RICARDO CALDERÓN WOKE UP AT 1 a.m. on May 13, 2008, to a call from Antonio López, the paramilitary known as “Job” who had contacted him in 2007 with accusations about the Supreme Court: “They’re taking my papa away.” He was referring to his boss, Diego Murillo Bejarano, or “Don Berna,” who had headed up the Envigado Office and the Cacique Nutibara Block of the AUC. “Do you know what’s going on?”
Calderón had no idea what Job was talking about, but the story was soon all over the news: shortly after midnight, hundreds of police officers had surrounded prisons in three different cities and taken fourteen men out, including most of the top paramilitary leaders—Don Berna, Salvatore Mancuso, Rodrigo Tovar Pupo (“Jorge 40”), and others, including drug trafficker Juan Carlos “El Tuso” Sierra—and transported them to a major military air base outside of Bogotá, the Military Transport Air Command (Comando Aéreo de Transporte Militar, or CATAM). There, police handed them over to officials from the US Drug Enforcement Agency, who loaded them onto an airplane bound for the United States, where indictments were pending against them.
In a press conference, flanked by his defense minister, Juan Manuel Santos, and his minister of interior, Carlos Holguín, and surrounded by multiple cabinet members, National Police Chief Óscar Naranjo, and Peace Commissioner Luis Carlos Restrepo, President Álvaro Uribe read a statement explaining the extraditions: “Today at dawn, a group of citizens was extradited because some of them had committed new crimes after subjecting themselves to the Justice and Peace Law, others were not cooperating as they should with the justice system, and all were failing to meet their obligations to provide reparation to victims by hiding assets or delaying their turnover.” Uribe pointed out that the government had retained the capacity to decide whether someone should be included on the list to receive Justice and Peace benefits, as well as to decide on suspension of extraditions. The paramilitaries’ demobilization process was the first time, he said, that persons in a peace process had been required to tell the truth and provide reparation. But the truth had to be “simple and timely” and could not be “manipulated.” The United States, he said, was still committed to allowing the extradited paramilitaries to continue participating remotely in judicial proceedings in Colombia; any assets turned over to US authorities would be transferred to Colombia for the reparation of victims. This arrangement, Uribe said, would contribute to a telling of “the truth without distortion.”
A week before, the government had extradited another paramilitary leader, Carlos Mario Jiménez, aka “Macaco,” who commanded the “Central Bolívar Block” of the AUC, which operated in multiple regions scattered throughout Colombia. But that extradition was no surprise: in August 2007, the United States had filed an extradition request for Macaco, citing evidence that the paramilitary had engaged in extensive trafficking of cocaine to the United States as recently as 2007. Because the US indictments involved criminal activity that continued well past the passage of the Justice and Peace Law—in fact, the indictment specifically referenced bank transactions dated the same day of and the day after the passage of the law—it would have been very difficult for the Uribe government to justify ignoring the request and letting Macaco stay in the Justice and Peace process. Instead, on August 24, 2007, a few days before the request was made public, the government transferred Macaco from Itagüí prison to a more secure facility in Cómbita, claiming that it had become aware of ongoing criminal activity by the paramilitary. It did the same to Don Berna. Then, in September, the government transferred Macaco to a navy brig in the Atlantic Ocean, citing security reasons. The extradition had been delayed while the Supreme Court reviewed the extradition request; once the Supreme Court approved the extradition, in April 2008, and after the High Council of the Judiciary lifted a stay, in May, the government moved quickly to ship Macaco away.
The extradition of the other paramilitary leaders, however, seemed to have come out of nowhere. A year had passed since Calderón had published his blockbuster stories about how the supposedly demobilized paramilitaries were committing crimes from prison, and—with the exception of Macaco—the government had not even tried to expel them from the Justice and Peace process, much less extradite them. For Uribe to claim, all of a sudden, that he was extraditing them because of their crimes made no sense: Why do this now?
Years later, people involved in the decision would offer slightly different explanations. Presidential adviser José Obdulio Gaviria would say that the paramilitaries were surprised by their extradition: they had bought the line of the government’s critics, who said that the Justice and Peace Law was meant to secure their impunity. But Gaviria insisted that that had never been the case. The law clearly stated that they could not commit more crimes, and they had been warned. Once reports started to trickle in from the United States indicating that the paramilitaries were still involved in arms and drug trafficking, Gaviria explained, Uribe decided that he had no choice but to activate the extradition orders.
General Óscar Naranjo, the chief of police, said that—at least with regard to Macaco and Don Berna—the decision to extradite them was based on information that the police had been collecting. He said that from the time he was appointed, Defense Minister Juan Manuel Santos had asked him to bring him any evidence of paramilitaries committing crimes from prison; if there was such evidence, he would talk to the president about extraditing those who were involved. Naranjo said the police then did legally collect recordings showing that Macaco and Don Berna were giving orders from prison, and he brought that evidence to the government, prompting the security meeting at which Uribe decided to proceed with the extraditions. Asked why the president decided to extradite all of them, rather than just Macaco and Don Berna, Naranjo simply said, “That was a decision the president made.”
In his own autobiography, Uribe recounted simply that it became obvious over time that the paramilitaries were still committing crimes and were not going to turn over their wealth, and that Colombia’s prisons were not strong enough to contain them. “I had one reason, and one reason alone, for extraditing these men,” he wrote. “I thought it would improve Colombia’s security. I believed that by removing these individuals from our country, we could not only prevent them from committing further crimes, but also show other individuals that they would face dire consequences if they did not cooperate with us.… [T]he decision was in fact not abrupt at all; it was the culmination of a years-long, painstakingly incremental process of trying to convince these men to cooperate.”
AT THE TIME, Calderón was particularly intrigued by the decision to extradite Don Berna. On the surface, his extradition made sense, as it was well known that Don Berna was one of the paramilitary leaders most wanted by the United States: the United States had issued a provisional arrest warrant for him as early as July 2004, for trafficking millions of dollars’ worth of cocaine into the states. In fact, cables later made public revealed that in meeting after meeting, the US embassy in Colombia had raised Don Berna’s case with the Colombian authorities, pressing for his extradition. The DEA considered him not only a major drug trafficker, but “the de facto leader” of the AUC, “in charge of its narcotics-trafficking activities, including all of its cocaine transportation and financial operations.” Berna, the DEA charged, “maintained his power in the AUC in part from the proceeds of his drug-trafficking activities.”
But the Colombian government’s treatment of Don Berna had swung back and forth repeatedly over the years, sometimes seeming tough, and other times inexplicably lenient. Berna’s inclusion among the paramilitaries at the negotiating table was controversial from the start, as he was known primarily as a criminal and drug trafficker (though Berna’s claims to being a paramilitary were arguably stronger than those of drug trafficker “El Tuso” Sierra and some others whom the government had allowed to participate in the demobilizations).
In fact, Berna had a long and sordid history: It was said that in his youth he had been a member of the Popular Liberation Army, a guerrilla group that had demobilized in 1991. By his own account, he had become the right-hand man for the Galeano brothers, close associates of Pablo Escobar, by the mid-1980s. When Escobar had the Galeano brothers murdered in a dispute over money, Don Berna joined forces with the Castaño brothers and the Cali cartel to form Los Pepes, the group that focused on hunting down Escobar and his associates. According to a book that Berna later published, his own little brother, Rodolfo—rather than members of the police’s Search Bloc—was the person who finally shot Escobar to death on a Medellín rooftop in 1993, though this claim contradicts the official version of events. After Escobar’s killing, Berna gradually rose to power in Medellín’s underworld, eventually running the Envigado Office and exerting control over the La Terraza gang, both of which were behind many of the worst murders in the city. He had maintained close ties to the Castaño brothers, however, and by the time the demobilization negotiations with the Uribe government started, he was claiming that he was a member of the AUC.
Despite Berna’s shaky claims to membership in the paramilitaries, he was the first commander to “demobilize” troops. The demobilization of paramilitaries under his control began with the Cacique Nutibara Block of the AUC in 2004, and it had been widely criticized as a sham. Observers claimed that, at the last minute, members of Don Berna’s group had gone through Medellín’s low-income neighborhoods recruiting young men to pass themselves off as paramilitaries. Berna, it was said, had wanted to put on a big show of demobilizing a lot of men without really giving up any power.
Then, in May 2005, while the paramilitary leaders were negotiating in Santa Fe de Ralito, the government entered the negotiation zone to arrest Don Berna for allegedly ordering the murder of Córdoba state congressman Orlando Benítez, his driver, and his sister alongside a road near Ralito—news reports said Benítez had disobeyed Berna’s orders not to campaign in the region. That afternoon, the government mounted a massive and showy manhunt, involving hundreds of police officers, while Uribe announced that he was not going to allow the negotiation zone in Ralito to become a “paradise of impunity.” In Medellín, Berna’s base of operations, transportation ground to a halt as Berna’s associates threatened bus and taxi drivers to make them go on a forced strike to protest the manhunt, and perhaps as a show of strength. Berna managed to escape Ralito, but a couple of days later, he turned himself in.
Then the government seemed to soften its stance: it did not take Berna out of the demobilization process despite his violation of the paramilitaries’ cease-fire, and for several months it held him at a ranch in Valencia, Córdoba, instead of a regular prison. In June 2005, the US chargé d’affaires, Milton Drucker, told Uribe and his advisers that the credibility of the entire demobilization process was at stake: Don Berna needed to be brought to justice for his crimes, and he needed to be taken out of the demobilization process. According to US cables, the Colombian officials insisted that Uribe had taken a tough line on Berna by arresting him, but they resisted taking him out of the demobilization process because he had promised to demobilize the remainder of his troops. A couple of months later, the government held another demobilization ceremony for 2,033 members of the “Heroes de Granada Block” of the paramilitaries, which Don Berna claimed included the last of his troops. However, for years people in Medellín would claim that Don Berna and his men—including Job and other members of the Democracy Corporation—continued to exert tight control over crime in Medellín and surrounding areas.
The government did eventually move Don Berna to a higher security prison in Cómbita, where he was kept separate from other paramilitary leaders for a couple of years. That changed in September 2007: when the government transferred Macaco to the navy brig, it also started to transfer Don Berna to another brig in the Pacific Ocean. But shortly afterward, it announced that Berna’s transfer had been a mistake, the result of an outlandish miscommunication between the Ministry of Interior and the National Prisons Institute. Berna’s real name was Diego Murillo; the person they meant to transfer was the infamous drug kingpin Diego Montoya.
By the end of the botched transfer operation, one of Calderón’s colleagues at Semana reported, the government had used more than a thousand men, three armed helicopters, multiple vehicles and motorcycles, and the two brigs. Semana noted that it was “worrying, that having in its hands the drug lord most wanted by the US and Colombia, and two of the former ‘para’ chiefs who may have continued committing crimes from prison, there was not the least bit of care to avoid errors like this one.”
Perhaps even more oddly, after the transfer, rather than leaving Don Berna in the maximum-security prison in Cómbita, the government placed him in La Picota, a prison in Bogotá that housed most of the politicians in detention for links to paramilitaries. La Picota had a reputation for being much more comfortable than most of the prisons in the country. Far from being treated as someone the government was readying for extradition, Berna seemed to be getting special treatment.
No wonder, then, that Job was astounded at his “papa’s” extradition.
TO VELÁSQUEZ, the extraditions came as a shock. Despite Uribe’s attacks on him, he had kept his investigations into Congress moving forward, and he had high hopes that, since they were required to tell the truth about their crimes, some of the paramilitary leaders might begin talking to him about their links to politicians, as Mancuso had already started to do. But by extraditing the paramilitary leaders, Uribe had sent away the witnesses who might have the most to say about their links to politicians. As a result, the extraditions felt like yet another chapter in the government’s attacks on the court.
In fact, what the media described as the “train collision” between the court and the president had continued ever since the Tasmania episode. On January 14, 2008, the newspaper El Espectador published an interview by the journalist Cecilia Orozco with Supreme Court President César Julio Valencia that led to yet another blow-up with Uribe: In response to Orozco’s question about the phone call he had received from Uribe on September 26, 2007, Valencia said that “the call by the head of state deeply surprised me. The criminal chamber had just indicted Dr. Mario Uribe. In that moment, in an angry tone, he expressed his unhappiness over some decisions that the chamber was taking and, in not very clear terms, made reference to other facts related to the actions of an assistant justice.” Orozco interrupted Valencia: Did Uribe specifically refer to his cousin’s case? Valencia replied: “Yes.” The journalist pressed him further: Did Valencia believe that the president was angry not only because of the Tasmania case, but also because of the Mario Uribe indictment? Valencia responded vaguely, saying only, “I don’t think things are the way you’re describing them. I do get the impression, yes, that the president acted too quickly to call me, even though he had, as I understand it, previously spoken with other officials about the Tasmania issue.” Orozco asked Valencia to describe exactly what Uribe had said to him about the Mario Uribe case, but Valencia refused to say anything further.
Valencia was in Paris attending a conference when El Espectador ran the interview, and he was stunned to receive a fax from the president the very next day. It consisted of two lines: “I have never spoken with you or any member of the Honorable Supreme Court of Justice about subjects that refer to political figures investigated for alleged links with paramilitaries. I ask you to remember and make a correction to El Espectador.” Valencia wrote back that he had no reason to make a correction, as Uribe had, in fact, called him on September 26 and expressed in an angry tone his concern over the indictment of Senator Mario Uribe, as well as over the Tasmania issue. A couple of days later, President Uribe issued a press release recognizing that he had called Valencia on September 26, but insisting that the sole purpose of the call was to discuss the Tasmania case. He claimed that he had witnesses who could confirm that he had not discussed the Mario Uribe case, including the Colombian ambassador to the United Nations, Claudia Blum, and the Colombian ambassador to the United States, Carolina Barco. The president announced that he was pressing criminal charges against Valencia for slander.
“I was not concerned,” said Valencia about the charges later on. He felt comfortable that he had told the truth. But the charges were alarming: the entity charged with investigating members of the Supreme Court was the Accusations Committee of the Colombian Congress, which at the time was packed with pro-Uribe parliamentarians. No matter how well he defended himself—and Valencia was represented by a top lawyer, Ramiro Bejarano—he had to worry that the investigators would be biased. As the case moved forward over the following months, Valencia also had to deal with frequent insults from people on the street. Many people recognized him and called him names, including “a son of a bitch,” for his supposed actions against the president.
MEANWHILE, the government was scrambling to deal with a number of new scandals. In February 2008, Francisco Villalba, the paramilitary witness who years before had provided testimony to Velásquez’s friend Amelia Pérez in connection with the El Aro and Pichilín massacres, had given new statements to prosecutors about El Aro. Villalba, who was then serving thirty-three years in prison for his involvement in the El Aro massacre, claimed that the brothers Santiago and Álvaro Uribe had participated in a meeting along with military officers and paramilitary leaders Carlos Castaño and Mancuso a few days before the El Aro massacre. According to Villalba, the El Aro massacre had been committed as part of an operation to rescue some hostages, and after the massacre, Álvaro Uribe, who was then the governor of Antioquia, had once again met with the paramilitaries to congratulate them, because the hostages were now safe and sound. There was no record of Villalba making these accusations before, but he claimed that he had told some of the CTI investigators in the late 1990s about it—and that they had later been killed by members of the paramilitaries working with the Fourth Brigade of the army.
The testimony got ample media coverage, even though there were good reasons to believe that Villalba was at least partly lying. Prosecutor Amelia Pérez had never trusted Villalba, ever since she had first interviewed him; there had always been parts of his testimony that were inaccurate. And this new testimony had serious inconsistencies: for example, he claimed that General Alfonso Manosalva had been present at the meeting three days before the massacre, but Manosalva was dead by then. Nor did any other paramilitaries corroborate his testimony about Uribe—though Mancuso later did allege that the Fourth Brigade, under General Carlos Alberto Ospina (who replaced Manosalva), had provided logistical support to the paramilitaries. He also claimed that a helicopter belonging to the Antioquia governor’s office had flown overhead during the massacre.
On April 20, 2008, the TV program Noticias Uno released an explosive interview by journalist Daniel Coronell. On the screen, Coronell made clear that this was a recording from August 8, 2004. The subject of the interview was Yidis Medina, a brown-haired, still young, round-faced former congresswoman who was initially seen nervously picking lint from her thick red, brown, and beige sweater. Then she crossed her arms and began to speak: She was the only person, she said, who could confirm what happened, and so she feared for her life—one of her colleagues, she claimed, had told her to be careful about speaking because the government would not fulfill its commitments to her. “It would be very easy,” she said the colleague warned her, for her to appear murdered, or for her to have an accident and for them to say that she was hit by a car and died.
Medina had surprised many observers in 2004 when, after giving the impression that she would vote against a bill to allow Uribe to run for a second term, she had changed her vote at the last minute. Another member of Congress, Teodolindo Avendaño, who had originally opposed the bill, never showed up to vote. In the Noticias Uno interview, Medina claimed that shortly before the vote, she had attended a meeting with Uribe’s chief of staff at the time, Alberto Velásquez, who had tried to persuade her to be “patriotic” and vote for reelection. In the middle of the meeting, she said, Uribe himself had made an appearance and repeated the same thing, saying that whatever she wanted, whatever agreements she discussed with his adviser, he would fulfill them, because he was a man of his word. She claimed that Uribe had said he wanted to save the country, and he wanted more time to finish his plan for the government. He had also promised, she said, that later on, once the noise around the bill had died down, he would allow her to name someone to a foreign consulate. After the president left, she told the interviewer, Velásquez and the minister of the interior, Sabas Pretelt, continued negotiating with her, on Uribe’s orders. They promised that she would be allowed to fill three positions in the Middle Magdalena region. She claimed that she also spoke with the minister of social protection, and the minister of social protection also spoke with Teodolindo Avendaño, the other member of Congress whose position on the bill changed. The day after she voted in favor of reelection, Medina said, Uribe called her to thank her and repeat his commitments. But later on, according to Medina, the government seemed to be backtracking on its promises. As a result, she decided to record the interview with Noticias Uno, but on one condition: that they not publish it unless she was killed or the government failed to deliver on its promises. Medina received her own copy of the recorded interview and also agreed not to share it with others. Four years later, Coronell found out that Medina had been talking to another journalist about what had happened and had revealed the existence of the video. Their agreement was now breached, and so, with Medina’s explicit permission, Coronell published the interview.
Uribe immediately denied Medina’s allegations, but the Supreme Court opened an investigation into her actions. On June 28, 2008, she was convicted of bribery. The court notified both the Accusations Committee of Congress and the attorney general’s office of its ruling so they could also open investigations into other officials who might be implicated.
At the same time, the investigation into Senator Mario Uribe was ramping up. He had resigned from the Senate after his indictment, so his case had been transferred from the Supreme Court to the attorney general’s office, which now had jurisdiction over it. Two days after Noticias Uno published Medina’s interview, on April 22, a prosecutor ordered Senator Uribe’s arrest.
Attorney General Mario Iguarán recalled that ordering the arrest was a difficult decision for him: “I would have preferred not to take a decision against him,” he said. “I knew him well.” When Ramiro Marín, the prosecutor handling the case, told him he was ready to issue an arrest warrant, Iguarán said, he sat with the prosecutor for hours, playing devil’s advocate, to test Marín’s arguments for any weaknesses. The arrest warrant was based in part on Mancuso’s statements about meeting with Mario Uribe and Congresswoman Eleonora Pineda to arrange the distribution of votes in Córdoba—according to the prosecutor, Uribe went from getting 3,985 votes in the 1998 elections to nearly triple that amount—11,136 votes—in the 2002 elections, perhaps as a result of the arrangement. The voting patterns in the state had also been highly atypical in ways the prosecutor considered consistent with fraud.
After five hours of arguing with the prosecutor, Iguarán said, he was convinced that Marín was right and they had to move forward. However, he asked Marín to hold off on the arrest for a little longer, so he could go and talk to President Uribe himself—he thought it was appropriate to give him some warning that this was coming. That night, he said, Uribe argued in his cousin’s defense, like anyone would who saw a loved one in that situation. But Uribe seemed to accept the decision.
The next morning, Mario Uribe was at the Costa Rican embassy, claiming that he was the victim of political persecution. It seemed as if he had learned about the arrest warrant before it could be carried out, and he had decided to seek asylum. But by the end of the day, Costa Rica had denied his application, and the CTI took him into custody.
IN THE MIDST of these scandals, Uribe administration officials found another subject to discuss in the media: at a public event with members of Congress and various administration officials in the Urabá region of Antioquia, Ferney Suaza, a demobilized paramilitary from Urabá, stood up and asked the officials to give President Uribe a message. A group of nongovernmental organizations and other people had tried to bribe Suaza, urging him to testify as to links between the president and paramilitary groups. Immediately, one of the congressmen present put Suaza on the phone with Uribe, and soon, Uribe and people from his inner circle were again taking to the airwaves to complain about what one presidential adviser, Fabio Valencia Cossio, called an “international plot” involving a “cartel of witnesses” against the government.
Meanwhile, another scandal had erupted in the media over a couple of trips by justices of the Supreme Court that had supposedly been paid for by a man named Ascencio Reyes, who was rumored to have “links” to persons involved in drug trafficking. Reports also said that Reyes was influential in the attorney general’s office, and that he was so close to Attorney General Iguarán that he had attended Iguarán’s swearing-in celebration. In a story written by one of Calderón’s colleagues, Semana posted a photo of Iguarán and a man it identified as Reyes, supposedly at the swearing-in. The photo would later turn out to be of someone else, not Reyes, but officials and pro-government commentators immediately seized on the Ascencio Reyes story. According to them, it was evidence that the court was corrupt. They revived their attacks on Velásquez’s investigations.
EVER SINCE PRESIDENT URIBE had made his announcements about the Tasmania letter in October 2007, Iván Velásquez’s life had been upended. On the court, Velásquez found that many of his colleagues were suddenly afraid of conducting investigations in the way they had done before—every time they interviewed a witness, they had to wonder whether that witness would later do a “Tasmania” on them, claiming that the justices had solicited false testimony. “With Tasmania, the government got many members of the investigative commission to practically stop working,” Velásquez would later recall.
And although Velásquez attempted to forge ahead, many of his contacts—prosecutors, judges, investigators—who would ordinarily have chatted with him and shared information, were now reluctant to be seen with him. One woman at the inspector general’s office, someone he had once considered a friend, flatly told him that even though she thought highly of him, she could no longer speak with him; if people knew they were friends, she could be fired. So Velásquez never spoke to her again. But at least, he thought, she had told him what she was doing. Many other contacts simply vanished. “It was like when someone knows there is a death threat against him, and nobody will enter the car with him for fear that a bomb will go off,” he would later explain. His wife, María Victoria, also later recalled that she tried to organize a party in those days, and ended up having to cancel it, because so many of their former friends said they could not attend. Velásquez had aspired to become a full justice on one of Colombia’s high courts, but now the other Supreme Court judges, whose support he would need to get confirmed, gave him the cold shoulder. His future in the judiciary, it seemed, was now over.
The Tasmania episode also affected Velásquez’s children: Velásquez’s youngest daughter, Laura, who was starting university, was so upset by the attacks on her father over the Tasmania letter that she missed a couple of weeks of school. By the time she went back, word had spread about who her father was, and many of her classmates refused to talk to her.
Even going out could be stressful: on one occasion, Velásquez and María Victoria were at a shopping mall when a woman stopped them to angrily ask why Velásquez was trying to harm the president. His daughter Catalina noticed that when they entered restaurants together, the entire room would go silent as people stared at him. They also had to worry about security: One day, Laura was on her way to take the public bus to school when she noticed men photographing her. A few days later, Catalina and her husband were in their car on their way to her job when she noticed a group of people taking photos of her from another car; she pretended not to see them, and they made a point of driving next to her. The family took it as a warning.
Shortly after Uribe’s accusations against Velásquez, and the Supreme Court’s complaints, the police assigned the assistant justice a bulletproof car, a driver, and two armed guards. But in late November, the family was rattled when they received a letter from a senior police official saying that he had determined that Velásquez did not need the guards, because he had the same level of risk as any other Colombian. The Supreme Court complained publicly, and Chief of Police Óscar Naranjo intervened. He immediately reinstated the security detail; the officer who had removed it had not consulted with anyone, he said, and had disobeyed written instructions.
Regardless of the level of protection her husband had, María Victoria was terrified that someone would try to kill him. Certainly, an attack on Velásquez would carry political costs, but you could never be sure how far some people would be willing to go to stop his investigations. On April 22, 2008, the Protection Directorate of the attorney general’s office sent a letter to Jairo Castillo Peralta, known as “Pitirri,” the Canada-based witness who had been testifying against the Sucre congressmen and Mario Uribe: “Through intelligence information, this directorate has become aware that two persons may be traveling as tourists to that country to assassinate you,” the letter said. The officials asked Pitirri to inform the Canadian authorities to ensure that his security measures were strengthened “in the extreme.” Although the letter was marked secret, Pitirri immediately made it public: he had no formal security measures in place, and found it odd that the Colombian authorities were writing to him, instead of coordinating directly with Canada to ensure his protection.
Velásquez tried to calm María Victoria down, but he, too, was now on high alert. Deep, dark circles hung from his brown eyes, and he was constantly on the lookout for threats: he went quiet whenever a waiter approached his table at a café, and he removed the battery from his phone whenever he had a sensitive conversation, to keep the intelligence service or other unknown enemies from tapping it as a surveillance device against him.
And yet Velásquez also had encounters that encouraged him to keep going: people he didn’t know stopped him on the street to say things like, “You’re very brave,” “Keep going,” and “Don’t let the president stop you.” In a society that rarely tolerated different points of view, and where there was overwhelming pressure to support the president, at least some people saw the court’s willingness to go after powerful members of Congress as a reason for hope—a sign that it was possible to go against the current and stand on principle.
WHEREAS VELÁSQUEZ VIEWED the extraditions as a blow to his investigations, and Calderón viewed them as a way to silence the extradited paramilitaries and intimidate the ones who were left behind, the George W. Bush administration in the United States welcomed them. To the US government, the extraditions were valuable for at least two reasons: the Justice Department wanted to prosecute the drug kingpins, and, as noted by White House spokesperson Dana Perino, the extraditions might help “persuade” Democratic members of Congress to finally move on the pending free trade agreement with Colombia. Over the preceding year, opposition to the deal seemed to have hardened, despite the Colombian government’s aggressive lobbying in DC—which had even included trying to enlist former president Bill Clinton’s help. In October 2007, the New York Times ran an editorial urging members of Congress to hold off on a deal: “President Álvaro Uribe and his government have not done enough to bring to justice the paramilitary thugs and their political backers responsible for widespread human rights violations.… [W]ithholding ratification can still be used as a lever to change Mr. Uribe’s behavior.” The two leading Democratic presidential candidates in US elections that year, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, had also expressed opposition to the deal. But Bush viewed the trade pact as a high priority, and in April 2008, in a move that many Democrats viewed as aggressive grandstanding, he announced that he was submitting the deal to Congress to force a vote. Regardless of their effect on investigations in Colombia, the extraditions now made it very hard to argue that the Uribe administration was being soft on the paramilitaries.