Meanwhile, though, the terms of the Justice and Peace process that applied to paramilitary leaders and those charged with serious crimes had changed dramatically. When the law was first approved, it seemed certain that commanders would be able to get away with making some vague, general statements about their activities, and serving a few years under lax detention conditions before being set free. Once they completed their light sentences, they would be allowed to enjoy their wealth, with their records clean—and the core of their illegal operations intact. But victims’ and human rights groups in Colombia filed multiple legal challenges to the law, and these challenges made their way all the way up to Colombia’s Constitutional Court. (Colombia has four high courts; the Constitutional Court reviews only select constitutional challenges to laws and rulings, whereas the Supreme Court reviews other types of appeals from lower courts.) In a May 2006 ruling hundreds of pages long, the Constitutional Court upheld the Justice and Peace Law, but on the condition that it be implemented with substantial amendments that gave the legislation more teeth: to be valid, the court held, the law had to require that the paramilitaries give full confessions about all their crimes and turn over all of their illegally acquired assets. If the paramilitaries failed to comply or committed new crimes, they risked losing the sentence reductions and having to serve the entirety of their original sentences.
The ruling fixed many of the key problems that activists and victims had been pointing out in the law. Of course, whether the law was implemented in the way the court envisioned—whether paramilitaries fully confessed, turned over their assets, or lost their benefits when they committed crimes—depended heavily on prosecutors’ ability or willingness to enforce the law. But still, for the first time, the ruling had created an incentive for the paramilitaries to talk to prosecutors about their crimes. And starting in December 2006, Salvatore Mancuso began to do so.
IN HIS EARLY STATEMENTS, Mancuso spoke broadly about his decision to join the paramilitaries and his collaboration with sectors of the army in setting up his groups, but he gave few details. Little by little, he started giving more information, as though he were testing the waters of how much he could say.
In a statement in January 2007, Mancuso admitted to planning the El Aro massacre—the same crime in which Valle had, so many years ago, accused the army of complicity. Validating Valle’s accusations, Mancuso said the paramilitaries had indeed planned the massacre with members of the army, and he specifically mentioned Alfonso Manosalva, the former Fourth Brigade army commander who had been based out of Medellín, as a coconspirator. Manosalva had died a few months before the massacre.
Later in 2007, Mancuso said that he had met with Senator Mario Uribe, the president’s second cousin and longtime political ally, a couple of times to discuss a plan for the paramilitaries to support him in the 2002 elections. He also claimed that Vice President Francisco Santos had met with Carlos Castaño and encouraged him to create a paramilitary group in Bogotá. And Mancuso said that Minister of Defense Juan Manuel Santos—the vice president’s cousin—had met with Castaño in 1997 and asked for the paramilitary leader’s support for a “sort of coup” in which the paramilitaries would reach a cease-fire agreement with the FARC. The agreement would allow them to set up a constituent assembly, with Santos at the helm, and remove then president Ernesto Samper from office.
But there were reasons to doubt what Mancuso was saying. The vice president acknowledged meeting with Castaño as a journalist, but purely for journalistic purposes, and he vigorously denied the claim that he had encouraged Castaño to create a paramilitary group. As for the allegations against Juan Manuel Santos, the media would later report that the defense minister, along with several witnesses who had been present at the meetings with the paramilitaries, had stated that although Santos had met with the paramilitaries and other armed groups, he had only done so as part of an effort to get them to agree to a cease-fire, not to remove Samper. The attorney general’s office looked into the allegations and eventually decided not to pursue an investigation into the defense minister.
During those early statements, Mancuso turned over a copy of what came to be known as the “Ralito Pact,” a written agreement from 2001 that had been signed by several AUC leaders, including Mancuso, Jorge 40, and Don Berna, as well as thirty-two politicians. The pact loftily announced the signatories’ goal of “re-founding” the nation, and signing a “new social contract” to build “a new Colombia, in a space where every person has the right to property, and has duties with respect to the community.” The signatories agreed to divide up into “working groups” that would present their results at their next meeting, in October. The politicians who signed included the governors of Córdoba and Sucre at the time (the governor of Sucre, Salvador Arana, was already under investigation by the time the pact was revealed), several senators and members of Congress, and various mayors and councilmen. Senator Miguel de la Espriella had already mentioned the pact in an interview with the newspaper El Tiempo in November, and Eleonora Pineda, a former congresswoman, and one of Mancuso’s most vocal and open supporters, corroborated De la Espriella’s statement, saying she had been proud to sign the agreement in the name of Colombia’s “peace.” The pact allowed the Supreme Court and the attorney general’s office to move forward in their investigations against some of the politicians mentioned in it. In May 2007, the court ordered the arrest of five senators, and the attorney general’s office ordered the arrest of Pineda (who was no longer in office, so not under the court’s jurisdiction at the time).
Velásquez’s team would later find more agreements between politicians and paramilitaries. During a visit to the coastal town of Santa Marta, Velásquez recalled, some of his colleagues heard about material sitting in a prosecutor’s office that the army had found during an operation several months earlier in Magdalena, in territory under Jorge 40’s control. When they opened the sealed boxes, the investigators found a large number of documents about the paramilitaries’ links to politicians—so many, in fact, that they sealed the boxes up again and brought them to Bogotá, where they spent a couple of days reviewing the contents. Among the documents they found was one that came to be known as the “Pivijay Pact,” which listed various plans about the candidates for various elected positions in the 2002 elections, who would support them, and how they would use their resources. In addition to being signed by multiple politicians, every page of the agreement bore Jorge 40’s signature—it was the same signature that appeared on the Ralito Pact. Jorge 40 refused to speak to the court, but the details of the pact seemed to corroborate some of Rafael García’s testimony about how the paramilitaries’ electoral fraud in Magdalena had worked, so Velásquez’s team opened investigations into the politicians under the court’s jurisdiction. Another agreement, known as the “Chivolo Pact,” provided further details about Jorge 40’s ties to politicians in Magdalena. Also around that time, Velásquez was approached by a Liberal politician, Dagoberto Tordecillas, who talked about how the “Élmer Cárdenas Block” of the paramilitaries had also struck deals with powerful politicians in Urabá—leading the court to open additional investigations in that region.
By mid-2007, it was clear that the court’s investigations extended well beyond the original Sucre indictments, and there was no telling how much further they would go. Up to that point, nearly all of the politicians under investigation were part of Uribe’s coalition in Congress.
IN RETROSPECT, Velásquez later thought, the Araújo arrest marked a turning point in the Uribe government’s view of the parapolitics investigations. The indictments of the Sucre politicians, Eric Morris, Álvaro García, and Jairo Merlano were significant because of the power these men had at a local level, but nationally they were barely known. By contrast, the Araújo family was extremely well-established and close to the president. To many, the Araújos seemed untouchable. Even if the investigation was uncomfortable for the government, however, Velásquez felt it would have been inconceivable to igno
re the evidence against Araújo: “It would upset me my whole life if someone could say to me: ‘Why didn’t you investigate so-and-so when you knew there was evidence against him? That would forever put me to shame.” Plus, by showing that the court was willing to investigate even the most powerful people in the country, Velásquez thought, it could start to inspire trust among members of the public who had never believed that institutions of justice could work.
Velásquez was paying less attention to the effect that his investigations were having on Colombia’s international standing, and, in particular, on a free trade deal that the Uribe administration had negotiated with the administration of George W. Bush in the United States. Colombia and the United States had negotiated the United States–Colombia Trade Promotion Agreement—which Uribe described as a “national priority”—in 2006, and the Uribe administration had campaigned hard for its approval, with senior officials repeatedly traveling to Washington and meeting with US lawmakers. But early on, Democratic members of the US Congress had been expressing concern over the large numbers of labor union members who had been killed in Colombia—more than 2,000 since the mid-1980s, many at the hands of paramilitaries. Hardly any of the cases had ever been solved or even meaningfully investigated. The AFL-CIO, the large US trade union, was calling Colombia the world’s most dangerous country for trade unionists. The parapolitics scandals only deepened opposition to the deal among many Democrats, who had taken control of the US Congress in January 2007. In subsequent trips to Washington, Uribe and his advisers were on the defensive, constantly trying to focus attention on the thousands of paramilitaries they had demobilized, the overall reduction in official rates of violence, and a decline in the rate of union member killings to argue that the free trade agreement should be approved. But on June 29, 2007, House leaders issued a stern statement expressing “widespread concern in Congress about the level of violence in Colombia, the impunity, the lack of investigations and prosecutions, and the role of the paramilitary,” and noting that they could not support the trade deal until there was “concrete evidence of sustained results on the ground.” A few weeks later, the House and Senate leadership together repeated the same points.
WHILE VELÁSQUEZ continued to plug away at his investigations of members of the Colombian Congress, another Colombian would soon try to train the spotlight on the president himself.
On April 17, 2007, the Colombian opposition congressman Gustavo Petro stood up in front of Congress, looking cool as he started his widely anticipated hearing on paramilitarism in Antioquia. Twenty years earlier, Petro had been a member of one of Colombia’s guerrilla groups, the M-19, which was known for being more urban and appealing to young people. Petro had joined the group as a teenager and had spent several years as a member before demobilizing as part of a peace process with the government in 1990. He had gone to college after that, and then quickly entered politics. In recent years, he had become known for his public criticism of the Uribe government’s policies on paramilitaries and his accusations concerning the influence of paramilitaries in the political system. It was Petro who in 2005 had held a hearing on the links between paramilitaries and public officials in Sucre, a few weeks before Velásquez started his investigations.
Some of the buzz around that day’s hearing stemmed from reports that Petro was going to talk about President Uribe’s family. A couple of years before, Petro had publicly stated that Uribe’s brother, Santiago, had once been the subject of a criminal investigation for paramilitarism in connection with a paramilitary group called the “Twelve Apostles” in the Antioquia region of Yarumal. In December 2006, Uribe acknowledged that his brother had indeed been the subject of an investigation, but said he had been cleared of all charges. Now, it was said, Petro was going to go into a lot more detail.
A lean man in his early forties, wearing thick glasses over his heavy-lidded eyes, Petro started the April hearing by arguing that the paramilitaries were not merely self-defense groups, who emerged in the state’s absence, as the Uribe government often liked to say. Instead, they were a military, social, and economic project that rested on three pillars: “the alliance between anticommunist members of the military and landowners; private vigilante groups carrying out ‘social cleansing’; and… drug trafficking.” He cited letters and statements by AUC members, military officers, prominent politicians, drug kingpins, and powerful landowners going back to the 1980s to support his view that members of all these groups had formed alliances, initially at a local level, but eventually at regional and then national ones, to further their interests. He spoke about the Convivirs that Uribe had backed as governor of Antioquia, reading off multiple names of members and leaders of the Convivirs in the mid-1990s who later turned out to be paramilitary commanders—these included Salvatore Mancuso and Rodrigo Mercado Peluffo (aka “Cadena,” the head of the paramilitaries in Sucre).
Petro also talked extensively about the evidence that Velásquez’s team had collected during the raid at the Padilla parking-lot shack in 1998. According to Petro, it contained all the evidence that was needed to take down paramilitarism at the time—until the investigation was closed by Attorney General Luis Camilo Osorio. That evidence, Petro said, included “beeper” messages between Jacinto Alberto Soto, aka “Lucas” (the financial chief of the paramilitaries, whom Velásquez’s team had arrested, and who later escaped), and thousands of people, including many messages with a man who headed a Convivir called “The Condor.” He then cited a witness’s testimony from the criminal case files about a meeting between this man and local paramilitary groups at the ranch called Guacharacas—which belonged to then governor Álvaro Uribe. The same witness said that groups of paramilitaries used Guacharacas as an operating base, from which they went out to kill people.
Petro also cited various witness statements about paramilitaries operating out of a ranch called “La Carolina,” in Yarumal, which was run by the president’s brother, Santiago Uribe. According to some of the testimony that Petro cited, Santiago was the boss of the Twelve Apostles group, which Petro claimed may have been behind as many as sixty-four killings in Yarumal, a massacre in a neighboring municipality, and at least two disappearances between 1990 and 1997. Digging further into the past, Petro also showed a photo of Santiago Uribe smiling with a group of men, including famed Medellín cartel member Fabio Ochoa Vásquez. According to Petro, the photo was taken in 1985, when it was widely known that Ochoa was a member of the cartel, and after the cartel’s murder of the justice minister, Rodrigo Lara, had prompted the government of Belisario Betancur to declare an all-out war against the cartel.
Uribe initially allowed others to respond to Petro’s statements. Presidential adviser José Obdulio Gaviria reportedly said that the hearing was truly vulgar; he had “never before seen such a disorganized, libelous debate, in which there was such an abusive lack of respect for justice, for people, for Colombians, and even for President Uribe.” Santiago Uribe also quickly issued a statement in which he challenged Petro to provide evidence to back up what he was saying. Santiago did not deny he was in the photo with Ochoa, but he said that it was a photo he had taken in the open—he had nothing to hide; in an interview with El Tiempo, he said that it was “no secret” that his father had grown up close to the Ochoa family and that they had traded in horses together.
But Petro’s hearing, coming on the heels of the parapolitics investigations, had an almost immediate effect: former US vice president Al Gore, who was supposed to participate alongside Uribe at an event in Miami, canceled his appearance, expressing deep concern about the allegations against Uribe, and noting that he had not been told that Uribe would be participating in the event when he received the invitation.
Two days after the hearing, Uribe convened a press conference that ended up lasting nearly two hours. To the assembled reporters he denied Petro’s allegations about his links to paramilitaries, saying his family had repeatedly been investigated by the authorities and that nothing had ever been found. On TV,
Uribe referenced Gore’s cancelation as evidence that Petro was undermining Colombia’s international standing, and argued that this was all part of a systematic effort to discredit his government and prevent approval of the free trade deal.
THE PETRO HEARING marked the first time Uribe had been personally accused of being involved in the parapolitics scandal, but in his response, he avoided talking about the Supreme Court’s investigations. In fact, Uribe had mostly appeared respectful of the court in his public statements, with the exception of a falling-out he had had with a former president of the court, Yesid Ramírez, in mid-2006. When the parapolitics investigations first started, Uribe had expressed support for them and, according to Velásquez, as well as two justices at the time, Álvaro Pérez and Mauro Solarte, went so far as to provide resources to the team conducting them. Attorney General Mario Iguarán, however, said the government kept referring his requests for more funding to Congress, where “we were left with absolutely no voice.”
It was only in January 2007, once the Araújo investigation was underway, that Velásquez started to notice that the government and the court might be working at cross-purposes. Rumors were going around that the administration was exploring the possibility of legislation that would free the politicians under investigation for working with the paramilitaries if they admitted their offenses. After initially denying that there was any such plan in the works, in April Uribe started speaking publicly about the idea, though he met with a lot of resistance from critics who said this was simply a way for Uribe to help his allies.
Things changed in July 2007, after the court ruled that, unlike the offense of “rebellion” with which guerrillas were usually charged, the conspiracy offenses with which paramilitaries were charged could not be considered “political” crimes, because they were not committed against the state—instead, they were committed alongside state actors. As a result, they could not be the subject of an amnesty, as the government was arguing. Uribe lambasted the court, saying the ruling reflected an “ideological bias” that would undermine his government’s peace process with the paramilitaries. Already, he said, thousands of paramilitaries had demobilized on the assumption that they would not have to serve any prison time simply for their membership in the group (the reduced prison terms in the Justice and Peace Law only applied to those charged with additional offenses, such as homicide, forced displacement, or drug trafficking—everyone else was getting a pass).
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