That January 13, 2009, Uribe seemed untouchable. He had consistently maintained popularity ratings at or above 70 percent, and much of the public credited him with not only bringing security to the country, but also improving their economic prospects. His image as a tireless worker who was sincere in his commitment to Colombia remained strong; it had not been diminished by his rages, or his cronies’ involvement in criminal activity, or the questions swirling around the paramilitaries’ demobilization. The president had eighteen months left in his term, and everyone expected him to run for office again—yet another constitutional amendment was making its way through Congress. If passed and then approved by the Constitutional Court, the bill would allow a referendum on whether Uribe could run for a third term. Given his popularity, its success seemed likely.
Colombians were tired of war, tired of the FARC, tired of the senselessness of it all. In November 2007, Colombian news media had published a photograph of a French-Colombian former presidential candidate, Íngrid Betancourt, who had been kidnapped in 2002; she was still a hostage, and in the photograph, she looked gaunt, ill, and broken. In an accompanying letter that the FARC had allowed her to send to her mother, as evidence that she was still alive, the once indomitable Betancourt sounded defeated: “Here, we live dead.… I don’t feel like anything. I think that’s the only thing that is okay, I don’t want anything because here in this jungle the only answer to everything is ‘no.’ It’s better, then, not to want anything, to at least be free of desires.” Earlier that year, Jhon Frank Pinchao, another FARC hostage, who had managed to escape after nine years in captivity, had publicly given chilling details of the conditions in which the FARC held the hostages—they tied them up with chains and used metal manacles on their hands, feet, and heads to punish them; several of the hostages had been ill. Betancourt and Pinchao were only two of the hundreds of people the FARC had kidnapped in previous years, for ransom or for political reasons, and held for years on end or killed. In January 2008, the FARC released two hostages, Consuelo Gonzales and Clara Rojas, as a result of negotiations by Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez. But the story of the dark-haired Rojas, a lawyer who had been Betancourt’s campaign manager, had only made Colombians more aware of the FARC’s brutality: Rojas had had a baby boy, Emmanuel, in captivity, delivering him through a C-section carried out by the guerrillas in the jungle, and the FARC seized him from her while he was still an infant. She was only reunited with him years later, after she was released and the government identified a three-year-old in the care of Colombia’s Family Welfare Institute as her baby.
Uribe had not flinched in confronting the FARC—something new for the country. US military aid through Plan Colombia had allowed the Colombian military to purchase modern airplanes, surveillance technologies, and other equipment that had allowed the Uribe administration to repel FARC efforts to take territory and to pinpoint their locations and target them. Early in his term, the government had arrested senior FARC commander Ricardo Palmera (aka “Simón Trinidad”), who was extradited to the United States and sentenced to sixty years in prison in connection with FARC kidnappings of three US contractors. Uribe and his defense minister, Juan Manuel Santos, could also claim credit for multiple military operations that had resulted in significant losses for the FARC: on March 1, 2008, for example, a joint military and police force conducted an airstrike and raid on a FARC camp across the Colombian border with Ecuador that killed senior FARC leader Raul Reyes. During the raid, they also recovered valuable computer files belonging to Reyes, some of which pointed to links between the FARC and officials in Ecuador and Venezuela. Later on, Uribe administration officials would also charge that some of the files indicated links between the FARC and the Colombian senator Piedad Córdoba, though she denied those claims; years later, one of Colombia’s high courts would rule that Córdoba should not be barred from participating in politics based on the files, finding that the evidence collected from Reyes’s computer had been manipulated. Although the strike caused a diplomatic rift with the government of President Rafael Correa in Ecuador, many Colombians viewed it as a huge and groundbreaking coup—a sign that the tide was truly shifting against the FARC. A few days later, the Uribe administration claimed another success when a FARC fighter murdered guerrilla commander “Iván Ríos,” hacked off his hand, and then brought it to the army as proof that Ríos was dead. A few weeks later, the FARC’s top commander, “Manuel Marulanda,” died of a heart attack.
Íngrid Betancourt in captivity. The image was published widely in the Colombian media in 2007.
Uribe’s image as a hero shone even more brightly in July 2008, thanks to a spectacularly successful military operation (Operación Jaque, or Operation Checkmate) to rescue a group of fifteen high-profile hostages being held by the FARC, including Betancourt; three US contractors (Marc Gonsalves, Tom Howes, and Keith Stansell); and several members of the Colombian military and police. Following the successful operation, officials described how they had been able to infiltrate the FARC’s First Front and deceive its leaders into believing that the FARC’s high command had organized a hostages-for-prisoners swap. The First Front’s command did not confirm the details, because of the dangers of communicating with the FARC leadership, and went ahead with the supposed plan. The government then sent in a military helicopter that it had painted white, with several soldiers on board pretending to be members of a nongovernmental organization. Thinking that this was, as promised, part of a humanitarian operation, and they were in no danger because they were headed for a meeting with a FARC leader, two FARC members got onto the helicopter along with the hostages. But as soon as they were in the air, the army immobilized the FARC members and told the hostages they were free.
In the past, the rescue of the hostages would have seemed inconceivable to most Colombians. But Uribe later wrote that he had declined Defense Minister Santos’s invitation to go and greet the hostages when they landed in the capital, as it would be good for Santos’s political future to handle it. “I wanted to signal to the nation that, in moments of great joy and moments of tragedy alike, our will to work would remain constant—our emotions would remain steady. We would proceed normally with the business of the Colombian nation, fulfilling our duty. So I kept the rest of my scheduled agenda for that day,” he wrote. Later on, with the hostages at the presidential palace, he did deliver a message on television, reminding the country that many more Colombians were still in captivity. “This is our commitment,” he said to those still being held by the FARC. “We won’t forget you for a moment until you are all back in freedom.”
In the midst of these military successes, the news about Tasmania’s confession and Job’s entry in the Casa de Nariño, which came out around the same time that Operation Checkmate took place, did little to dent Uribe’s popularity.
Neither did the scandal over what became known as the “false-positives,” when, in 2008, the media began to focus on long-standing allegations that the army had been killing civilians, and then dressing them up as guerrillas killed in combat, during Uribe’s administration. Uribe and Defense Minister Santos responded by announcing a purge in military ranks, removing twenty-five members of the army. But the purges, which seemed to imply that the killings could be attributed to a few bad apples in the military, didn’t even scratch the surface of the problem, in Calderón’s opinion. Even while he was writing about the DAS, he published a story about a young man who admitted that, in exchange for money, he had repeatedly lured away young men in Bogotá—more than thirty in total—with false promises of jobs or membership in paramilitary groups, and then turned them over to members of the military. Several of the young men later turned up dead, with the military claiming they were guerrillas. Over time, it would become clear that there were thousands of similar cases around the country.
The false-positives and the DAS scandals did raise serious questions in Washington, however, where Congress was still holding up the US–Colombia free trade deal. The administration of
Barack Obama also seemed to be keeping more of a distance from Uribe than Bush had—Obama’s first budget request to Congress included significant money for Colombia, but reduced the proportion of the assistance that would go to the military. As a presidential candidate, Obama had opposed the trade deal, stating that Colombia needed to first deal with the unpunished killings of trade unionists, lest it make “a mockery” of the agreement.
But within Colombia, the Uribe administration largely managed to deflect criticism. “Uribe was God,” Calderón later said. “It was impressive, the fanatical following he had.” The journalist Daniel Coronell, who was very critical of Uribe, would later say that he thought that so many Colombians adored the president partly because the country was so frustrated by the failure of the earlier peace process with the FARC: “It is as if your house were on fire and the firefighter arrived. You don’t care if the firefighter steals or beats his wife. It’s the firefighter.” Calderón offered a similar explanation: “The country was blind at that time. People settled for simple things, like being able to go out on the highways at night without being kidnapped. That, combined with his hardline rhetoric, made the bulk of the public see [Uribe] as some sort of savior of the country, of whom all things would be forgiven.”
NONETHELESS, THE DAS criminal investigations were inching along. In the last week of January 2010, prosecutors from the attorney general’s office indicted six midlevel DAS officials—plus José Miguel Narváez, the former deputy director, who had been removed in 2005—for some of the agency’s illegal spying in 2004 and 2005 through the G-3. Among the targets of the spying, Semana reported later that week, were five justices of the Constitutional Court who were, at the time—in 2005—reviewing Uribe’s first reelection amendment and eventually approved it.
Three weeks later, in February 2010, the Constitutional Court once again ruled on whether Uribe could run for reelection. But this time, it said no. The process by which the bill allowing the referendum had been approved, the court found, failed to meet several legal requirements. More importantly, allowing a president to serve a third term would irreparably damage the balance of powers set forth in the Constitution, and approving the amendment would mean undoing the Constitution itself. The message was unequivocal: no matter how strong, how popular, and how insistent President Uribe was, and no matter how corrupt or brutal the country had become, Colombia remained a country of laws—a constitutional democracy, with limits and rules that applied to everyone.
Uribe accepted the court’s decision graciously, saying he would respect it; he hoped to “keep serving Colombia from whatever trench until the last day of my existence.” The once untouchable president would step down in August.
SHORTLY BEFORE THE end of Uribe’s term, Calderón published a story that would conclusively put an end to claims that the DAS had not engaged in illegal surveillance of the court, or that—as many officials had claimed—the surveillance was limited to the investigation of the justices’ trip to Neiva that had supposedly been funded by Ascencio Reyes. That would turn out to be simply a convenient cover for what they were really doing.
The DAS, it turned out, had assigned an agent specifically to spy on the Supreme Court. Calderón had known about the agent for several months, through sources who told him about what she was doing. But with the witch-hunt going on within the DAS, he had been unable to talk to her directly, and it had taken him a long time to finally assemble the story.
The agent, Alba Luz Flórez, whom Semana described as tall, with “cinnamon skin, green eyes, chestnut hair,” and a voluptuous figure, and who soon became known as the “Mata Hari of the Supreme Court,” spoke to prosecutors soon afterward. She explained that starting as early as March 2007—when the “parapolitics” scandal started to heat up, because of the Araújo indictment—her supervisor at the DAS, William Romero, had assigned her to spy on the court. Through a former boyfriend, she had met and recruited David García, who was then a bodyguard for one of the justices on the court. He eventually became a bodyguard for Velásquez. García, in turn, helped her to recruit another informant, Manuel Pinzón, a police officer who had been assigned to be Velásquez’s driver. Pinzón was in financial straits, trying to support a large family, and so her promises of monetary rewards were a significant enticement. Flórez had also introduced herself as a representative of the presidency, and she had persuaded her sources that getting the information was a matter of national security. She cited the fights between the president and the court as the reason for the surveillance—in fact, this was how she understood the work as well: she believed “the president needed to find out what was happening inside the court so he could make decisions.” Flórez said that Pinzón ended up being a key source, helping her to obtain photocopies of many of the classified case files for the parapolitics cases in the Supreme Court as well as information about planned arrests. At one point, she testified, Romero specifically asked her for copies of Mario Uribe’s case file; when she said the file would be difficult to obtain because the case had already been transferred to the attorney general’s office, he told her that didn’t matter, and that she should go to impossible lengths to get it. She was ultimately unable to do so.
By March 2008, after the Tasmania scandal, and at a time of very high tension between the court and Uribe, Flórez said, Romero asked her to find out what the justices were discussing in their private meetings. So, through García, Flórez recruited Janeth Maldonado, one of the court’s señoras del tinto—the women who, in what may be a uniquely Colombian profession, were charged with regularly walking around offices offering small cups of bitter coffee, along with clutches of long white sugar packets, to anyone who wanted them. Initially, Maldonado told Flórez little snippets of conversations that she was able to catch as she went in and out of meetings. But then, Flórez said, her supervisors gave her an audio recorder for Maldonado to hide in the court’s conference rooms before their meetings. As a result, the DAS was soon receiving recordings of entire court deliberations on cases as well as meetings in which the justices discussed how to respond to the government’s attacks on them.
Flórez confirmed that her work had continued until April 2009, two months after the DAS scandal first broke.
Calderón’s publication of the story about Flórez, which other outlets then picked up, put an end to most of the doubts that other outlets were expressing about his reporting. It was now very hard to deny that the intelligence service had engaged in extensive illegal spying, including on the Supreme Court. And there was no way to explain that behavior other than as part of a plot to undermine, discredit, and sabotage the court’s—and particularly Velásquez’s—investigations. To Velásquez, Flórez’s statements about his driver, Pinzón, were especially upsetting—he had liked Pinzón, and he felt betrayed and disappointed. But her testimony was also reaffirming, as he had been frustrated by the difficulty of getting to the truth about what the DAS had done to him.
In April 2010, the US ambassador to Colombia, Bill Brownfield, announced that all US assistance that had previously gone to the DAS would be redirected to the Colombian National Police.
Uribe left office, as promised, in August. He was the most popular president in Colombia’s history.
CHAPTER 19
THE QUESTION STUCK IN THEIR THROATS
AT THE PODIUM IN DUBAI, Qatar, Iván Velásquez got ready to speak to the crowd. It was November 4, 2011, and he was standing before hundreds of lawyers to receive the International Bar Association’s prestigious Human Rights Award, in recognition of his work on the parapolitics cases.
By then, the Supreme Court had convicted thirty-nine members of Colombia’s Congress in connection with Velásquez’s investigations. Velásquez was busily opening new lines of inquiry into events in the coastal state of Atlántico, into the activities of a still-active paramilitary group in the Casanare region, and into the little-known group known as the “Capital Block” of the AUC, which operated in the region of Cundinamarca, where Bogotá
itself was located. In mid-2010, Velásquez had also finally been able to make arrangements to interview some of the extradited paramilitaries in the United States, including Salvatore Mancuso, the commander who had been involved in the El Aro massacre, and AUC Northern Block commander Jorge 40 (Rodrigo Tovar Pupo). But, despite the international acclaim Velásquez was getting, his job had grown much harder.
César Julio Valencia, the president of the Supreme Court, against whom President Uribe had pressed criminal defamation charges, and Álvaro Orlando Pérez, Velásquez’s initial supervisor on the court, had both retired at the end of their terms, and the composition of the tribunal had gradually been changing. Several justices—some of whom Velásquez thought were close to Uribe or members of Congress—began to criticize Velásquez. Others, he sensed, were jealous of the media attention and praise he was receiving, considering that he was, as Velásquez put it, “merely an assistant.” When he informed the justices of the award the International Bar Association was giving him, he recalled later, none of them congratulated him or even asked him what the award was about. It was “as though it hadn’t happened.… Not one word. That reveals what the situation is like.”
Some of the justices and other officials seemed to be throwing roadblocks into Velásquez’s path to make it harder for him to conduct the investigations. Velásquez recalled later that one justice, Leonidas Bustos, wanted to end the practice of conducting informational interviews in the early stages of an investigation—instead, Velásquez and his team would only be allowed to conduct interviews when they were formally collecting evidence as part of an open case. Velásquez argued that such restrictions would paralyze the investigations, and managed to fend off the initiative. But he was less successful in stopping another effort that he viewed as problematic: the new inspector general of Colombia, Alejandro Ordóñez, who was famous for his far-right-wing views, had said that Velásquez should include a representative from his office in all of the informational interviews he was conducting with the paramilitaries in the United States, and threatened to conduct a disciplinary investigation against him if he did not. Velásquez didn’t want to do this; he did not believe it was an appropriate request—the informational interviews were not formal, and there was no need for someone from the inspector general’s office to be present. Indeed, it was critical that investigators be able to build trust and a rapport with the paramilitaries to find out what they knew, and the presence of someone from the inspector general’s office could change the dynamic and undermine that trust, making the paramilitaries less likely to speak. Justice Bustos supported Ordóñez’s request, however, and the other justices agreed to the demand.
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