Velásquez and Calderón had similar concerns about the DAS case: yes, some important testimony had been brought to light, and there had been a number of convictions, but the early prosecutors handling the DAS investigation had paid little attention to the surveillance of the court. By the time new prosecutors took over, the government was starting to take the DAS apart, making it difficult to track down witnesses.
VELÁSQUEZ’S DIFFICULTIES with the Supreme Court finally came to a head in August 2012, when the criminal chamber asked him to give up his role as coordinator of the parapolitics investigations. The members of the chamber offered little explanation beyond stating that the coordinator role should rotate among various assistant justices. In the following days, the journalist Cecilia Orozco published an op-ed in El Espectador titled “Homage to a Brave and Decent Judge.” She praised Velásquez, who, she wrote, “in his infinite solitude has borne the greatest threats and conspiracies against his life, good name, and honor.” She criticized the majority of the members of the court, calling them corrupt bureaucrats who were primarily concerned with paying back other officials for getting them their jobs. That same day, Velásquez recalled, some of the justices called him to complain about the op-ed. They told him he was a loose cannon, that he didn’t follow instructions, that he should have publicly made clear that he was not the “star justice” of parapolitics, and that it was unacceptable for him to be receiving international awards. They asked him to go to the media and publicly correct Orozco. The only one who didn’t attack him, Velásquez recalled, was María del Rosario González. Velásquez did not do as they asked, and a few days later, after more pressure from the court, he tendered his resignation.
STILL, THE PANDORA’S BOX that Velásquez and Calderón had opened could no longer be shut. After years of near-total silence, some of the paramilitary leaders extradited to the United States completed their plea negotiations with US prosecutors or started serving out their sentences for drug trafficking. The United States had shown little obvious interest in pursuing the paramilitaries’ allegations against their accomplices in the political system—though at least one source indicates that US prosecutors did attempt to do so—and none of the paramilitaries faced charges in the United States related to their human rights abuses. But some of the paramilitaries were beginning to talk more openly about their crimes, associates, and relationships with politicians. Their statements would slowly allow Velásquez to piece together a clearer picture of what lay behind the attacks against him in recent years—and even the murders of his friends and colleagues years before.
Juan Carlos “El Tuso” Sierra, Tasmania’s protector in Itagüí, denied Tasmania’s claims about how he (El Tuso) and the lawyer Sergio González had manufactured the letter that Tasmania sent to the president—he said the letter was genuine and reflected what Tasmania told him about his meeting with Velásquez and his colleague. However, El Tuso went on to say that the government gave the paramilitaries a number of benefits in exchange for their cooperation on the letter: they took Macaco (Carlos Mario Jiménez), from the AUC’s Central Bolívar Block, off the ship where he was being held, moved Don Berna from the maximum-security prison in Cómbita to La Picota, and moved Tasmania to Patio 1 of Itagüí prison, where he could be with the paramilitary leaders. El Tuso went on to say that he and other paramilitary leaders had participated in plots with the government to smear Yidis Medina, the former congresswoman who claimed that Uribe administration officials had bought her vote for the amendment allowing for Uribe’s reelection—in the smear campaign, they had tried to link her to the ELN. He also admitted that they had recorded Velásquez, in the hope of catching him doing something wrong. And he said that the government, at the peak of its confrontation with the Supreme Court, was desperately asking the paramilitaries for help in trying to discredit the court. The paramilitaries, he said, had helped to fabricate a letter from Francisco Villalba which had him withdrawing his claim that President Uribe and his brother Mario were involved in the El Aro massacre.
A 2015 court ruling noted that El Tuso also turned over a list, which has not yet been made public, of people who supposedly worked with the Envigado Office, including Mario Uribe and several other members of Congress and the military as well as businesspeople.
Setting aside El Tuso’s claim that he hadn’t pressed Tasmania to manufacture the letter, which Velásquez assumed was a lie because El Tuso didn’t want to incriminate himself, Velásquez thought many of his statements were credible—they were consistent with other evidence Velásquez had seen. In 2014, El Tuso would be released from prison in the United States, after serving less than six years for drug trafficking; even though he was facing multiple serious charges in Colombia, he was never deported back to the country, apparently having successfully argued that he faced a risk of torture if he returned.
As early as November 2008, after his extradition to the United States, Mancuso had also begun to talk. He gave more details about the paramilitaries’ entry into Ituango in 1996 and 1997, which he and Carlos Castaño had arranged in close collaboration with members of the military. In fact, Mancuso said, he met with Alfonso Manosalva, the head of the Fourth Brigade of the army, at least ten times to get information and coordinate the paramilitary incursion in the region. Mancuso said the paramilitaries had help from other parts of the government as well: they had coordinated directly with Pedro Juan Moreno, then chief of staff to Álvaro Uribe, who was governor of Antioquia at the time, to establish the “Convivirs” that the paramilitaries were using as cover for their activities. Mancuso said that at a meeting at a ranch in Córdoba, Carlos Castaño himself, in front of Mancuso, had given Moreno detailed information about their plans to go into El Aro, supposedly to reduce the guerrilla presence in the region and rescue some hostages the FARC was holding. For the massacre, Mancuso said, the paramilitaries had coordinated directly with army troops in the nearest town, Puerto Valdivia. “The army in the area knew everything that was happening, [and] the police knew everything that was happening,” he said. Mancuso also provided more details about the helicopters he had mentioned before: There were four helicopters flying over the massacre site, he said. One belonged to the guerrillas, who used it to evacuate their leadership. Another belonged to the paramilitaries, and Mancuso flew in that one, taking in ammunition, removing bodies, and taking in wounded paramilitaries. The third, he said, was yellow and orange, and belonged to the Antioquia governor’s office; he said he watched it fly over as the paramilitaries were conducting the operation. The fourth belonged to the army and flew over the site as the paramilitaries were leaving the town.
In 2012, Mancuso publicly stated that the paramilitaries had actively campaigned for Uribe’s reelection in 2006. That same year, Mancuso stated before a Justice and Peace Tribunal that he had contributed financial support to Uribe’s 2002 campaign. He also said that, at his request, the members of Congress Eleonora Pineda and Miguel de la Espriella (who were later convicted in the parapolitics cases) had met with Uribe at his ranch, El Ubérrimo, to tell him that the paramilitaries had contributed large sums of money to his campaign, and that if he won, the paramilitaries wanted to start peace negotiations. Pineda and De la Espriella backed Mancuso up in court.
Mancuso also stated that he had maintained a close working relationship since 1995 with Pedro Juan Moreno, and that this relationship continued until Moreno’s death in a helicopter crash in 2006. He claimed that he had met with Álvaro Uribe himself when Uribe was governor of Antioquia, and that during the presidential campaign, he had continued to be in touch with the candidate through Moreno (in addition to Pineda and De la Espriella). At one point during the campaign, he said, Moreno had told him he was concerned about the damage that the paramilitaries’ ongoing massacres might do to Uribe’s image, and urged them to instead focus on more targeted operations. As a result, the paramilitaries agreed to hold off on massacres in the lead-up to the election.
In other statements, Mancuso said he had actually met
Uribe in social settings before Mancuso joined the paramilitaries. But he said that he had formally met with Uribe once when Uribe was governor of Antioquia. Mancuso was already a paramilitary—“and the governor knew that as such.” He said they met at Uribe’s ranch, El Ubérrimo, in Córdoba, and that a police officer from Córdoba had introduced Mancuso as the man who was “helping” them with security in the state. Mancuso recalled that Uribe had said he was happy that Mancuso was helping them, and that they spoke specifically about an attack that the FARC was supposedly planning against Uribe and his ranch, and their efforts to figure out who exactly was involved in the plot.
Mancuso’s statements didn’t get as much public attention as they might have, in part because Calderón had already reported similar allegations in the past. In an interview with Fabio Ochoa Vasco, a major drug trafficker, that Calderón published in 2007, Ochoa claimed that he had witnessed Mancuso contributing substantial sums of money to Uribe’s presidential campaign, as well as Mancuso organizing the paramilitaries to get out the vote for him, because he had been promised a favorable peace deal.
Uribe responded by issuing a statement strongly denying the claims of both the paramilitary leader and the former members of Congress, adding that he had contacted the US ambassador to Colombia because he had heard that Mancuso was improperly applying pressure on the former members of Congress to get them to make statements against him. He also announced, via Twitter, that he was planning to press criminal charges against them for making false statements. Eventually, Uribe sued Mancuso for slander and insult (injuria) and asked that he be removed from the Justice and Peace process for supposedly lying about him. Uribe’s lawyer, Jaime Granados, told the media that Mancuso was making the statements out of a desire for revenge, because Uribe had arrested and extradited him.
DON BERNA, WHO in 2009 was convicted of drug trafficking and sentenced to thirty-one years in prison in Miami, also began talking in later years. He confirmed much of Semana’s reporting about his efforts with Job to smear the Supreme Court, as well as what he described as regular meetings between Job and representatives of the presidency and the intelligence service.
Berna also made disturbing new statements about the witness Francisco Villalba and the El Aro massacre. A little over a year after he first made his statements against Uribe, Villalba had suddenly received permission from a judge to serve his sentence under house arrest, supposedly on account of health concerns. In April 2009, twenty-three days after his release, as he was walking down the street with his wife and four-year-old daughter, three men came up to him and shot him to death.
According to Don Berna, Sergio González (the lawyer who represented Tasmania and El Tuso, and who was reportedly close to Mario Uribe) had approached him to see what could be done to keep Villalba from talking about El Aro. Berna said he later learned from a prosecutor that “the boss”—whom the prosecutor identified as President Uribe—was very concerned about Villalba’s statements. So, Don Berna said, he met with Villalba in prison and tried to bribe him to stop talking. According to Berna, Villalba refused, because for him, talking about it was a form of “catharsis.” So instead, Don Berna paid another paramilitary who had participated in the massacre, a man known as “Pilatos,” to sign a statement disputing Villalba’s claims. Berna said that he “had no doubt” that Villalba’s murder was a “crime of state.” He said that “powerful sectors of the country were involved in the death of Villalba because he was uncomfortable because of his knowledge of the El Aro massacre, because he was constantly talking about it, because he was insistent in continuing to implicate certain people of the establishment.”
Prosecutors later ordered new investigations into Uribe’s alleged role in the massacre and in Villalba’s murder, but Uribe has strenuously denied any role in either, pointing to the many inconsistencies in Villalba’s statements over time—such as his claim that General Manosalva was present at a meeting shortly before the massacre, even though Manosalva had been dead for months. In a letter to the newspaper El Espectador complaining about its coverage of the story, Uribe also noted that Mancuso at one point called Villalba a liar and said Uribe had nothing to do with El Aro. The ex-president emphasized that the national chief of police, General Óscar Naranjo, attributed Villalba’s death to a dispute between criminals. Uribe also asserted that the prosecutor mentioned by Don Berna had contradicted the paramilitary leader and later sued him for defamation.
But to many investigators and victims of paramilitary crimes, several of Don Berna’s revelations about their past seemed credible, and even confirmed their long-held suspicions. He spoke about the paramilitaries’ involvement in a series of major assassinations that happened in the 1990s, for example, in some cases linking government officials to the crimes. These included the 1999 murder of beloved thirty-eight-year-old comedian Jaime Garzón, who had been involved in negotiations for the release of FARC hostages when he was gunned down by paramilitaries in his car in Bogotá. They also included the dramatic May 1997 killing of a married couple, Elsa Alvarado and Mario Calderón, who were investigators for the Center for Research and Popular Education (Centro de Investigación y Educación Popular, or CINEP), a Jesuit foundation working for social change: in that case, the couple opened the door to their Bogotá apartment in the middle of the night to find armed men identifying themselves as CTI members. The men barged in and shot the couple, as well as Alvarado’s father, Carlos, to death. Their baby, Iván, survived because he was hidden in a wardrobe.
Don Berna also shed light on the killings of the CTI investigators who had worked with Velásquez in Medellín in the late 1990s, explaining that, at the time, Castaño had viewed the investigators in the attorney general’s office as enemies, because they were investigating the paramilitaries. Through Uber Duque, a member of the CTI whom the paramilitaries had put on their payroll, they were able to obtain detailed information about the investigations as well as the names and addresses of key investigators to target. Don Berna specifically highlighted the Padilla parking-lot investigation as the reason for some of the murders, explaining that the accounting information that Velásquez’s team had found in the parking-lot shack was about “the sponsors of the self-defense forces,” and that “it was very important.” As a result, he said, Castaño had ordered the killings of the investigators who had participated in the Padilla search. The purpose of those killings was “to intimidate them and ensure that they would not continue with those investigations and end up identifying the people who worked with the AUC, since there were many businessmen, [and] ranchers.”
Berna’s statements about the Padilla parking-lot investigation were consistent with what other paramilitaries in prison would later say. One, Rodrigo Zapata, who had once been Vicente Castaño’s right-hand man, stated in an interview for this book that the prosecutors’ discovery of the paramilitaries’ accounting records and the arrest of Jacinto Alberto Soto (aka “Lucas”), the accountant, in the parking-lot shack “hit the spot where all the investments of the groups in the area, all the financial backers, were. Everything was centralized.… Everything was left without a head, because Lucas kept all the accounts.”
In another interview for this book, Raúl Hasbún, a wealthy banana businessman who had eventually run a paramilitary group in the Urabá region of Antioquia and Chocó, agreed about Lucas’s importance as the accountant for Carlos and Vicente Castaño. He said the paramilitaries were surprised when the Padilla investigation did not end up having more of an impact on them or their supporters.
Éver Veloza, a paramilitary commander known as “HH” who was extradited to the United States in 2009, also talked about Lucas, confirming that he had been a key figure. Lucas had received all the contributions to the paramilitaries from banana growers and other businesspeople and had played a major role in managing the paramilitaries’ relationships with military figures and politicians. HH recalled waiting for Lucas in a car while Lucas had meetings with commanders in the Fourth Brigade at the army
’s headquarters in Medellín. He said that Lucas had six separate beepers to manage his contacts with different officials, and that “he even had one for the governor, who in those days was Uribe.” HH recalled accompanying Lucas to several meetings, including one with Pedro Juan Moreno, then Governor Uribe’s chief of staff in Antioquia. After his escape from prison, Lucas participated in the demobilization process, but he had not been forced to go through the Justice and Peace process because there were no serious charges pending against him—he was now free. Given that Lucas had a wealth of information about the paramilitaries’ accomplices, HH found it surprising that prosecutors weren’t going after him to find out what he knew. It was easy for Uribe and others in power to argue that HH and other former paramilitaries were simply making up these statements out of a desire for revenge over their imprisonment or extradition. But as HH saw it, “it turns out we were extradited precisely to discredit our truths, the knowledge we have of the war. We were extradited to protect the interests of many people.”
Hasbún, the former banana businessman who ran a paramilitary group, also claimed in an interview for this book that he had maintained a close relationship in the late 1990s with the governorship of Antioquia. At the time, Hasbún said, he personally set up fourteen Convivirs—the security cooperatives that then governor Uribe was promoting in the region. But, Hasbún made clear, “the Convivirs were the AUC—at least mine were, and I assume that Mancuso’s and others were, too. It was a way to legalize the contributions of ranchers, businessmen, etc. to the AUC.” At the beginning, he said, officials in the governor’s office may not have had reason to know that the Convivir members belonged to the AUC. “But afterward, they did.” According to Hasbún, Pedro Juan Moreno, would go to Hasbún’s house, “where there was a guard standing outside holding an AK-47. We would meet with Lucas and speak openly about issues related to the AUC, to financing. He was happy about it.… Moreno never financed us directly, but through the Fourth Brigade he gave us weaponry, munitions for the self-defense forces—it was clear it was not for the Convivirs.”
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