Meanwhile, Calderón discovered that one of his Semana colleagues, whom he considered very close to the Uribe administration, had obtained a copy of the Anaya video and the García audio recordings from senior officials. That was interesting: How did the administration get the material? Clearly, there was some channel of communication between Don Berna’s people and the administration. Calderón persuaded the magazine to hold off on publishing the recordings—he wanted to nail down the full story.
Calderón was not surprised that Job was involved in some kind of effort to smear Velásquez. After all, Job had admitted as much. But if the administration was sharing these recordings, that suggested it was actively working with Job and Don Berna.
“I JUST CAME out of the Casa de Nari,” a deep male voice, with a thick Antioquia accent, said on a never before published audio recording, referring informally to the Casa de Nariño, as the presidential palace is known. Calderón recognized the voice—he knew it well—and sat back, satisfied. This was the last piece of evidence he needed to write the story.
On August 25, 2008, Calderón revealed to the public just how close Job had gotten to the highest circles of political power in the country. With new audio and video recordings that he obtained from various sources that had been monitoring Job’s activities, Calderón reported in Semana that four months earlier, on April 23, Job and Don Berna’s lawyer, Diego Álvarez, had entered the Casa de Nariño and met with some of Uribe’s closest advisers. They included the president’s legal counsel, Edmundo del Castillo, and his press secretary, César Mauricio Velásquez, as well as a couple of other individuals. There, Álvarez and Job had offered supposed “evidence” against the Supreme Court—in particular, the Anaya video and the recording of Iván Velásquez meeting with Álvarez. The meeting happened the same week that Noticias Uno made the video of Yidis Medina public, in which she accused the administration of buying her vote, and just a couple of days after Mario Uribe’s arrest. It was also the day before Job’s associate Ferney Suaza made his explosive statements in the media about how mysterious people had been offering him benefits in exchange for testifying against Uribe.
Don Berna and his men had come up with a “Machiavellian” plan, Calderón wrote, to surreptitiously record members of the Supreme Court and other persons and take those recordings to the government in exchange for benefits. This behavior by the paramilitaries was unremarkable, since, after all, they were “criminals with a mafia-like modus operandi.” But what was surprising, Calderón wrote, was that “in the heart of the Casa de Nariño, just a few meters from the office of president Álvaro Uribe, the legal counsel and press chief would meet with envoys of ‘Don Berna’ to receive information against the court. And what did the paras want in exchange? To delay the extradition of ‘Don Berna,’ as the paramilitaries themselves acknowledged to Semana.”
Calderón explained that Don Berna and his men had started to develop their plot soon after President Uribe launched his first attacks on the court over the Tasmania letter, when they realized the depth of the animus the government had toward the Supreme Court. They had seen an opportunity to make themselves useful to the administration by collecting or manufacturing material that the administration could use to harm the court, and particularly Velásquez. So they decided to secretly record several people with the goal of collecting material that might be useful to them. Don Berna’s men knew that Anaya didn’t work for the Supreme Court, but even so, he did have contacts in the court, including Iván Velásquez himself, because he had been an intermediary with witnesses in some of the court’s cases. That’s why Berna’s people had specifically reached out to Anaya: they hoped they could get him to say something they could use to smear the court. Anaya had apparently seen an opportunity to make some money by boasting of his connections in the court and offering to use them on Don Berna’s behalf—as revealed in the video. Anaya had also, Calderón noted, managed to arrange meetings between Velásquez and Álvarez, which the paramilitaries had also recorded, in an effort to get Velásquez to say something they could use against him. But, as Calderón had already seen in the videos that Job had given him, Velásquez had said nothing in any way problematic in these meetings. Still, Don Berna’s people had tried to make the most of what they had, and had offered the videos to the administration.
But, Calderón noted, “like any good mafioso,” Don Berna had covered all his bases. So, in addition to collecting material that would implicate the court, he also sought material that he could use as a sort of “insurance policy” against the government. Once the government transferred him to La Picota prison (after the bizarre episode in which it put him on the navy brig), Don Berna had shared a cell for a while with Rafael García, the former IT chief for the DAS, who had implicated the DAS director, Jorge Noguera, years before. He had spent hours talking to García, secretly recording his conversations. On the recordings, Berna could be heard trying to goad García into saying things that would undermine the parapolitics cases. But Calderón also noticed that, on some of the recordings, Berna repeatedly tried to get García to tell him information that might be harmful to President Uribe.
All of these efforts came to a head on April 3, 2008, when the Uribe administration extradited “Macaco” (Carlos Mario Jiménez), the former leader of the AUC’s Central Bolívar Block, to the United States. Don Berna was sure that he would be next, because of the United States’ intense interest in his extradition. Don Berna knew, Calderón wrote, that there was no way he could avoid ending up in a US prison. But he wanted to buy time so his lawyers could negotiate with US officials, and so he could get his criminal organization in Medellín in order. So Berna’s men had ramped up their efforts to persuade the Uribe administration to delay their commander’s extradition.
Before writing the article, Calderón had spoken to Edmundo del Castillo, Uribe’s general counsel, as well as César Mauricio Velásquez, the press secretary. Both had confirmed that they had been at the April 23 meeting with Job and Álvarez. Del Castillo said he had also met on two other occasions with Berna’s lawyer, Álvarez. It later became clear that they had been joined in the meeting by a representative of the DAS, as well as two other individuals. According to Del Castillo, he had agreed to meet with Job because Job had said that he had evidence of a plot by the court against the president, but Job had not asked for anything in exchange. In other words, Calderón wrote, criminals had secretly recorded the Supreme Court’s top investigator in an effort to smear him, and had then given the recordings to high officials from the president’s office. And then, instead of reporting them, those officials “had decided to maintain a complicit silence.”
Worse yet, as Calderón already knew, someone in the Casa de Nariño had tried to distribute some of the paramilitaries’ recordings to the press to smear the court. “As if that weren’t enough,” Calderón wrote, they then tried to cover it up. “To avoid leaving behind evidence that the paramilitaries were the ones who collected the secret recordings,” Calderón reported, based on statements by senior intelligence officials, “an official from the Casa de Nariño called the DAS to ask it to install hidden microphones and tap certain phone lines, including that of Assistant Justice Iván Velásquez and the man in the video, Anaya.”
Don Berna’s plan did not work out: a little over two weeks after the meeting, Uribe extradited him to the United States along with the other paramilitary leaders. And on July 28, as Job ate lunch at Angus Brangus, a steak and seafood restaurant in the El Poblado neighborhood in Medellín, two men with guns interrupted him, shooting the paramilitary to death for reasons that would never be entirely clear.
STANDING STRAIGHT IN front of a background of blue curtains, next to the Colombian flag, President Uribe read a carefully worded statement, responding to Semana’s report. He had, Uribe acknowledged with a poker face, learned of Del Castillo’s meeting with Job beforehand, and he did “not disallow it,” as it was policy in the presidential palace to “meet with all people who might bring r
elevant information about public order.” The paramilitaries, he said, had told his staff that they had evidence that Supreme Court investigators were manipulating witnesses so they could accuse the president of something. And that, Uribe said, was “serious.” To explain further, he said, “Because you know, we have had many difficulties in that regard. In Colombia today there is a trafficking in witnesses, in testimony, and that is corruption and we have to eliminate it too.” Ultimately, he said, the presidency had decided not to report anything to prosecutors because they had found the information that the paramilitaries gave them to be “irrelevant,” and they had thought it would be irresponsible to make accusations against the court based on the videos they had seen. However, they had turned the material over to the DAS to be transcribed, though the DAS was still working on that because parts of the recordings were “inaudible.”
Uribe’s statement raised far more questions than it answered, as Calderón and one of his colleagues noted in Semana: Why would the presidency have a policy of meeting with all people who had information about public order, when there were entire state agencies, including the police and the armed forces, devoted to that? Was the Supreme Court a threat to “public order,” in his mind? Why would the press secretary and the general counsel be charged with meeting with paramilitaries, when it wasn’t within their job descriptions? Why had Job been given permission (as Calderón discovered) to enter the presidential palace with his car, through the basement, when all official visitors had to go through the front door? And if the whole meeting was aboveboard, why was there no official record, as there would be for any other visit, of Job having entered the Casa de Nariño? Rather, Calderón had discovered, there was only a record of Berna’s lawyer, Diego Álvarez, coming in in his car—and Job was not listed as a passenger. Finally, Calderón asked: “If, as the president said, the information was ‘irrelevant,’… what was the point of leaking some of the recordings and transcripts to a media outlet?” Here, Calderón was referring to the material he assumed someone in the presidential palace had given to one of his colleagues at Semana. He went on to note that it was equally curious that even though the recordings had inaudible portions, the transcripts made in the Casa de Nariño and shared with the media included language that wasn’t even in the recordings.
Calderón’s article—combined with what many in the public perceived as a disturbing response by the president—caused a massive national scandal, with virtually all other media outlets in the country covering his findings. Iván Velásquez had had some sense of what was coming: he and Calderón had recently reconnected after a long period of not speaking, and Calderón had asked him a number of questions to cross-check information in the article. But it was a relief to have more evidence supporting his own belief that he had been the target of a coordinated smear operation.
Calderón was convinced that, ultimately, the decision to extradite the paramilitaries came down to the simple fact that keeping them in Colombia had become more risky to the administration than sending them away. Berna, hoping to avoid extradition to the United States, had followed two paths simultaneously: on the one hand, offering to help the government, by collecting an array of recordings that could harm the court or the parapolitics investigations, and, on the other, trying to get ahold of information he could use to blackmail the Uribe administration. It was clear to Calderón that the paramilitaries were getting out of control—not just because of their continued criminal activity, which Calderón had reported more than a year before—but because they might turn on the administration.
In December 2008, another journalist, Félix de Bedout, added further fuel to this theory, when his W Radio show published audio recordings of a meeting the paramilitary leader Salvatore Mancuso had had with politicians Eleonora Pineda and Miguel de la Espriella, while Mancuso was still in Colombia and participating in the Justice and Peace process. In the recordings, Mancuso could be heard telling the two politicians that they needed to remember every name of any politician who had collaborated with the paramilitaries, and start disclosing them—his idea, apparently, was to overwhelm the system. “The more people are involved, the faster there will be a solution,” Mancuso had said. “Uribe can’t imprison 20,000 people, and he can’t imprison the 100 most important people in this country, he can’t. What is he going to do with his ministers, with his minister of defense? What is he going to do with his vice president?” This effort, it seemed, was partly why in 2006 De la Espriella and Pineda had first revealed the existence of the Ralito Pact, which had involved several politicians. But what else had Mancuso been planning to reveal?
Besides, Calderón was starting to learn, the court’s enemies in the government had plenty of other tools at their disposal, without the paramilitaries’ help, to go after Iván Velásquez’s investigations.
CHAPTER 17
SPIES
AT 11 A.M. ON FEBRUARY 18, 2009, Ricardo Calderón was walking down the street to Hacienda Santa Bárbara, a high-end red-brick shopping mall in Bogotá, when his DAS sources pulled up next to him and dragged him into their car. He had assumed that—as on other occasions—the DAS agents would ask him to climb into the trunk of their car in the basement parking lot, and drive him to an unidentified location to talk. They had good reasons to be paranoid, so he didn’t mind following their instructions whenever they met. But this time, they punched him in the brow and knocked him out. When the guard outside his building woke him up the next morning on the front lawn of his apartment building, Calderón could not remember anything that had happened over the past twenty or so hours. He went to the emergency room for stitches on his head wound, and a blood test revealed that he had been administered a drug similar to scopolamine, or “Devil’s Breath,” which left him able to function but with no awareness or recollection of what he was doing.
Around noon, Calderón pulled up to Semana’s offices to tell his editor what had happened. He was taken aback to find the same agents waiting for him by the building’s entrance. He took them into his office to talk, and they immediately apologized: “We’re so sorry, but you have to understand,” Calderón recalls them saying. The agents had been talking with him for so many months, without Calderón writing any articles, that they had become afraid that he was working for the counterintelligence branch of the DAS. Meanwhile, the word had been getting around within the agency that Calderón was writing something big about them. A counterintelligence agent had spotted Calderón talking to one of his sources, and had alerted the DAS’s counterintelligence director, Jorge Lagos. As a result, Calderón’s sources said, counterintelligence agents had begun destroying incriminating material and were now conducting a witch hunt within the agency, trying to find out who else might be talking to the media. Calderón’s sources were nervous. They didn’t understand why he hadn’t done anything yet with all the information they had been giving him, so they had decided to dope and interrogate him. “Last night we realized that you were loyal, but we had to be sure that you hadn’t been sent by Lagos,” they explained. Calderón accepted their apology and said he understood. But the incident changed things: he had kept the lid on his latest investigation for a long time and would have liked to continue investigating. But what if his other sources also grew suspicious? What else might they do to him?
Calderón’s wife, Mónica, was having dinner with her mother, who was visiting them, when she saw him walk into their apartment with a huge bruise on his head. He tried to avoid being seen, but she rushed to him, alarmed. What had happened? she wanted to know. Calderón always tried to keep the threats he received from Mónica, as he didn’t want to upset her. The only one she had ever directly encountered was a message on their phone’s answering machine in 2004, warning Calderón to be quiet or suffer the consequences. The threat, Calderón had believed, was in response to an article he had written about how police officers, apparently working on behalf of paramilitaries, had kidnapped and tortured a young woman they believed had stolen money from the paramilitari
es. After that incident, which shook Mónica deeply, the couple had moved, and had gotten rid of their answering machine.
This time, Calderón told Mónica he had slipped and hurt his head by accident. Mónica kept looking him over, to see if he had any other injuries, but she couldn’t find any. She didn’t believe him, but she also didn’t want to upset her mother, so she accepted his explanation and let him go to sleep. Mónica had always known Calderón did dangerous work, and she had never fully understood why he was so passionate about it—she would not choose to do that work herself. But she also knew that it was central to who he was. So the best way for her to deal with it, and not live in a constant state of anxiety, was simply to trust him and try not to know too much about what he was doing.
CALDERÓN HAD STARTED this latest investigation as a result of his monitoring of Job’s activities. He had recognized former members of the DAS who were showing up to meet with the paramilitary, and who were clearly passing information on to him. Curious to find out more, Calderón had reached out to some of his DAS sources from the days when he was covering the scandal over paramilitary infiltration of the DAS under its director at the time, Jorge Noguera. Calderón had never revealed their names, so they trusted him. Knowing of Job’s efforts to smear the court, Calderón had asked them whether the DAS was spying on political figures—or even the Supreme Court. They confirmed that it was. And so began, especially starting in October 2008, yet another round of surreptitious meetings in which they gave him information. In addition to the basement of Hacienda Santa Bárbara, Calderón would meet them at gas stations, and at various restaurants in the middle of the night, usually on weekends. Initially, they only told him what they were seeing, and explained the structure of the DAS—which operated in cells—and the role of different actors. But Calderón kept pressing them for more.
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