WHEN RICARDO CALDERÓN WALKED INTO the decrepit little Bogotá bar at 10 p.m. on a Sunday in October 2006, he had no idea what he was getting into. All he knew was that a person had written to the general email account for Semana claiming to have information the magazine might find interesting. Calderón wrote back, and the person asked him to meet at this bar.
Calderón was easy for his contact to pick out: “I’m skinny, bald, and have a big head,” he had said. Once the man found him, they chatted a bit—the man said he had information about the paramilitaries, and might even have audio recordings, which he would like to sell. Calderón explained that he did not pay for information, but he figured out pretty quickly where the man had come from: “You’re from police intelligence, right?” Yes, the man confirmed, and then launched into a long explanation about how unfairly the institution was treating him, and the difficulties he was having getting medical care for his sick child. Calderón sympathized, and they kept talking. Little by little, the man started disclosing more information, and they agreed to meet again. Soon, they were meeting regularly on Sunday nights, at the same place and same time. Eventually, Calderón gave him a series of flash drives, and at each meeting, the source gave one back to him, loaded with recordings of phone calls and copies of email exchanges involving the paramilitary leaders.
BY THE TIME the source contacted Calderón, several of the paramilitary leaders had relocated to a low-security “detention center” in a building that had previously served as housing for Jesuit seminarians, and then as lodging for tourists, in the municipality of La Ceja, Antioquia. President Álvaro Uribe had announced the move on August 14, 2006, in a four-point statement alluding to the need for the peace process to progress in order to maintain its “national and international credibility.” He called on the paramilitaries to “immediately go to the detention centers, which are dignified, sober, and austere, even if they are temporary, while a decision is made about the permanent ones.”
The media portrayed the move in part as the government’s tough response to a “crisis” in the negotiations. The Constitutional Court ruling on the Justice and Peace Law had led several of the paramilitary commanders to worry about whether the new version of the law left them too exposed to prosecution and extradition to the United States, and some of them threatened to leave the negotiating table. Uribe’s statement called on the paramilitary leaders to put themselves at the disposal of special courts set up to review the charges against them, warning that “those who have benefited from suspension of their extradition orders must follow this decision, or they will lose that benefit.” But Uribe also paired that warning with a promise: “The government will issue a decree providing regulations for the implementation of the Justice and Peace Law. If necessary, it will once again go to Congress. The official will is to save the process… with the cooperation of those who are participating in it.” The minister of interior and justice, Sabas Pretelt, went further in separate statements, indicating that he believed—as the paramilitaries were arguing—that the court ruling was not retroactive, so the paramilitaries could benefit from the law as it was drafted, and not as amended by the court.
But another factor likely contributed to the decision to relocate the paramilitary leaders: an article in El Tiempo, published on July 22, had triggered a public outcry by describing in detail the “jet-setting” lifestyle of some of the paramilitary commanders in the negotiations. Mancuso was regularly spotted in high-end shopping malls in Medellín, buying expensive clothes and—it was said—his favorite Salvatore Ferragamo shoes. He had recently left his wife of more than twenty years to marry a much younger woman, and the article described his wedding as a massive party, with five orchestras and specially built cabins to house the guests. The former commander claimed to have lost all his assets to the war, but it was said that he was still traveling across the country in privately chartered flights and helicopters. In his hometown of Montería, the news report said, his convoy of pickup trucks (which included multiple armed guards provided by the DAS and police, as well as several paid for by Mancuso himself) regularly paralyzed traffic—only top members of the cabinet could usually tie up traffic that badly. Also disturbing, the article reported, without providing much detail, was that Rodrigo Tovar Pupo (aka “Jorge 40”) and Carlos Mario Jiménez (aka “Macaco,” known as one of the commanders most deeply involved in drug trafficking) were continuing to run their criminal operations even in the midst of the negotiations with the government.
Whatever the reason, the paramilitaries who moved to La Ceja were apparently not forced to go there: Mancuso reportedly turned himself into police in a gleaming new Toyota pickup truck, accompanied by his pregnant young wife and escorted by men in two other trucks. And both he and Iván Roberto Duque, known as “Ernesto Báez”—a senior commander of the AUC—made statements indicating that they had “voluntarily” chosen to go to La Ceja, based on an agreement with the government. Not all the paramilitary leaders agreed with the decision: Vicente Castaño, who had long been a critic of the process and did not trust the government, disappeared. A few months later, Semana published a letter from him in which he complained to Peace Commissioner Luis Carlos Restrepo about the government’s failure to follow through on promises to pass stronger laws or decrees to protect them from extradition. Meanwhile, in August, prosecutors announced that six paramilitaries had confessed to having murdered Vicente’s brother Carlos, along with five of his bodyguards, in April 2004, on Vicente’s orders. Salvatore Mancuso and Jorge 40 had also allegedly been involved in the decision. The killers later chopped up the bodies, covered them in gasoline, and set them on fire in common graves. Investigators would eventually exhume the bodies and confirm the younger Castaño’s death. The grisly news seemed to confirm that the more overtly pro–drug-trafficking wing of the paramilitaries, which included Vicente, had prevailed in their internal battles over who should be allowed to demobilize. But it also made it even less likely that Vicente would reappear.
Jorge 40 also failed to turn himself in with Mancuso and the others in August, but he did so in September, after Semana published an article about the computer and files that prosecutors had seized from his lieutenant, “Don Antonio,” which included evidence of ongoing crimes and apparent fraud in the demobilizations. Oddly, the evidence did not prompt the government to lift the suspension of the extradition order against him, or even to withdraw him from the list of people who could benefit from the Justice and Peace Law. Instead, he was simply taken to La Ceja along with the other leaders.
In December, the government suddenly announced that it was moving all the paramilitary leaders from La Ceja to the Itagüí maximum-security prison. Carlos Holguín, now minister of the interior, claimed that they had received information about a plan to escape from La Ceja. The paramilitary leaders expressed surprise, pointing out that they had gone to La Ceja voluntarily. Earlier that week, Uribe had also made a comment about a couple of murders of lieutenants of the paramilitary leaders, indicating that the murders might have been ordered from La Ceja. He warned that those involved might lose the benefits offered under the Justice and Peace Law. Still, the government took no action to take away those benefits, and it was reportedly allowing the paramilitary leaders unrestricted use of cellphones from Itagüí.
“EVERY DAY THIS is getting worse. Here, orders change every day. I say no, and immediately they call the director general, the commissioner, the minister, or, if not, the president,” Calderón wrote, quoting the recorded statements of a former director of Itagüí prison, Yolanda Rodríguez, in a front-page article in Semana in May 2007. Armed with around 8,000 hours of recorded phone conversations that he had obtained during his Sunday-night meetings with his source, Calderón had put together a short but explosive story: the supposedly demobilized paramilitaries, including some who were now serving reduced prison terms, were running entire criminal operations from behind bars—even in Itagüí.
Calderón quoted recordings from the previous four months in which the right-hand men of the top paramilitary commanders, who were sharing the same patio (prison yard) as their bosses in Itagüí, ordered the purchase and sale of large cocaine shipments, instructed troops to dig up the weapons they had hidden at the time of their “demobilizations,” so that they could reassert their control over key neighborhoods, and told their associates to continue their extortion of small businesses in order to help fund their operations. “And what’s most terrifying,” Calderón wrote, “is that, calmly, on cellphones, they talk about the murders and acts of torture that they keep committing; for example, in [one conversation involving a paramilitary known as ‘El Mosco’], men report the murder of a man, saying, ‘Believe it or not, nobody cried or anything for that son of a bitch. You know, sir, that as long as that’s done with your approval and on your say-so, then that’s how it is.’”
Calderón noted that the evidence flatly contradicted a statement that President Uribe had made a few months before, in which he had said that the paramilitaries’ detention in Itagüí stood in stark contrast to what had happened with Pablo Escobar’s lavish prison in La Catedral. Regarding the latter, Uribe said—perhaps in a reference to former Colombian president César Gaviria—that “many of our critics have yet to explain [it] to the country.” Calderón wrote, “Now the country needs another explanation. For Itagüí.”
The morning Semana ran his story, Calderón heard from General Óscar Naranjo, who headed the Criminal Investigations Directorate of the police. Naranjo was said to have been involved in some of the police force’s most successful operations against the Medellín and Cali cartels. Now, he told Calderón that there were rumors going around that he was Calderón’s source—which, as Calderón knew, was false. If he was asked, could Calderón please set the record straight? Calderón, who knew and thought highly of Naranjo, agreed.
Soon afterward, Calderón got a call from Minister of Defense Juan Manuel Santos, who asked point-blank whether Naranjo had something to do with the story. Calderón said no. But Santos then asked him to come to his house. Calderón tried to reach his editor, Alfonso Cuéllar, to ask him to join him, but there wasn’t enough time, so Calderón went alone. As Calderón recalled it, Santos said the situation was very serious—he claimed he had had no idea that the paramilitaries were doing these things. He tried to probe for more details as to Calderón’s source, but Calderón refused to give him any more information. At one point, Santos asked Calderón how much material he had—was it 8 or 10 transcripts? It was more than 8,000, Calderón replied. And what if the government came out and said it wasn’t true? Calderón made clear that he had enough material to keep publishing for months on end. At that point, Santos went back to stating that this was very serious, and he would need to shake up the police. He began asking Calderón who would make for a good chief of the national police, but Calderón said that was his decision. Calderón left feeling worried: Was the government going to do anything about the paramilitaries’ crimes?
The following Monday, Santos issued a statement saying that the government had not known about the crimes reported in the Semana article beforehand, and that once it verified the authenticity of the recordings, it would withdraw Justice and Peace benefits from those who had continued committing crimes. But instead of addressing what had happened in Itagüí, the rest of the statement focused on the source of the recordings: “Unfortunately, it has been confirmed that the recordings and leaks were conducted by personnel from the Directorate of Intelligence of the National Police [DIPOL, for Dirección de Inteligencia Policial].” And then it changed the subject of public debate entirely by announcing that the government had discovered that “personnel from the DIPOL had, for over two years, been recording people who were not the subjects of any investigation, including members of the government, opposition, and journalists. This manner of proceeding is entirely unacceptable, illegal, and contrary to the policy of the government.… An internal investigation has been ordered to identify those responsible for such deplorable facts and punish them accordingly.” In the meantime, given the “gravity” of the situation, Santos announced, he had asked for the resignation of the chief of police, Jorge Daniel Castro, and named General Óscar Naranjo to replace him. In the process, he was also removing eleven generals who were senior to Naranjo to clear the way for Naranjo’s promotion.
ONE EVENING A few days later, at 8 or 9 p.m., Calderón got into his car to drive the few blocks to his apartment from Semana’s offices in a small red-brick building in the north of Bogotá. As he rolled up to a corner, a man in a black leather jacket walked into the street directly in front of his car, forcing Calderón to stop. Calderón stared, and then heard a tapping sound. Another man, also in leather, was by his window, showing him a gun. They looked at him for a few seconds, then the two men turned and walked away. Neither one had bothered to cover his face.
It was a warning—Calderón was convinced these were plainclothes police. But the incident, while unsettling, just added to his anger. Ever since he had published his article on the paramilitaries’ phone calls, Calderón had been hearing members of the Uribe administration on the radio denying that anything was happening. At one point, Calderón recalled later, Uribe himself even accused Semana of paying money for material, though he later retracted that claim. Now that he was being threatened, too, Calderón knew how he wanted to reply.
The following week, Semana published more details about the recordings, running an article by Calderón stating that the police had been illegally recording many people who were not under investigation, including the former foreign minister, María Consuelo Araújo, the opposition leader Carlos Gaviria, and multiple journalists. The article even included excerpts from a phone call Araújo had had with one of her brothers, in which she joked that if the neighboring country of Ecuador didn’t allow Colombia to fumigate coca crops along their border, Colombia would cut off its energy supply.
Publishing the second article was, to Calderón, the only way to defend himself from the government—if the police were going to go after him for the first article, then he was going to open five more holes that they would have to deal with. And, as the government knew, Calderón had thousands of additional recordings that he could make public if necessary.
His tactic worked: the attacks on Semana for the first article stopped. But Calderón later felt conflicted about the story: certainly, reporting on the police’s illegal surveillance was important, and the scandal did apparently lead to reforms within the police. But the focus on the police actions distracted the public from the scandal Calderón had reported on in the first place, over the paramilitaries ordering crimes from prison. And despite Santos’s promise to remove the paramilitaries from the Justice and Peace process if the government “verified” the crimes reported by Semana, as far as Calderón could tell, nothing was happening.
CALDERÓN’S STORIES MAY not have led to the results he thought they should, but they did get the attention of someone he didn’t expect. Antonio López, also known as “Job,” was a supposedly demobilized paramilitary member who, because he had never been charged with any crimes, remained free. But the heavy-set man, his bushy eyebrows hovering like rainclouds over a penetrating glare, was known to be close to Don Berna (Diego Murillo Bejarano), the head of the Envigado Office, who had demobilized in 2004, claiming to be a paramilitary. Job was also one of the leaders of the “Corporación Democracia” (Democracy Corporation), an organization in Medellín supposedly set up to assist demobilized paramilitaries, though many Medellín residents said it was in fact a tool through which Don Berna continued exerting control over the city.
A fellow journalist at Semana had asked Calderón to meet with Job in her place one day when Job was at a nearby restaurant, as she was away and could not make it. Job already knew who Calderón was, and soon after meeting him, asked Calderón how much it would cost to buy the recordings about his “papa”—referring to Don Berna—and his friends. Calderón told him they weren’t for sale.
But Job had other fish to fry. His main goal, it seemed, was to offer Calderón what he said was very important information about the parapolitics investigations and the Supreme Court—something to do with corruption on the court. Was Calderón interested? asked Job. Calderón said it depended on whether there was evidence.
And so began a series of meetings between Calderón and Job at restaurants near Semana’s offices. The meetings quickly became tiresome to Calderón: Job provided no concrete information, instead making only vague statements about judges who he claimed were asking for money from politicians. Meanwhile, the long-winded Job was endlessly boring Calderón with his speeches about the wonderful projects he claimed the Democracy Corporation was implementing in Medellín.
At one of their meetings, Job launched into his usual spiel about how Uribe was such a great person, who was trying to follow through on his promises on the demobilization, but the Supreme Court was so corrupt. But then Job added a detail that intrigued Calderón—he started talking about one assistant justice in particular: Iván Velásquez, whom “they” knew from Medellín. Job went on for a long time, repeating that Velásquez was making stuff up, that he was persecuting the government and the business community, and that he was using false witnesses. He also kept adding that Velásquez was terribly corrupt, though he provided no solid details to back up his claims.
The intensity of Job’s attacks on Velásquez struck Calderón as strange. The journalist had never met Velásquez before, though he had been meaning to contact him to see if the assistant justice had any information he could share about some of the politicians in the recordings that Calderón was still analyzing. Through another journalist, he reached out to Velásquez, who agreed to see him.
The first meeting between Velásquez and Calderón, sometime in mid-2007, was very short—no longer than thirty minutes. Calderón shared some information with him from his own investigations about members of Congress whom Velásquez was also investigating, and told him about some of the things Job had said. Velásquez thanked him, but he was his usual formal, dry self, and hardly said anything.