CHAPTER 16

INSIDE THE PRESIDENTIAL PALACE

“WHAT A WASTE OF TIME,” Ricardo Calderón thought to himself as he listened to the Democracy Corporation members talk. It was early 2008, months before the paramilitary leaders were extradited, and Calderón was sitting in the lovely terrace of a small hotel in the exclusive Poblado neighborhood of Medellín, surrounded by tropical plants and hummingbirds, as elegantly dressed servers came by with more drinks and food for the group. Calderón had traveled to Medellín for other reasons, but the paramilitary known as “Job” (Antonio López) had urged him to meet with him and some of his associates to listen to what they were doing in the city.

The men from the Democracy Corporation, a nonprofit made up of demobilized paramilitaries in Medellín, had a well-practiced pitch about their work: their association, led by Job and a few other former members of the group that had been led by Don Berna (Diego Murillo Bejarano) who were free and not participating in the Justice and Peace process (because there were no criminal charges against them), was helping demobilized paramilitaries reintegrate into civilian life. In close collaboration with Medellín’s office of reintegration, which was headed by Jorge Gaviria, brother to presidential adviser José Obdulio Gaviria, the Democracy Corporation found jobs for demobilized men, helped them get schooling, represented them in negotiations over benefits with the government, and helped them to participate in an organized way in local politics—peacefully rather than through the use of force. They also organized the demobilized men, naming “coordinators” for different groups, which mirrored some of the original structure of the armed groups in various neighborhoods in the city.

Medellín had experienced a dramatic drop in homicides in the past few years—after a peak of 184 murders per 100,000 residents in 2002, the number of killings dropped by half in 2003, and now stood at 28.7 per 100,000. As a result, both US and Colombian officials were talking about a sort of Medellín “miracle” and a “revolution” in violence reduction. Bush administration officials, who were aggressively pushing Democratic legislators in Washington to approve the pending free trade deal, had been particularly effusive in holding Medellín out as a model, not only for violence reduction but for President Uribe’s security and demobilization policies. The Democracy Corporation had capitalized on this narrative, and a meeting with leaders like Job, Giovanni Marín, William López (aka “Memín”), and Fabio Acevedo—all tough-looking but smooth-talking associates of Don Berna—had become almost a required stop for delegations of foreign officials visiting Colombia.

Calderón had few illusions about what the Democracy Corporation really was. To him, it was clear that this was a mechanism through which Don Berna, and perhaps other, new leaders, could continue exerting control in the city with a veneer of legality. There had already been reporting in the media about the fear Medellín residents were living with because of the ongoing threats by demobilized paramilitaries. Democracy Corporation members had been trying to take over local community councils—and their access to state resources—through intimidation. It was said that they killed community leaders, “coordinators” of the demobilized, or others who didn’t follow the orders of Berna’s men. The Democracy Corporation members themselves had acknowledged that the drop in homicides had more to do with the fact that Don Berna’s group had vanquished most of its rivals in 2002 than with the demobilization process. So listening to Job and his buddies talk about their social work was frustrating and mind-numbingly boring to Calderón. He was only doing it on the off-chance that he would gain some insight into what Job was really up to behind the scenes.

Calderón had never believed Job’s vague claims to have evidence against Iván Velásquez, but he had been intrigued enough to keep meeting with Berna’s associate. As luck would have it, soon after they first met, in mid-2007, Job had started to spend much of his day in meetings and taking calls from the terrace of a steak restaurant very close to Calderón’s office in Bogotá. When Job got close to the corner of the terrace, Calderón could even take photos of him and the people accompanying him from his office window. Soon, he was regularly photographing Job in different parts of the restaurant, not only from the window, but also from Semana’s rooftop, and even from a car with tinted windows that he borrowed from a friend—this went on for eight months or more. Calderón’s mother passed away in August 2007, and Calderón threw himself into his work even more than in the past as a way to deal with his grief. Calderón’s schedule was highly irregular, but it seemed like Job was spending virtually all his time at the restaurant—arriving at 11 a.m. and staying until 11 p.m. Sometimes Calderón would join Job for lunch, and Job began introducing him to some of his associates, which even included a former police officer who now seemed to be working as Job’s assistant. On those occasions, Calderón would convince some of his colleagues to help him film the meetings from afar.

The Medellín Democracy Corporation meeting was just part of Calderón’s ongoing cultivation and monitoring of Job. Months later, it would turn out to be critically important to Calderón in showing the lengths to which the paramilitaries were going to help the government discredit the parapolitics investigations.

THE OFFICES OF THE governmental National Learning Service (Servicio Nacional de Aprendizaje, or SENA) in Apartadó were packed—and, as was always the case in the main town in the tropical Urabá region of Antioquia, muggy. It was April 24, 2008—two days after Mario Uribe’s arrest, and four days after Noticias Uno published the video of Yidis Medina saying that she had been bribed to vote for Uribe’s reelection. Several high-level officials from Bogotá had descended upon the SENA offices for a meeting about “productive projects” that the government was supposed to put in place to create jobs for demobilized men.

As the meeting, which was being streamed live on the public TV channel, came to a close, one of the local demobilized leaders asked to speak: he wanted to inform President Uribe of something that had happened to him. He went on to say that he had recently been approached by someone who offered him 200 million pesos (around US$100,000) if he would say that President Uribe and other members of the region’s political class had connections to the paramilitaries in the Urabá region. The statement led to another storm of media coverage, with the man who had spoken appearing in multiple news outlets repeating his claim about the attempted bribe. He added that he had been offered potential asylum in Canada or another country, with the help of a nongovernmental organization, and that he was worried, because this was “a clear effort to destabilize” the country’s democratic institutions, and he didn’t want to participate in that. He refused to identify the people who had approached him, stating that he would do so in a longer conversation with the president. He did not agree with many of the president’s policies, and had never voted for him, he added, so this was not a situation in which he was trying to do the president a favor.

Poster belonging to Ricardo Calderón, Bogotá, October 2016. It used to hang in his office at Semana when he was investigating the 2009 DAS scandal. © Maria McFarland Sánchez-Moreno.

Uribe administration officials immediately seized upon the demobilized man’s statements as further proof that people were plotting against the president. Presidential adviser Fabio Valencia Cossio spoke of “an international plot” against Uribe and told the media that the man’s claims were proof that there was a “cartel of witnesses” against the government—an implicit attack on Velásquez. “One week they set something up from one prison, and the following week, they do it from outside the country,” said Valencia Cossio.

Calderón could not believe his eyes when he saw footage of the demobilized paramilitary making these statements: it was Ferney Suaza, one of Job’s associates, who had participated in the hotel meeting with Democracy Corporation members a few months earlier in Medellín. There was no way, thought Calderón, that this was a mere coincidence. In the preceding months, Job had kept hammering away at his claim that Velásquez was corrupt, though for a long time he offered nothing concrete to back up those claims. Now one of Job’s associates was giving further ammunition to those who were claiming that the court was persecuting the president.

Calderón finally confronted Job directly: What was going on? It was all very simple, Job told Calderón: There was a battle between the court and the president, and the paramilitaries had to pick a side. They had decided to help Uribe by gathering evidence against the court. But, Calderón was starting to understand, the paramilitaries’ activities were going well beyond “gathering” evidence.

Soon after, Job finally brought Calderón material that he described as evidence of Velásquez’s corruption: it was a video recording taken in an office of a round man in a suit and glasses, named Henry Anaya, who was talking in an animated manner with Diego Álvarez, the dry, wiry, bearded lawyer who represented Don Berna. On the video, Anaya seemed to hold himself out as a representative of the Supreme Court, and to be asking Álvarez for US$15,000 in exchange for, apparently, getting “improvements” in Don Berna’s prison conditions. Job urged Calderón to publish the video, but to Calderón it was absurd: Anaya might well be trying to scam Don Berna’s lawyers, but it was clear that he didn’t work for the court, and the video didn’t show any misbehavior by the court itself. Job later shared another video with Calderón of Velásquez meeting with Don Berna’s lawyer, but the video showed nothing out of the ordinary or inappropriate. And he shared audio recordings of prison conversations between Don Berna and the former IT chief from the DAS, Rafael García, apparently with the goal of discrediting García, whose testimony was important in several of the parapolitics cases—though the recordings didn’t really do that.

Meanwhile, Calderón discovered that one of his Semana colleagues, whom he considered very close to the Uribe administration, had obtained a copy of the Anaya video and the García audio recordings from senior officials. That was interesting: How did the administration get the material? Clearly, there was some channel of communication between Don Berna’s people and the administration. Calderón persuaded the magazine to hold off on publishing the recordings—he wanted to nail down the full story.

Calderón was not surprised that Job was involved in some kind of effort to smear Velásquez. After all, Job had admitted as much. But if the administration was sharing these recordings, that suggested it was actively working with Job and Don Berna.

“I JUST CAME out of the Casa de Nari,” a deep male voice, with a thick Antioquia accent, said on a never before published audio recording, referring informally to the Casa de Nariño, as the presidential palace is known. Calderón recognized the voice—he knew it well—and sat back, satisfied. This was the last piece of evidence he needed to write the story.

On August 25, 2008, Calderón revealed to the public just how close Job had gotten to the highest circles of political power in the country. With new audio and video recordings that he obtained from various sources that had been monitoring Job’s activities, Calderón reported in Semana that four months earlier, on April 23, Job and Don Berna’s lawyer, Diego Álvarez, had entered the Casa de Nariño and met with some of Uribe’s closest advisers. They included the president’s legal counsel, Edmundo del Castillo, and his press secretary, César Mauricio Velásquez, as well as a couple of other individuals. There, Álvarez and Job had offered supposed “evidence” against the Supreme Court—in particular, the Anaya video and the recording of Iván Velásquez meeting with Álvarez. The meeting happened the same week that Noticias Uno made the video of Yidis Medina public, in which she accused the administration of buying her vote, and just a couple of days after Mario Uribe’s arrest. It was also the day before Job’s associate Ferney Suaza made his explosive statements in the media about how mysterious people had been offering him benefits in exchange for testifying against Uribe.

Don Berna and his men had come up with a “Machiavellian” plan, Calderón wrote, to surreptitiously record members of the Supreme Court and other persons and take those recordings to the government in exchange for benefits. This behavior by the paramilitaries was unremarkable, since, after all, they were “criminals with a mafia-like modus operandi.” But what was surprising, Calderón wrote, was that “in the heart of the Casa de Nariño, just a few meters from the office of president Álvaro Uribe, the legal counsel and press chief would meet with envoys of ‘Don Berna’ to receive information against the court. And what did the paras want in exchange? To delay the extradition of ‘Don Berna,’ as the paramilitaries themselves acknowledged to Semana.”

Calderón explained that Don Berna and his men had started to develop their plot soon after President Uribe launched his first attacks on the court over the Tasmania letter, when they realized the depth of the animus the government had toward the Supreme Court. They had seen an opportunity to make themselves useful to the administration by collecting or manufacturing material that the administration could use to harm the court, and particularly Velásquez. So they decided to secretly record several people with the goal of collecting material that might be useful to them. Don Berna’s men knew that Anaya didn’t work for the Supreme Court, but even so, he did have contacts in the court, including Iván Velásquez himself, because he had been an intermediary with witnesses in some of the court’s cases. That’s why Berna’s people had specifically reached out to Anaya: they hoped they could get him to say something they could use to smear the court. Anaya had apparently seen an opportunity to make some money by boasting of his connections in the court and offering to use them on Don Berna’s behalf—as revealed in the video. Anaya had also, Calderón noted, managed to arrange meetings between Velásquez and Álvarez, which the paramilitaries had also recorded, in an effort to get Velásquez to say something they could use against him. But, as Calderón had already seen in the videos that Job had given him, Velásquez had said nothing in any way problematic in these meetings. Still, Don Berna’s people had tried to make the most of what they had, and had offered the videos to the administration.

But, Calderón noted, “like any good mafioso,” Don Berna had covered all his bases. So, in addition to collecting material that would implicate the court, he also sought material that he could use as a sort of “insurance policy” against the government. Once the government transferred him to La Picota prison (after the bizarre episode in which it put him on the navy brig), Don Berna had shared a cell for a while with Rafael García, the former IT chief for the DAS, who had implicated the DAS director, Jorge Noguera, years before. He had spent hours talking to García, secretly recording his conversations. On the recordings, Berna could be heard trying to goad García into saying things that would undermine the parapolitics cases. But Calderón also noticed that, on some of the recordings, Berna repeatedly tried to get García to tell him information that might be harmful to President Uribe.

All of these efforts came to a head on April 3, 2008, when the Uribe administration extradited “Macaco” (Carlos Mario Jiménez), the former leader of the AUC’s Central Bolívar Block, to the United States. Don Berna was sure that he would be next, because of the United States’ intense interest in his extradition. Don Berna knew, Calderón wrote, that there was no way he could avoid ending up in a US prison. But he wanted to buy time so his lawyers could negotiate with US officials, and so he could get his criminal organization in Medellín in order. So Berna’s men had ramped up their efforts to persuade the Uribe administration to delay their commander’s extradition.

Before writing the article, Calderón had spoken to Edmundo del Castillo, Uribe’s general counsel, as well as César Mauricio Velásquez, the press secretary. Both had confirmed that they had been at the April 23 meeting with Job and Álvarez. Del Castillo said he had also met on two other occasions with Berna’s lawyer, Álvarez. It later became clear that they had been joined in the meeting by a representative of the DAS, as well as two other individuals. According to Del Castillo, he had agreed to meet with Job because Job had said that he had evidence of a plot by the court against the president, but Job had not asked for anything in exchange. In other words, Calderón wrote, criminals had secretly recorded the Supreme Court’s top investigator in an effort to smear him, and had then given the recordings to high officials from the president’s office. And then, instead of reporting them, those officials “had decided to maintain a complicit silence.”

Worse yet, as Calderón already knew, someone in the Casa de Nariño had tried to distribute some of the paramilitaries’ recordings to the press to smear the court. “As if that weren’t enough,” Calderón wrote, they then tried to cover it up. “To avoid leaving behind evidence that the paramilitaries were the ones who collected the secret recordings,” Calderón reported, based on statements by senior intelligence officials, “an official from the Casa de Nariño called the DAS to ask it to install hidden microphones and tap certain phone lines, including that of Assistant Justice Iván Velásquez and the man in the video, Anaya.”

Don Berna’s plan did not work out: a little over two weeks after the meeting, Uribe extradited him to the United States along with the other paramilitary leaders. And on July 28, as Job ate lunch at Angus Brangus, a steak and seafood restaurant in the El Poblado neighborhood in Medellín, two men with guns interrupted him, shooting the paramilitary to death for reasons that would never be entirely clear.

STANDING STRAIGHT IN front of a background of blue curtains, next to the Colombian flag, President Uribe read a carefully worded statement, responding to Semana’s report. He had, Uribe acknowledged with a poker face, learned of Del Castillo’s meeting with Job beforehand, and he did “not disallow it,” as it was policy in the presidential palace to “meet with all people who might bring relevant information about public order.” The paramilitaries, he said, had told his staff that they had evidence that Supreme Court investigators were manipulating witnesses so they could accuse the president of something. And that, Uribe said, was “serious.” To explain further, he said, “Because you know, we have had many difficulties in that regard. In Colombia today there is a trafficking in witnesses, in testimony, and that is corruption and we have to eliminate it too.” Ultimately, he said, the presidency had decided not to report anything to prosecutors because they had found the information that the paramilitaries gave them to be “irrelevant,” and they had thought it would be irresponsible to make accusations against the court based on the videos they had seen. However, they had turned the material over to the DAS to be transcribed, though the DAS was still working on that because parts of the recordings were “inaudible.”

Uribe’s statement raised far more questions than it answered, as Calderón and one of his colleagues noted in Semana: Why would the presidency have a policy of meeting with all people who had information about public order, when there were entire state agencies, including the police and the armed forces, devoted to that? Was the Supreme Court a threat to “public order,” in his mind? Why would the press secretary and the general counsel be charged with meeting with paramilitaries, when it wasn’t within their job descriptions? Why had Job been given permission (as Calderón discovered) to enter the presidential palace with his car, through the basement, when all official visitors had to go through the front door? And if the whole meeting was aboveboard, why was there no official record, as there would be for any other visit, of Job having entered the Casa de Nariño? Rather, Calderón had discovered, there was only a record of Berna’s lawyer, Diego Álvarez, coming in in his car—and Job was not listed as a passenger. Finally, Calderón asked: “If, as the president said, the information was ‘irrelevant,’… what was the point of leaking some of the recordings and transcripts to a media outlet?” Here, Calderón was referring to the material he assumed someone in the presidential palace had given to one of his colleagues at Semana. He went on to note that it was equally curious that even though the recordings had inaudible portions, the transcripts made in the Casa de Nariño and shared with the media included language that wasn’t even in the recordings.

Calderón’s article—combined with what many in the public perceived as a disturbing response by the president—caused a massive national scandal, with virtually all other media outlets in the country covering his findings. Iván Velásquez had had some sense of what was coming: he and Calderón had recently reconnected after a long period of not speaking, and Calderón had asked him a number of questions to cross-check information in the article. But it was a relief to have more evidence supporting his own belief that he had been the target of a coordinated smear operation.

Calderón was convinced that, ultimately, the decision to extradite the paramilitaries came down to the simple fact that keeping them in Colombia had become more risky to the administration than sending them away. Berna, hoping to avoid extradition to the United States, had followed two paths simultaneously: on the one hand, offering to help the government, by collecting an array of recordings that could harm the court or the parapolitics investigations, and, on the other, trying to get ahold of information he could use to blackmail the Uribe administration. It was clear to Calderón that the paramilitaries were getting out of control—not just because of their continued criminal activity, which Calderón had reported more than a year before—but because they might turn on the administration.

In December 2008, another journalist, Félix de Bedout, added further fuel to this theory, when his W Radio show published audio recordings of a meeting the paramilitary leader Salvatore Mancuso had had with politicians Eleonora Pineda and Miguel de la Espriella, while Mancuso was still in Colombia and participating in the Justice and Peace process. In the recordings, Mancuso could be heard telling the two politicians that they needed to remember every name of any politician who had collaborated with the paramilitaries, and start disclosing them—his idea, apparently, was to overwhelm the system. “The more people are involved, the faster there will be a solution,” Mancuso had said. “Uribe can’t imprison 20,000 people, and he can’t imprison the 100 most important people in this country, he can’t. What is he going to do with his ministers, with his minister of defense? What is he going to do with his vice president?” This effort, it seemed, was partly why in 2006 De la Espriella and Pineda had first revealed the existence of the Ralito Pact, which had involved several politicians. But what else had Mancuso been planning to reveal?

Besides, Calderón was starting to learn, the court’s enemies in the government had plenty of other tools at their disposal, without the paramilitaries’ help, to go after Iván Velásquez’s investigations.