BOGOTÁ, COLOMBIA, OCTOBER 9, 2007.
Colombian president Álvaro Uribe sounded aggrieved. He spoke slowly, choosing his words with care, but he couldn’t quite mask the rage brewing underneath. “We’re dealing with one of three possibilities here,” he said on La FM radio station’s popular early-morning news show. “Either the president of the republic is a murderer; or the prisoner… is lying; or there is some machination, a machination by an assistant justice… against the president.”
The story had already been all over news shows the previous night, after Uribe first issued a press release about it and then proceeded to make multiple media appearances on the topic. But that morning, he explained yet again why he was so concerned: some time earlier, Uribe had received a letter from a man named José Orlando Moncada, who went by the alias “Tasmania.” A low-level member of the paramilitaries’ “Southwestern Antioquia Block,” Tasmania was serving time in the Itagüí maximum-security prison on the outskirts of Medellín on charges of extortion and kidnapping. In the letter, which was publicly released and dated September 11, 2007, Tasmania reported to Uribe that Assistant Supreme Court Justice Iván Velásquez had asked him to accuse the president, along with an influential Antioquia businessman and landowner, of involvement in the attempted assassination, in 2003, of a paramilitary leader from Southwestern Antioquia known as “René.” In exchange for his testimony, Tasmania said, Velásquez had offered him a sentence reduction, admission to a witness protection program, and the relocation of his family. The letter concluded: “My concern, Mr. President, is that Mr. Velásquez, it appears to me, wishes to harm you. It is the only thing that interests him. In exchange for that, he will give anything.”
The claim that Uribe would have ordered an assassination seemed, as one of the radio hosts put it, “delusional.” But what disturbed him about all of this, Uribe emphasized, was the behavior of the Supreme Court. The court had no jurisdiction to investigate the president, so what was Velásquez doing, trying to get Tasmania to testify against him? The implication seemed clear: Velásquez must be trying to frame the president for murder. And at this point, Uribe said, he felt he had no other choice but to publicly call on the attorney general to conduct a criminal investigation into Velásquez’s actions.
Uribe’s appearance on La FM that morning went on for nearly an hour and a half. Finally, he hung up to take more calls on the Tasmania letter from other radio stations. Broadcast radio still had a huge following among the nation’s more than 45 million inhabitants. People across Colombia—from the northern Caribbean towns of Cartagena and Santa Marta, to the lush coffee-growing regions in the mountains, to the flatlands on the eastern border with Venezuela, and to the Amazon rainforest farther south—listened to Uribe, fascinated and confused, as they started their day.
To most Colombians, the story about Tasmania’s letter came out of nowhere. They had never heard of René or Tasmania. It seemed odd for the president to devote so much energy to what a low-level criminal wrote from prison. On the other hand, to many, it made sense for Uribe to fight back. After all, Uribe’s enemies—the people who would like to sabotage his achievements, weaken the military, and keep the country living behind bulletproof glass—might lurk anywhere, even in the country’s highest courts.
By contrast, few Colombians knew much about Velásquez. The media had already identified him as the coordinator of the parapolitics investigations, in some cases calling him the “star judge” of parapolitics, but before he, too, went on the radio that morning to deny Uribe’s accusations, Velásquez had never been at the center of the national spotlight.
“It’s absolutely false,” Velásquez retorted, when La FM’s hosts asked about Tasmania’s letter. “The country can be certain that the court does not use such methods to investigate, and that it does not have jurisdiction to investigate the president—that alone is enough to thoroughly undermine those claims.” So what was behind all this? Velásquez went on: “I have always acted with a great deal of loyalty and probity, keeping the justices constantly informed. I do not hide myself to conduct investigations. The only purpose that can be seen in all this is to discredit the investigation.”
And then Velásquez added his own bombshell to the story: “Last week I informed the criminal chamber of the court of what I could see was coming, as I had been warned that an investigation or intelligence activity of some sort had been started against me. In light of that, the court summoned the attorney general and inspector general to hear in person and in detail what had happened [and] formally filed a criminal complaint with the attorney general.”
Over the course of many more interviews, Velásquez would explain his version of events in detail: several weeks earlier, a couple of investigators who were working with the court and charged with looking into the situation in Antioquia had been asking around about potential witnesses who knew about links between paramilitaries and several Antioquia congressmen—including the president’s second cousin, Senator Mario Uribe. In the process, they had received reports that Tasmania might have some relevant information, so they met with him. Tasmania asked them whether he would get any benefits if he cooperated, and they explained that any discussion of benefits had to be conducted directly by the assistant justices. They put Tasmania’s lawyer, Sergio González, in touch with the court. As a result, on September 10, 2007, Velásquez and another assistant justice who was looking into Antioquia, Luz Adriana Camargo, had traveled to Medellín to meet with Tasmania.
Tasmania wanted to be included in the Justice and Peace process, so he could have his sentence reduced to the five to eight years available to the paramilitary leaders, but the justices explained that that was not in their hands: it was up to the government to decide who went on the list of paramilitaries who could benefit from that process. Instead, the two justices explained the standard benefits available to witnesses who cooperated, which included a reduction of about one-sixth to one-quarter of the sentence they were serving. But Tasmania, who only had a third-grade education and was clearly a low-level paramilitary, struck Velásquez as unlikely to have much valuable information. Velásquez asked him whether he knew of Juan Carlos “El Tuso” Sierra, a major drug trafficker who had been allowed to demobilize along with the paramilitary leaders. El Tuso was from the town of Andes, where Tasmania said he operated, and yet Tasmania denied knowing about him—a statement that was so absurd that Velásquez immediately concluded Tasmania was lying. Tasmania said that he could talk about murders and other activities of the Southwestern Antioquia Block of the paramilitaries, but the justices said they were not interested in that: they were only investigating links with members of Congress—for example, Senator Mario Uribe, who was also from Andes. Tasmania said he didn’t know anything about congressmen, and that he had only seen Mario Uribe driving around once. He did volunteer that he knew something about “a problem” that President Uribe had had with René, but Velásquez told him that the court didn’t investigate the president, and did not pursue the matter further. In light of Tasmania’s apparent lack of knowledge, or recalcitrance to share what he knew, Velásquez decided to cut the interview short and leave. But then González asked him to wait. The lawyer pulled Tasmania aside, and after a few minutes came back and said they needed some time for Tasmania to organize his thoughts. If Velásquez left them his cellphone number, they would get in touch soon. Velásquez agreed, and then he left. The meeting was unremarkable—like many meetings Velásquez and other justices had held with prisoners or potential witnesses over the course of their investigations. Velásquez would not have given it a second thought were it not for what happened the very next day.
Velásquez had finished his workday and was catching a ride home with his son Víctor—Velásquez still did not drive—when his cellphone rang. It was a call from the president, the operator told him. The president? Velásquez had not spoken to Uribe in many years. Why would he be calling? Uribe’s unmistakable voice came on the line, very friendly, asking how Velásquez was doing. But the president quickly got to the point: Uribe wanted to know whether there was some kind of investigation in the court against him. There was a great deal of concern in the presidency, he said, because someone called Tasmania was saying that Uribe had provided him with weapons to carry out an attack against the paramilitary leader René. Did Velásquez know anything about that? That was strange, Velásquez replied, because he had just been with Tasmania the day before. He assured Uribe that they had not discussed anything related to such an attack, and in any case, Velásquez recalled telling the president, “the court has no jurisdiction to investigate you, I know of no information against you, and if there were any, the court would immediately transfer it to the appropriate authorities.” Uribe said, of course, that that was what he would expect, and they ended the call on a cordial note.
Velásquez thought the call was strange, but he was not too concerned. When Velásquez’s wife, María Victoria, heard about it, however, she was horrified: she had never believed in Uribe, and now she tried to explain to Velásquez that she had an awful feeling about the call. “There’s nothing good in that call, Iván,” she told him in the kitchen, tears welling up. Velásquez, seated at the table, tapped his fingers together and asked her not to make things out to be bigger problems than they were—she was reading too much into it; the president was being generous by calling him to clear things up. Still, the next day he informed the president of the criminal chamber of the court, Alfredo Gómez, as well as a couple of other justices about the call.
THROUGHOUT THE YEAR, the court had been slowly making progress in its investigations into members of Congress from Antioquia, including Senator Mario Uribe. Mancuso had testified that he had met with Mario Uribe and Representative Eleonora Pineda—who had already admitted to having signed the Ralito Pact with the paramilitaries, and was under investigation—ahead of the 2002 elections. According to Mancuso, the paramilitaries had agreed to support Mario Uribe and Pineda in part of Córdoba. Pineda said that the meetings happened after the elections, but the voting patterns in the area Mancuso mentioned were highly irregular, favoring Mario Uribe.
With his beady eyes, full mane of white hair, and thick neck firmly set into expensive-looking suits, Mario Uribe appeared eminently comfortable in his role as one of Colombia’s most prominent and influential politicians. Not only had he served as president of the Senate, but he had also been a close political ally of President Uribe for over two decades. In the 1980s, the cousins had jointly founded an offshoot of the Liberal Party, called the Democratic Sector (Sector Democrático), and they had been elected to Congress together in 1986—Álvaro to the Senate and Mario to the House. Their movement eventually morphed into the Democratic Colombia Party (Partido Colombia Democrática), which Mario now led, and which was a key part of the president’s coalition in Congress, often leading congressional debate on the president’s initiatives.
Velásquez also knew Mario Uribe a bit and had a cordial relationship with him. In the 1980s, when Velásquez had joined his brother’s private legal practice, his office had been in the El Café building in Medellín, one floor below Mario’s office, and they would often see each other on the elevator. Mario Uribe’s office messenger had also been a former student of Velásquez’s. And Mario Uribe’s sister was the dentist for Velásquez’s children for years. “She was a very pleasant, professional person, who treated the kids very well, and we liked her a lot,” Velásquez said. But as an investigator, Velásquez had to follow the evidence.
On September 26, 2007, at around 5 p.m., the Supreme Court announced Senator Mario Uribe’s indictment. The president was attending the UN General Assembly in New York at the time, and when journalists called him, he made only a very simple statement: “As president, I have to support the justice system. As a person, I feel sadness.”
A couple of days later, Velásquez was approached by a former colleague from Antioquia, who was close to Mario Uribe. After the usual pleasantries, the man expressed concern about the investigation of Mario Uribe, telling Velásquez that the investigation was part of a fight between the court and the president, and that he was concerned about what could happen to Velásquez. Mario, he said, was very mad, and Velásquez should be careful. The man asked whether Velásquez had ever considered leaving the court: if he wanted to, he could ensure that the government would nominate him to be a justice on another high court. Velásquez expressed disbelief that such a thing was possible, given how upset members of Congress were about his investigations, and the man said not to worry, that it could be arranged. In fact, he said, Mario would like to talk to him—he was just two blocks away. Velásquez cut him short: “I have nothing to say to him.” But the man insisted, warning him that there could always be smear campaigns against him, and remarking that Velásquez would not want to be in Mario Uribe’s shoes. Eventually, he asked Velásquez if there was anything that could be done to postpone the date on which Mario Uribe was supposed to give his statement to the court. Velásquez said he should file a formal request with the court, and left it at that.
FIVE DAYS BEFORE Uribe’s announcement about Tasmania, on October 3, Velásquez attended the regularly scheduled Wednesday meeting of the justices of the criminal chamber to brief them on his work. At the end of the briefing, he paused and shifted gears, saying, “If I may, I would like to discuss a personal problem.” The night before, he explained, a contact from the attorney general’s office had reached out to him, saying he needed to speak to him urgently. Velásquez had suggested they wait until the next day, but his contact insisted: “No, doctor, it has to be now.” So the contact visited Velásquez at his home and told him what he had learned: that in the past few days there had been a secret, high-level meeting at the DAS, at which officials had discussed something about Velásquez and “someone called Tasmania, or Tanzania, something like that,” who was trying to do something against the president. The goal of the meeting—which was framed as a matter of national security—was to ask for an investigation to be opened against Velásquez for allegedly trying to frame the president. During the meeting, DAS officials had also displayed some files involving Velásquez, including photos of him and some of his family, as well as all their phone numbers, full names, and addresses, which suggested that the intelligence agency had been spying on the justice. Something had to be done right away, said the contact, or it would be too late to head off what seemed to be an attempt to harm Velásquez’s credibility and possibly get him thrown off the court and into prison.
Velásquez was surprised, he told the justices, but he trusted this contact and believed his story: it made sense of Uribe’s strange call to Velásquez—and this contact had no reason to know about that, or about the meeting with Tasmania. “This means that the DAS is conducting intelligence operations against me,” he said. “They’re following me, and my communications are under surveillance.”
The justices were alarmed: if this was true, they concluded, the DAS was engaging in obstruction of justice. So they decided to convene meetings with Attorney General Mario Iguarán and Inspector General Edgardo Maya the next day, October 4. At those meetings, the justices asked Velásquez to repeat the story to the other officials, and then they formally filed a criminal complaint over the DAS’s surveillance of Velásquez. The following Monday, the president issued his press release about Tasmania’s letter.
THE PUBLIC FOCUS on the Tasmania scandal continued for days. News outlets ran interview after interview with the president and members of his administration, as well as with Tasmania himself. Velásquez felt like his phone never stopped ringing—journalists wanted to know why he was trying to frame the best president in the history of Colombia for murder. At Uribe’s request, Attorney General Iguarán opened an investigation against Velásquez for the alleged attempt to frame the president. This investigation would run concurrently with the investigation into the court’s complaint over the DAS’s alleged surveillance of the assistant justice. In all his time working on the parapolitics cases, Velásquez had never felt so much pressure.
Velásquez was convinced that, had it not been for the tip he had received about the meeting at the DAS, and his quick action to inform the Supreme Court, Uribe’s onslaught against him in the media might have gotten him fired. Getting rid of him was probably the objective behind the entire Tasmania episode, though exactly who was behind it, and why, remained hazy. Even though the whole criminal chamber was involved in the investigations, the media had identified Velásquez as the main force pushing the cases forward, and so he was an obvious target for people who wanted to discredit the endeavor.
Other members of the court, however, may have been inclined to believe Velásquez, because they had themselves already felt the effects of Uribe’s frustration—including through the president’s attacks on the court over the preceding months. The Supreme Court president, César Julio Valencia, also said he had had a troubling phone call with President Uribe. He had received his call on September 26, just a couple of hours after the court announced that it had indicted Senator Mario Uribe. According to Valencia, early that evening he was at a meeting with the head of the office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights when a secretary pulled him out of the meeting because the president was looking for him. Valencia remembered that when he got on the phone, the president sounded “furious.” Uribe spent about half an hour complaining to the justice about Tasmania and Velásquez—this was many days before the October 6 press release about Tasmania’s letter. Much later, Valencia would tell a journalist that President Uribe also touched upon the Mario Uribe case, though Valencia refused to elaborate on what Uribe had said. Surprised and shaken, Valencia said little on the phone call with Uribe—as he later remembered it, most of his answers had been monosyllabic. But the next day, September 27, Valencia briefed several other justices who worked with him on the civil chamber of the court about the call. He also informed Sigifredo Espinosa, who was then acting president of the criminal chamber. Valencia did not know Velásquez well, as they were on different chambers of the court, so he didn’t tell Velásquez about the call at the time.
Once President Uribe made his public accusations against Velásquez in connection with the Tasmania letter, Valencia and the rest of the court decided to back up the assistant justice. On a radio show, Valencia warned that what Uribe had stated was not only incorrect, but also posed a threat to Velásquez’s security. Moreover, he said, it amounted to obstruction of the parapolitics investigations. Sigifredo Espinosa also spoke out in defense of Velásquez.
But the justices were courting Uribe’s ire. On some news shows, Uribe insulted the justices, calling Valencia a fraud. On La FM radio, the president said that the last time he had seen Justice Espinosa, Espinosa had asked him for help getting one of his relatives into college. Uribe said he had not been able to help because the person didn’t meet the requirements, but that he “hoped that wasn’t why” Espinosa was mad at him. Uribe added that Espinosa had asked him to his house to eat some beans, but that Uribe had been unable to attend.
To most of the justices, who were not used to working in the public spotlight—much less to being subjected to personal attacks by the president—Uribe’s comments were highly intimidating. Still, the court as a whole remained consistent in its response. On October 9 it issued a formal statement noting that Velásquez and assistant justice Luz Adriana Camargo had interviewed Tasmania on September 10 as part of their regular work and at Tasmania’s request. The next day, the court said, Uribe had called Velásquez, and the court had informed the attorney general and the inspector general of these events. Without specifically referencing Uribe’s attacks, the court then called on government officials to “respect the autonomy and independence” of the judges; it “emphatically rejected” as false the suggestion that the court was engaging in any kind of conspiracy. It emphasized that all of its decisions were the result of joint discussion, rather than any one individual’s preferences, and, moreover, that it strongly supported the statements of Valencia and Espinosa: they had “acted faithfully as spokespersons” of the court.
A COUPLE OF days after the initial round of interviews, the media reported on yet another allegation against Velásquez, this time coming from a former paramilitary and retired member of the military, Edwin Guzmán, who was now living in the United States. The news stories said that, after seeing the Tasmania story, he had decided to approach the Colombian consulate in New York to report that Velásquez and another justice had done the same thing with him: “They said that if I had anything against the president, if I had seen or heard him, no matter what it was, that I should report it and that they would help me leave the country along with my family.” Uribe’s supporters immediately seized on Guzmán’s claims as further proof that Velásquez was obsessed with trying to frame the president for something—anything—and would go to great lengths to do so. To Velásquez’s supporters on the court and elsewhere, it seemed evident that Guzmán’s claims were just part of a larger plot to discredit him, though there was no way to prove it.
URIBE’S PRESS RELEASE and subsequent attacks on him and on the court initially surprised and disappointed Velásquez. He knew the intelligence service was up to no good, and, of course, he disagreed with many of the president’s policies. But he had always believed that Uribe was a straight shooter—someone who would confront him directly if anything was wrong. In Antioquia, when Uribe had backed the establishment of the Convivirs, Velásquez recalled, he did so openly, even vociferously, despite the fact that many people opposed him. Given that the president had already called him on September 11 to ask about the Tasmania meeting, why wouldn’t he just call Velásquez directly again after receiving the letter? Why issue a press release and then go on this media rampage?
To María Victoria, Uribe’s actions simply confirmed her suspicions about his call to Velásquez a month earlier: “Do you now see that there was nothing good in that call he made to you?” she had asked Velásquez when he had told her of the secret DAS meeting. It was partly at María Victoria’s insistence that Velásquez had informed the court about it before Uribe’s press conference. “That man can do everything against you, you have to understand,” she had told him. “You’re a nobody, and it’s so easy to build up something against you, and then what are we going to do?”
As the days passed and the attacks continued, Velásquez also started to develop a darker view of what was happening. The Tasmania letter was dated September 11—the same day that Uribe had called Velásquez—but the whole story of how the letter got to Uribe was murky, and in interviews Uribe seemed evasive about it. At first, Uribe had said that by the time he called Velásquez, he had only “heard” about the Tasmania interview from “several sources,” which he did not name. He said that after he called Velásquez, he trusted what the assistant justice told him, and “forgot about” the issue. It was only later, Uribe said, that he received the Tasmania letter—he didn’t say how. But Uribe claimed he had waited to go public until the DAS had confirmed the authenticity of the letter, and until Tasmania had reiterated his allegations in an interview with the attorney general’s office. Once he received that confirmation, he said, he asked the attorney general—both in private and in public—to investigate. But on October 14, the newspaper El Tiempo reported that Uribe’s brother, Santiago, had informed the president of Velásquez’s supposed offer to Tasmania on the very same day that Velásquez met with the paramilitary. It turned out that Santiago Uribe was a neighbor of Sergio González, Tasmania’s lawyer, who told Santiago about the meeting right away.
The connection between Santiago Uribe and Sergio González was in itself suspicious. But Velásquez also wondered why, if Uribe had known about the meeting as early as September 10, he had waited nearly a month to go public. The explanation about waiting for the DAS to confirm the authenticity of the letter did not add up: Why would the DAS take so long to confirm something so simple? And it was still unclear how the actual letter got into Uribe’s hands.
And then there was Tasmania’s behavior: the day after Uribe’s press release about the Tasmania letter, Velásquez listened to an interview that La FM conducted with him, and he was surprised at the ease with which Tasmania spoke. The illiterate paramilitary had barely said a word when Velásquez had interviewed him, and had used fairly basic language when he did speak. Somebody must have coached him on what to say on the radio.
Velásquez also soon learned that on October 1, Tasmania had been transferred from Patio 2, the maximum-security section of Itagüí prison, where he was among the general population, to Patio 1, which held only a few dozen senior AUC leaders, who were participating in the Justice and Peace process. The transfer had major implications for Tasmania’s quality of life: In Patio 2, family visits and a prisoner’s ability to receive packages were tightly restricted, and the prisoners had no access to televisions, phones, or computers. Now, in Patio 1, this low-level paramilitary could enjoy much more frequent visits from his four children; he could watch TV and use a cellphone and a computer; and instead of regular prison food, he could eat food that was specially prepared for the paramilitary leaders in a separate kitchen.
All these facts, combined with the intensity and persistence of the attacks against him, led Velásquez to conclude that he had been the target of a coordinated operation to undermine the parapolitics investigations and discredit him personally—maybe even get him kicked off the court. It was sheer luck that he had learned about the DAS’s actions beforehand, and had been able to warn the court and get it on his side.
But Velásquez was now constantly wondering: What other attacks might be in the works?