpful, reliable, and positive drivers and assistants as I conducted research in Colombia, though they did not know exactly what I was working on.
Many friends, colleagues, family members, and others read parts of the book, offered advice and encouragement, housed me at key moments, or were helpful in other ways. These include Kim Barker, Stephen McFarland, Max Schoening, Ana Arana, Amy Braunschweiger, Kathy Rose, Pierre Bairin, Nicole Martin, Laura Pitter, Joanne Mariner, José Miguel Vivanco, Daniel Wilkinson, Juan Pappier, Minky Worden, Dinah Pokempner, Patrick Ball, José Carlos Ugaz, Pamela Yates, Paco de Onís, Tim Rieser, John Biaggi, Bruce Rabb, Terry Christie, Andy Kaufman, Francisco Goldman, Jon Lee Anderson, Tico Almeida, Carlos Villalón, Andrea Lari, Juan Forero, John Otis, Adam Isacson, and Jim Moody Wyss. Leslie Sharpe and Jill Rothenberg at Mediabistro gave me valuable guidance when I was assembling the book proposal. The community of writers at Paragraph Writer’s Space in New York offered companionship and advice as I figured out how to pitch the book to agents.
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