This book is largely based on my interviews over the course of five years (in some cases, more) with characters in the book and witnesses of the events described therein. I got to know both Iván Velásquez and Ricardo Calderón through my work as a human rights activist in Colombia between 2004 and 2010, and was in communication with them as many of the events in the book were unfolding. I also interviewed them extensively in later years. I conducted additional interviews with their family members, including María Victoria Velásquez, Velásquez’s children, and several of his siblings, as well as with Calderón’s wife, whom I have given the pseudonym “Mónica” in this book. Many of their colleagues and friends provided valuable information; these include, among others, Velásquez’s mentor and friend J. Guillermo Escobar; Gregorio Oviedo, the CTI chief in Medellín in the late 1990s; prosecutor Amelia Pérez; Supreme Court justices César Julio Valencia, María del Rosario González, Mauro Solarte, and Álvaro Pérez; several CTI investigators and prosecutors who worked with Velásquez in both Medellín and Bogotá, who would prefer to remain unnamed; Calderón’s editor, Alfonso Cuéllar, his colleague Rodrigo Pardo, and his fellow journalists Félix de Bedout and Daniel Coronell.
Jesús María Valle had already been killed by the time I started working on Colombia, but he is still loved and dearly remembered by many friends, colleagues, and community members who are grateful for his help. Walking around Medellín, one sees constant reminders of the mark he left on the city, from murals depicting his image at the University of Antioquia to schools bearing his name and a plaque at the prosecutor’s office—not to mention countless people who light up at the mention of his name. His sisters Nelly and Magdalena shared many of their memories about his life with me, as well as written records and photographs. So did Gloria Manco, his fellow activist, close friend, and lawyer. Patricia Fuenmayor, María Victoria Fallon, Beatriz Jaramillo, Amparo Areiza, Darío Arcila, Jesús Abad Colorado, Óscar Castaño, the late Carlos Gaviria, Jairo León Cano, and many others also shared details and stories that allowed me to reconstruct some of this remarkable character’s life and his final months.
Former president Álvaro Uribe never responded to multiple interview requests that I sent by email and fax between 2014 and 2016. In 2017, one of his staff members at the Centro Democrático political party said that Uribe had received my requests, but was unable to take an interview because he was recovering from surgery. Uribe never responded to another meeting request that I sent a few weeks later, when he was once again appearing in the media. Nor did he send a response to a detailed questionnaire asking for his take on the various events described in this book. However, his close adviser, José Obdulio Gaviria, granted me two interviews, including one that lasted approximately four hours, in 2014. I obtained additional insights about Uribe’s life and actions from some of his friends and from officials who worked with him in Antioquia and Bogotá, including Fabio Echeverri, Jaime Jaramillo Panesso, Alberto Rendón, General Óscar Naranjo, former attorney general Mario Iguarán, and others who asked not to be named. I have also relied on reports in the media and Uribe’s autobiography, No Lost Causes (New York: Celebra, 2012), for the quotations attributed to him in the book.
Several former Colombian officials shared additional contextual information about the country’s history and the events described in the book. These officials include former Colombian presidents César Gaviria and Ernesto Samper, former attorney general Alfonso Gómez Méndez, former deputy attorney general and then Constitutional Court justice Jaime Córdoba Trivino, former CTI chief Pablo Elías González, former inspector general Carlos Gustavo Arrieta, former senator Rafael Pardo, and others who asked not to be named.
I interviewed former paramilitary commanders Raúl Hasbún and Rodrigo Zapata at Itagüí prison, and exchanged emails with Diego Murillo Bejarano (“Don Berna”), who is in prison in Miami, Florida. As part of my Human Rights Watch work, I had in previous years interviewed Antonio López (aka “Job,” now deceased) and several other paramilitaries who participated in the demobilization process.
Additional interviewees included the former IT director for the DAS, Rafael García, who became a witness in investigations of the DAS, and a former DAS member who was a source for Calderón, Alexander Menjura.
Miladis and Maryori Restrepo Torres shared their painful memories of the El Aro massacre.
Other interviewees, including a former US official, asked not to be named.
Ricardo Calderón shared a great deal of documentary material and audio and video recordings corroborating his reporting and allowing me to flesh out details for the book. The case files on the Parqueadero Padilla case, Jesús María Valle’s murder, and the El Aro massacre also contained critical documents backing up the statements of many of my sources. Other documentary sources included rulings by the Supreme Court and by the Justice and Peace Tribunal in Medellín; publicly available testimony in the parapolitics cases; the first CTI report and testimony given by multiple witnesses in the investigations of the DAS illegal surveillance scandal; and video recordings of testimony by several witnesses, including Iván Roberto Duque (aka “Ernesto Báez”) and José Orlando Moncada (aka “Tasmania”) in the case against attorney Sergio González over the Tasmania scandal.
The Semana, El Colombiano, El Tiempo, and El Espectador news archives, as well as the website VerdadAbierta.com, a nonprofit providing in-depth reporting on Colombia’s conflict, offered a wealth of valuable information, as did reporting by several journalists for foreign media, including Sibylla Brodzinsky, Juan Forero, John Otis, Simón Romero, Steven Dudley, and Jeremy McDermott. The Colombian journalist Juan Diego Restrepo has also written extensively about the situation in the Medellín attorney general’s office in the late 1990s. My own Human Rights Watch reporting in Colombia between 2004 and 2010, as well as that of my predecessor as Colombia researcher, Robin Kirk, and my successor, Max Schoening (all available on www.hrw.org/americas/colombia), were also references. US cables that have been declassified and are available through the National Security Archive at George Washington University, as well as cables leaked to the website Wikileaks, provided additional useful information.
Many public events described in the book, including press conferences, congressional hearings in Colombia, the ceremony in which US president George W. Bush awarded Uribe the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and the first signing of Colombia’s peace agreement with the FARC, were recorded on videos that are available online.
I have used numbers sparingly in the book; where statistics do appear, their sources are noted in the text or in this section. Numbers concerning Colombia’s conflict—homicide and kidnapping rates, total numbers of people killed or displaced, estimates of combatants—often vary wildly according to source. Numbers are often political tools in Colombia and used by different actors to support their versions of history. During the Uribe administration, the government used numbers particularly effectively to build a narrative according to which Colombia’s conflict was largely becoming a thing of the past. More recent analysis by data expert Patrick Ball suggests that this analysis was at least partly incorrect. See Patrick Ball and Michael Reed Hurtado, “Cuentas y mediciones de la criminalidad y de la violencia,” Forensis 16, no. 1 (2014): 529, available at www.medicinalegal.gov.co/documents/88730/1656998/Forensis+Interactivo+2014.24-JULpdf.pdf/9085ad79-d2a9-4c0d-a17b-f845ab96534b (Forensis is the magazine for Colombia’s Institute of Forensic Medicine). See also P. Ball and M. Reed, “El registro y la medición de la criminalidad: El problema de los datos faltantes y el uso de la ciencia para producir estimaciones en relación con el homicidio en Colombia, demostrado a partir de un ejemplo, el departamento de Antioquia (2003–2011),” Revista Criminalidad 58, no. 1 (2016): 9–23, https://hrdag.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/criminality-registration-Colombia-PBall-2016.pdf.
According to Ball, official datasets on homicides remained pretty flat from about 2003 to 2011. Yet in 2006, estimates—based on those datasets—of undocumented homicides in the regions of Antioquia and Valle del Cauca (which were the focus of the analysis) skyrocketed. In subsequent discussions of the study, Ball suggested that there could be multiple explanations for the fact that official figures did not capture these killings, including that official sources “overflowed” when homicides increased. In other words, they covered what they could, but in times of increasing violence, they simply didn’t have the capacity to document more than they normally did. It was also possible that, for various reasons, officials chose not to document the additional cases.
The following books cover some of the events described in this book and offer additional information:
Abad Colorado, Jesús. Mirar de la Vida Profunda. Bogotá: Paralelo 10, 2015.
Abad Faciolince, Héctor. Oblivion. Translation of El Olvido Que Seremos. Anne McLean and Rosalind Harvey, translators. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012.
Aranguren Molina, Mauricio. Carlos Castaño: Mi Confesión. Bogotá: Editorial La Oveja Negra, 2001.
Betancourt, Ingrid. No Hay Silencio Que No Termine. Bogotá: Aguilar, 2010.
Bowden, Mark. Killing Pablo: The Hunt for the World’s Greatest Outlaw. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2001.
Braun, Herbert. The Assassination of Gaitán: Public Life and Urban Violence in Colombia. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985.
Brodzinsky, Sibylla, and Max Schoening. Throwing Stones at the Moon: Narratives from Colombians Displaced by Violence. San Francisco: McSweeney’s and Voice of Witness, 2012.
Bushnell, David. The Making of Modern Colombia: A Nation in Spite of Itself. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.
Comisión Nacional de Réparación y Reconciliación, Grupo de Memoria Histórica. Bojayá: La Guerra Sin Límites. Bogotá: Aguilar, Altea, Taurus, Alfaguara, 2010.
Coronell, Daniel. Recordar es Morir. Bogotá: Aguilar, 2016.
Dudley, Steven. Walking Ghosts: Murder and Guerrilla Politics in Colombia. New York: Routledge, 2004.
Duzán, María Jimena. Así Gobierna Uribe. Bogotá: Planeta, 2004.
Ferry, Stephen. Violentology: A Manual of the Colombian Conflict. New York: Umbrage Editions, 2012.
Instituto Popular de Capacitación and Corporación Jurídica Libertad. Memoria de la Impunidad en Antioquia: Lo Que La Justicia No Quiso Ver Frente Al Paramilitarismo. Medellín: Pregón, 2010.
Kirk, Robin. More Terrible Than Death: Massacres, Drugs, and America’s War in Colombia. New York: Public Affairs, 2003.
Otis, John. Law of the Jungle: The Hunt for Colombian Guerrillas, American Hostages, and Buried Treasure. New York: William Morrow, 2010.
Palacios, Marco. Between Legitimacy and Violence: A History of Colombia, 1875–2002. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006.
Roldán, Mary. Blood and Fire: La Violencia in Antioquia, Colombia, 1946–1953. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002.
Ronderos, María Teresa. Guerras Recicladas: Una Historia Periodística del Paramilitarismo en Colombia. Bogotá: Aguilar, 2014.
Safford, Frank, and Marco Palacios. Colombia: Fragmented Land, Divided Society. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.
Salazar, Alonso. La Parábola de Pablo: Auge y Caída de un Gran Capo del Narcotráfico. Bogotá: Planeta, 2012.
Soto, Martha. Velásquez: El Retador del Poder. Bogotá: Intermedio Editores, 2016.
Uribe Vélez, Álvaro. No Lost Causes. New York: Celebra, 2012.
Part of the prologue is based on notes from my interview with Rodrigo Zapata. Additional information came from the January 30, 2017, ruling in his case by the Justice and Peace Tribunal of Medellín, which convicted him of various offenses, including homicide. The ruling is available at Tribunal Superior de Distrito, Sala de Conocimiento de Justicia y Paz, January 30, 2017, https://www.ramajudicial.gov.co/documents/6342975/6634902/30.01.2017-sentencia-bloque-pacifico-frente-suroeste-rodrigo-zapata-sierra-y-otros.pdf/286792b7–084b-415a-89f3-e664b5bd8af0. As of this writing, Zapata has appealed.
A copy of Jesús María Valle’s November 20, 1996, letter to Governor Álvaro Uribe was among the papers his family kept.
The account of the assassination of Jorge Eliecer Gaitán is largely drawn from Herbert Braun’s The Assassination of Gaitán: Public Life and Urban Violence in Colombia (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985). Some of the details about La Violencia’s impact in Antioquia are drawn from Mary Roldán, Blood and Fire: La Violencia in Antioquia, Colombia, 1946–1953 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002).
The quotation about the state of siege during La Violencia came from Marco Palacios, Between Legitimacy and Violence: A History of Colombia, 1875–2002 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006).
The stories from Valle’s childhood came primarily from his sister Magdalena.
The account of the assassination of Dr. Héctor Abad Gómez is drawn from Oblivion, the English translation of the memoir written by his son, Héctor Abad Faciolince, titled El Olvido Que Seremos, translated by Anne McLean and Rosalind Harvey (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012), though additional details were provided by other witnesses. The quotation from the kill list including Abad’s name also comes from Oblivion.
Details about the 1996 La Granja massacre are drawn from the ruling by the Inter-American Court on Human Rights on the La Granja and El Aro massacres.
The quotations from Valle are drawn from video recordings and the case file of his homicide.
The account of Valle’s meeting with Uribe on December 9, 1996, is based largely on the account of a witness who asked not to be named. That account is partly corroborated by a statement that Valle gave on February 6, 1998, to a prosecutor in Medellín. In that statement, Valle described a meeting he had with Uribe and others to inform the governor of the deaths in Ituango. At the meeting, Valle said that Uribe “sent us to talk to General Manosalva (r.i.p.). After the visit, the governor did nothing, and… in the commission to Ituango… he cleverly took me off the commission so I could not go, and the bloodshed continued.”
Former President Uribe did not respond to a March 15, 2017, set of written questions for this book. These included questions about his version of events of the December 9, 1996, meeting, such as whether Uribe recalled the meeting, whether Valle had told him about having evidence about collusion between the military and paramilitaries in Ituango, whether Uribe called General Manosalva and told him that Valle was falsely accusing the military of collusion and should be sued, whether Uribe told Valle that he should present his allegations to Manosalva, whether Valle told him he had evidence of mass graves in Ituango, whether Uribe organized a committee to visit Ituango—with Valle—by helicopter the following Saturday, and whether Valle was informed at the last minute that he could not join the group by helicopter. The same questionnaire also included questions about, among other issues, Uribe’s views on the Convivirs, his knowledge of paramilitary activity in Antioquia when he was governor, his response to the massacre of La Granja, Ituango, in July 1996, his recollection of Valle’s reports of paramilitary abuses and military collusion, the El Aro massacre, and his alleged statement accusing Valle of being an enemy of the armed forces.
Uribe’s quotation, cited in Chapter 1, in which he backs the Fourth Brigade commander’s account of an alleged FARC attack in Ituango, which Valle challenged, was reported in “Connivencia en Antioquia entre Fuerza Pública y Paramilitares No Fue una Ficción” (Collusion in Antioquia Between Public Security Forces and Paramilitaries Was Not Fiction), Semana, February 25, 2008. It is unclear whether it was previously reported elsewhere.
The unclassified US cable calling Governor Álvaro Uribe a “bright star in the Liberal Party firmament” is Cable Bogota 003714, March 1995, available through the National Security Archive.
The quotation from Uribe about witnessing Liberal guerrillas coming to his house as a child comes from the English translation of his autobiography, No Lost Causes (New York: Celebra, 2012), 54.
Some of the history about Pablo Escobar is drawn from Alonso Salazar’s La Parábola de Pablo: Auge y Caída de un Gran Capo del Narcotráfico (Bogotá: Planeta, 2012) and Mark Bowden’s Killing Pablo: The Hunt for the World’s Greatest Outlaw (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2001), among other sources.
The account of Velásquez’s early effort, with Uribe and Álvaro Villegas, to get Pablo Escobar to turn himself in came from interviews with Velásquez. Álvaro Villegas also confirmed it to journalist Martha Soto, according to her book, Velásquez: El Retador del Poder (Bogotá: Intermedio Editores, 2016). Pablo Escobar’s letter to the Colombian government can also be found in an appendix to that book. The March 15, 2017, questionnaire sent to Uribe asked for his account of these events.
The decree authorizing the establishment of the Convivir program was Decree 356 of February 11, 1994.
Then governor Uribe’s quotations about the Convivir program in Chapter 2 come from “Las Convivir Apoyan a la Fuerza Pública” (The Convivirs Support the Public Security Forces), El Tiempo, November 11, 1997.
The account of the El Aro massacre is based primarily on interviews with Miladis and Maryori Restrepo, as well as a review of excerpts of the El Aro case file; the Inter-American Court of Human Rights ruling in the El Aro and La Granja massacres; rulings of the Justice and Peace Tribunal in Medellín in the cases of Jesús Ignacio Roldan (“Monoleche”), Ramiro (“Cuco”) Vanoy, and Juan Fernando Chica; and interviews with prosecutor Amelia Pérez, attorney María Victoria Fallon, and Amparo Areiza, among others. In the years since the massacre, several women have told investigators that they were raped during the massacre, but in the immediate aftermath of the slaughter, most remained silent out of fear or shame. Miladis’s exchange with “Junior” is based on her account. Junior has admitted to having participated in the El Aro incursion and is in prison for various paramilitary crimes.
Carlos Castaño’s comment about the El Aro massacre was quoted in an article in Semana titled “Las Cicatrices de El Aro” on October 21, 2008, available at www.semana.com/nacion/conflicto-armado/articulo/las-cicatrices-el-aro/96472-3.
The account of Valle’s murder is based on the statements of Nelly Valle as well as the case file on his homicide. In 2014, the Angulo brothers, mentioned in Chapters 4 and 8, were ordered detained in connection with the El Aro massacre; the Supreme Court also approved a prosecutor’s motion that the investigation against them in connection with Valle’s murder be reopened. It is unclear, based on publicly available information, where these investigations stand. It does not appear that they have ever been charged in connection with the drug-trafficking allegations made by witness Carlos Jaramillo and mentioned by others.
Relatively little has been written about this chapter of Colombian history. As a result, this section is overwhelmingly based on my own reporting.
One exception is Memoria de la Impunidad en Antioquia: Lo Que La Justicia No Quiso Ver Frente Al Paramilitarismo (Medellín: Pregón, 2010), a lengthy book written jointly by the Medellín-based organizations Instituto Popular de Capacitación and Corporacion Jurídica Libertad. It contains a great deal of detailed information about many of the cases that the chief prosecutor’s office for Antioquia was handling at the end of the 1980s. It also includes accounts of several of the killings of CTI investigators, as well as analysis of possible explanations.
Carlos Mario Aguilar, the former CTI agent who was mentioned in Chapter 5 as having been involved in recruiting other CTI agents to work with the Envigado Office, was years later reported to have become the head of the Envigado Office. In 2008, he turned himself in to US authorities and served several years in prison in New York pursuant to a plea bargain. News reports indicate that he completed his sentence in 2015 and that he may have remained free in the United States.
“Junior” and “Cobra,” both of whom Francisco Villalba identified, in Chapter 6, as participants in the El Aro massacre, are also mentioned as commanders of troops who participated in the massacre in a February 2, 2015, ruling by the Justice and Peace Tribunal of Medellín in the case of paramilitary leader Ramiro Vanoy. That ruling, which discusses the El Aro massacre at length, is available at República de Colombia, Rama Judicial del Poder Público, Tribunal Superior de Medellín, Sala de Justicia y Paz, February 2, 2015, https://www.ramajudicial.gov.co/documents/6342975/6634902/1.+2015.02.02+Sent_Bl_Mineros-ramiro-vanoy-murillo.pdf. Junior is in prison for various paramilitary crimes. There is no recent public information about Cobra’s whereabouts.
On September 1, 2014, the Justice and Peace Chamber of the Court of Bogotá convicted Luis Eduardo Cifuentes, aka “The Eagle,” of several crimes related to his involvement in the paramilitaries, including multiple homicides. The ruling is available at Tribunal Superior de Bogotá, Sala de Justicia y Paz, September 1, 2014, www.fiscalia.gov.co/jyp/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/2014-09-01-SENTENCIA-BLOQUE-CUNDINAMARCA-1-sep-2014.pdf. The charges did not include drug trafficking, though prosecutors told the court that several of the defendants in the case had confessed that they had obtained resources for the group from drug trafficking.
The numbers of victims in the Bojayá massacre of 2002, when the FARC lobbed a gas cylinder bomb into the town of Bellavista, comes from Comisión Nacional de Reparación y Reconciliación, Grupo de Memoria Histórica, Bojayá: La Guerra Sin Límites (Bogotá: Aguilar, Altea, Taurus, Alfaguara, 2010).
The quotations from Uribe in Chapter 9, about being in the bullring, come from his No Lost Causes (New York: Celebra, 2012), 45–46.
Some of the allegations about Uribe’s father’s connections with the Ochoa family and about Uribe’s actions at the Civil Aviation Agency appear in Joseph Contreras’s book, El Señor de las Sombras: Biografia No Autorizada de Álvaro Uribe Vélez (Bogotá: Oveja Negra, 2002). Other journalists, including Fabio Castillo, in the book Los Jinetes de la Cocaína (Bogotá: Editorial Documentos Periodísticos, 1987), had already published about some of them. According to the newspaper El Tiempo, Contreras’s book received some harsh criticism when it was published during the 2002 presidential campaign, with one editor stating that the book had been written “lightly,” though Contreras said it was the result of a serious investigation.
A February 24, 2007, letter from Jaime Bermúdez, then the Colombian ambassador to Argentina, to the newspaper Clarín, includes quotations from Uribe responding to the allegations made against him in the 2002 campaign. A copy of the letter can be found at http://web.archive.org/web/20110706084412/http://www.embajadacolombia.int.ar/site/indexnb.asp?IdSeccion =389&IdSector=1.
Ministry of Defense estimates of the number of paramilitary troops were cited in a 2004 US cable available at https://www.scribd.com/document
/84833997/Cable-914-US-Assessment-of-Size-and-Organization-of-Armed-Paramilitary-and-Insurgent-Groups-in-Colombia.
Attorney General John Ashcroft’s statement is available at the US Department of State Archive, http://2001-2009.state.gov/p/inl/rls/rm/13663.htm.
Carlos Castaño’s emails were obtained by Ricardo Calderón through his reporting.
The US cable cited in Chapter 10 is US Cable 06BOGOTÁ010596, November 17, 2006, available at http://cables.mrkva.eu/cable.php?id=86233& show=original.
The members of Congress from Sucre mentioned in Chapter 10, Jairo Merlano, Eric Morris, Muriel Benito, and Álvaro García, were all convicted at various times of offenses related to their involvement with paramilitary groups. García was also convicted of involvement in the homicide of Georgina Narváez and the massacre of Macayepo. While the politicians challenged the credibility of the testimony by Jairo Castillo (aka “Pitirri”), in its rulings the Supreme Court cited corroborating evidence and other factors that supported Castillo’s version of events. With regard to Morris, the court did not find that he had been directly involved in diverting public resources as governor, as suggested by Castillo, but it did find that he had conspired with paramilitaries. Prosecutors also pressed charges against landowner Joaquín García in connection with the Macayepo massacre; in rulings in some of the other cases, the court talks about him as a well-known promoter of the paramilitaries. However, according to news reports, Joaquín García disappeared in September 2010 after unknown men reportedly took him from his apartment, and the investigation against him was closed on the grounds that García was presumed dead. The former governor of Sucre Salvador Arana was convicted of the murder of the mayor of El Roble, Eudaldo “Tito” Díaz.
In May 2008, the Supreme Court convicted Senator Mauricio Pimiento, who is mentioned in Chapter 11, of conspiring with paramilitaries and of voter “constraint.” In March 2010, the court convicted Senator Álvaro Araújo, also mentioned in Chapter 11, of the same offenses.
Details of the Chivolo and Pivijay pacts cited in Chapter 10 are available in Supreme Court ruling 35227 against José María Imbeth and Feris Chadid. Additional information is available in ruling 26585, involving Rubén Dario Quintero.
Colombian journalist Juanita León analyzed Mancuso’s statements about Juan Manuel Santos, as well as the responses by Santos and various witnesses, in an article in La Silla Vacía on April 13, 2010, available at http://lasillavacia.com/historia/9420.
The description in Chapter 12 of the meeting that Ricardo Calderón had with then minister of defense Juan Manuel Santos is based on Calderón’s account. Santos, who later became president, did not respond to a request for his account of the meeting sent via a July 7, 2017, letter to his adviser Enrique Riveira.
The US cable cited in Chapter 13, which indicates that Colombian officials expressed concern that the Supreme Court would permanently block extraditions, is US Cable 05BOGOTÁ5310_a, June 2, 2005, available at https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/05BOGOTÁ5310_a.html.
Don Berna’s claim that his brother killed Pablo Escobar is recorded in Don Berna’s book Así Matamos al Patrón: La Cacería de Pablo Escobar, by Diego Murillo Bejarano (Bogotá: Ícono, 2014).
The US chargé d’affaires’s statements to the Colombian government about the handling of Don Berna’s case in 2005 are recorded in US Cable 05BOGOTÁ5753_a, June 16, 2005, available at https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/05BOGOTÁ5753_a.html.
Official information about the demobilization of each paramilitary block, including the date, the number of members demobilizing, and the number of weapons turned over, is listed in the Final Report on the Peace Process with the Self-Defense Forces, produced by the Colombian government (undated). See “Proceso de Paz con las Autodefensas,” available at www.cooperacioninternacional.com/descargas/informefinaldesmovilizaciones.pdf.
“Mónica” is a pseudonym for Calderón’s wife.
The Noticias Uno video of Yidis Medina’s statements about her vote in favor of Uribe’s reelection is available on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1NbO8O-ZN34. The events around it are also summarized in Daniel Coronell’s book Recordar es Morir (Bogotá: Aguilar, 2016).
The quotation from Uribe in Chapter 14 about why he extradited the paramilitary commanders comes from the English version of his autobiography, No Lost Causes, 287.
Mancuso’s allegations about the involvement of “General Ospina” in the El Aro massacre have not been confirmed. According to news reports, prosecutors instructed that an investigation be conducted into the possible involvement of General Carlos Alberto Ospina, who at the time was the commander of the army’s Fourth Brigade, in the El Aro massacre. But as of this writing, it was unclear whether such an investigation was moving forward. Years earlier, before Mancuso’s statements, the inspector general’s office had reportedly closed a disciplinary investigation of Ospina in connection with the massacre.
Former president Uribe never responded to the questionnaire sent to him in connection with this book in March 2017, which asked him for his version of events concerning his meeting with then attorney general Mario Iguarán, mentioned in Chapter 14. The same questionnaire included numerous detailed questions about, among other issues, the Tasmania scandal, Yidis Medina’s allegations against him, the parapolitics investigations, the paramilitary demobilization process, Rafael García’s allegations of electoral fraud in Magdalena during the 2002 presidential elections, his public falling-out with the Supreme Court, Calderón’s reports about ongoing paramilitary crimes after the demobilization, and his decision to extradite most of the paramilitary leadership.
The Supreme Court eventually issued an order (an auto inhibitorio) closing the investigation into Senator Nancy Patricia Gutiérrez, mentioned in Chapter 15, for lack of sufficient evidence.
In a TV interview with Noticias Uno, Henry Anaya, the man who appeared in the Job video, apparently trying to ask Don Berna’s lawyer for a bribe, denied that that had ever happened. He said he had no connection to the court and that he had only met with attorney Diego Álvarez because he admired him.
The reference in Chapter 17 to DAS chief Felipe Muñoz’s inaccurate claims that there were no recordings of illegal surveillance, and that Attorney General Mario Iguarán had said he had found no evidence against anyone in the presidency, came from US Cable 09BOGOTÁ1618_a, May 22, 2009, available at https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/09BOGOTÁ1618_a.html.
Additional information came from US Cable 09BOGOTÁ2921_a, September 10, 2009, available at https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/09BOGOTÁ 2921_a.html, and US Cable 09BOGOTÁ2963_a, September 16, 2009, in which the ambassador and Vice President Santos discuss the response to the DAS scandals, available at https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/09BOGOTÁ 2963_a.html.
The quotation in Chapter 17 from presidential adviser José Obdulio Gaviria in response to Jorge Lagos’s allegations against him appeared in a newspaper interview, “Oposición pudo haberse infiltrado en el DAS para provocar escándalo,” El Tiempo, May 14, 2009, www.eltiempo.com/archivo/documento/CMS-5188254.
The quotation from US State Department spokesman Ian Kelly comes from “Determination and Certification of Colombian Government and Armed Forces with Respect to Human Rights Related Conditions,” a press statement dated September 11, 2009, available at US Department of State, https://2009-2017.state.gov/r/pa/prs/ps/2009/sept/129135.htm.
Accounts of Operation Checkmate, which is described in Chapter 18, are available in John Otis, The Law of the Jungle: The Hunt for Colombian Guerrillas, American Hostages, and Buried Treasure (New York: William Morrow, 2010), as well as Íngrid Betancourt’s No Hay Silencio Que No Termine (Bogotá: Aguilar, 2010), among many other accounts. The quotations from Uribe about his decision to keep his regular schedule during Operation Checkmate, and about his comments to the rescued hostages, come from the English version of his autobiography, No Lost Causes (New York: Celebra, 2012), 300–301.
The quotations from Alba Luz Flórez in Chapter 18 are drawn from her statement to the attorney general’s office on May 24, 2010.
The court ruling referenced in Chapter 19, which mentions a list of Envigado Office collaborators turned over by Juan Carlos Sierra, aka El Tuso, is a September 24, 2015 decision by the Tribunal Superior de Medellín, Sala de Conocimiento de Justicia y Paz, in the case of Edilberto de Jesús Cañas Chavarriaga et al., for conspiracy and other offenses, para. 161.
The 2016 letter mentioned in Chapter 19, in which former president Uribe asked El Espectador to correct its reporting about the allegations against him related to El Aro, is available at “Álvaro Uribe Vélez se refiere a la massacre de El Aro, El Espectador, June 3, 2016, www.elespectador.com/noticias/judicial/alvaro-uribe-velez-se-refiere-masacre-de-el-aro-articulo-635870.
As Pedro Juan Moreno is dead, he cannot respond to the allegations against him by paramilitary leaders Don Berna, Mancuso, and Hasbún. Former president Uribe has questioned the credibility of Don Berna and other paramilitary leaders and defended the record of his former chief of staff.
The questionnaire sent to former president Uribe in March 2017 in connection with this book, to which he never responded, included detailed questions about the allegations that have been made against him and his associates, the scandal over “Job” and his entry into the Casa de Nariño, and the DAS scandal.
Numbers of people killed in the Colombian conflict are drawn from the Center for Historical Memory of Colombia, which estimated that 218,094 people were killed between 1958 and 2012. See “Estadísticas del conflicto armado en Colombia,” Centro Nacional de Memoria Histórica, www.centrodememoriahistorica.gov.co/micrositios/informeGeneral/estadisticas.html.
The Supreme Court ruling convicting María del Pilar Hurtado and Bernardo Moreno came in Case No. 36784, dated April 28, 2015. The press release from the attorney general’s office announcing charges against César Mauricio Velásquez, Edmundo del Castillo, Sergio González, and Diego Álvarez is available at “Fiscalía acusó al ex secretario jurídico y al exjefe de prensa de la Casa de Nariño por planear supuestamente desprestigio a la Corte Suprema de Justicia,” Fiscalía General de La Nación, June 22, 2017, www.fiscalia.gov.co/colombia/noticias/fiscalia-acuso-al-ex-secretario-juridico-y-al-exjefe-de-prensa-de-la-casa-de-narino-por-planear-desprestigio-a-la-corte-suprema-de-justicia.
The February 2015 ruling from the Justice and Peace Tribunal of Medellín in the case of Ramiro Vanoy, in which the court ordered Uribe’s investigation in connection with the El Aro massacre, is available at República de Colombia, Rama Judicial del Poder Público, Tribunal Superior de Medellín, Sala de Justicia y Paz, February 2, 2015, https://www.ramajudicial.gov.co/documents/6342975/6634902/1.+2015.02.02+Sent_Bl_Mineros-ramiro-vanoy-murillo.pdf. The quotations from the second ruling are drawn from the same court’s September 24, 2015, decision in the case of Edilberto de Jesús Cañas Chavarriaga et al., for conspiracy and other offenses. According to a legal expert interviewed for this book, the status of that ruling is currently uncertain, as, on appeal, the Supreme Court held that the ruling was unnecessary, as the Medellín court had already issued instructions for Uribe to be investigated on the same grounds in a ruling in 2013. But the Supreme Court had previously overturned the 2013 ruling on other grounds, leading to confusion about whether the instructions to investigate Uribe still stood. The Supreme Court’s decision on the appeal from the 2015 ruling should, in theory, mean that the 2013 order still stands.
Former president Uribe never responded to a March 15, 2017, set of written questions for this book, which referenced Don Berna’s claim that Uribe had ordered that Pedro Juan Moreno’s helicopter be sabotaged, leading to his death. The same questionnaire included questions about the allegations of Mancuso and others against Uribe and against Pedro Juan Moreno, as well as about the ruling by the Justice and Peace Tribunal in Medellín, in which the court requested that Uribe be investigated for promoting paramilitary groups.
The information included in this book about the status of potential investigations against Uribe and of Uribe’s lawsuits against others is based on public reports and conversations with knowledgeable people and is current to the best of the author’s knowledge as of the writing of this book.