Valle and Amparo had immediately started calling all the authorities they could, trying to get someone to stop the paramilitaries on their way into town. They each called the Fourth Brigade, separately, but were told that because there were going to be elections on Sunday, all the troops were being confined to their barracks. They tried calling the police and the governor’s office, but with the elections pending, they could get no answers.
Municipal officials from Ituango also later stated that they had been in touch with El Aro community members as the massacre was getting underway, and that as early as Sunday, October 26, while the massacre was in full swing, they had tried to get the attention of the governor’s office, the army, and the police. But the governor’s office only promised to hold a meeting about it three days later, the army said it had no troops available, and the police said they were under orders not to send any officers to rural areas because of security concerns. Meanwhile, the paramilitaries were free to continue their theft, murder, and destruction over several days.
As survivors of the massacre fled to Yarumal, Puerto Valdivia, and Medellín, Valle, along with Amparo and others, started collecting their stories, though Valle’s trips to Ituango had to be very brief, as he himself was a target. Amparo had seen military helicopters land in Yarumal after the massacre, and she had been told the paramilitaries were on them.
Valle tried to convince survivors to tell their stories to prosecutors and other people who might do something about it. Many were terrified, but Valle kept saying that if only they told their stories, justice might be slow, but it would eventually come. At one meeting he organized in Medellín, with representatives of the Organization of American States, Amparo was surprised to see how, as survivors started to tell their stories, “pain turned into courage.” The more they heard each other speak, the more emboldened they became.
Still, they were running enormous risks. Soon after she made her statement to the criminal investigators, Amparo heard that the report had somehow been shared with authorities in the town of Yarumal, where she lived, and that “Junior,” the paramilitary from El Aro, had been seen in local government offices reviewing her statement. Around the same time, she noticed a skinny young man who seemed to be monitoring her, and she started getting threatening phone calls from a man claiming to be her father’s killer, who said she should leave town “or we will chop you up just like we did with him.” She fled to Medellín, where she kept meeting with Valle, but even there, as she waited for the bus one day, she once again saw the skinny man, who snatched her purse and told her he had been ordered to kill her, but he didn’t want to do so.
Meanwhile, Valle had been doing his best to get the word out about what he was learning. He began saying publicly that witnesses had seen military helicopters flying over El Aro during the massacre. Once again, he accused the military of conspiring with the paramilitaries. A few days after the massacre, Governor Uribe called for a “security meeting” with representatives of the army and Valle. The Fourth Brigade’s commander, Carlos Ospina, denied Valle’s charges that the military was involved, saying the army had tried to help the community, but that its helicopters had been unable to arrive at the site in time to do so. But Valle didn’t buy the story. In a sworn statement before a court in early 1998, he repeated his earlier accusations about the military’s complicity: “The paramilitary groups could not commit so many abuses, kill so many persons, sow terror among my people if it weren’t for the colluding behavior of the army.”
MILADIS HAD NEVER met Valle, though she had heard a lot about him from others in the community, and viewed him as “the only one” who stood up for them in that whole time, by insisting on telling the truth. She and her family had lost nearly everything in the massacre: Wilmar, their home, their land, their animals, their entire way of life. Like millions of other Colombians who, fleeing the paramilitaries, flocked to the outskirts of Medellín, Bogotá, and other major cities, they did their best to build new lives for themselves. With help from Miladis’s older brother, the family moved into a tiny house in Puerto Valdivia. They had trouble getting by—the government offered them no assistance—and after a year, they decided to move back to El Aro, which was essentially a ghost town. They tried to rebuild, but in 2004 and 2005, small groups of armed paramilitaries started going through the town again, stealing small things—good clothes, deodorants, hand lotion—as well as mules. After everything Miladis and her family had gone through, they could not stay and wait for another massacre. They fled again, never to return.
CHAPTER 4
FOR THOSE WHO SPEAK THE TRUTH
IVÁN VELÁSQUEZ PUSHED HIS WAY through the throng in front of the worn four-story building, the Colón, where Jesús María Valle kept his modest legal office. Ordinarily, he would not personally visit a murder scene—that’s what criminal investigators did. As chief prosecutor, Velásquez reviewed the evidence they collected, directed their next steps, and crafted legal arguments from behind his desk.
But this was a special case.
“They didn’t kill a man. They killed the dignity of Antioquia!” a man proclaimed outside the building. He was bony and pale, glasses perched atop a prominent nose and full mustache, and seemed to be holding back tears as he raised his arms. He was one of many mourners standing awkwardly among the downtown crowds, paying little heed to the afternoon sun pounding down on them, or to the street vendors hawking the usual dried packets of herbs, T-shirts, knock-offs of brand-name purses, and fresh fruit. TV crews and photographers were also on the scene, holding out microphones and cameras, eager to be the first to catch the latest tidbit of information about the attack.
At the entrance to the Colón, Velásquez drily greeted the police officers guarding the perimeter before stepping in. His eyes adjusted as he strode through the dim, narrow corridor past the front desk. Ignoring the creaky elevator, Velásquez climbed the three flights of stairs to the hallway leading to No. 405.
VALLE’S SPARROW-LIKE sister, Nelly, who had been his secretary for years, had first noticed her big brother was afraid in December 1997, two months after the El Aro massacre. At the end of the workday, Valle would look over his shoulder as they got into a taxi. He asked her to keep her son from watching TV in a room with a window overlooking the street, which he felt was too exposed. At one point, he urged her to find some other place to live. She had been hurt, thinking he was mad at her: she didn’t realize it was because he didn’t want her to be there when they killed him.
Velásquez and J. Guillermo Escobar had tried to convince Valle to seek protection: Valle was getting a lot of public exposure in the media, and his accusations against the military were the kind of statements, thought Velásquez, that got you killed. Valle’s campaign was also making many people, not only members of the military, increasingly angry. As Velásquez waited to enter a meeting at the governor’s office one day, he overheard Uribe’s deputy, businessman Pedro Juan Moreno, speaking mockingly about Valle as “that nut-case with his accusations.” Later on, Velásquez recalled that there had been “huge hostility by Pedro Juan and Uribe toward Valle. The minute Valle made an accusation, which he would make public through the newspaper El Colombiano, or radio stations, there would be a strong reaction from the military or the governorship.”
International human rights organizations offered to buy Valle an airplane ticket out of the country. Even if it was just for six months, Velásquez and J. Guillermo argued, he should go—at least until things calmed down a bit. But Valle refused.
Why would Valle stay, knowing he might get killed? Years later, Velásquez agreed that it was hard to understand. But Valle was one of those people, he said, who “could die of sadness if he fled—no, more than sadness, shame.” For someone as attached to his people as Valle was, leaving was not an option: “When he talked about ‘my town,’ ‘my people,’ he wasn’t speaking rhetorically. He was talking about his people.”
So Valle continued taking taxis to his office and walking from there t
o the courthouses and prosecutors’ offices for hearings and meetings. At least, Velásquez and J. Guillermo agreed, they would try to get him some bodyguards.
With the exception of his closest friends, few people continued to associate with him; many of his acquaintances now kept their distance. Valle started getting phone calls from people who would then hang up—threats, or perhaps attempts by his enemies to keep tabs on him. But Valle was also filled with indignation: after his fight with Uribe and the Fourth Brigade over his claims about links between the military and the paramilitaries, “he had no more peace,” recalled Gloria Manco, a former student of Valle’s who was close to the activist. “He had his moments of reading—he was a man who loved books—but after that point he didn’t have those pleasures. His last days were supremely difficult, because he could not derive joy even from the smallest things.”
ON FEBRUARY 6, 1998, Valle had given a statement to prosecutors from Velásquez’s office who were investigating the El Aro massacre. He had not minced words in his description of those he considered responsible for the massacre:
I always saw, and understood, that there was something like a tacit agreement… cleverly arranged between the commander of the Fourth Brigade, the commander of the Antioquia Police, Dr. Álvaro Uribe Vélez, Dr. Pedro Juan Moreno, and Carlos Castaño [the chief of the ACCU]. All the power of the self-defense groups has become consolidated because of the support this group has received from people linked to the government, the military establishment, the police establishment, and to well-known ranchers and bankers from Antioquia and the country.… Because of the failure to act by Álvaro Uribe and Pedro Juan Moreno, I understood that in those three years there was an alliance in Antioquia that, with the pretext of acting against the guerrillas, had attacked the defenseless civilian population and had strengthened the drug trade.
Valle had also continued to fight the slander lawsuit that the Fourth Brigade member had started against him several months earlier: he wanted to use the lawsuit as a way to force the courts to investigate what was happening in Ituango. So on Thursday, February 26, 1998, at 2:30 p.m., he and Gloria Manco, who was representing him in the suit, went to the office of the local prosecutor (not under Velásquez’s jurisdiction) handling the slander suit, and Valle repeated his earlier statements, only in greater detail: since September 1996, he said, there had been a paramilitary group operating right outside the town of Ituango, very close to where the army’s Fourth Brigade and the police were based. Valle recalled that he had written to Governor Uribe, his chief of staff Pedro Juan Moreno, and former Fourth Brigade commander Alfonso Manosalva to request protection for the community, “but I found no answer,” he said. Given how openly the paramilitary group operated—more than forty members, carrying rifles, had moved around the edge of the town—he believed they had to be enjoying the backing of the army and the police. He then recalled how, as councilman for Ituango, he had received information about how the paramilitaries worked jointly with the army: one would arrive, and the other would always be right behind. “That’s why the La Granja massacre happened, as well as the deaths of what I estimate to be more than 150 people who were taken out of their homes, tortured, disappeared, and killed, and that’s why the massacre in El Aro happened,” Valle said. He added that he knew the chief prosecutor’s office wanted to get in there to pick up the bodies, but that they couldn’t because the military would not cooperate by providing helicopters. Not only that: “In El Aro, the peasants have said that army helicopters were present, which should be investigated. That’s why I am saying that the army will not cooperate with prosecutors to even pick up the bodies.”
As for the specific events that were the subject of the lawsuit—Valle’s televised claim that the army had forced an Ituango driver to carry wounded paramilitaries with them in his car—he repeated his allegations and urged the prosecutor to try to determine who the paramilitaries and army members were in that case. Ultimately, Valle said, so long as prosecutors investigated “why my people are living in the shadow of terror, and how the peasants I knew as a child walking through the paths and small towns have died and their bodies have been dismembered,” he would be at peace even if he was convicted.
After Valle made his statement, Gloria recalled, an official asked him why he hadn’t just kept quiet. He blew up, furious: this, she recalled him saying, was why Colombia was the way it was—because the criminals had officials as their middlemen. How could someone ask him to keep quiet, when their rivers were bathed in blood? To Valle, Gloria said, suggesting that he remain quiet “was the worst insult anyone could have given him.”
THE MORNING OF Friday, February 27, 1998, Nelly and Valle went into the office together. She took calls while he spoke to students and clients. She stepped out for lunch alone—he had too much work. While she was away, Valle took a call from Carlos Jaramillo, one of his Ituango contacts, with whom he regularly met, along with Amparo Areiza, to hear about what was going on in the region. They had helped him piece together what had happened in El Aro and identify links between paramilitaries and the military. According to Jaramillo, the paramilitaries were also receiving support from two brothers, the Angulos, who he said ran a cocaine-processing lab and operated some of their drug-trafficking business in Ituango. In his later statement to prosecutors, Jaramillo would say that when he called, Valle immediately invited him to come by the office. After greeting the doorman, Jaramillo took the elevator up, and Valle let him into the office, where the two started drinking coffee and chatting as usual. Jaramillo remembered one statement that struck him from their conversation: at some point, Valle said, “They haven’t killed me because they haven’t wanted to. Whenever they want, they can kill me, and nothing will happen.”
WHEN SHE CAME back from lunch, Nelly saw two men at the door. They were wearing suits and ties and carrying briefcases. Thinking they were clients, she unlocked the door to the little reception area that led into Valle’s office. But as Nelly started to go into the office to greet her brother, the men shoved past her, pushing her into a chair across from Valle, who looked startled for a second. Then, realizing what was about to happen, Valle turned to his sister and held her gaze firmly: “Stay calm, Nelly, we’re here now.”
He let the men grab him. At some point, a woman slipped into the office and helped them tie Nelly and Jaramillo up on the floor near the door. Then one of the men pulled out a gun and put something on it: a silencer. Be quiet, one of them hissed. They forced Valle to lie face-down on the floor in a corner of his office, next to the window, and tied him up there by his hands and feet.
Nelly couldn’t tear her eyes away from Valle’s face as one of the men put the gun to her brother’s head. She screamed when they shot him.
VELÁSQUEZ KNEW WHAT to expect when he got to Valle’s office later that afternoon, but the sight of his friend was still jarring. Valle’s boulder-like figure remained unmistakable even as he lay face-down, crumpled on the floor by his desk. Dark blood confused itself with his thick hair and navy blue suit. His arms lay twisted into an arc behind him—later on, Velásquez would hear that the killers had used Valle’s own shoelaces to tie his thumbs together before shooting him twice on the left side of his head.
That calm and strong voice that so many had relied upon to speak the truth, and which so many in power had dismissed, was now silenced for good.
PART II
THE HUNT
MEDELLÍN, COLOMBIA, 1998–1999
CHAPTER 5
THE INVESTIGATORS
“YOU WOULDN’T BELIEVE SOME OF the cases,” J. Guillermo Escobar said to Iván Velásquez. The two men sat smoking in Velásquez’s seventh-floor office in the concrete government complex known as “La Alpujarra” in downtown Medellín. La Alpujarra had little to recommend it—the clutch of gray, characterless buildings struck a somber note in the middle of a hectic city that, despite the daily string of murders, was still colorful and very much alive. But his surroundings were the last thing on Velásquez�
�s mind.
His boss in Bogotá, Attorney General Alfonso Gómez Méndez, had instructed Velásquez that one of his top priorities as chief prosecutor was to investigate a large number of gruesome massacres and killings in Antioquia and Córdoba in which the paramilitaries were involved—previous prosecutors had made little headway in the cases. Because he needed someone he could trust to take the lead on these cases, Velásquez had asked J. Guillermo, his close friend and former thesis adviser, who was on the verge of retirement, to join him as a prosecutor, to coordinate the paramilitary cases.
They had started by taking an inventory of the case files involving paramilitaries that were littering the office, unsolved and, in many cases, untouched for months. In the case files involving the left-wing guerrillas, in contrast, there were signs that prosecutors had taken testimony, ordered searches and arrests, and even completed investigations. It wasn’t clear yet whether the difference had to do with the relative difficulty of investigating the cases and the support they got from security forces and police, or lack of interest, fear, or corruption among prosecutors and investigators.
“I just found one file that’s all about body parts: heads, arms, legs,” continued J. Guillermo. The case records showed that the paramilitaries in the town of Puerto Berrío, on the banks of the Magdalena River, had collected all the bodies of people they killed, dismembered them, and then piled them up into a series of pyramids. He was particularly offended by how previous prosecutors had labeled the file: the case of the “big sausages.” Other than that, they had apparently done virtually nothing to pursue the case.
There Are No Dead Here Page 7