by Austin Galt
His elder brother Lucas won two terms as governor of Cesar in the 1990s. He was subsequently found guilty of receiving paramilitary support in the second campaign and was thrown out after a year in office and into jail. In this second race, he went up against his former ally-turned-rival Consuelo Araújo Noguera who would be assassinated by the FARC in 2001. Lucas’s son, José Alfredo, was elected senator in 2014, while another son, José Amiro, married the country’s beloved prime-time television news anchor Vicky Dávila. In 2009, Lucas Gnecco was condemned to 24 years in prison for corruption.
Another brother, José Eduardo known as ‘Pepe’, became a Colombian senator from 1998 to 2002. Pepe was also one of the signatories to the infamous Ralito Pact.
Jorge Gnecco’s sister Cielo married a controversial businessman with one of their sons, Luis Alberto Monsalvo Gnecco, going on to become governor of Cesar from 2012 to 2015.
Gnecco’s cousin Juan Francisco ‘Kiko’ Gómez Cerchar entered the political scene under the guidance of Santa ‘The Marlboro Man’ Lopesierra. He became a councilman and then mayor of his home town Barrancas before being elected governor of La Guajira in 2011. He resigned his position in 2014 after he was arrested by authorities who accused him of the crimes of homicide and presumed links with paramilitaries, such as Jorge 40, and drug traffickers, including his brother-in-law Marcos ‘Marquitos’ Figueroa. In 2017, Kiko Gómez was sentenced to 55 years in jail for a triple murder carried out by Figueroa’s men.
Marquitos, from an indigenous Wayuu family, was nicknamed ‘El Perrero de los Malcriados’ or ‘The Spoiled Brats Catcher’. He began his criminal career smuggling contraband across the Venezuelan border into Wayuu territory, which the Colombian government generally doesn’t enter, and was a partner of The Marlboro Man. He became Jorge Gnecco’s head of security just as tensions were rising between Don Giraldo and Jorge 40. Marquitos fled Colombia after the murder of his boss and set up operations in Venezuela. He was eventually captured in Brazil in 2014.
Jorge’s nephew Hugh Gnecco was installed as mayor of Santa Marta in 1998 and again in 2000 but was suspended before he could finish his second term. He was then convicted of embezzlement and sentenced to 10 years in prison; however he fled to Venezuela where he was injured in an assassination attempt in 2005. He was subsequently deported back to Colombia.
Clearly, the Gnecco family has been and remains one of the dominant forces in the region known as the Greater Magdalena comprising the states of Magdalena, Cesar and La Guajira.
Jorge Gnecco had also sponsored the paramilitaries in Cesar who were led by Jorge 40 who, in turn, supported Gnecco controlling the drug routes. However, Gnecco was viewed as just a narco by the paramilitary leadership and not ideologically aligned with the AUC’s main cause of eliminating the guerrillas from Colombian territory. Also, Jorge 40 was more aligned with the Araújo clan, which was now opposed to the Gnecco clan.
On 11 August 2001, Jorge Gnecco was called to a meeting by Jorge 40 in the municipality of Sabanas de San Ángel, near the border of Magdalena and Cesar, and he arrived thinking it was a get-together of friends. It wasn’t.
Jorge Gnecco’s wife María del Pilar Espinosa, widowed by Gnecco’s assassination, began a relationship with Eduardo Dávila who had been a close friend of her husband. Dávila was part of the city’s jet-set crowd and known for attending parties with a large group of bodyguards. He was one of Santa Marta’s top marijuana traffickers during the bonanza of the 1970s, while he also controlled the Unión Magdalena football club. He was arrested in 1994 while watching a game against Real Cartagena after 1900 kilograms of marijuana were discovered at one of his properties, leading to a sentence of 10 years in prison. He would also eventually be ordered to turn over a significant percentage of his shareholding in the football club.
Eduardo Dávila was released on parole in 2001 just as his brother José Domingo Dávila became the governor of Magdalena, thanks to the help of paramilitaries. José was a signatory to the Chivolo Pact which was signed by over 400 politicians on 28 September 2000. The meeting was instigated by Jorge 40 who wanted to consolidate the political movement Provincia Unida por una Mejor Opción de Vida or United Province for a Better Choice of Life. There were a couple of other pacts made between the region’s politicians and paramilitaries which were aimed at consolidating political power in Magdalena, including the Pivijay Pact, signed in late 2001, and the El Difícil Pact, signed in early 2003. José Domingo Dávila was eventually arrested in 2008 and sentenced to over seven years in jail for his paramilitary ties.
María del Pilar Espinosa separated from Eduardo Dávila in 2005 amid claims of mistreatment and interference in the Gnecco family business. He blamed her accountant Carmen Vergara for the break-up and she was subsequently murdered by sicarios in 2007. Dávila was found to be the intellectual author of the crime and sentenced to 34 years in jail. At the time, he was also being investigated for his ties to paramilitary leaders Hernán Giraldo and Jorge 40.
Jorge 40 was born Rodrigo Tovar Pupo in the city of Valledupar. His family was considered part of ‘la gente de la plaza’ or ‘the people of the square’, as the region’s elites are called. His father was an officer in the Colombian army, but Rodrigo was brought up by his uncle Edgardo Pupo who had previously served in the cabinet of Cesar’s first governor, ex-president Alfonso López Michelsen, before he himself went on to become governor of Cesar in 1982.
Rodrigo’s family were good friends with another ‘plaza’ member – the politically powerful Araújo clan, including Consuelo who ran the city’s Festival de la Leyenda Vallenata or Legendary Vallenato Festival which she founded with Alfonso López Michelsen. Her father was a respected Liberal Party leader, while one of her sons from her first marriage, Hernando Molina Araújo, went on to serve as governor of Cesar from 2005 to 2007.
Álvaro Araújo, Consuelo’s brother, also served in López Michelsen’s cabinet while governor, and was minister of agriculture while López Michelsen was president. His son, also named Álvaro, would go on to become a congressman and senator, while his daughter Maria became minister of foreign affairs under President Álvaro Uribe.
The links between the Pupo and Araújo families were well formed before Rodrigo started making his way in life, first going to university in Bogotá where he met Salvatore Mancuso. He didn’t stay long in the capital, however, preferring to return to Valledupar where he worked as a city inspector of agricultural products. By the mid-1990s, many landowners, including his family and friends, were being extorted and kidnapped at the hands of the FARC guerrillas who were strengthened by the addition of old plaza member Ricardo Palmera, now known by his alias of Simón Trinidad.
Rodrigo decided he wanted to fight back. In 1996, a top military general met with all the important families and leaders of the region and suggested they unite all the private vigilante groups into a single paramilitary organisation. This would be the government’s proxy in the war against the guerrillas. Rodrigo, along with several others from the meeting, travelled to Córdoba to meet with Salvatore Mancuso and Carlos Castaño. The idea of the AUC’s Northern Bloc was formed with Rodrigo as its leader. Rodrigo Tovar became Jorge 40.
With Salvatore Mancuso as Jorge 40’s military teacher and Carlos Castaño as his ideological master, the new paramilitary bloc went on to wreak havoc among those populations where the guerrillas exerted influence. It participated in many massacres, including that in El Salado, while another of note occurred in El Piñon in 1999.
On 9 January 1999, about 80 paramilitaries arrived just after midday in the hamlet of Playón de Orozco in the municipality of El Piñon. Over the next hour, they shot dead 26 local men and a pregnant woman, while most of the town’s women and children were held captive in the local church. The bodies were then butchered with the remains disposed of in the surrounding streets. They also set ablaze approximately 20 houses as they departed. All the surviving inhabitants subsequently left, adding to the number of displaced victims. It was later revealed tha
t the massacre was in retaliation for a recent guerrilla attack on the paramilitary property, El Diamante. Carlos Castaño, who was lucky to survive, responded by telling Jorge 40 to ‘take down 1000 in less than 15 days’.
Massacres in this region were nothing new and stemmed all the way back to 1928. In December of that year, representatives of the United Fruit Company, a large American company with interests in banana plantations in the area, sent telegrams back to the US government stating the bananeros or banana workers were striking. In response, the US government threatened to invade the area if the Colombian government didn’t protect the company’s interests.
Shortly after, soldiers were sent to the town where they set themselves up around the central plaza. It was a Sunday and the majority of the town’s population had gathered for Mass. As families left the church and milled around outside, the soldiers opened fire on the crowd with machine guns. It was estimated about 1000 men, women and children were mowed down, although it has never been verified.
The massacre was the basis of the novel One Hundred Years of Solitude written by famous Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez in 1967. This novel, which depicted the massacre in a fictional way, helped Márquez win the 1982 Nobel Prize in Literature.
Márquez was politically active and considered a socialist and even a communist. He was friends with the region’s most well-known left-wing protagonists such as Cuban leader Fidel Castro and Venezuelan leader Hugo Chávez as well as the leaders of the FARC and ELN, and he was instrumental in bringing both guerrilla groups to the negotiating table.
His support for Fidel Castro was believed to be the reason he was denied a visa to travel to the United States for many years. The ban was eventually lifted after Bill Clinton became president and he subsequently travelled there to meet with President Clinton. While dining with the US president, he remarked, ‘If you and Fidel could sit face to face, there wouldn’t be any problem left’. After the 9/11 attacks, the anti-imperialist Márquez published a letter to President George Bush asking, ‘How does it feel now that horror is erupting in your own yard and not in your neighbour’s living room?’
Pablo Escobar’s former hitman Jhon Jairo ‘Popeye’ Velásquez, who calls himself ‘the historical memory of the Medellín Cartel’, stated in a television interview in 2015 that Gabriel Garcia Márquez was the conduit between Pablo Escobar and Fidel Castro who allegedly helped the cartel smuggle cocaine into Florida. Popeye claimed he used to pass letters directly to Márquez, who would then allegedly pass them on to the Cuban leader.
Gabriel García Márquez, known affectionately as Gabo, was born in 1927 in the town of Aracataca, Magdalena. Being a known communist sympathiser, it was probably lucky for him that he had left his home town by the time 20 paramilitary fighters arrived there on 19 February 1993. The fighters were those of the Rojas clan and on arrival they found a group of locals playing football. They immediately killed one of the locals before taking away another three and murdering them nearby. The victims were accused of being guerrilla collaborators.
The Rojas clan spent 2001 plotting their revenge against Don Giraldo. The house where Adán Rojas’s wife lived had been attacked with grenades, which obviously infuriated the clan. They wanted to return to Santa Marta but would need the backing of the AUC.
While the assassination of Jorge Gnecco in August 2001 set the stage for war, the final trigger occurred a couple of months later.
On 9 October 2001, a dozen bodyguards of Jairo ‘Pacho’ Musso, a drug trafficker and Giraldo’s second-in-command, arrived at the El Pechiche restaurant in front of the Mendihuaca Caribbean Resort, which is located on the eastern side of Parque Tayrona and near the border with La Guajira. They opened fire with AK-47 assault rifles on a van that was carrying several anti-narcotics agents investigating Giraldo and other traffickers close to him. Three police officers who worked for the DEA were killed as well as three innocent bystanders – two tourists who witnessed the attack and tried to escape and a watchman. Their bodies were thrown in a nearby river.
Within days, the DEA, alongside the Colombian police, flooded the zone looking for the perpetrators of the attack. During their search they found and confiscated about 16 tons of cocaine which was a damaging blow to the drug traffickers’ operations. This did not at all please the Castaño brothers whose funding relied on the drugs flowing freely through the zone.
Great pressure was also brought to bear on the AUC who American authorities deemed ultimately responsible for the deaths of their agents. To alleviate this pressure, the Castaño brothers asked Giraldo to turn Musso over to the authorities.
Giraldo refused saying, ‘A father never gives up his children.’
The war was on.
Don Giraldo had several opportunities to merge peacefully with the AUC but he still resisted giving up complete control of the region which he had enjoyed for so long. Besides, he had seen off other challengers before and he wasn’t going to let go so easily. Pamphlets warning of the imminent arrival of the AUC began to be distributed throughout the region in December 2001 and Jorge 40, along with the Rojas clan, began advancing on Giraldo’s positions in the Sierra Nevada.
A massive displacement of the population in the Sierra Nevada began to take place with thousands of villagers making their way out of the war zone. This gave rise to a humanitarian crisis at the beginning of 2002. Under orders from Giraldo, for several weeks they blockaded the main highway connecting Santa Marta with Riohacha, the capital of La Guajira. Meanwhile, a paro armado or armed strike was enforced in Santa Marta on certain days determined by Giraldo. This shut down all commerce as all shops remained closed, while services were suspended. The streets were deathly silent on those days as residents were ordered to stay in their homes.
The Rojas forces knew of Giraldo’s zones of influence in the city and began attacking his structure there, and it didn’t take long before the bodies began piling up. Giraldo’s forces retaliated by detonating a bomb in the Santa Marta market, killing several fighters from the Northern Bloc. Some innocent civilians were also caught in the crossfire and fear gripped the region. No one left their houses after the sun went down.
In the meantime, the battle between opposing paramilitary forces raged up in the mountains. Jorge 40 began to surround Giraldo’s positions, with over 1000 fighters approaching from all directions, forming an impenetrable barrier. Thousands of peasants who hadn’t already left became trapped and Giraldo used them as human shields. Many were mistaken for the enemy and killed. With nowhere to turn and his forces outnumbered sixfold, Giraldo surrendered in early February 2002. The war was over.
Don Giraldo signed a peace agreement with the AUC in May 2002 whereby he brought his paramilitary forces, which would now be called the Tayrona Resistance Front, under the control of the Northern Bloc’s Jorge 40 who would receive 60 percent of Giraldo’s revenues. Giraldo kept control over his own personal bodyguards but was now more of a decorative figure for his larger paramilitary unit. He lost control of territory in La Guajira which was transferred to a new paramilitary unit called the Wayúu Counterinsurgency Front. The Rojas clan returned to their lands, while Pacho Musso was given 24 hours to leave. He was caught by authorities a year later in Venezuela and extradited to the United States where he spent the next six years in jail.
Jorge 40 was the new Lord of the Mountain and had all of Greater Magdalena under his control. Not only did he control the criminal structures, he began to control the political scene, putting both elected and unelected bureaucrats in positions of power across the region. Politicians were required to get permission from Jorge 40 before running for office. Those that didn’t were threatened and sometimes killed.
Any pockets of resistance were brutally put down by the Northern Bloc which upped the ante, carrying out many more massacres in its quest to rid the region of guerrillas. Its new Wayuu Counterinsurgency Front went on an attack-blitz to prove their worth which included the slaughter of six Wayuu natives in the town of Bahia Po
rtete. On 18 April 2004, about 45 paramilitaries arrived in the town with two family names on their mind – Fince and Epinayú. They had been complaining to government authorities about the AUC presence in their region. Their complaints were about to stop, permanently.
Wayuu people are native to the Guajira Peninsula in the Caribbean border region of Colombia and Venezuela. While being fluent in Spanish, they also speak their own language which forms part of the Arawak languages. Wayuu families are divided into clans and each settlement is generally isolated and made up of around five houses. Many Wayuu youth have become involved in the lucrative contraband business between Venezuela and Colombia, while the various criminal groups try to forge alliances with them in order to operate unimpeded in the area.
It is the Wayuu women who bind the tribe together, so taking out those female elders would be the best revenge. The paramilitaries started with the 70-year-old Margoth Fince Epinayú, who was taken out of her house and beaten up before being murdered with a machete. Next was Rosa Fince, who was tied up and decapitated. The heads of both victims were then nailed with a stake to the doors of their houses. Another three Fince women were taken away and never seen nor heard from again. The final victim was 18-year-old Rubén Epinayú, who was tied up to a car and dragged around the town for everyone to see.
The terror that many of these communities experienced over the years would soon subside with the AUC demobilising a couple of years later. Jorge 40 demobilised with over 4000 men, however, he would later be extradited to the United States and sentenced to 16 years in prison. Giraldo and over 1000 of his men demobilised in 2006. He was sent to jail as part of the agreement, however, he was believed to have continued his drug trafficking and, as such, was extradited to the United States in 2008 and also sentenced to 16 years in jail.
During the justice and peace process, Giraldo accepted responsibility for dozens of sexual assaults, including many underage girls as young as nine years old. He also fathered at least 19 children whose mothers were minors at the time of birth, including one 12-year-old girl. Hernán Giraldo was described by Colombian prosecutors as ‘the biggest sexual predator of paramilitarism’.
