“IS THIS A TRAP?” IVÁN Velásquez asked himself as he read the letter from Iván Roberto Duque.
Duque, also known as “Ernesto Báez,” was one of Colombia’s longest-running paramilitary leaders: a lawyer and politician, Duque had been a senior member of one of Colombia’s first “self-defense” groups, the Association of Middle Magdalena Ranchers and Farmers (Asociación Campesina de Ganaderos y Agricultores del Magdalena Medio, or ACDEGAM), which in the 1980s was already committing large numbers of killings and “disappearances” of community leaders, trade unionists, and others they associated with the left. Later on, Duque was said to have become one of Carlos Castaño’s closest advisers, and then, when Castaño lost influence within the AUC, Duque joined the Central Bolívar Block as a close adviser to its leader, Carlos Mario Jiménez, aka “Macaco,” whom President Álvaro Uribe had extradited in May 2008. The articulate and sharp Duque often portrayed himself as an intellectual leader for the AUC—a political representative and a true believer in the group’s far-right-wing views, who was not involved in the “military” or operational side of the group’s activities, though reports suggested otherwise. The paramilitaries from the Middle Magdalena had always been close to drug traffickers, including Gonzalo Rodríguez Gacha, known as “The Mexican,” a Medellín cartel member who had bought land in the Middle Magdalena region and provided substantial funding to the group. But the United States had never requested Duque’s extradition, and so Duque was still in Colombia, participating in the Justice and Peace process and serving a reduced sentence in Itagüí prison on the outskirts of Medellín.
In June 2008, Duque sent a letter to Velásquez, writing that he had learned of supremely serious matters that he wanted to report to him immediately. He asked that Velásquez meet with him and José Orlando Moncada, that is, “Tasmania,” as soon as possible. Tasmania had in fact cosigned the letter—proof, Duque said, of the younger man’s goodwill.
Velásquez had interviewed Duque at length as part of the parapolitics investigations, and he had a good rapport with the paramilitary leader, who seemed eager to talk. With his loud, raspy voice, dramatic storytelling style, and prodigious memory, Duque was a surprisingly magnetic witness, and so far, his testimony about politicians’ links with his group seemed fairly credible. Still, Velásquez had every reason to question the motives behind this letter, especially with Tasmania involved. Was this part of yet another elaborate attempt to get him in trouble by manufacturing “evidence” against him? Thanks to the court’s backing, Velásquez had been able to hold onto his job, for now, but he was well aware that another flurry of attacks could be in the works. And yet, if this was a genuine offer to talk, Velásquez could not ignore it.
So, as soon as he obtained permission from the justices, Velásquez slipped an audio recorder into his suit-jacket pocket and traveled to Itagüí.
“OH JUDGE, I’m so ashamed, forgive me judge!” Tasmania finally said. He had looked flustered when he first came into the large prison meeting room where Velásquez—after negotiating an unusually difficult amount of paperwork to access the prison—was waiting to interview him. “Calm down,” Velásquez had greeted him, making clear he was turning on his audio recorder. “Have a seat.” But almost immediately, the strong-looking, still-young Tasmania launched into an apology for the letter to Uribe. Then he began to tell Velásquez his version of events, which he would later repeat under oath.
According to Tasmania, it was “totally false” that Velásquez or any of the investigators who came to talk to him had ever asked him to speak about President Uribe. He recalled that Velásquez had asked him about Mario Uribe—which was to be expected, because Tasmania had come from Mario Uribe’s hometown, Andes—and that Velásquez had asked him about a drug trafficker, Juan Carlos “El Tuso” Sierra, who was also from Andes and had demobilized with the AUC. But what was in the letter to the president was simply false.
In fact, Tasmania said, he never wrote the letter to Uribe—he only went to school up to third or fourth grade, and could not have written it. Rather, he had signed the letter without reading it, because it was among several documents he was signing to apply to enter the Justice and Peace process—he thought his lawyer, Sergio González (whose office was in the same building as Mario Uribe’s), had written the letter. It was only after he signed it that El Tuso, who was also in Itagüí prison, and who had secured González’s representation of Tasmania a couple of months earlier, told him what he had signed. According to Tasmania, El Tuso said the letter was needed “to help some friends.” Tasmania expressed concern about the letter—he didn’t want to get into trouble. But El Tuso said it was no big deal—he had to go along with the plan, because “his family” was at stake. According to Tasmania, El Tuso had used a threatening tone; at the same time, the drug trafficker had offered him benefits, such as “money and a house for my mom.” Tasmania had many children, so the money was appealing. Also, El Tuso promised to get Tasmania moved to Patio 1 in Itagüí, where the paramilitary leaders participating in the Justice and Peace process were staying. There, he would enjoy many more comforts, including better food, a television, and frequent visits from family. In fact, Tasmania said, El Tuso and González had delivered on the transfer promise almost immediately; on October 1, 2007, he had been informed that by presidential order he was being transferred to Patio 1. Then, soon after the letter was made public, González and El Tuso arranged to have his mother relocated from her little plot of land to a new house. They began to pay her rent and utilities.
Once President Uribe made the letter public, on October 7, Tasmania was flooded with calls from the media, and El Tuso helped him respond. Tasmania claimed that El Tuso and González even drafted a script for him to read from for his interview with Vicky Dávila of La FM radio. The goal, El Tuso told him, was to “attack justices.” Tasmania said he didn’t even know what a justice was—“I’m a peasant,” he said. But El Tuso told him that a justice was a lawyer, and that Tasmania shouldn’t worry about any of that because they would get lawyers to defend him.
According to Tasmania, El Tuso told him that the “friends” they were trying to help were Mario Uribe, the president’s second cousin, and Santiago Uribe, the president’s brother. After one interview, Tasmania said, El Tuso even showed him a letter in which—according to El Tuso—Mario was congratulating Tasmania for his work. He said he was told that letters had come from both Mario and Santiago, though he didn’t know them or their handwriting, so he couldn’t confirm that.
Later on, Tasmania told Velásquez, El Tuso and González abandoned him. El Tuso stopped talking to him, and after six months they stopped paying his mother’s rent. He never received the money he had been promised. After President Uribe extradited the paramilitary leaders, including El Tuso, Tasmania managed to get ahold of González to ask what had happened to all their promises, but the lawyer told him that that was old news. Tasmania wasn’t going to get any help anymore because the paramilitary leaders were gone.
“I became very sad,” Tasmania later said. “I like music, I like to play the guitar and sing. I used to always get together with Báez [Iván Roberto Duque] in a library office to play guitar. He saw I was worried and asked, ‘What’s wrong with you? Why are you like that?’ I told him about the frame job against Iván Velásquez in which they had involved me, and said look at the problem I had now, that I had to give statements but didn’t even have a lawyer to do anything, that they dumped me along with my family.… [Duque] said, ‘You need to communicate with the court, with that justice, to explain.’”
So, according to Tasmania, Duque drafted the letter that Velásquez later received. Tasmania just wanted to clear things up, he said. Now that he knew what a justice was, he was sorry. He was also scared.
Once Tasmania had finished, Velásquez spoke to Duque, who confirmed what Tasmania had said. Both men said they would be willing to repeat their statements to investigators.
Although Velásquez wasn’t sure if he was getting the full story, a lot of what Tasmania and Duque said made sense to him. At a minimum, their statements should finally be enough to put President Uribe’s accusations against him to rest. Not only that, but Tasmania’s allegations against González, Santiago Uribe, and Mario Uribe should give investigators solid leads to pursue.
MEANWHILE, RICARDO CALDERÓN was actively pursuing what he now viewed as the larger story behind the Tasmania scandal: the existence of an ongoing plot, involving people at the highest levels of the government, to discredit and undermine the Supreme Court, particularly Velásquez. In April 2008, he had a conversation with Edwin Guzmán, the former paramilitary in Washington, DC, who, shortly after the Tasmania scandal broke, had stated that Velásquez had offered him benefits in exchange for testifying against the president. Like Tasmania, Guzmán also took his statement back. According to Guzmán, he had made the accusation against Velásquez because an official had offered to help him get visas to bring his family to the United States. “And because I was desperate, well, I said what they told me to say. The bad thing is that after they had me talk to journalists and I gave the statement, they never even answered my calls again, and obviously didn’t do anything they promised.” In an interview with Calderón, the official Guzmán had mentioned strongly denied the former paramilitary’s new claims. Combined with Tasmania’s retraction, however, these new statements suggested that there had been a much larger plot. Calderón would keep trying to piece it together.
WITHIN A MATTER of weeks, thanks to Tasmania’s and Guzmán’s retractions, the attorney general’s office closed its investigation of President Uribe’s allegations against Velásquez. Instead, it ordered the investigation of Sergio González, Tasmania, and Edwin Guzmán for their involvement in the plot against the assistant justice. But Velásquez was dissatisfied: the prosecutors did not even mention the names of Mario or Santiago Uribe, apparently having decided not to investigate their potential roles in the plot. Years later, then attorney general Mario Iguarán said that such an investigation “should have moved forward.”
Velásquez’s suspicions were further stoked when, in August 2008, additional facts came to light that raised questions about how the Tasmania plot had come about. Ramiro Bejarano, a prominent law professor and attorney—and frequent critic of President Uribe through a regular op-ed column in El Espectador—who represented César Julio Valencia in the defamation case Uribe had brought against the Supreme Court president, had filed a public records request with the government to find out how Uribe had received the letter. The Uribe administration replied that it had obtained the letter from the head of the DAS, María del Pilar Hurtado. Bejarano filed another public records request with the DAS to find out how Hurtado had learned of the Tasmania case. She replied in writing that the information had come from Bernardo Moreno, President Uribe’s chief of staff, who had asked her to send detectives to Itagüí prison to pick up some documents in the national interest. Bejarano followed up with a records request to Moreno, asking how he learned about the Tasmania letter. Moreno replied that he had learned about it through an anonymous call on September 29, 2007—he could not identify the caller—and so that day he had asked the head of the DAS to look into it.
In an op-ed in El Espectador, Bejarano highlighted some of the strange facts in the case: it was odd, to begin with, that Moreno “could not recall who called his exclusive phone number to discuss this issue.” It was stranger still, he noted, that in an interview, Santiago Uribe had insisted that “on September 10, 2007, Mario Uribe called me and said that… Sergio González was going to bring me a very serious letter. The next day, he showed up and brought me the letter.” According to Santiago, however, it was Mario Uribe who delivered the letter to the president. “I don’t know if he did it in person or through José Obdulio [Gaviria, presumably]. The president’s accusation came after that.” Not only did Moreno’s account about the presidency first learning about the letter through an anonymous call in late September make no sense, since Santiago was claiming that Mario delivered it to the president, but there was also nearly a month-long gap between the day Santiago Uribe said he received the letter, September 11, and the day President Uribe made it public, October 7.
Velásquez had always wondered about the origins of the Tasmania letter, and he had repeatedly urged the prosecutors to find out more about how the letter got to the presidency, but the attorney general’s office had failed to dig into the issue. Bejarano’s findings only underscored his concerns. In a lengthy interview in El Espectador a few days after Bejarano’s column, he flagged another inconsistency in the official version of events: “The director of the DAS has admitted that on September 30 she sent for the document in the morning, and that afternoon she took it to the president. That would mean that the president first read the letter on September 30. If that’s the true order of events, then how did the president go about asking Justice Valencia about my supposedly irregular conduct with Tasmania on September 26?”
In addition to all this, Velásquez pointed out in the interview, there seemed to be a number of connections between Mario and Santiago Uribe and Sergio González, the lawyer who represented El Tuso and Tasmania. For example, he said, he had learned that González had an office in the same building as Mario Uribe’s, and prosecutors had been able to establish that fact; also, Santiago Uribe had admitted that he shared Mario’s office. Santiago had also acknowledged in an interview that he and González had neighboring land. Velásquez couldn’t corroborate all of these claims, and he didn’t know whether prosecutors had asked Mario and Santiago Uribe or Sergio González about them. But, combined with all the inconsistencies about how the letter got to the presidency, as well as Tasmania’s claims about Mario and Santiago, he thought it was clear that somebody was lying. The prosecutors, he said, should have tried harder to get to the bottom of it all.
Ultimately, Velásquez said, “there was a criminal organization behind this plot. And not only involving Sergio González and Tasmania. What was its interest? There’s an unfortunate situation in all of this, which is that many of the defendants have directed their hatred toward me, as if I were the source of the parapolitics investigation.… There’s an evident goal of harming me, on the one hand. On the other, there’s also the goal of discrediting the court’s investigations.”
NEW ALLEGATIONS KEPT surfacing against Velásquez. He felt that people close to the Uribe administration had now undertaken a persistent campaign to discredit him and his investigations. In August 2008, El Espectador reported on new allegations by Betty Barreto, who was said to have been the cook for the paramilitary commander Héctor Germán Buitrago (aka “Martín Llanos”) for many years. She was claiming that Velásquez and two other investigators had improperly offered alcohol to her and her son—who had reportedly also worked with the paramilitaries—when they were interviewing them in Yopal, in the state of Casanare, at the end of her workday. She told journalists that she felt that the investigators were trying to get her drunk so she would talk. The article also made it sound like Barreto felt they were pushing her to talk specifically about Colombian politician Germán Vargas Lleras. When asked by journalists, Velásquez said that the team had indeed gone out for a drink while they talked to the witness, and that she had talked at length about the history of the paramilitaries in Casanare, which she knew well. But there was no effort to get her drunk, or to get her to talk about any particular member of Congress. “You don’t conduct investigations at the desk of a court office,” Velásquez would say later on, reflecting on the incident. He had simply been trying to gain the trust of a witness who had important things to say, and that meant spending time talking with her, following her lead. In his view, it was unfortunate that as a result of a groundless scandal, the country “missed out on an important opportunity to get to know an important part of the truth about the relationship of… Colombian politicians with Martín Llanos’s paramilitaries.” Soon afterward, Barreto said she had been misquoted. She essentially confirmed Velásquez’s version of events, saying that even though there had been alcohol during her meeting with the investigators, she was never pressed to give any information or to talk about Vargas Lleras.
Around the same time, Senate president Nancy Patricia Gutiérrez, who was then under investigation for paramilitary links, released a recording she had surreptitiously made of a conversation she had had with one of the investigators working with Velásquez’s team, Juan Carlos Díaz Rayo. Over the course of the long conversation—which in tone suggested a high degree of familiarity between the investigator and Gutiérrez—Díaz Rayo expressed some concerns about how the parapolitics investigations worked. In particular, he made a comment about a case the court had open, number 26,625, in which he said Velásquez was collecting evidence against multiple members of Congress without notifying them that they were under investigation, as would normally be required. Gutiérrez and others tried to portray this as a grave violation of due process rights, and President Uribe publicly backed Gutiérrez up. In fact, Uribe made new insinuations about the courts, stating that “some senator has told me about feeling that certain sectors of the justice system had asked him or her for money. I’ve asked, ‘Why don’t you report them?’ But the person told me that it was done in such a subtle way that it would be hard to report, and also that he or she is afraid to do so.”
Soon after, Díaz Rayo was reportedly removed from the investigative team. As for the substance of Gutiérrez’s complaint, Velásquez explained to the media that, although it was true that there was a general open case, number 26,625, in which the court could receive testimony related to parapolitics, it was not focused on any one individual, and so they had not violated any rights—the minute an investigation did focus on an individual, they opened a new case for that person. In fact, conducting preliminary inquiries about possible paramilitary links with politicians was the mission the court had given him—there was nothing improper about that. After a special meeting to discuss the new allegations against Velásquez, the court ended up “decisively and emphatically” backing Velásquez’s work.
BUT COMMENTATORS and politicians continued attacking Velásquez and the court, often referring darkly to a “cartel of witnesses” that Velásquez was supposedly running, or talking about his supposed mismanagement of investigations, without giving much detail. No matter what Velásquez did, or what the evidence showed, it felt as though there would be no end to the efforts to discredit him.