There Are No Dead Here

by Maria McFarland Sánchez-Moreno

  But the Colombian government’s treatment of Don Berna had swung back and forth repeatedly over the years, sometimes seeming tough, and other times inexplicably lenient. Berna’s inclusion among the paramilitaries at the negotiating table was controversial from the start, as he was known primarily as a criminal and drug trafficker (though Berna’s claims to being a paramilitary were arguably stronger than those of drug trafficker “El Tuso” Sierra and some others whom the government had allowed to participate in the demobilizations).

  In fact, Berna had a long and sordid history: It was said that in his youth he had been a member of the Popular Liberation Army, a guerrilla group that had demobilized in 1991. By his own account, he had become the right-hand man for the Galeano brothers, close associates of Pablo Escobar, by the mid-1980s. When Escobar had the Galeano brothers murdered in a dispute over money, Don Berna joined forces with the Castaño brothers and the Cali cartel to form Los Pepes, the group that focused on hunting down Escobar and his associates. According to a book that Berna later published, his own little brother, Rodolfo—rather than members of the police’s Search Bloc—was the person who finally shot Escobar to death on a Medellín rooftop in 1993, though this claim contradicts the official version of events. After Escobar’s killing, Berna gradually rose to power in Medellín’s underworld, eventually running the Envigado Office and exerting control over the La Terraza gang, both of which were behind many of the worst murders in the city. He had maintained close ties to the Castaño brothers, however, and by the time the demobilization negotiations with the Uribe government started, he was claiming that he was a member of the AUC.

  Despite Berna’s shaky claims to membership in the paramilitaries, he was the first commander to “demobilize” troops. The demobilization of paramilitaries under his control began with the Cacique Nutibara Block of the AUC in 2004, and it had been widely criticized as a sham. Observers claimed that, at the last minute, members of Don Berna’s group had gone through Medellín’s low-income neighborhoods recruiting young men to pass themselves off as paramilitaries. Berna, it was said, had wanted to put on a big show of demobilizing a lot of men without really giving up any power.

  Then, in May 2005, while the paramilitary leaders were negotiating in Santa Fe de Ralito, the government entered the negotiation zone to arrest Don Berna for allegedly ordering the murder of Córdoba state congressman Orlando Benítez, his driver, and his sister alongside a road near Ralito—news reports said Benítez had disobeyed Berna’s orders not to campaign in the region. That afternoon, the government mounted a massive and showy manhunt, involving hundreds of police officers, while Uribe announced that he was not going to allow the negotiation zone in Ralito to become a “paradise of impunity.” In Medellín, Berna’s base of operations, transportation ground to a halt as Berna’s associates threatened bus and taxi drivers to make them go on a forced strike to protest the manhunt, and perhaps as a show of strength. Berna managed to escape Ralito, but a couple of days later, he turned himself in.

  Then the government seemed to soften its stance: it did not take Berna out of the demobilization process despite his violation of the paramilitaries’ cease-fire, and for several months it held him at a ranch in Valencia, Córdoba, instead of a regular prison. In June 2005, the US chargé d’affaires, Milton Drucker, told Uribe and his advisers that the credibility of the entire demobilization process was at stake: Don Berna needed to be brought to justice for his crimes, and he needed to be taken out of the demobilization process. According to US cables, the Colombian officials insisted that Uribe had taken a tough line on Berna by arresting him, but they resisted taking him out of the demobilization process because he had promised to demobilize the remainder of his troops. A couple of months later, the government held another demobilization ceremony for 2,033 members of the “Heroes de Granada Block” of the paramilitaries, which Don Berna claimed included the last of his troops. However, for years people in Medellín would claim that Don Berna and his men—including Job and other members of the Democracy Corporation—continued to exert tight control over crime in Medellín and surrounding areas.

  The government did eventually move Don Berna to a higher security prison in Cómbita, where he was kept separate from other paramilitary leaders for a couple of years. That changed in September 2007: when the government transferred Macaco to the navy brig, it also started to transfer Don Berna to another brig in the Pacific Ocean. But shortly afterward, it announced that Berna’s transfer had been a mistake, the result of an outlandish miscommunication between the Ministry of Interior and the National Prisons Institute. Berna’s real name was Diego Murillo; the person they meant to transfer was the infamous drug kingpin Diego Montoya.

  By the end of the botched transfer operation, one of Calderón’s colleagues at Semana reported, the government had used more than a thousand men, three armed helicopters, multiple vehicles and motorcycles, and the two brigs. Semana noted that it was “worrying, that having in its hands the drug lord most wanted by the US and Colombia, and two of the former ‘para’ chiefs who may have continued committing crimes from prison, there was not the least bit of care to avoid errors like this one.”

  Perhaps even more oddly, after the transfer, rather than leaving Don Berna in the maximum-security prison in Cómbita, the government placed him in La Picota, a prison in Bogotá that housed most of the politicians in detention for links to paramilitaries. La Picota had a reputation for being much more comfortable than most of the prisons in the country. Far from being treated as someone the government was readying for extradition, Berna seemed to be getting special treatment.

  No wonder, then, that Job was astounded at his “papa’s” extradition.

  TO VELÁSQUEZ, the extraditions came as a shock. Despite Uribe’s attacks on him, he had kept his investigations into Congress moving forward, and he had high hopes that, since they were required to tell the truth about their crimes, some of the paramilitary leaders might begin talking to him about their links to politicians, as Mancuso had already started to do. But by extraditing the paramilitary leaders, Uribe had sent away the witnesses who might have the most to say about their links to politicians. As a result, the extraditions felt like yet another chapter in the government’s attacks on the court.

  In fact, what the media described as the “train collision” between the court and the president had continued ever since the Tasmania episode. On January 14, 2008, the newspaper El Espectador published an interview by the journalist Cecilia Orozco with Supreme Court President César Julio Valencia that led to yet another blow-up with Uribe: In response to Orozco’s question about the phone call he had received from Uribe on September 26, 2007, Valencia said that “the call by the head of state deeply surprised me. The criminal chamber had just indicted Dr. Mario Uribe. In that moment, in an angry tone, he expressed his unhappiness over some decisions that the chamber was taking and, in not very clear terms, made reference to other facts related to the actions of an assistant justice.” Orozco interrupted Valencia: Did Uribe specifically refer to his cousin’s case? Valencia replied: “Yes.” The journalist pressed him further: Did Valencia believe that the president was angry not only because of the Tasmania case, but also because of the Mario Uribe indictment? Valencia responded vaguely, saying only, “I don’t think things are the way you’re describing them. I do get the impression, yes, that the president acted too quickly to call me, even though he had, as I understand it, previously spoken with other officials about the Tasmania issue.” Orozco asked Valencia to describe exactly what Uribe had said to him about the Mario Uribe case, but Valencia refused to say anything further.

  Valencia was in Paris attending a conference when El Espectador ran the interview, and he was stunned to receive a fax from the president the very next day. It consisted of two lines: “I have never spoken with you or any member of the Honorable Supreme Court of Justice about subjects that refer to political figures investigated for alleged links with paramilitaries. I ask you to remember and
make a correction to El Espectador.” Valencia wrote back that he had no reason to make a correction, as Uribe had, in fact, called him on September 26 and expressed in an angry tone his concern over the indictment of Senator Mario Uribe, as well as over the Tasmania issue. A couple of days later, President Uribe issued a press release recognizing that he had called Valencia on September 26, but insisting that the sole purpose of the call was to discuss the Tasmania case. He claimed that he had witnesses who could confirm that he had not discussed the Mario Uribe case, including the Colombian ambassador to the United Nations, Claudia Blum, and the Colombian ambassador to the United States, Carolina Barco. The president announced that he was pressing criminal charges against Valencia for slander.

  “I was not concerned,” said Valencia about the charges later on. He felt comfortable that he had told the truth. But the charges were alarming: the entity charged with investigating members of the Supreme Court was the Accusations Committee of the Colombian Congress, which at the time was packed with pro-Uribe parliamentarians. No matter how well he defended himself—and Valencia was represented by a top lawyer, Ramiro Bejarano—he had to worry that the investigators would be biased. As the case moved forward over the following months, Valencia also had to deal with frequent insults from people on the street. Many people recognized him and called him names, including “a son of a bitch,” for his supposed actions against the president.

  MEANWHILE, the government was scrambling to deal with a number of new scandals. In February 2008, Francisco Villalba, the paramilitary witness who years before had provided testimony to Velásquez’s friend Amelia Pérez in connection with the El Aro and Pichilín massacres, had given new statements to prosecutors about El Aro. Villalba, who was then serving thirty-three years in prison for his involvement in the El Aro massacre, claimed that the brothers Santiago and Álvaro Uribe had participated in a meeting along with military officers and paramilitary leaders Carlos Castaño and Mancuso a few days before the El Aro massacre. According to Villalba, the El Aro massacre had been committed as part of an operation to rescue some hostages, and after the massacre, Álvaro Uribe, who was then the governor of Antioquia, had once again met with the paramilitaries to congratulate them, because the hostages were now safe and sound. There was no record of Villalba making these accusations before, but he claimed that he had told some of the CTI investigators in the late 1990s about it—and that they had later been killed by members of the paramilitaries working with the Fourth Brigade of the army.

  The testimony got ample media coverage, even though there were good reasons to believe that Villalba was at least partly lying. Prosecutor Amelia Pérez had never trusted Villalba, ever since she had first interviewed him; there had always been parts of his testimony that were inaccurate. And this new testimony had serious inconsistencies: for example, he claimed that General Alfonso Manosalva had been present at the meeting three days before the massacre, but Manosalva was dead by then. Nor did any other paramilitaries corroborate his testimony about Uribe—though Mancuso later did allege that the Fourth Brigade, under General Carlos Alberto Ospina (who replaced Manosalva), had provided logistical support to the paramilitaries. He also claimed that a helicopter belonging to the Antioquia governor’s office had flown overhead during the massacre.

  On April 20, 2008, the TV program Noticias Uno released an explosive interview by journalist Daniel Coronell. On the screen, Coronell made clear that this was a recording from August 8, 2004. The subject of the interview was Yidis Medina, a brown-haired, still young, round-faced former congresswoman who was initially seen nervously picking lint from her thick red, brown, and beige sweater. Then she crossed her arms and began to speak: She was the only person, she said, who could confirm what happened, and so she feared for her life—one of her colleagues, she claimed, had told her to be careful about speaking because the government would not fulfill its commitments to her. “It would be very easy,” she said the colleague warned her, for her to appear murdered, or for her to have an accident and for them to say that she was hit by a car and died.

  Medina had surprised many observers in 2004 when, after giving the impression that she would vote against a bill to allow Uribe to run for a second term, she had changed her vote at the last minute. Another member of Congress, Teodolindo Avendaño, who had originally opposed the bill, never showed up to vote. In the Noticias Uno interview, Medina claimed that shortly before the vote, she had attended a meeting with Uribe’s chief of staff at the time, Alberto Velásquez, who had tried to persuade her to be “patriotic” and vote for reelection. In the middle of the meeting, she said, Uribe himself had made an appearance and repeated the same thing, saying that whatever she wanted, whatever agreements she discussed with his adviser, he would fulfill them, because he was a man of his word. She claimed that Uribe had said he wanted to save the country, and he wanted more time to finish his plan for the government. He had also promised, she said, that later on, once the noise around the bill had died down, he would allow her to name someone to a foreign consulate. After the president left, she told the interviewer, Velásquez and the minister of the interior, Sabas Pretelt, continued negotiating with her, on Uribe’s orders. They promised that she would be allowed to fill three positions in the Middle Magdalena region. She claimed that she also spoke with the minister of social protection, and the minister of social protection also spoke with Teodolindo Avendaño, the other member of Congress whose position on the bill changed. The day after she voted in favor of reelection, Medina said, Uribe called her to thank her and repeat his commitments. But later on, according to Medina, the government seemed to be backtracking on its promises. As a result, she decided to record the interview with Noticias Uno, but on one condition: that they not publish it unless she was killed or the government failed to deliver on its promises. Medina received her own copy of the recorded interview and also agreed not to share it with others. Four years later, Coronell found out that Medina had been talking to another journalist about what had happened and had revealed the existence of the video. Their agreement was now breached, and so, with Medina’s explicit permission, Coronell published the interview.

  Uribe immediately denied Medina’s allegations, but the Supreme Court opened an investigation into her actions. On June 28, 2008, she was convicted of bribery. The court notified both the Accusations Committee of Congress and the attorney general’s office of its ruling so they could also open investigations into other officials who might be implicated.

  At the same time, the investigation into Senator Mario Uribe was ramping up. He had resigned from the Senate after his indictment, so his case had been transferred from the Supreme Court to the attorney general’s office, which now had jurisdiction over it. Two days after Noticias Uno published Medina’s interview, on April 22, a prosecutor ordered Senator Uribe’s arrest.

  Attorney General Mario Iguarán recalled that ordering the arrest was a difficult decision for him: “I would have preferred not to take a decision against him,” he said. “I knew him well.” When Ramiro Marín, the prosecutor handling the case, told him he was ready to issue an arrest warrant, Iguarán said, he sat with the prosecutor for hours, playing devil’s advocate, to test Marín’s arguments for any weaknesses. The arrest warrant was based in part on Mancuso’s statements about meeting with Mario Uribe and Congresswoman Eleonora Pineda to arrange the distribution of votes in Córdoba—according to the prosecutor, Uribe went from getting 3,985 votes in the 1998 elections to nearly triple that amount—11,136 votes—in the 2002 elections, perhaps as a result of the arrangement. The voting patterns in the state had also been highly atypical in ways the prosecutor considered consistent with fraud.

  After five hours of arguing with the prosecutor, Iguarán said, he was convinced that Marín was right and they had to move forward. However, he asked Marín to hold off on the arrest for a little longer, so he could go and talk to President Uribe himself—he thought it was appropriate to give him some warning that this was coming. That nigh
t, he said, Uribe argued in his cousin’s defense, like anyone would who saw a loved one in that situation. But Uribe seemed to accept the decision.

  The next morning, Mario Uribe was at the Costa Rican embassy, claiming that he was the victim of political persecution. It seemed as if he had learned about the arrest warrant before it could be carried out, and he had decided to seek asylum. But by the end of the day, Costa Rica had denied his application, and the CTI took him into custody.

  IN THE MIDST of these scandals, Uribe administration officials found another subject to discuss in the media: at a public event with members of Congress and various administration officials in the Urabá region of Antioquia, Ferney Suaza, a demobilized paramilitary from Urabá, stood up and asked the officials to give President Uribe a message. A group of nongovernmental organizations and other people had tried to bribe Suaza, urging him to testify as to links between the president and paramilitary groups. Immediately, one of the congressmen present put Suaza on the phone with Uribe, and soon, Uribe and people from his inner circle were again taking to the airwaves to complain about what one presidential adviser, Fabio Valencia Cossio, called an “international plot” involving a “cartel of witnesses” against the government.

  Meanwhile, another scandal had erupted in the media over a couple of trips by justices of the Supreme Court that had supposedly been paid for by a man named Ascencio Reyes, who was rumored to have “links” to persons involved in drug trafficking. Reports also said that Reyes was influential in the attorney general’s office, and that he was so close to Attorney General Iguarán that he had attended Iguarán’s swearing-in celebration. In a story written by one of Calderón’s colleagues, Semana posted a photo of Iguarán and a man it identified as Reyes, supposedly at the swearing-in. The photo would later turn out to be of someone else, not Reyes, but officials and pro-government commentators immediately seized on the Ascencio Reyes story. According to them, it was evidence that the court was corrupt. They revived their attacks on Velásquez’s investigations.