There Are No Dead Here

by Maria McFarland Sánchez-Moreno

  Members of the group, including Valle and Velásquez, would regularly meet at each other’s homes. Over cups of bitter coffee (or, in J. Guillermo’s case, endless glasses of Coca-Cola), often smoking, they would stay long into the night talking about politics, law, and current events. It was a thrill to Velásquez: here was a community of people like him, who believed—all evidence to the contrary—that a more just society in Colombia was possible. Not only that, but they were doing something about it.

  Iván Velásquez and his daughter Laura, 1988 or 1989. © Iván and María Victoria Velásquez.

  Velásquez enjoyed Valle’s lively storytelling style and the expansive smile under his thick, dark brows. The two men had a lot in common beyond their idealism. Both Valle and Velásquez had grown up poor, the children of deeply Catholic, politically conservative parents, and both had worked their way through law school at the University of Antioquia, though a few years apart.

  The two also had differences: by the time they met, Valle, as part of the Permanent Human Rights Committee of Antioquia, was an outspoken activist on behalf of various social justice causes in Medellín. By contrast, although Velásquez was friendly with several of the committee’s members, and was deeply shaken by the murders of so many of its leaders in the mid-1980s, he never seriously considered joining it. In his mind, he was simply a lawyer who did what he could to improve the system—not an activist. Still, in 1989, Valle convinced Velásquez to replace him as head of the Antioquia Bar Association, and with that platform, Velásquez regularly organized groups of lawyers to raise issues of public concern with the authorities. When, in 1990, the Colombian government held elections for a constituent assembly—a group of people to draft a new constitution for Colombia—Velásquez, Valle, J. Guillermo Escobar, and a few other friends ran together for seats. Flyers promoting their candidacy described them as representing “the damaged justice system, the massacred youth, [and] those who have been tortured,” and, most importantly, it said, “WE ARE HUMAN RIGHTS.”

  They did not get elected, but it was an exciting experience. Velásquez began thinking more about public service through government, which may have influenced his eventual decision to take the inspector general job in 1991. He had refused the job at first, but María Victoria had teased him relentlessly: “Ay mijo” (“Oh my boy”), she said in her sassy style, “aren’t you the one who’s always going on about people’s rights? And now that you have a chance to do something about it, you say no? I guess it was all just talk after all… oh well.” Valle had also encouraged him: Velásquez was perfect for the job, and it would make a world of difference to have someone trustworthy there. Eventually, Velásquez agreed: “I guess I’m stuck: either I look like a hypocrite, or I have to not only take the job, but also do something with it.”

  But as much as he liked and trusted Valle, when Velásquez returned to Medellín after two years away, he was not quite sure what to make of his friend’s accusations about paramilitaries and their links to the military. He was particularly surprised and concerned by the tension between Valle and Governor Uribe, whom Velásquez knew a bit and had once even admired.

  A SLIGHT MAN in his mid-thirties, with perfectly combed and parted hair and a Boy Scout’s look about him, Álvaro Uribe seemed like a different kind of politician from those of Colombia’s past: he had gained notoriety in 1985 when, along with his second cousin Mario Uribe, he had founded a dissident faction of the Liberal Party known as the “democratic sector” of liberalism in Antioquia, rebelling against the traditional patronage system by which the party was run in the state. In those days, it was common for politicians to dole out gifts, promise jobs, or serve alcohol at political events, to encourage voters to vote for them. Senior party officials, rather than voters, decided who would get to run for office or hold positions in government. Uribe, however, refused to engage in patronage; instead, he devoted himself to traveling widely within the state, talking directly to voters, and trying to understand their concerns and address their problems head-on. He developed a reputation as a workaholic. When he took over the governorship, the US embassy in Colombia described him in a cable as “a bright star in the Liberal Party firmament.”

  Like Valle and Velásquez, Uribe had studied law at the University of Antioquia, though Uribe was finishing his studies around the same time that Velásquez was starting his, in 1975. Uribe had been a good student when he attended in the early 1970s, but he had also become deeply involved in the school’s politics, constantly speaking out against protests by an alphabet soup of leftist or anarchist student movements—JUPA, MOIR, IRI, GUB, as well as the ELN—whose protests often led to classes being canceled. María Victoria, Velásquez’s wife, who was a student there in the late 1970s, recalled that for a time, there were people at the university “burning many cars, throwing stones, and things like that.” “One day,” she said, “they burned a car with a nun inside, and even though they tried to open the doors, they were unable to do so. After that, there was a general repudiation. But throughout that time it was more or less the same story: a lot of noise without much structure.” A former classmate of Uribe’s recalled thinking that, given what he viewed as Uribe’s right-wing positions, it was strange that Uribe was attending the university. Uribe surrounded himself with a small group of students with similar views, and he routinely stood up in the middle of protests to object. It was a gutsy and unpopular thing to do, but it earned Uribe a reputation early on for speaking his mind, regardless of the consequences.

  Uribe had grown up in relative comfort between Medellín and the small Antioquia town of Salgar a few hours away, where his family owned land. His father was extremely charismatic—a “snake charmer,” as one of Uribe’s friends put it—but also a demanding rancher who loved horses, parties, and women. Despite some accounts saying that the family was wealthy, people close to Uribe say that his father bought and sold a lot of land, and was a risk-taker, so his wealth fluctuated a great deal. This might explain Uribe’s attendance at the University of Antioquia, a public school. Uribe’s mother was said to have been a strong figure, deeply involved in the women’s suffrage movement, who taught Uribe to recite poetry from Pablo Neruda, as well as speeches by Jorge Eliecer Gaitán and Simón Bolívar, and encouraged his political aspirations. His parents separated in 1964, when Uribe and his four younger siblings were small—by some accounts, the separation was traumatic for the children, especially because marriage break-ups were highly unusual and viewed as shameful in their conservative society. But Uribe seems to have remained close to both his parents, and several people close to him say that he inherited his father’s authoritative temperament, if not the more jovial aspects of his character. Instead, the younger Uribe had acted, since he was very small, as a man with a mission. Friends, relatives, and former teachers remembered that even as a small child, Uribe wanted to be president of Colombia—not out of personal ambition, but because he was utterly committed to the country. One colleague recalled Uribe saying, in the mid-1980s, “I would like, at the end of my days, to look back upon my life and see that I have spent it in the service of the nation.”

  Immediately after finishing law school, Uribe landed a senior management job in Empresas Públicas de Medellín (Medellín Public Enterprises), the city’s public utilities company. It was the first in a string of increasingly high-profile public positions he held, which included, in the early 1980s, serving as director of the national civil aviation agency charged with overseeing and regulating all civilian air travel in the country. He also served a brief stint as mayor of Medellín.

  Despite his advantages, Uribe had also been scarred by Colombia’s conflict. Years later, in his autobiography, he would recount a memory from childhood that mirrored Valle’s own experience during La Violencia: One afternoon, when he was five or six, more than three hundred Liberal Party fighters arrived at his family’s farm demanding food and refuge. “I remember watching as my mother… cooked meals for this gang of men,” he wrote. “I remembe
r watching as my father… talked with these outlaws with guns. And I remember yearning, at the purest, most primal level, to live in a Colombia where armed men would never invade our farm, where my family would all be safe, and where no one would ever have to lock herself inside her home, staring at the door in terror.”

  On June 14, 1983, Uribe’s father, Alberto, was killed by the FARC on one of his ranches, Guacharacas, where Uribe recalls that the family employed forty workers and a butler. His father, Uribe later said, had resisted many extortion attempts by the FARC, and had become increasingly worried about security on the ranch. The day his father was killed, Uribe’s brother Santiago and sister María Isabel were at the ranch with him and several of the workers when a group of FARC members showed up and attempted to kidnap him. He resisted, shooting at them, but the FARC shot him twice, killing him before running away. Santiago was wounded but managed to flee. In his autobiography, years later, Uribe would write eloquently about the terror that the FARC had inflicted on so many Colombians. But, he stressed, he did not believe in revenge. Instead, he wanted to wrest the country back from lawlessness. “The final stage of all this grief,” Uribe wrote, “was not hatred but love: love for my country; love for my countrymen; and love, above all, for a future Colombia where fathers would not be torn away from their daughters and sons.”

  Velásquez’s first impressions of Uribe were very positive. He liked Uribe’s stance against corruption and patronage in the Liberal Party. Uribe was young and democratic, and he seemed like a different, more honest type of politician. María Victoria did not share Velásquez’s admiration: “Uribe said he exited [liberalism] because of corruption. Iván believed him. He thought that that was a dignified, brave position, and that all political movements needed to have people like Uribe, that he was the model to follow.” Many other Medellín residents seemed to agree with Velásquez. But something about Uribe always rubbed María Victoria the wrong way: yes, he was attractive, educated, and sounded good, but his break with the Liberal Party somehow struck her as selfish and ungrateful. That was more of a gut reaction, though, and Velásquez did not share it.

  Velásquez recalled first meeting Uribe in person at a security summit held by the mayor of Medellín in the months after Escobar’s escape from his prison-mansion of La Catedral. The war between Escobar’s people and his enemies was in full swing, with bombs going off or killings happening every day. Uribe, then a senator, was seated next to Velásquez, who was inspector general of Medellín, and leaned over to ask whether there was any way to get Escobar to turn himself in. Velásquez pointed out that the difficulty was that the security forces were under orders to shoot Escobar; Uribe replied that he could bring together all the Antioquia members of congress to surround Escobar while he turned himself in, and in that way ensure his safety. Velásquez agreed that it was worth a try. He approached former Antioquia governor Álvaro Villegas, who lived in the same building as Escobar’s mother-in-law and agreed to help. Through Escobar’s wife, the three men sent the message to the drug lord. A few days later, on December 26, 1992, Escobar wrote a letter to the government offering to turn himself in, though insisting on extreme conditions—all the members of the Police Investigations Unit had to be fired—and making new threats of violence. The letter, which concluded with a note thanking Velásquez, Uribe, and Villegas for their “goodwill,” was leaked to the press, and Los Pepes responded swiftly, setting off multiple bombs on or near properties belonging to Escobar’s relatives. One of the bombs went off near Villegas’s own house, and he was badly injured. The leak of the letter—which, in any case, President Gaviria rejected—and the bombings by Los Pepes derailed the three men’s efforts. Escobar would be dead within the year.

  Velásquez and Uribe did not stay in touch, but Velásquez continued to view Uribe as a serious, committed, and generally progressive man, even if they didn’t agree on everything. Since becoming governor, however, Uribe seemed to have taken a turn toward the right, becoming much more militaristic and aggressive in his approach to security in the region, and particularly to fighting the FARC guerrillas. Velásquez was particularly concerned about a program the national government had authorized by decree a few years before, in 1994. The decree allowed groups of people in “high-risk” areas, where the military might have trouble providing support, to apply for licenses to provide private security services in those regions. The decree also authorized the groups, known as “Convivirs” (for Cooperativas de Vigilancia y Seguridad Privada, which means Private Cooperatives for Vigilance and Security), to use weapons that would normally be restricted to the military and law enforcement. In theory, the groups would not engage in combat, but rather would serve as a sort of “watch committee.” They were to be in regular contact with the authorities, reporting suspicious activity.

  The decree allowing the Convivir program had been controversial from the start. Some officials were afraid that it would simply create a new way for the military to legally establish paramilitary groups. In the 1960s and 1970s, the Colombian government had passed decrees and laws allowing the Colombian military to arm civilians to establish self-defense forces, supposedly to defend themselves from the guerrillas. But a number of those groups, in the 1970s and 1980s, had become powerful criminal enterprises, especially in the Middle Magdalena region along the Magdalena River and in the town of Puerto Boyacá, where they had begun committing heinous murders and massacres with military support. By the mid-1980s, the paramilitary group known as the Association of Middle Magdalena Ranchers and Farmers (Asociación Campesina de Ganaderos y Agricultores del Magdalena Medio, or ACDEGAM) was also working closely with drug traffickers—Gonzalo Rodríguez Gacha, aka “The Mexican,” a powerful member of the Medellín cartel, underwrote them. In the midst of the bloodshed of the late 1980s, Colombia’s government had passed new laws criminalizing the establishment of groups of assassins or death squads and suspended decree provisions that had allowed the military to arm civilians. But the 1994 decree, and regulations issued by President Ernesto Samper’s administration allowing the establishment of the Convivirs, had created a new opening for government support of “self-defense” groups—and Governor Uribe enthusiastically embraced them.

  In a later interview, former president Samper would say that he had viewed the Convivirs as “a space in which citizens could organize their own defense in a peaceful manner, but [Uribe] began to use them as an instrument of war, blindly defending them.” Dozens of Convivirs sprouted up throughout Antioquia, with strong support from the governor, who portrayed the Convivir program as a harmless and legitimate way for civilians to cooperate with the military to further peace. Uribe’s chief of staff, Pedro Juan Moreno, a businessman on the far right known for his quick temper and tendency to use harsh language and insult people, regularly held meetings with Convivir leaders and Fourth Brigade members to coordinate the provision of security and intelligence in the region. By 1997, according to one estimate, there were about 414 Convivir groups operating throughout the country with more than 120,000 members. Seventy-eight of those groups were in Antioquia.

  The media, human rights organizations, and even the United Nations became increasingly critical of the Convivirs, especially in 1997. Samper’s original decree had raised concerns about the risk the government was taking, if it was seen as supporting death squads, but Uribe’s aggressive implementation of the program was, in the eyes of many, confirmation of their worst fears, particularly as reports began to surface of Convivir members becoming involved in criminal activity. Uribe brushed off their concerns. “People imagine that the Convivirs are private, armed armies,” he said to one news outlet in November 1997. “If only they knew how they operate in Antioquia.… [T]heir experience has shown the people of Antioquia that what’s really needed is solidarity, in working jointly with public security forces and providing timely information.” Convivir members who committed crimes should be brought to justice, he argued, but that didn’t mean the whole program was flawed.

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p; Uribe’s backing for the Convivirs generated a great deal of criticism, but it also garnered him support in much of Antioquia—including from Velásquez’s father. In arguments, Alberto Velásquez, who looked like an older, white-haired and blue-eyed version of Velásquez, kept going back to the same position, one that was reflected in some local papers and had become the talking points of some politicians: The country needed to find a way to strengthen security in the countryside. It was simply intolerable for farmers, landowners, and businesses to be constantly subject to the FARC’s threats, extortion, and kidnapping. Lands were being lost, businesses shutting down. The highways were becoming so dangerous—because any minute you could be stopped by a FARC patrol and taken for ransom—that many people were choosing to give up travel entirely. For God’s sake, the FARC were in Medellín itself, hiding out in plain sight, dressed as civilians. What was so wrong with the government supporting citizens who were simply trying to defend themselves? Something had to give!

  Velásquez would sigh, getting increasingly irritated. He knew his father was exceedingly proud of him, and he had picked up a lot of his father’s attitudes: the value of reading, hard work, and study; his disgust with officials who took bribes and broke the public’s trust; his belief that, even when they were flawed, it was more important to try to make institutions of government work than to tear them down. But they parted ways on most policy matters. His father was so attached to protecting what he viewed as the country’s established institutions (the Catholic Church, the military, business), and maintaining—or imposing—order, that he often ended up taking radical positions that Velásquez found appalling. For example, his father was still a great admirer of Laureano Gómez, a highly controversial figure who had led Colombia’s Conservative Party from the 1930s to the 1960s, and who was known to sympathize with fascist governments, like Hitler’s in Germany and Franco’s in Spain.