A fellow journalist at Semana had asked Calderón to meet with Job in her place one day when Job was at a nearby restaurant, as she was away and could not make it. Job already knew who Calderón was, and soon after meeting him, asked Calderón how much it would cost to buy the recordings about his “papa”—referring to Don Berna—and his friends. Calderón told him they weren’t for sale.
But Job had other fish to fry. His main goal, it seemed, was to offer Calderón what he said was very important information about the parapolitics investigations and the Supreme Court—something to do with corruption on the court. Was Calderón interested? asked Job. Calderón said it depended on whether there was evidence.
And so began a series of meetings between Calderón and Job at restaurants near Semana’s offices. The meetings quickly became tiresome to Calderón: Job provided no concrete information, instead making only vague statements about judges who he claimed were asking for money from politicians. Meanwhile, the long-winded Job was endlessly boring Calderón with his speeches about the wonderful projects he claimed the Democracy Corporation was implementing in Medellín.
At one of their meetings, Job launched into his usual spiel about how Uribe was such a great person, who was trying to follow through on his promises on the demobilization, but the Supreme Court was so corrupt. But then Job added a detail that intrigued Calderón—he started talking about one assistant justice in particular: Iván Velásquez, whom “they” knew from Medellín. Job went on for a long time, repeating that Velásquez was making stuff up, that he was persecuting the government and the business community, and that he was using false witnesses. He also kept adding that Velásquez was terribly corrupt, though he provided no solid details to back up his claims.
The intensity of Job’s attacks on Velásquez struck Calderón as strange. The journalist had never met Velásquez before, though he had been meaning to contact him to see if the assistant justice had any information he could share about some of the politicians in the recordings that Calderón was still analyzing. Through another journalist, he reached out to Velásquez, who agreed to see him.
The first meeting between Velásquez and Calderón, sometime in mid-2007, was very short—no longer than thirty minutes. Calderón shared some information with him from his own investigations about members of Congress whom Velásquez was also investigating, and told him about some of the things Job had said. Velásquez thanked him, but he was his usual formal, dry self, and hardly said anything.
CHAPTER 13
FRAME JOB
BOGOTÁ, COLOMBIA, OCTOBER 9, 2007.
Colombian president Álvaro Uribe sounded aggrieved. He spoke slowly, choosing his words with care, but he couldn’t quite mask the rage brewing underneath. “We’re dealing with one of three possibilities here,” he said on La FM radio station’s popular early-morning news show. “Either the president of the republic is a murderer; or the prisoner… is lying; or there is some machination, a machination by an assistant justice… against the president.”
The story had already been all over news shows the previous night, after Uribe first issued a press release about it and then proceeded to make multiple media appearances on the topic. But that morning, he explained yet again why he was so concerned: some time earlier, Uribe had received a letter from a man named José Orlando Moncada, who went by the alias “Tasmania.” A low-level member of the paramilitaries’ “Southwestern Antioquia Block,” Tasmania was serving time in the Itagüí maximum-security prison on the outskirts of Medellín on charges of extortion and kidnapping. In the letter, which was publicly released and dated September 11, 2007, Tasmania reported to Uribe that Assistant Supreme Court Justice Iván Velásquez had asked him to accuse the president, along with an influential Antioquia businessman and landowner, of involvement in the attempted assassination, in 2003, of a paramilitary leader from Southwestern Antioquia known as “René.” In exchange for his testimony, Tasmania said, Velásquez had offered him a sentence reduction, admission to a witness protection program, and the relocation of his family. The letter concluded: “My concern, Mr. President, is that Mr. Velásquez, it appears to me, wishes to harm you. It is the only thing that interests him. In exchange for that, he will give anything.”
The claim that Uribe would have ordered an assassination seemed, as one of the radio hosts put it, “delusional.” But what disturbed him about all of this, Uribe emphasized, was the behavior of the Supreme Court. The court had no jurisdiction to investigate the president, so what was Velásquez doing, trying to get Tasmania to testify against him? The implication seemed clear: Velásquez must be trying to frame the president for murder. And at this point, Uribe said, he felt he had no other choice but to publicly call on the attorney general to conduct a criminal investigation into Velásquez’s actions.
Uribe’s appearance on La FM that morning went on for nearly an hour and a half. Finally, he hung up to take more calls on the Tasmania letter from other radio stations. Broadcast radio still had a huge following among the nation’s more than 45 million inhabitants. People across Colombia—from the northern Caribbean towns of Cartagena and Santa Marta, to the lush coffee-growing regions in the mountains, to the flatlands on the eastern border with Venezuela, and to the Amazon rainforest farther south—listened to Uribe, fascinated and confused, as they started their day.
To most Colombians, the story about Tasmania’s letter came out of nowhere. They had never heard of René or Tasmania. It seemed odd for the president to devote so much energy to what a low-level criminal wrote from prison. On the other hand, to many, it made sense for Uribe to fight back. After all, Uribe’s enemies—the people who would like to sabotage his achievements, weaken the military, and keep the country living behind bulletproof glass—might lurk anywhere, even in the country’s highest courts.
By contrast, few Colombians knew much about Velásquez. The media had already identified him as the coordinator of the parapolitics investigations, in some cases calling him the “star judge” of parapolitics, but before he, too, went on the radio that morning to deny Uribe’s accusations, Velásquez had never been at the center of the national spotlight.
“It’s absolutely false,” Velásquez retorted, when La FM’s hosts asked about Tasmania’s letter. “The country can be certain that the court does not use such methods to investigate, and that it does not have jurisdiction to investigate the president—that alone is enough to thoroughly undermine those claims.” So what was behind all this? Velásquez went on: “I have always acted with a great deal of loyalty and probity, keeping the justices constantly informed. I do not hide myself to conduct investigations. The only purpose that can be seen in all this is to discredit the investigation.”
And then Velásquez added his own bombshell to the story: “Last week I informed the criminal chamber of the court of what I could see was coming, as I had been warned that an investigation or intelligence activity of some sort had been started against me. In light of that, the court summoned the attorney general and inspector general to hear in person and in detail what had happened [and] formally filed a criminal complaint with the attorney general.”
Over the course of many more interviews, Velásquez would explain his version of events in detail: several weeks earlier, a couple of investigators who were working with the court and charged with looking into the situation in Antioquia had been asking around about potential witnesses who knew about links between paramilitaries and several Antioquia congressmen—including the president’s second cousin, Senator Mario Uribe. In the process, they had received reports that Tasmania might have some relevant information, so they met with him. Tasmania asked them whether he would get any benefits if he cooperated, and they explained that any discussion of benefits had to be conducted directly by the assistant justices. They put Tasmania’s lawyer, Sergio González, in touch with the court. As a result, on September 10, 2007, Velásquez and another assistant justice who was looking into Antioquia, Luz Adriana Camargo, had traveled to Medellín t
o meet with Tasmania.
Tasmania wanted to be included in the Justice and Peace process, so he could have his sentence reduced to the five to eight years available to the paramilitary leaders, but the justices explained that that was not in their hands: it was up to the government to decide who went on the list of paramilitaries who could benefit from that process. Instead, the two justices explained the standard benefits available to witnesses who cooperated, which included a reduction of about one-sixth to one-quarter of the sentence they were serving. But Tasmania, who only had a third-grade education and was clearly a low-level paramilitary, struck Velásquez as unlikely to have much valuable information. Velásquez asked him whether he knew of Juan Carlos “El Tuso” Sierra, a major drug trafficker who had been allowed to demobilize along with the paramilitary leaders. El Tuso was from the town of Andes, where Tasmania said he operated, and yet Tasmania denied knowing about him—a statement that was so absurd that Velásquez immediately concluded Tasmania was lying. Tasmania said that he could talk about murders and other activities of the Southwestern Antioquia Block of the paramilitaries, but the justices said they were not interested in that: they were only investigating links with members of Congress—for example, Senator Mario Uribe, who was also from Andes. Tasmania said he didn’t know anything about congressmen, and that he had only seen Mario Uribe driving around once. He did volunteer that he knew something about “a problem” that President Uribe had had with René, but Velásquez told him that the court didn’t investigate the president, and did not pursue the matter further. In light of Tasmania’s apparent lack of knowledge, or recalcitrance to share what he knew, Velásquez decided to cut the interview short and leave. But then González asked him to wait. The lawyer pulled Tasmania aside, and after a few minutes came back and said they needed some time for Tasmania to organize his thoughts. If Velásquez left them his cellphone number, they would get in touch soon. Velásquez agreed, and then he left. The meeting was unremarkable—like many meetings Velásquez and other justices had held with prisoners or potential witnesses over the course of their investigations. Velásquez would not have given it a second thought were it not for what happened the very next day.
Velásquez had finished his workday and was catching a ride home with his son Víctor—Velásquez still did not drive—when his cellphone rang. It was a call from the president, the operator told him. The president? Velásquez had not spoken to Uribe in many years. Why would he be calling? Uribe’s unmistakable voice came on the line, very friendly, asking how Velásquez was doing. But the president quickly got to the point: Uribe wanted to know whether there was some kind of investigation in the court against him. There was a great deal of concern in the presidency, he said, because someone called Tasmania was saying that Uribe had provided him with weapons to carry out an attack against the paramilitary leader René. Did Velásquez know anything about that? That was strange, Velásquez replied, because he had just been with Tasmania the day before. He assured Uribe that they had not discussed anything related to such an attack, and in any case, Velásquez recalled telling the president, “the court has no jurisdiction to investigate you, I know of no information against you, and if there were any, the court would immediately transfer it to the appropriate authorities.” Uribe said, of course, that that was what he would expect, and they ended the call on a cordial note.
Velásquez thought the call was strange, but he was not too concerned. When Velásquez’s wife, María Victoria, heard about it, however, she was horrified: she had never believed in Uribe, and now she tried to explain to Velásquez that she had an awful feeling about the call. “There’s nothing good in that call, Iván,” she told him in the kitchen, tears welling up. Velásquez, seated at the table, tapped his fingers together and asked her not to make things out to be bigger problems than they were—she was reading too much into it; the president was being generous by calling him to clear things up. Still, the next day he informed the president of the criminal chamber of the court, Alfredo Gómez, as well as a couple of other justices about the call.
THROUGHOUT THE YEAR, the court had been slowly making progress in its investigations into members of Congress from Antioquia, including Senator Mario Uribe. Mancuso had testified that he had met with Mario Uribe and Representative Eleonora Pineda—who had already admitted to having signed the Ralito Pact with the paramilitaries, and was under investigation—ahead of the 2002 elections. According to Mancuso, the paramilitaries had agreed to support Mario Uribe and Pineda in part of Córdoba. Pineda said that the meetings happened after the elections, but the voting patterns in the area Mancuso mentioned were highly irregular, favoring Mario Uribe.
With his beady eyes, full mane of white hair, and thick neck firmly set into expensive-looking suits, Mario Uribe appeared eminently comfortable in his role as one of Colombia’s most prominent and influential politicians. Not only had he served as president of the Senate, but he had also been a close political ally of President Uribe for over two decades. In the 1980s, the cousins had jointly founded an offshoot of the Liberal Party, called the Democratic Sector (Sector Democrático), and they had been elected to Congress together in 1986—Álvaro to the Senate and Mario to the House. Their movement eventually morphed into the Democratic Colombia Party (Partido Colombia Democrática), which Mario now led, and which was a key part of the president’s coalition in Congress, often leading congressional debate on the president’s initiatives.
Velásquez also knew Mario Uribe a bit and had a cordial relationship with him. In the 1980s, when Velásquez had joined his brother’s private legal practice, his office had been in the El Café building in Medellín, one floor below Mario’s office, and they would often see each other on the elevator. Mario Uribe’s office messenger had also been a former student of Velásquez’s. And Mario Uribe’s sister was the dentist for Velásquez’s children for years. “She was a very pleasant, professional person, who treated the kids very well, and we liked her a lot,” Velásquez said. But as an investigator, Velásquez had to follow the evidence.
On September 26, 2007, at around 5 p.m., the Supreme Court announced Senator Mario Uribe’s indictment. The president was attending the UN General Assembly in New York at the time, and when journalists called him, he made only a very simple statement: “As president, I have to support the justice system. As a person, I feel sadness.”
A couple of days later, Velásquez was approached by a former colleague from Antioquia, who was close to Mario Uribe. After the usual pleasantries, the man expressed concern about the investigation of Mario Uribe, telling Velásquez that the investigation was part of a fight between the court and the president, and that he was concerned about what could happen to Velásquez. Mario, he said, was very mad, and Velásquez should be careful. The man asked whether Velásquez had ever considered leaving the court: if he wanted to, he could ensure that the government would nominate him to be a justice on another high court. Velásquez expressed disbelief that such a thing was possible, given how upset members of Congress were about his investigations, and the man said not to worry, that it could be arranged. In fact, he said, Mario would like to talk to him—he was just two blocks away. Velásquez cut him short: “I have nothing to say to him.” But the man insisted, warning him that there could always be smear campaigns against him, and remarking that Velásquez would not want to be in Mario Uribe’s shoes. Eventually, he asked Velásquez if there was anything that could be done to postpone the date on which Mario Uribe was supposed to give his statement to the court. Velásquez said he should file a formal request with the court, and left it at that.
FIVE DAYS BEFORE Uribe’s announcement about Tasmania, on October 3, Velásquez attended the regularly scheduled Wednesday meeting of the justices of the criminal chamber to brief them on his work. At the end of the briefing, he paused and shifted gears, saying, “If I may, I would like to discuss a personal problem.” The night before, he explained, a contact from the attorney general’s office had reached out to him, saying he nee
ded to speak to him urgently. Velásquez had suggested they wait until the next day, but his contact insisted: “No, doctor, it has to be now.” So the contact visited Velásquez at his home and told him what he had learned: that in the past few days there had been a secret, high-level meeting at the DAS, at which officials had discussed something about Velásquez and “someone called Tasmania, or Tanzania, something like that,” who was trying to do something against the president. The goal of the meeting—which was framed as a matter of national security—was to ask for an investigation to be opened against Velásquez for allegedly trying to frame the president. During the meeting, DAS officials had also displayed some files involving Velásquez, including photos of him and some of his family, as well as all their phone numbers, full names, and addresses, which suggested that the intelligence agency had been spying on the justice. Something had to be done right away, said the contact, or it would be too late to head off what seemed to be an attempt to harm Velásquez’s credibility and possibly get him thrown off the court and into prison.
Velásquez was surprised, he told the justices, but he trusted this contact and believed his story: it made sense of Uribe’s strange call to Velásquez—and this contact had no reason to know about that, or about the meeting with Tasmania. “This means that the DAS is conducting intelligence operations against me,” he said. “They’re following me, and my communications are under surveillance.”
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