There Are No Dead Here

by Maria McFarland Sánchez-Moreno

  To succeed, he would need a strong team; with Oviedo gone, he was again facing the problem of whom to trust in the CTI. Velásquez knew he could count on Jorge Fernández, Oviedo’s deputy, and he had hoped Pablo Elías González, the national CTI director, would appoint Fernández to lead the regional office. Instead, González named a man named Fernando Márquez, who immediately struck Velásquez as a problem—in their early interactions, Velásquez thought Márquez seemed more concerned about keeping bureaucratic control of the investigations than in cooperating to make them succeed. The progress that Oviedo had been making seemed to stall. Worse yet, on July 31, 1998, Jorge Fernández received notice that he was fired, though no explanation was provided (González later did not remember Fernández being fired, and instead said maybe the agent resigned). To Velásquez, it made no sense. Fernández had been a brave, reliable, and honest agent. There was no reason to let go of him.

  So Velásquez put in a request to the main office in Bogotá for an entirely new arrangement: he wanted to have a small, specialized team of CTI investigators assigned to work directly within the prosecutors’ office, under his supervision, on the cases involving paramilitaries. The arrangement would not only allow them to work more efficiently, but also provide greater security to the CTI investigators they trusted, as it would be harder for corrupt investigators in the CTI to know and report on their movements. The prosecutors’ office also had access to more resources—more bulletproof cars, for example—to protect them.

  It was a big ask, but he insisted, and finally Bogotá agreed. The new team, which included wiretapping expert and former seminarian Diego Arcila, started working with Velásquez shortly afterward.

  A DOOR SWUNG open and a man in his early thirties emerged into the outdoors. The slightly pudgy, five-foot-nine man in blue jeans looked fairly harmless, unusual in Colombia only in that his eyes were green and he had a small scar, one and a half inches long, above his right eyebrow. It was September 29, 1998, and Jacinto Alberto Soto, aka Lucas, had spent over four months in the maximum-security unit of Bellavista prison in Medellín. During that time, Velásquez’s prosecutors had repeatedly interviewed him, and Lucas had admitted to being a member of the paramilitaries for the past two years, and to managing some of the accounting for the paramilitaries from early on. He also claimed he had no alias. But the prosecutors knew, in part because of what Amelia Pérez’s witness had said about Lucas being the paramilitaries’ finance chief, that he was holding back. They would never learn what else he might have to say, though. Lucas left Bellavista through the front door and vanished.

  Eleven days earlier, on September 18, Velásquez’s office had received a telegram from the National Directorate of Prosecutors’ Offices in Bogotá, which ordered the transfer of the Padilla case to a Bogotá prosecutor’s office. “We were still in the process of going through the accounts, and doing other investigative activities, confirming facts,” recalled Velásquez. “But we were facing several logistical and personnel challenges, and that is what Bogotá took advantage of—instead of strengthening our investigation with additional resources and a support team, they decided to order the transfer.”

  The attorney general at the time, Alfonso Gómez Méndez, did not later recall the details of the transfer, but remembered that there had been a problem with paramilitary infiltration of the local CTI office. “When that sort of thing happened,” he said, “the cases were sometimes brought to Bogotá,” adding, “I had a national team that was and still is perfectly trustworthy.” So Velásquez’s team had to box up all the files, the checks, and the graphs that covered their office walls, tracking the route that the money followed and how the different accounts connected to each other, and send it to Bogotá. Someone else in Bogotá would now have to pick up all those threads.

  Meanwhile, the transfer created an opportunity for Lucas. An unknown person replaced the transfer order from Velásquez’s office with a different one, stating that Lucas was to be transferred not to Bogotá, but to the custody of a local prosecutor’s office in Medellín. In turn, a prosecutor in that office issued an order to release Lucas, who then simply walked out, never to be seen again. The prosecutor was later convicted of helping Lucas to escape; he never explained why he did it, but the paramilitaries would later acknowledge having paid for Lucas’s release. Nearly a decade afterward, a paramilitary leader known as “HH” would testify, without providing details, that Lucas’s freedom had cost the paramilitaries millions of dollars—though he didn’t specify whom they paid—and added that Carlos Castaño had insisted upon securing the release because Lucas had been his right-hand man. In the view of prosecutor Javier Tamayo, “Lucas was such a fundamental piece of the puzzle that if he had been neutralized at that time, I think much of what permeated Medellín, Antioquia, Córdoba,” would have ended. Another former paramilitary leader and wealthy businessman from the Urabá region of Antioquia, Raúl Hasbún, also later confirmed that Lucas was very close to Castaño and his brother Vicente, and that the documents the investigators found at the Padilla parking-lot shack amounted to “all of the accounting records” of the Castaño brothers, including records of the paramilitaries’ financial backers. So securing Lucas’s release had been a top priority for them.

  TO GET SO FAR in the Padilla investigation and to then have it snatched away, and have the key witness escape, was almost unbearable. But there was so much they could still do, and were doing. In the Valle investigation, prosecutors working under J. Guillermo Escobar concluded that they had enough evidence to order the arrest of the brothers Jaime Alberto and Francisco Antonio Angulo, as well as Carlos Castaño and two other individuals.

  Toward the end of the year, Diego Arcila showed up in Velásquez’s office, excited and somewhat nervous, to inform him of another breakthrough: he had identified one of the senior leaders of the Envigado Office—a sinister man known as “Ñato,” and later on as “Don Berna,” who was said to be behind much of the criminal activity in the city, including many of the killings of CTI agents. One of the witnesses in the Valle case had also said the Ñato was involved in the activist’s murder. According to another prosecutor at the meeting, Arcila said that he had dressed up as a priest to sneak into the school where Don Berna’s children went, and had been able to access the records listing the kids’ parents’ names and addresses. The man’s true name, he said, was Diego Fernando Murillo Bejarano. Arcila had gone on to find official ID records for Murillo, and had even gone to the address he had obtained and knocked on the door. The discovery was a big deal: a former member of Los Pepes, Don Berna, as he would be most commonly known, was in fact the leader of the Envigado Office and the liaison between the paramilitaries and La Terraza.

  Arcila was worried, however, because he had noticed a video camera by the entrance to Don Berna’s house when he visited—what if Don Berna identified him? Arcila did not want to leave town, but at Velásquez’s insistence, he went to Bogotá to hide out for a while.

  YET FOR ALL their efforts, Velásquez and his team could not escape the fact that they still worked for a larger institution whose members did not necessarily understand or agree with their work. After the order from Bogotá transferring the Padilla case, the appointment of Márquez, and the firing of Fernández, Velásquez now viewed the main office, and particularly the national CTI director, González, with suspicion. The team’s investigations—especially the Padilla parking-lot case—had threatened many powerful interests, not just the paramilitaries, and Velásquez could not help but wonder whether some of his colleagues were trying to put a stop to the investigations. Another senior official in the attorney general’s office attributed the tension between Velásquez and González not to any effort to derail the investigations, but to a turf war between the two men, possibly because González, who was close to Attorney General Gómez Méndez, wanted more credit for the investigations underway. González, meanwhile, did not recall having had any issues with Velásquez.

  In Bogotá, things were gettin
g difficult for Amelia Pérez, too. She and her investigators had continued their research into Upegui and the disappearances of the three young men in 1995, and on November 3, 1998, she issued a warrant for the arrest of Colonel Luis Rodríguez Pérez, a police officer and former member of UNASE who had just been named police commander for Medellín and surrounding areas. Amelia Pérez believed strongly, based on the evidence the investigators had collected, that Rodríguez Pérez was involved in the disappearances. But that same day, a senior official in the attorney general’s office ordered that the case be reassigned to another prosecutor. Soon after, the office also withdrew the arrest warrant. She never got a satisfactory explanation from her colleagues as to why they had made these decisions.

  “DR. VELÁSQUEZ, sorry to interrupt you on your vacation, but something terrible has happened,” Diego Arcila said at the outset of a phone call in early January 1999. Velásquez had finally taken a few days off after the holidays, and he and the family were trying to unwind on the beach in Coveñas, Sucre, a few hours from Medellín. “Jorge is dead.”

  Jobless and desperate after his firing, Jorge Fernández, Oviedo’s former deputy, had decided to try to work as a taxi driver. He was shot and killed while doing his rounds. Velásquez was sure that it was another paramilitary hit.

  Arcila knew that he was also in danger, even in Bogotá: he had noticed that several of the other CTI agents had been keeping their distance from him, looking at him suspiciously. A risk assessment conducted by the main CTI office in Bogotá had concluded that Arcila and Velásquez were the next likely targets for the paramilitaries. But, one of his colleagues recalled, Arcila didn’t believe the witness protection system run out of the Attorney General’s office worked. Pablo Elías González, the national CTI director, later said that Arcila had been “desperate” to return to Medellín: he had insisted on leaving Bogotá despite González’s objections.

  But Arcila would not be able to work with Velásquez for long. In the weeks after Fernández’s death, the small team of CTI agents working directly under Velásquez was finally disbanded, and all the specialized team’s investigators were placed back under the leadership of the regional CTI office. Velásquez recalled that the orders came from González, and perhaps from the regional CTI director, Gilberto Rodríguez (who had replaced Fernando Márquez). González did not later recall the details of how it happened, but said that “normally, CTI people worked in the CTI. In Bogotá nobody worked in the offices of the prosecutors.” To Velásquez, the loss of the special team meant not only that they would lose their focused, more confidential and productive way of working highly sensitive cases, but also that the investigators working on those cases would be at even greater risk as a result of the paramilitary infiltration elsewhere in the CTI office. “They’re going to undo everything,” he railed to J. Guillermo Escobar.

  Arcila pleaded with the main office to let him keep working with Velásquez. He was convinced that he would only be safe if he could continue reporting directly to Velásquez, and working in his office, rather than back in the CTI’s main office, where paramilitary informants would keep track of all his movements. Velásquez remembered sending messages to the attorney general himself, asking him to let Arcila stay on in his office. But he got nowhere.

  As his transfer date approached, Arcila grew increasingly agitated. One day, he pulled J. Guillermo aside: “I think they’re going to kill me very soon,” he told the prosecutor. “And I have a favor to ask of you: When they kill me, please go to the funeral and find my father.… Tell him and my whole family that I love them very much, I respect them, and I’m grateful for their offer to help me leave my job to save my life.” J. Guillermo tried to interrupt, but Arcila would not let him. “Tell them I could not accept it,” he said. “I’ve been working on some very important investigations that are on the verge of producing results, and it’s my duty to see them through. So I couldn’t agree to their offer to help me set up a business. I’ve been putting my life on the line, but it is out of love for justice.”

  Iván Velásquez and J. Guillermo Escobar continued trying to find ways to keep Arcila safe. They sent him to the countryside to take a break. But they could not stop the transfer.

  On Monday, February 15, 1999, Arcila’s first day back at the CTI’s regional offices in Medellín, he got into a cab and headed to work. For several weeks, he had been carrying a loaded handgun wherever he went, and it was in his lap, covered with a manila envelope, then. The taxi stopped at a light, and out of nowhere, two men on a motorcycle pulled up next to the cab and shot him. Arcila died there, his hand on a gun that he had not even had the chance to draw.

  Velásquez was in his office, a few blocks away, when he got the call about Arcila’s death. Later on he would watch the killing, which had been caught on tape by one of the video cameras set up on the street, and he would see the motorcycle with the anonymous killers, their faces indistinguishable in the distance, turn the corner and get lost in the chaos of the city.

  VELÁSQUEZ’S RUN AS chief prosecutor for Antioquia finally came to an end in April 1999. As he and one of his colleagues later remembered it, Pablo Elías González—who at that point was the acting national director of all the prosecutors’ offices—called and told him that the office was asking all regional directors to tender their resignations, as the attorney general was considering a nationwide restructuring of the agency (González did not recall this happening, and Gómez Méndez said he never gave instructions along those lines, but neither offered an alternative explanation for Velásquez’s departure). Velásquez thought it was strange, but he complied, and Gómez Méndez accepted his resignation. Only later did Velásquez call two other regional directors and find out that they had not been asked to resign.

  Afterward, María Victoria was terrified to learn that the attorney general’s office was apparently planning to withdraw Velásquez’s security detail, since he would no longer be working for the agency. Shortly before Diego Arcila’s murder, the CTI agent had told María Victoria that he was concerned not only about his own life, but also about Velásquez’s, and even her own security. One of his colleagues at the CTI, he had said, had been asking Arcila and other CTI agents about María Victoria: where she lived, what her car was like, what her schedule was. She had not paid too much attention to what Arcila was telling her at the time, but after his death, she had grown alarmed about her family’s security, and had contacted the attorney general’s office in Bogotá to express her fears. At the time, they had strengthened Velásquez’s security detail. But two months later, it seemed, Velásquez was going to be stripped of all protection.

  In desperation, she drafted an urgent petition to Attorney General Gómez Méndez on April 20, describing the many killings and threats that people around Velásquez had received, and noting that Jorge Fernández had been killed even after he was no longer working for the office. She asked that Gómez Méndez inform her about how he was going to keep her husband safe. Soon afterward, she followed up, reporting that a low-level official had denied her first request, and that she assumed the attorney general was not aware of the denial. “I apologize in advance for the way in which I am going to express myself,” she wrote, copying Amnesty International, the United Nations office in Colombia, and the newspaper El Colombiano, “but I find no other way to say it, which is that I hold you responsible in the future if anything happens to my husband or to me.”

  María Victoria and Iván Velásquez recalled that soon afterward, Velásquez got his security detail reinstated.

  IN THE FOLLOWING years, things would only get more difficult for those investigating paramilitary crimes. On August 1, 2001, a new attorney general, Luis Camilo Osorio, took over, and almost immediately he began criticizing the investigations, saying there was a “distortion” in the way that prosecutors were handling the cases. He argued—despite extensive evidence to the contrary—that they were neglecting cases against the guerrillas and instead were overly focused on the paramilitaries.
Almost immediately, he began purging the office of prosecutors who had been involved in major cases against paramilitaries. One of them was Gregorio Oviedo, who had been working at the office in Bogotá: on August 8, just one week after Osorio took over, Oviedo received a letter notifying him that he was being fired.

  Others, such as Amelia Pérez, found it increasingly challenging to do their jobs. After Velásquez’s departure from Medellín, Pérez had continued investigating the El Aro massacre, and had charged both Salvatore Mancuso and Carlos Castaño. Her work had clearly angered the paramilitaries, and in April 2002 a CTI investigator informed her that a letter was circulating in which the paramilitaries were announcing their plans to kill several prosecutors, including her. Pérez asked the office to provide her with some form of protection—the bulletproof vehicle that had been assigned to her and her family for years for their security had been suddenly reassigned to someone else after Osorio took over—but she never received a straight answer. Instead, she was transferred in May to the Counterterrorism Unit of the office, where she would have to work with members of the very same security forces she had previously been investigating. Several months later, a bombing took place in El Nogal, an exclusive club in Bogotá. Pérez, assigned to the investigation, began working on several hypotheses, but later said she began to feel pressure immediately from her supervisors to focus only on members of the FARC as possible perpetrators. Eventually, she was removed from the case, with no explanation, and reassigned to the Anti-Drug Trafficking Unit.

  Meanwhile, Oviedo had also received new reports that Carlos Castaño had ordered his assassination. With Oviedo out of the attorney general’s office, and Pérez sidelined, it was clear to both of them that they would receive no protection. Neither would their two small sons. Finally, they decided, it was time to go. They requested asylum in Canada, and fled with their children to Quebec in April 2003. Like many other prosecutors who had been forced to move there, Oviedo and Pérez had a difficult time: they had never experienced such cold in their lives, they had to learn a new language, and they could not practice law, so they struggled to get by financially, doing odd jobs to support their kids while studying French. They missed their country. But they had no choice: exile was better than death.