There Are No Dead Here

by Maria McFarland Sánchez-Moreno

  Pérez found Villalba to be a puzzling witness: she viewed him as a “cold being,” and “very strange.” Based on what she knew about the cases, she believed he often lied. But other statements he made did fit the evidence she was finding—including his statements about the involvement of the military, as well as his identification of other paramilitaries involved.

  Much later, Amparo Areiza would learn that Villalba had admitted to being the man who had tortured and killed her father. When she saw his image, she immediately recognized him: this was the skinny man who had repeatedly threatened her, and finally told her that he didn’t want to kill her.

  ANOTHER WITNESS GAVE Pérez an important lead connected to the Padilla raid. The witness was a former member of one of the Convivirs who said he had realized that his Convivir, called Nuevo Horizonte (New Horizon), was in fact a front for the paramilitaries, and that its members were killing people. So he had gone to the CTI and begun helping Pérez on a number of cases, including that of Pichilín. As she started interviewing him one day, she recalled, he made a casual comment: “Ay doctor, what a blow they dealt to the paramilitaries in Medellín…” She paused. What did he mean? The witness explained: the man they had arrested in the Padilla parking-lot shack, Jacinto Alberto Soto, was no mere accountant. He was the man known by his alias as “Lucas,” a heavyweight in the ACCU whose alias had come up repeatedly on the wiretapped calls from the safe house. Lucas was the group’s chief for finances, and someone very close to Castaño himself. Pérez got a portrait sketched based on the witness’s verbal description and sent it along to Velásquez.

  CHAPTER 7

  “THINGS THAT CAN’T BE INVESTIGATED”

  TRAFFIC WAS HEAVY THAT FRIDAY, May 8, 1998, but twenty-nine-year-old investigator Augusto Botero was finally nearing the university on his Yamaha motorcycle. As usual, the streets were choked with smoke-spewing buses, decrepit taxis, the occasional expensive truck or SUV with tinted windows, and mobs of pedestrians who took their lives in their hands by throwing themselves across the street whenever they saw a small opening in the sea of vehicles.

  Since the days of Pablo Escobar, motorcycles had had a sinister image in Medellín, since assassins so often used them. It was easy for a shooter to conceal a weapon under clothes while sitting in the back, holding onto the driver, and motorcycles made great getaway vehicles, as they could cut through the congested traffic easily. But they were also everywhere, as they were cheap and fast. So driving through town was a hair-raising experience, not only because of the risk of accidents, but also—especially if you might be a target for one of the city’s armed groups—because you never could be sure whether a motorcycle coming up behind you carried a killer or just another person trying to get to work. Still, the motorcycle made sense for Botero, who needed to get around fast if he wanted to keep up with both his day job as a CTI agent and his accounting studies at the university.

  As he got farther away from downtown, traffic eased up a bit, and the area got prettier, more residential, lined by palm trees and the other lush foliage reminding visitors that, yes, they were in the tropics. Botero pulled up at a light at Forty-First Avenue and Fifty-Third Street—only a few more blocks to go before he got to school.

  He had so much on his mind that he probably didn’t even notice the killers pulling up beside him on the other motorcycle. Shots rang out and Botero’s motorcycle swerved sharply, crashing into a tree. The assassins made sure to finish the job, following his bike and shooting him six more times by a tree. It was barely more than a week after the Padilla raid.

  Botero had been one of two CTI investigators whom Gregorio Oviedo had assigned to Jesús María Valle’s murder, because he had a reputation for being clean. He had also been working with Amelia Pérez on the investigation into the murder of CTI agent Jaime Piedrahita, in connection with Pérez’s work on the Upegui case. So it seemed pretty obvious that the paramilitaries, or people linked to them, had ordered his killing, though it was hard to pinpoint exactly why. Another agent, Julio César González, who worked in the wiretapping room of the CTI, had died a few days earlier, in a supposed fight in Bello, and Oviedo was sure that he, too, had been assassinated.

  Around that time, another CTI agent approached Oviedo: “Boss,” Oviedo recalled him saying, “a source told me that the killings are based on a list of thirteen CTI members. Your name is at the top of the list.” According to the source, the killings were being carried out by the La Terraza gang, which was working with the Envigado Office. Botero and González had both been on the list.

  The threat to his life, Oviedo concluded, was now too serious. He asked for a transfer. Meanwhile, for security, he started to sleep in a different safe house every night. He barely went into the office, and was constantly on the move.

  ON JUNE 10, 1998, a disheveled Sergio Humberto Parra walked into Oviedo’s office, looking worried. Parra had been receiving death threats ever since he’d participated in that first operation, in which they’d stopped the paramilitaries’ truck full of military uniforms. Earlier that day, he had also noticed a white Mazda following him. There was a little office party going on, so he and Oviedo chatted a bit while having a drink, and then Parra decided to go home. It was around 9:30 p.m.

  A few minutes later, another agent ran into the party: Parra had been hit. He had been sitting in his gray Renault 12, stopped at a red light, when two men had gotten out of a parked green pickup truck and walked up to the front of his vehicle on either side. Before he could react, they had let fly a barrage of bullets into the windshield, hitting him sixteen times and eventually killing him.

  Parra had been right, Oviedo concluded. They were both dead men.

  ONE MONDAY NIGHT in June, Iván Velásquez hurried over to the house where Oviedo was staying with more bad news. A young woman he knew had come into his office that day to tell him about a conversation she had overheard while having lunch with her father on Sunday at one of the clubs that many of the city’s prominent businessmen frequented. Velásquez explained: “A man, who she thinks was a rancher, was telling a group of people that you, Gregorio Oviedo, are ‘screwing with them,’ and that they ‘have finally decided to take action.’ She says that the man also said that they had ‘already taken down one of them,’ apparently referring to Sergio’s [Parra’s] death, and said that you only escaped his fate that weekend because you were traveling in Bogotá at the time.” The two stayed up late into the night, discussing what to do. The answer was clear: Oviedo couldn’t delay his departure any further. He had to leave town.

  The very next day, Oviedo got a radio message from one of his agents: “Santacruz 901.” It was code, meaning that an agent was down. Two assassins had killed yet another CTI investigator, Tomas Santacruz, as he was getting out of a taxi near downtown Medellín.

  That week, Oviedo went back to Bogotá.

  J. GUILLERMO ESCOBAR was walking into the court building in Medellín when a young man stopped him. His appearance—entirely bald, covered in freckles, with a wild look in his eyes—was striking, but J. Guillermo was even more surprised by what the young man said: “Master J. Guillermo, I accuse society and defend the mother.” He was quoting a phrase J. Guillermo himself had written in a law journal article about one of his past cases.

  “I see you’re an intelligent man, because you remember this woman’s case,” said J. Guillermo, reaching out to shake his hand.

  The young man introduced himself as “Edward,” and J. Guillermo asked him where he worked.

  “What if I told you that I’m not a lawyer but an assassin?” asked the young man.

  “I wouldn’t believe it,” said J. Guillermo. “You look like a lawyer, and you have read legal articles. Where is your office?”

  The young man paused, pointing to a nearby building.

  J. Guillermo nodded: “Ah, you’re not an assassin but a lawyer.”

  The young man hurried off. In discussing the incident later with Velásquez and Diego Arcila, both agreed with J. Guil
lermo that the young man was indeed an assassin, and that he had approached J. Guillermo to intimidate him, in an effort to derail his investigations.

  J. Guillermo believed that his coordination with prosecutor Carlos Bonilla in the investigation of Valle’s murder was probably the root of the threats against them. He and Bonilla had been making progress in the Valle case: they had discovered, for example, that the day before Valle’s murder, the army’s Fourth Brigade and the police had suddenly decided to “disarm” their forces and withdraw from important parts of the city the following afternoon—soon after Valle’s murder. Had the killers counted on that to make their escape easier? They had also found witnesses who had identified the killers as members of the La Terraza gang, tied to the paramilitaries. Witnesses had spoken of the involvement of someone called the “Ñato,” and had said that the Angulo brothers, powerful landowners from Ituango who were suspected of drug trafficking and of collaborating with Castaño, had been complicit in Valle’s death.

  J. Guillermo often got a ride in Bonilla’s car, and he had noticed that they were routinely being followed: men were taking photographs and videotaping them as they drove. They would be walking down the street and notice that someone right ahead of them was waiting, and would start to walk in the same direction. At one point, J. Guillermo had picked up the phone to hear a cold voice telling him that he was conducting an investigation that he had to stop immediately. Otherwise, they wouldn’t kill him, but they would kill “the daughter who lives on the third floor.” The person calling him clearly knew that J. Guillermo’s grown daughter lived with her husband and two children on the third floor of his building.

  J. Guillermo warned his daughter that she was at risk, and soon afterward, she told him that someone had followed her when she was coming out of the University of Antioquia, where she was studying special education. Two days later, she and her husband stopped the car they were in so he could run into a store half a block from their house. Another car pulled up alongside theirs, and a bald, freckled man gave her a look. “That’s not her,” she overheard him saying, before he left.

  The next day, J. Guillermo had her leave the university, and he made arrangements for her and her family to flee the country.

  J. Guillermo, however, stayed on. He could not leave his work: it was “a mission for justice,” he told his wife. And she agreed.

  Carlos Bonilla, however, could not stay. Investigators listening to a wire had learned of a specific plan to have Bonilla assassinated. He left Colombia soon afterward.

  MEANWHILE, JAVIER TAMAYO, the young prosecutor who had roomed with Oviedo, had been conducting investigations into the Envigado Office and La Terraza. At one point, a police officer who had gone to school with him warned him that he had obtained information about a prosecutor who was investigating the Envigado Office: members of the office were planning to seize the prosecutor, torture him, and kill him. Tamayo was sure the officer meant him.

  One of the targets of Tamayo’s investigations was a man named Alexander Londoño, who was better known as “El Zarco.” El Zarco was both extremely good-looking and extremely vicious. He was said to have been an assassin for Pablo Escobar, and he had later become a senior member—and top assassin—for La Terraza, which at the time was working hand in hand with the Envigado Office and the paramilitaries. Working with CTI investigators, Tamayo had been wiretapping El Zarco’s phone—it was a real coup. But then they realized that El Zarco had figured out who Tamayo was. In one of his calls, they overheard him ask about the prosecutor, how tough he was, and whether he followed a regular schedule.

  Tamayo began to carry a loaded gun with him, just in case.

  But the weapon was of no use when, one night, he walked into his apartment building late to learn that two assassins had just left, after murdering the building’s security guard and dumping his body next to Tamayo’s car. Tamayo read the incident not as a botched attempt on his life, but rather, as an effort to intimidate him.

  MARÍA VICTORIA VELÁSQUEZ waited alone at the elevator bank on the first floor of her office building—strangely, hardly anyone was there that day. She had just finished lunch near the Medellín personería, a municipal office charged with looking out for city residents’ rights, where she had been working for several years. She liked taking the elevators at the end of the bank, which were reserved for staff only, because, while less attractive, they were usually less crowded than the others, though at lunchtime there was normally some traffic on all of them.

  Finally, one of the staff elevators opened and María Victoria got on, ready to head up to her office on the eleventh floor. One person joined her, a medium-sized man with wavy hair. She was surprised—she didn’t recognize him, and he didn’t look like most other people who worked in the building, though later she couldn’t remember much about his face, as she deliberately tried to forget it. It was a small elevator that could not fit more than ten people, squeezed tightly. The doors closed and it was just them.

  María Victoria waited to go up to her office, but the elevator didn’t stop on her floor. Instead, it went all the way to the top floor, and then started to go down again. What was wrong with the elevator? Suddenly it dawned on her: he had locked it with a key.

  And then the man started to talk to her. “You know there are things that can’t be investigated. You’re not deaf,” he said. He told her that she could not keep pretending she didn’t understand what was happening: “When we send a message, it’s a message.”

  She stared at the man in silence, but she knew what he meant. For weeks, she had been keeping the threats to herself: The phone would ring, and she would hear a funeral dirge on the other end of the line. One time she received a funeral wreath with a card that she immediately tore up and threw into the garbage. “I didn’t want to know what that was,” she said years later. But she knew that they were threats against her husband: the killers had probably figured out that the best way to get to him was through his family.

  María Victoria had also grown suspicious and tense around her colleagues. She recalled that one of them, who claimed to be friendly with Gustavo Upegui, the former Los Pepes member and businessman whom Pérez was investigating, kept telling her: “They’re going to kill your husband, María Victoria.”

  “Why would you say that?” she’d ask.

  “You have to be careful,” the colleague would say. “Your husband needs to slow down. He has no idea about all those dark forces around here. Tell Iván not to get involved in all these things. I’m very afraid to be your colleague, you know more than anyone that they can set a bomb here and we’re done.”

  Other times, her colleague would just say: “I don’t know if your husband is brave or stupid. Maybe he doesn’t value his family.” María Victoria was left confused: Was he trying to help her as a friend and colleague, or was he delivering a threat?

  María Victoria had kept all the calls, the flowers, and the comments from her colleague secret—she knew that if she shared the threats with Velásquez, he would feel he had to quit his job, to protect his family. She also knew that quitting would be devastating to him. So she said nothing.

  But on the elevator, the horror of it all engulfed her, pounding on her like an inescapable, angry wave. Even though the man never touched her, to María Victoria, the experience felt like torture: going up and down the floors of the building, with no escape, while this man made what she clearly understood to be death threats against her husband.

  He kept talking for what felt like an eternity: “We know what you don’t know. We know what you do, what you eat, everything, we know everything. So tell him: that’s enough.”

  She had no idea how long they had been in the locked elevator when the man suddenly pulled the keys out of the elevator controls and pressed a button. When they got to the ninth floor, he got off, and with the door open, said goodbye to her, affectionately adding, “but we’ll see each other in English class.” María Victoria stared, unable to move. She had just paid fo
r a full course in English.

  María Victoria never told Velásquez about any of it. Not the calls. Not her colleague’s comments. Not even what the man on the elevator said. Velásquez would never quit out of fear for his own well-being, and she didn’t want him to do so out of fear for her or the children.

  María Victoria also avoided telling anyone in her own family about it at the time. She had grown so accustomed to keeping things to herself that it just seemed like the best thing. Why alarm anyone?

  She couldn’t always keep her emotions in check, though, and would sometimes break out crying at work. Concerned colleagues would ask: Is Velásquez mistreating you? What’s wrong? She couldn’t even begin to explain.

  From then on, she developed an intense phobia of elevators. To this day, she would much rather climb many flights of stairs than get on an elevator. Velásquez was unaware of the threats María Victoria had received, and he put all thoughts of danger to himself out of his mind. The way he later described his feelings about it, it sounded like he didn’t just compartmentalize the fear: he deliberately banished it from his mind.

  CHAPTER 8

  THE ENEMY WITHIN

  IVÁN VELÁSQUEZ WAS SMOKING ALL the time now, up to three packs a day sometimes. To others, he continued to appear calm. But the killings of the investigators, the loss of his father and Jesús María Valle, the difficulty of working in a place where he could never be entirely sure whom to trust, and now Gregorio Oviedo’s departure, all within the space of just six months, had taken their toll.

  At the same time, Velásquez knew that the threats and attacks on his team were happening because they were making progress against the paramilitaries. The arrest of Jacinto Alberto Soto, aka “Lucas,” and the discovery of the records in the Padilla shack must have dealt them a serious financial blow, and Velásquez was convinced that, if they continued working at it, he and his team could crack open the ACCU’s organizational structure, and eventually arrest its leadership and powerful backers. He had to continue.