There Are No Dead Here
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In an op-ed in El Espectador, Bejarano highlighted some of the strange facts in the case: it was odd, to begin with, that Moreno “could not recall who called his exclusive phone number to discuss this issue.” It was stranger still, he noted, that in an interview, Santiago Uribe had insisted that “on September 10, 2007, Mario Uribe called me and said that… Sergio González was going to bring me a very serious letter. The next day, he showed up and brought me the letter.” According to Santiago, however, it was Mario Uribe who delivered the letter to the president. “I don’t know if he did it in person or through José Obdulio [Gaviria, presumably]. The president’s accusation came after that.” Not only did Moreno’s account about the presidency first learning about the letter through an anonymous call in late September make no sense, since Santiago was claiming that Mario delivered it to the president, but there was also nearly a month-long gap between the day Santiago Uribe said he received the letter, September 11, and the day President Uribe made it public, October 7.
Velásquez had always wondered about the origins of the Tasmania letter, and he had repeatedly urged the prosecutors to find out more about how the letter got to the presidency, but the attorney general’s office had failed to dig into the issue. Bejarano’s findings only underscored his concerns. In a lengthy interview in El Espectador a few days after Bejarano’s column, he flagged another inconsistency in the official version of events: “The director of the DAS has admitted that on September 30 she sent for the document in the morning, and that afternoon she took it to the president. That would mean that the president first read the letter on September 30. If that’s the true order of events, then how did the president go about asking Justice Valencia about my supposedly irregular conduct with Tasmania on September 26?”
In addition to all this, Velásquez pointed out in the interview, there seemed to be a number of connections between Mario and Santiago Uribe and Sergio González, the lawyer who represented El Tuso and Tasmania. For example, he said, he had learned that González had an office in the same building as Mario Uribe’s, and prosecutors had been able to establish that fact; also, Santiago Uribe had admitted that he shared Mario’s office. Santiago had also acknowledged in an interview that he and González had neighboring land. Velásquez couldn’t corroborate all of these claims, and he didn’t know whether prosecutors had asked Mario and Santiago Uribe or Sergio González about them. But, combined with all the inconsistencies about how the letter got to the presidency, as well as Tasmania’s claims about Mario and Santiago, he thought it was clear that somebody was lying. The prosecutors, he said, should have tried harder to get to the bottom of it all.
Ultimately, Velásquez said, “there was a criminal organization behind this plot. And not only involving Sergio González and Tasmania. What was its interest? There’s an unfortunate situation in all of this, which is that many of the defendants have directed their hatred toward me, as if I were the source of the parapolitics investigation.… There’s an evident goal of harming me, on the one hand. On the other, there’s also the goal of discrediting the court’s investigations.”
NEW ALLEGATIONS KEPT surfacing against Velásquez. He felt that people close to the Uribe administration had now undertaken a persistent campaign to discredit him and his investigations. In August 2008, El Espectador reported on new allegations by Betty Barreto, who was said to have been the cook for the paramilitary commander Héctor Germán Buitrago (aka “Martín Llanos”) for many years. She was claiming that Velásquez and two other investigators had improperly offered alcohol to her and her son—who had reportedly also worked with the paramilitaries—when they were interviewing them in Yopal, in the state of Casanare, at the end of her workday. She told journalists that she felt that the investigators were trying to get her drunk so she would talk. The article also made it sound like Barreto felt they were pushing her to talk specifically about Colombian politician Germán Vargas Lleras. When asked by journalists, Velásquez said that the team had indeed gone out for a drink while they talked to the witness, and that she had talked at length about the history of the paramilitaries in Casanare, which she knew well. But there was no effort to get her drunk, or to get her to talk about any particular member of Congress. “You don’t conduct investigations at the desk of a court office,” Velásquez would say later on, reflecting on the incident. He had simply been trying to gain the trust of a witness who had important things to say, and that meant spending time talking with her, following her lead. In his view, it was unfortunate that as a result of a groundless scandal, the country “missed out on an important opportunity to get to know an important part of the truth about the relationship of… Colombian politicians with Martín Llanos’s paramilitaries.” Soon afterward, Barreto said she had been misquoted. She essentially confirmed Velásquez’s version of events, saying that even though there had been alcohol during her meeting with the investigators, she was never pressed to give any information or to talk about Vargas Lleras.
Around the same time, Senate president Nancy Patricia Gutiérrez, who was then under investigation for paramilitary links, released a recording she had surreptitiously made of a conversation she had had with one of the investigators working with Velásquez’s team, Juan Carlos Díaz Rayo. Over the course of the long conversation—which in tone suggested a high degree of familiarity between the investigator and Gutiérrez—Díaz Rayo expressed some concerns about how the parapolitics investigations worked. In particular, he made a comment about a case the court had open, number 26,625, in which he said Velásquez was collecting evidence against multiple members of Congress without notifying them that they were under investigation, as would normally be required. Gutiérrez and others tried to portray this as a grave violation of due process rights, and President Uribe publicly backed Gutiérrez up. In fact, Uribe made new insinuations about the courts, stating that “some senator has told me about feeling that certain sectors of the justice system had asked him or her for money. I’ve asked, ‘Why don’t you report them?’ But the person told me that it was done in such a subtle way that it would be hard to report, and also that he or she is afraid to do so.”
Soon after, Díaz Rayo was reportedly removed from the investigative team. As for the substance of Gutiérrez’s complaint, Velásquez explained to the media that, although it was true that there was a general open case, number 26,625, in which the court could receive testimony related to parapolitics, it was not focused on any one individual, and so they had not violated any rights—the minute an investigation did focus on an individual, they opened a new case for that person. In fact, conducting preliminary inquiries about possible paramilitary links with politicians was the mission the court had given him—there was nothing improper about that. After a special meeting to discuss the new allegations against Velásquez, the court ended up “decisively and emphatically” backing Velásquez’s work.
BUT COMMENTATORS and politicians continued attacking Velásquez and the court, often referring darkly to a “cartel of witnesses” that Velásquez was supposedly running, or talking about his supposed mismanagement of investigations, without giving much detail. No matter what Velásquez did, or what the evidence showed, it felt as though there would be no end to the efforts to discredit him.
CHAPTER 16
INSIDE THE PRESIDENTIAL PALACE
“WHAT A WASTE OF TIME,” Ricardo Calderón thought to himself as he listened to the Democracy Corporation members talk. It was early 2008, months before the paramilitary leaders were extradited, and Calderón was sitting in the lovely terrace of a small hotel in the exclusive Poblado neighborhood of Medellín, surrounded by tropical plants and hummingbirds, as elegantly dressed servers came by with more drinks and food for the group. Calderón had traveled to Medellín for other reasons, but the paramilitary known as “Job” (Antonio López) had urged him to meet with him and some of his associates to listen to what they were doing in the city.
The men from the Democracy Corporation, a nonprofit made up of demobilized
paramilitaries in Medellín, had a well-practiced pitch about their work: their association, led by Job and a few other former members of the group that had been led by Don Berna (Diego Murillo Bejarano) who were free and not participating in the Justice and Peace process (because there were no criminal charges against them), was helping demobilized paramilitaries reintegrate into civilian life. In close collaboration with Medellín’s office of reintegration, which was headed by Jorge Gaviria, brother to presidential adviser José Obdulio Gaviria, the Democracy Corporation found jobs for demobilized men, helped them get schooling, represented them in negotiations over benefits with the government, and helped them to participate in an organized way in local politics—peacefully rather than through the use of force. They also organized the demobilized men, naming “coordinators” for different groups, which mirrored some of the original structure of the armed groups in various neighborhoods in the city.
Medellín had experienced a dramatic drop in homicides in the past few years—after a peak of 184 murders per 100,000 residents in 2002, the number of killings dropped by half in 2003, and now stood at 28.7 per 100,000. As a result, both US and Colombian officials were talking about a sort of Medellín “miracle” and a “revolution” in violence reduction. Bush administration officials, who were aggressively pushing Democratic legislators in Washington to approve the pending free trade deal, had been particularly effusive in holding Medellín out as a model, not only for violence reduction but for President Uribe’s security and demobilization policies. The Democracy Corporation had capitalized on this narrative, and a meeting with leaders like Job, Giovanni Marín, William López (aka “Memín”), and Fabio Acevedo—all tough-looking but smooth-talking associates of Don Berna—had become almost a required stop for delegations of foreign officials visiting Colombia.
Calderón had few illusions about what the Democracy Corporation really was. To him, it was clear that this was a mechanism through which Don Berna, and perhaps other, new leaders, could continue exerting control in the city with a veneer of legality. There had already been reporting in the media about the fear Medellín residents were living with because of the ongoing threats by demobilized paramilitaries. Democracy Corporation members had been trying to take over local community councils—and their access to state resources—through intimidation. It was said that they killed community leaders, “coordinators” of the demobilized, or others who didn’t follow the orders of Berna’s men. The Democracy Corporation members themselves had acknowledged that the drop in homicides had more to do with the fact that Don Berna’s group had vanquished most of its rivals in 2002 than with the demobilization process. So listening to Job and his buddies talk about their social work was frustrating and mind-numbingly boring to Calderón. He was only doing it on the off-chance that he would gain some insight into what Job was really up to behind the scenes.
Calderón had never believed Job’s vague claims to have evidence against Iván Velásquez, but he had been intrigued enough to keep meeting with Berna’s associate. As luck would have it, soon after they first met, in mid-2007, Job had started to spend much of his day in meetings and taking calls from the terrace of a steak restaurant very close to Calderón’s office in Bogotá. When Job got close to the corner of the terrace, Calderón could even take photos of him and the people accompanying him from his office window. Soon, he was regularly photographing Job in different parts of the restaurant, not only from the window, but also from Semana’s rooftop, and even from a car with tinted windows that he borrowed from a friend—this went on for eight months or more. Calderón’s mother passed away in August 2007, and Calderón threw himself into his work even more than in the past as a way to deal with his grief. Calderón’s schedule was highly irregular, but it seemed like Job was spending virtually all his time at the restaurant—arriving at 11 a.m. and staying until 11 p.m. Sometimes Calderón would join Job for lunch, and Job began introducing him to some of his associates, which even included a former police officer who now seemed to be working as Job’s assistant. On those occasions, Calderón would convince some of his colleagues to help him film the meetings from afar.
The Medellín Democracy Corporation meeting was just part of Calderón’s ongoing cultivation and monitoring of Job. Months later, it would turn out to be critically important to Calderón in showing the lengths to which the paramilitaries were going to help the government discredit the parapolitics investigations.
THE OFFICES OF THE governmental National Learning Service (Servicio Nacional de Aprendizaje, or SENA) in Apartadó were packed—and, as was always the case in the main town in the tropical Urabá region of Antioquia, muggy. It was April 24, 2008—two days after Mario Uribe’s arrest, and four days after Noticias Uno published the video of Yidis Medina saying that she had been bribed to vote for Uribe’s reelection. Several high-level officials from Bogotá had descended upon the SENA offices for a meeting about “productive projects” that the government was supposed to put in place to create jobs for demobilized men.
As the meeting, which was being streamed live on the public TV channel, came to a close, one of the local demobilized leaders asked to speak: he wanted to inform President Uribe of something that had happened to him. He went on to say that he had recently been approached by someone who offered him 200 million pesos (around US$100,000) if he would say that President Uribe and other members of the region’s political class had connections to the paramilitaries in the Urabá region. The statement led to another storm of media coverage, with the man who had spoken appearing in multiple news outlets repeating his claim about the attempted bribe. He added that he had been offered potential asylum in Canada or another country, with the help of a nongovernmental organization, and that he was worried, because this was “a clear effort to destabilize” the country’s democratic institutions, and he didn’t want to participate in that. He refused to identify the people who had approached him, stating that he would do so in a longer conversation with the president. He did not agree with many of the president’s policies, and had never voted for him, he added, so this was not a situation in which he was trying to do the president a favor.
Poster belonging to Ricardo Calderón, Bogotá, October 2016. It used to hang in his office at Semana when he was investigating the 2009 DAS scandal. © Maria McFarland Sánchez-Moreno.
Uribe administration officials immediately seized upon the demobilized man’s statements as further proof that people were plotting against the president. Presidential adviser Fabio Valencia Cossio spoke of “an international plot” against Uribe and told the media that the man’s claims were proof that there was a “cartel of witnesses” against the government—an implicit attack on Velásquez. “One week they set something up from one prison, and the following week, they do it from outside the country,” said Valencia Cossio.
Calderón could not believe his eyes when he saw footage of the demobilized paramilitary making these statements: it was Ferney Suaza, one of Job’s associates, who had participated in the hotel meeting with Democracy Corporation members a few months earlier in Medellín. There was no way, thought Calderón, that this was a mere coincidence. In the preceding months, Job had kept hammering away at his claim that Velásquez was corrupt, though for a long time he offered nothing concrete to back up those claims. Now one of Job’s associates was giving further ammunition to those who were claiming that the court was persecuting the president.
Calderón finally confronted Job directly: What was going on? It was all very simple, Job told Calderón: There was a battle between the court and the president, and the paramilitaries had to pick a side. They had decided to help Uribe by gathering evidence against the court. But, Calderón was starting to understand, the paramilitaries’ activities were going well beyond “gathering” evidence.
Soon after, Job finally brought Calderón material that he described as evidence of Velásquez’s corruption: it was a video recording taken in an office of a round man in a suit and glasses, named Henry Anaya, who
was talking in an animated manner with Diego Álvarez, the dry, wiry, bearded lawyer who represented Don Berna. On the video, Anaya seemed to hold himself out as a representative of the Supreme Court, and to be asking Álvarez for US$15,000 in exchange for, apparently, getting “improvements” in Don Berna’s prison conditions. Job urged Calderón to publish the video, but to Calderón it was absurd: Anaya might well be trying to scam Don Berna’s lawyers, but it was clear that he didn’t work for the court, and the video didn’t show any misbehavior by the court itself. Job later shared another video with Calderón of Velásquez meeting with Don Berna’s lawyer, but the video showed nothing out of the ordinary or inappropriate. And he shared audio recordings of prison conversations between Don Berna and the former IT chief from the DAS, Rafael García, apparently with the goal of discrediting García, whose testimony was important in several of the parapolitics cases—though the recordings didn’t really do that.