There Are No Dead Here

by Maria McFarland Sánchez-Moreno

  THE PADILLA parking-lot investigation never produced the results it could have. In Bogotá, prosecutors divided it into a number of smaller cases. One of the Medellín investigators who had worked on the case with Velásquez said that, in his view, they “distorted” the direction of the investigation and the case essentially got lost in the office. Nobody else was arrested for years. In 2001, one of the cases did lead prosecutors to conduct a search of the “Foundation for the Peace of Córdoba,” an entity that had been mentioned in the Padilla records, and that turned out to be a cover for the Castaño family, so that it could move its money. But hundreds of other leads in the Padilla records seemed to have been abandoned.

  To those who had worked on the case, the outcome was appalling: “With that small group we had, if we had continued, we would have done the twenty searches in Córdoba, the ones in Antioquia, and we would have found just how rotten the country was,” said Javier Tamayo. With all those hours they put in, all the sacrifices they made, they should have achieved something. But instead, he and others felt, “after weighing everything that we had done, we reached the conclusion that all we did was to put at risk men who were assassinated.”

  Oviedo felt similarly: when he had started the work, he had been idealistic about what they could achieve, but his ideals had collided with a very different reality. In the end, he thought, he and Velásquez had been “Don Quixote and Sancho Panza tilting against windmills. That is how we ended up, I think. At least we weren’t dead.”

  The investigation they had started into Valle’s murder also seemed to go nowhere. In March 2001, a Medellín court convicted Carlos Castaño in absentia in connection with Valle’s murder, but the conviction was one of several against the paramilitary leader that had no practical consequences: there seemed to be no real effort underway to arrest him. To the disappointment of the prosecutors who had worked on the Valle case under Velásquez, the court acquitted the Angulo brothers. There seemed to be no ongoing effort to identify others who might have been involved, or to dig into whether the military—which Valle had criticized so sharply—had any role in his assassination.

  After his dismissal in 1999, Velásquez continued living in Medellín, but he was constantly looking over his shoulder. He worked as an administrative law judge until May 2000, when he got a job as an assistant justice on the Colombian Supreme Court, in Bogotá. It was only when he walked off the airplane in Bogotá, with no security detail, that he realized the burden he had been carrying. “It was like recovering my freedom,” he recalled. Medellín would always be home in a way, but it would also forever be tied to the losses he suffered there. In Bogotá, finally, he could walk the streets calmly, without guards, without worrying.

  PART III

  HOPE

  BOGOTÁ, COLOMBIA, 2000–2008

  CHAPTER 9

  HEROES

  “HAVE YOU EVER SEEN SOMEONE be eaten alive by ants?” The question took investigative journalist Ricardo Calderón aback, but the man beside him kept talking, matter-of-factly pointing at an anthill surrounded by four stakes with chains attached to them. “They tie up informants and guerrillas there and coat them with panela [a form of cane sugar]. They last about three days while the ants eat them.” The lawyer was giving Calderón a tour in early 2006 of a vast ranch on a mountaintop near the Magdalena River owned by his client, a paramilitary leader known as “The Eagle.” The Eagle’s lawyer had invited Calderón several times to visit the ranch and talk to his boss. In addition to the anthill, Calderón noticed a large board to which the paramilitaries tied their victims before doing target practice on them, a swimming pool shaped like a guitar, with a bar and jukebox next to it, and a massive house. Farther out, the lawyer had told Calderón, The Eagle had several cocaine-processing labs. On his fairly short drive from Bogotá to the ranch, Calderón had also noticed several large plaster statues of eagles perched along the road, as well as a couple of wrecked Toyota and Ford pickup trucks—The Eagle’s son, the lawyer said, enjoyed drinking and crashing vehicles, then leaving them by the side of the road. His father always replaced them.

  THE SON OF A POLICEMAN, the scrawny, prematurely balding, chain-smoking Calderón had grown up during the heyday of the Medellín cartel. He had attended a school in Bogotá for the children of police officers, so, ever since he was a small child, he had heard macabre stories about drug lords and police raids. He had attended many funerals for fathers of his classmates, including the one for Colonel Jaime Ramírez, who in 1984 had discovered Pablo Escobar’s cocaine-processing lab, Tranquilandia, and was then gunned down by assassins. Calderón also developed a sense of which kids’ fathers might be on the take, based on how much money the children could spend on going out for ice cream or to play pinball.

  He had always been intrigued by that world. He had even thought of becoming a policeman himself, but his father warned him away from it: “You’re very lazy, you don’t like getting up early, and you don’t like cold water.” Lazy may not have been the best description for Calderón, who had worked every summer since he was fourteen, packing glass and crystal cups for a local company, or stretching lengths of chain out on the city’s streets, to take measurements for the official transit agency. But it was true that he hated waking up early, and couldn’t stand cold water, and, sure enough, Calderón found out that if he joined the police, he would have to get up at 4 a.m. and take very short, cold showers. So he decided to go to college instead. He started out studying biology, but did very poorly. When a family friend offered to find him a spot at a new college that was opening on a beautiful campus in Bogotá, he jumped at the chance to transfer. The only catch was that the new school only offered two majors: engineering and journalism. Calderón was bad at numbers, so, to his father’s dismay—at the time, journalism was known as the career of choice of Colombian beauty queens, and his father viewed it as a frivolous profession—Calderón picked journalism. He was, he claimed later, a terrible student, though one of his classmates, Mónica, who would one day become his wife, disagreed, remembering that even in college the shy, quiet Calderón would throw himself into his journalism projects, usually working alone, with passion.

  In 1994, during one of his final years in college, a classmate told him about an opening at the newsweekly Semana, covering sports. Unlike many Colombians, Calderón had little interest in sports—soccer, to him, was just a group of men running around with a ball—but he jumped at the job and got by, at first by writing about the only sport he knew a bit about: Formula One car racing. It was a great opportunity. The magazine had a very small writing staff, so Calderón got to see how it put together an entire issue, and to see how politics, crime, and public order issues, which he found fascinating, got covered.

  The following year, a massive political scandal began to unfold over what became known as “Proceso 8,000,” a wide-ranging criminal investigation started by the attorney general’s office into alleged ties between the Cali cartel and various prominent public figures, including several members of Congress, as well as Santiago Medina, the treasurer for President Ernesto Samper’s 1994 presidential campaign. (The unofficial name, which meant “Process 8,000,” referred to the case number.) After his arrest, Medina began testifying against other former campaign officials who were now in the Samper administration. The president himself soon came under investigation in Congress. Meanwhile, the accountant for the Cali cartel, Guillermo Pallomari, turned himself in to the US Drug Enforcement Administration and started to hand over evidence against Colombian politicians. Although Samper was eventually acquitted, the case would continue to present new twists. It dominated the news for years.

  Semana’s political journalists poured themselves into coverage of the rapidly changing scandal over the Proceso 8,000, but that meant nobody was available to cover the ongoing war. So Calderón volunteered to start going to the country’s “red zones,” where the conflict was hot, even while he continued to cover sports. Soon, he was traveling to far-flung parts of the country
and filing reports about FARC killings and—increasingly—paramilitary massacres, alongside his still-required stories about the local soccer team.

  Throughout the decade, the paramilitary groups had slowly been gaining in strength, but now they were engaged in a coordinated and terrifying campaign to seize control of key regions of the country. Moving beyond Antioquia and Córdoba, where Carlos Castaño’s ACCU had first started its expansion in the 1990s, they were now spreading out over most of the country’s northern states, and even venturing into the center and south of the country. The ACCU had also joined forces with other paramilitary groups, organized under a single umbrella as the AUC (Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia, or United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia), which had multiple “blocks,” each under separate leadership.

  The areas that were hit the worst included the Middle Magdalena Valley and the oil port city of Barrancabermeja, a traditional ELN stronghold that Calderón visited repeatedly, and from which he wrote numerous articles about increasing paramilitary killings. In one, he described how, on May 16, 1998, around fifty paramilitaries had entered the northeastern section of the city, murdered eleven people, and kidnapped another twenty-five, labeling them “guerrilla sympathizers.” In a statement delivered to the government, ACCU leader Carlos Castaño later announced that the paramilitaries had summarily “tried” and executed the twenty-five before burning their bodies. The massacre was so brazen that it got national public attention, but it was far from unique. Across the region and much of the country, paramilitaries were growing fast. With the promise of high wages, which were easy to pay with their profits from cocaine, the AUC had enticed thousands of underemployed young men to join their ranks, and they were killing tens of thousands of people in grisly ways, including beheading, clubbing, or dismembering their victims, often in front of their families and neighbors. Calderón lost track of how many mass paramilitary killings he wrote about at the time. In the aftermath of massacres, remaining community members fled in terror, leaving behind ghost towns throughout much of the Middle Magdalena region, Antioquia, and the northern coast.

  Meanwhile, the FARC and the ELN, too, were engaging in ever more ruthless tactics. They had taken people hostage for ransom or political gain for years, but now kidnappings were a daily occurrence. Travel by road throughout Colombia had become so hazardous that many people gave it up entirely. The guerrillas took advantage of the absence of law enforcement on many lonely roads to conduct pescas milagrosas (miraculous fishing), where they stopped drivers and kidnapped those they thought might be worth something. The kidnappings affected Colombians of all stripes and backgrounds, wealthy and poor alike, and by paralyzing travel, damaged the economy and frustrated city residents, for whom going to the countryside was a common pastime. To secure their territory, the guerrillas had also deployed antipersonnel landmines, which maimed not only soldiers, but also peasants, children, and animals that walked in the wrong place.

  Calderón’s own family had been the target of the FARC’s cruelty: his mother had come from a comfortable family from Yarumal, Antioquia. They had owned a very good piece of land on which they had processed panela, which was a traditional Colombian sugarcane product. There was also an asbestos mine on the property. As a small child, Calderón had spent his school breaks on that farm, playing with his cousins and surrounded by vegetation and farm animals. But in the early 1980s, the 13th Front of the FARC came into the region, forcing Calderón’s uncles to flee and seizing the farm, depriving the family of what his grandfather had built up over an entire lifetime. A few years later, one of his cousins visited a nearby community and started talking about the land with a store owner; another man in the store, who turned out to be a FARC member, overheard him and shot Calderón’s cousin on the spot.

  By the 1998 presidential elections, many Colombians were eager to find a way to end the war. Andrés Pastrana, a former TV news anchor, and a Conservative, was elected president on a platform promising to seek peace with the FARC. Immediately after the elections, Pastrana launched negotiations, and by 1999 the government had ceded a demilitarized jungle area the size of Switzerland, in the region known as El Caguán, in the southern state of Caquetá, to the FARC. However, the talks got off to an inauspicious start when Manuel Marulanda, the FARC’s top commander, stood Pastrana up on the opening day of negotiations, claiming there was a plot underway to kill him. Things got even worse when, in March 1999, two months after the start of the process, the FARC murdered three US indigenous rights workers.

  Calderón began traveling regularly to the town of San Vicente, in El Caguán, to cover the talks, joining an assortment of foreign dignitaries, international media, and movie stars who were traipsing through the demilitarized zone. But, while many seemed to get a kick out of hanging out with the guerrillas, Calderón was more interested in what was happening with the people from the region, who had not had any say in the establishment of the zone. He met one man, for example, who said the FARC had blown up his house. In another case, the FARC had kidnapped and killed an affluent rancher, Arnulfo Amaya; they later also kidnapped his wife, but released her after she paid them half of the ransom they required. When the peace negotiations started, the FARC used the remaining “debt” she owed them as a justification for seizing the family’s house, which was spacious, attractive, and conveniently perched on the top of a hill overlooking San Vicente. They used it as a meeting space, forcing Amaya’s wife and daughter, who were still living in the house, to host the FARC leadership, which meant, essentially, becoming servants for the guerrilla leaders. Calderón also saw family members of hostages showing up to pay ransoms, or to ask about their relatives: in one case, a rice farmer from the neighboring state of Huila, who clearly had limited resources, drove to San Vicente in his truck—he had already paid a ransom, but the FARC was still holding his father, and he wanted to convince them to take the truck as further payment.

  In the last few pieces he wrote from El Caguán, Calderón reported about a curious infrastructure project underway: a group of wealthy Iranians was getting ready to build a multimillion-dollar slaughterhouse and refrigeration plant in San Vicente, from which meat could be shipped directly to Iran. It seemed like a bizarre idea, but the Iranian embassy told Calderón that they were making the investment to help Colombia’s development. When Calderón interviewed Colombian ranchers, they argued that the plant made no sense; it would harm other plants that were already in operation. Building on Calderón’s reporting, Newsweek went further, reporting that the project was a cover for Iranian weapons sales to the FARC. Within a few weeks, the Iranian embassy announced that it had canceled the project.

  Calderón was then living at his parents’ home in Bogotá, and one day, as he took his car out of the underground garage, a funeral wreath dropped from the top of the garage door onto his car. It was his first death threat. He was sure it was connected to his reporting on the Iranian meat plant. Mónica, who was then his girlfriend, recalled that Calderón didn’t say much about the threat, but he did leave town for a period of time: he had a great fear of flying, so he drove to Medellín. To her, that seemed like going into the lion’s den, given all the violence wracking the city, but it was a way of letting the immediate threat from the FARC subside.

  Unable to return to El Caguán, Calderón once again began writing about paramilitary crimes. In November 2000, it was a massacre in the picturesque town of Nueva Venecia, one of a handful of Colombian villages made up entirely of buildings on stilts. It was in the swampland near Santa Marta on the northern coast. When he heard about the killings, Calderón started making phone calls, and he was struck by one woman’s description of what had happened: “As soon as the paracos [slang for paramilitaries] arrived, they started shooting us like ducks. It was a duck hunt.”

  Three days after the massacre, Calderón took a boat into town from Barranquilla. Nueva Venecia smelled like death. There was still blood on the soccer and basketball field the community had built among the houses, though t
he victims’ bodies were gone. The people he interviewed didn’t understand what had happened: Nueva Venecia had always been a peaceful town. It only had around 450 houses, and most of its 4,000 inhabitants lived off fishing. “Here we lived as if every day were a holiday,” the man who sold ice in the town told Calderón. “In this town we never had thieves, and we never needed the police.” But late at night on November 21, a group of sixty paramilitaries on five motorboats had made their way toward the town with a list of six names of people they claimed worked with the ELN. On their way in, they stopped a group of sixteen fishermen and asked them what they knew about the people on their list. When the fishermen couldn’t answer, the paramilitaries knifed eleven of them to death; they took the other five with them into town. They later ran into another boat with twelve fishermen on board. After making the men throw all their catch back into the water, the paramilitaries forced all twelve to go back into the town with them. Then, in front of the church, a group of the paramilitaries interrogated the men about the six names on the list. After, again, not getting any answers, the paramilitaries killed them all. Another group of paramilitaries shot indiscriminately at the houses in town. Yet another group looted the shops, homes, and fishermen’s boats, taking home electronics, food, and boat motors. They then kept going, and, according to the remaining residents, slaughtered several more people on the water. Not all the bodies had been recovered, but the official death toll stood at thirty-eight. Calderón estimated that the paramilitaries had killed more than fifty people during the incursion. More than five hundred others fled the town in the following days.