AT THE PODIUM IN DUBAI, Qatar, Iván Velásquez got ready to speak to the crowd. It was November 4, 2011, and he was standing before hundreds of lawyers to receive the International Bar Association’s prestigious Human Rights Award, in recognition of his work on the parapolitics cases.
By then, the Supreme Court had convicted thirty-nine members of Colombia’s Congress in connection with Velásquez’s investigations. Velásquez was busily opening new lines of inquiry into events in the coastal state of Atlántico, into the activities of a still-active paramilitary group in the Casanare region, and into the little-known group known as the “Capital Block” of the AUC, which operated in the region of Cundinamarca, where Bogotá itself was located. In mid-2010, Velásquez had also finally been able to make arrangements to interview some of the extradited paramilitaries in the United States, including Salvatore Mancuso, the commander who had been involved in the El Aro massacre, and AUC Northern Block commander Jorge 40 (Rodrigo Tovar Pupo). But, despite the international acclaim Velásquez was getting, his job had grown much harder.
César Julio Valencia, the president of the Supreme Court, against whom President Uribe had pressed criminal defamation charges, and Álvaro Orlando Pérez, Velásquez’s initial supervisor on the court, had both retired at the end of their terms, and the composition of the tribunal had gradually been changing. Several justices—some of whom Velásquez thought were close to Uribe or members of Congress—began to criticize Velásquez. Others, he sensed, were jealous of the media attention and praise he was receiving, considering that he was, as Velásquez put it, “merely an assistant.” When he informed the justices of the award the International Bar Association was giving him, he recalled later, none of them congratulated him or even asked him what the award was about. It was “as though it hadn’t happened.… Not one word. That reveals what the situation is like.”
Some of the justices and other officials seemed to be throwing roadblocks into Velásquez’s path to make it harder for him to conduct the investigations. Velásquez recalled later that one justice, Leonidas Bustos, wanted to end the practice of conducting informational interviews in the early stages of an investigation—instead, Velásquez and his team would only be allowed to conduct interviews when they were formally collecting evidence as part of an open case. Velásquez argued that such restrictions would paralyze the investigations, and managed to fend off the initiative. But he was less successful in stopping another effort that he viewed as problematic: the new inspector general of Colombia, Alejandro Ordóñez, who was famous for his far-right-wing views, had said that Velásquez should include a representative from his office in all of the informational interviews he was conducting with the paramilitaries in the United States, and threatened to conduct a disciplinary investigation against him if he did not. Velásquez didn’t want to do this; he did not believe it was an appropriate request—the informational interviews were not formal, and there was no need for someone from the inspector general’s office to be present. Indeed, it was critical that investigators be able to build trust and a rapport with the paramilitaries to find out what they knew, and the presence of someone from the inspector general’s office could change the dynamic and undermine that trust, making the paramilitaries less likely to speak. Justice Bustos supported Ordóñez’s request, however, and the other justices agreed to the demand.
Velásquez had hoped at one point to be named a justice himself, and the court had considered him as a candidate, but had not selected him. According to Justice María del Rosario González, who had continued to support Velásquez, it was his very success that prevented the other justices from supporting him: “Iván Velásquez has had a heroic role,” she said. “He has put his life on the line for the cause of Colombia and for justice, with no recognition. On the contrary: when you mess with the political and economic classes, doors close.… Without him, nothing would have been done, and what little has been achieved has required fighting with everybody.”
Meanwhile, the politicians who had been convicted by the court were continuing to charge that they had been treated unfairly. One of their main points of contention was that they had no way to appeal the Supreme Court’s ruling. Velásquez, who believes in the right to an appeal, was sensitive to this issue, but it was a complicated matter. Though people convicted by ordinary criminal courts had the right to appeal, members of Congress in Colombia could only be investigated and tried by one of the four high courts, and in criminal matters, that was the criminal chamber of the Supreme Court. The arrangement was originally considered to be a privilege. But that meant that no appeal was possible, unless the defendant was claiming that his or her constitutional rights had been violated, which would involve the Constitutional Court. Eventually, the Constitutional Court would require that the code of criminal procedure be changed to establish an opportunity for defendants tried by the criminal chamber of the Supreme Court to appeal their rulings to the entire Supreme Court. That decision did not apply retroactively, however, so the politicians’ convictions stood.
More broadly, some of the politicians and commentators sympathetic to them were continuing to sow confusion in the public by making vague claims that there was a “cartel of witnesses” being run by the court (or by Velásquez) to persecute them. A couple of years later, a group of politicians would go all the way to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights alleging various due process violations. They argued that the “fight” between Uribe and the Supreme Court had politicized the investigations against them, rendering their convictions unfair and invalid. As of this writing, those petitions were apparently still pending.
In 2014, Luis Gustavo Moreno, a young lawyer who had represented several of the politicians accused of links to paramilitaries, would publish a book, El falso testimonio (False Testimony), in which he would make the case that there was a systematic problem with false witnesses in Colombia’s criminal justice system. Pundits and commentators seized on the opportunity to argue that there had been a vast conspiracy to go after the “parapoliticians” with false witnesses. Whatever the broader situation in the country, however, Velásquez did not feel that the investigations he had led were tarnished: “Whenever you have evidence based on witnesses, it’s easy to make arguments of this type, because it’s a fact that witnesses can lie or be persuaded to lie,” he said. “Naturally, there can be false witnesses, but not in the way they’ve presented it.… In the court we were always very careful not to use testimony unless we had strong reasons to believe it was credible. There were many witness statements against members of Congress that we never used because there was no way to corroborate them.” In 2017, the author of El falso testimonio, who had by then become the anticorruption unit director at the Office of the Attorney General, would be arrested by Colombian authorities with the help of the US Drug Enforcement Administration. According to news reports, he allegedly solicited a bribe in Miami from a Colombian politician who was under investigation.
AT THE SAME TIME, more details were coming to light about the various plots against Velásquez and the court.
In October 2010, Ricardo Calderón published a story with additional details about what had happened with Ferney Suaza, the associate of Job’s who had publicly claimed that someone was bribing him to accuse the president of crimes. On an audio recording from the day Suaza made his accusation (around the same date that Job had entered the Casa de Nariño with his videos), Job and Suaza could be heard discussing Suaza’s statements: “Did you see the news? There’s an interview, brother, and everything… on Caracol, RCN, Teleantioquia [TV news stations], everything, brother,” said Suaza. Job praised Suaza, and then asked: “When do you meet with Uribe?” President Uribe had announced that he wanted to talk to him directly. Suaza replied, “In the afternoon the high commissioner is coming… and later they say they’ll do something to get me close to the president.” Job then warned Suaza, “Don’t tell the commissioner what you and I discussed, just the president, do you hear?” Later in the call, Suaza said he needed to see how he could get his family out of where they were. Job told him to go ahead and “look for a house, and tell me how much it costs.” Suaza insisted that he needed to get them out right away, and he didn’t know how to handle the cost of the plane tickets and other things, but Job told him not to worry, that he should go ahead and get them out and just tell him later how much it all cost.
Months later, Calderón wrote, Suaza ended up in “the worst of both worlds,” as he was unable to back up the serious claims he had made. When he had finally gone before prosecutors, he had not identified any specific individuals as having been behind the supposed attempts to bribe him to testify against the president. According to Calderón, that bothered some administration officials, who had expected him to give a more “explosive” statement. Soon afterward, he lost the security detail the administration had been providing him. With Job now dead, Suaza had nobody to protect or speak for him, and he fled the country. Semana learned that Suaza had told other people that he had been part of a “strategy” organized by Job and government officials.
In February 2011, another dramatic scandal erupted when Ramón Ballesteros, an attorney representing some of the members of Congress accused of paramilitary links, was arrested in the middle of a Supreme Court hearing in the case of former senator Luis Alberto Gil. One of the witnesses in the hearing, David Hernández (also known as “Diego Rivera”), was a former paramilitary leader who had provided testimony against the defendant in the case. Hernández had gone to the United States a few years before and was apparently collaborating with the US Drug Enforcement Administration when—as he stated during the hearing—Ballesteros had contacted him to offer him US$100,000 to take back his accusations against Gil and other politicians, and instead claim that Iván Velásquez had improperly pressed him to make false statements. A US official present at the hearing submitted a video reportedly recorded at a restaurant in Dulles Airport, outside Washington, DC, in which Ballesteros appeared to seal the deal with Hernández. In the recording, according to news reports, Ballesteros could be heard saying to Hernández: “You’re going to become the parapoliticians’ ‘star’ and I’m going to charge whatever honoraria I want. Get money out of those sons of bitches.” Ballesteros eventually pled guilty to bribery charges.
OVER THE COURSE of the following year or so, several DAS officials would also provide testimony about their involvement in surveillance of the court and other questionable activities. These included not only the “Mata Hari of the Supreme Court,” Alba Luz Flórez, who confirmed what Semana had reported, but also William Romero, Flórez’s supervisor, who provided detailed testimony about Flórez’s mission, which he claimed started in May 2007. Romero corroborated much of Flórez’s testimony about the sources she had developed within the court and around the justices, the pressure to get case files and recordings of the court’s discussions, and the substantial sums of money that the DAS had paid their sources in the court. In October 2008, Romero said, a few months before Calderón broke the story, Intelligence Director Fernando Tabares had ordered him and others to get rid of all information they had collected about the court: somebody had “made a mistake,” and they “should not leave a trace.” Romero described an elaborate operation to disguise or destroy evidence.
Velásquez found a statement to prosecutors by Martha Leal, the deputy director for intelligence at the DAS, working directly under Tabares, to be particularly valuable, as it confirmed to him that he had been right to be raising questions about how the Tasmania letter got to the presidency, and when the letter was even written. Leal had said little to investigators when the scandal first broke. But after some of the agents working under her were arrested and started talking, Calderón later recalled, it became clear that she would have to disclose what she knew. Otherwise, she might end up facing serious charges, and lose the opportunity to get sentencing benefits in exchange for her testimony.
According to Leal, on Saturday, September 29, 2007, the DAS director, María del Pilar Hurtado, informed her that someone in the presidency had told her that Sergio González, Tasmania’s lawyer, had some very sensitive information about a situation involving Tasmania and Velásquez. As a result, Hurtado needed Leal to travel to Medellín that very day to pick up a document from González. Leal flew to Medellín and met with González, who told her his version of the Tasmania events and gave her a photocopy of the Tasmania letter to Uribe, with Tasmania’s signature and fingerprint on it. But two days later, on October 1, Hurtado sent her back to Medellín, because Mario Uribe had to deliver something to her. Leal said Mario Uribe’s driver gave her a sealed envelope at the airport in Medellín. She then boarded the plane back to Bogotá and delivered the envelope to Hurtado, without knowing the contents. Her boss, Fernando Tabares, later told prosecutors that the document was the original copy of the Tasmania letter.
President Uribe had first called Velásquez about Tasmania on September 11—the day after Velásquez met with Tasmania, and the same day that the letter was supposedly written. So why was the presidency suddenly sending the DAS to get the letter more than two weeks later? The only intervening event was the September 26 decision to indict Mario Uribe. Velásquez had to wonder: Had the letter in fact only been written after the decision to indict, to allow the government to attack the court in retaliation? Was the president’s call to Velásquez a way to lay the groundwork, taking advantage of Velásquez’s meeting with Tasmania, and maybe to give the assistant justice an implicit warning not to mess with Mario Uribe? And was sending the DAS to get the letter a way to formalize and create an apparent independence in what had been a very intimate process? The fact that Tasmania’s transfer to the much more comfortable Patio 1 of Itagüí prison was only ordered on October 1, after Mario Uribe’s indictment, also suggested that the decision to use the Tasmania letter and reward the paramilitary had only been made after the indictment. There were still questions, and they would remain unanswered.
LEAL’S TESTIMONY ALSO pointed to an unusual level of collaboration between the DAS—and even the presidency—and two of the paramilitaries’ lawyers, Sergio González and Diego Álvarez.
According to Leal, after she picked up the Tasmania letter, González called her again, but she ignored the calls, thinking they were unimportant. Hurtado confronted her about it soon after, saying the presidency had asked why Leal wasn’t taking González’s calls. Whenever he called, Hurtado impressed upon her, the deputy should pick up the call, and meet with him if necessary. So began a series of interactions between Leal and González—on several occasions, she had to travel to Medellín to meet with him and “receive messages that he was sending to the Casa de Nariño, and which were sent there through the director of the DAS.” Among these messages, she recalled, was one where González asked her to tell Hurtado that he had learned that Francisco Villalba, the paramilitary who had accused President Uribe and his cousin Mario of involvement in El Aro, was receiving psychiatric treatment, which could be used to challenge the admissibility of his testimony in court. She also said that González suggested that Villalba be transferred to Itagüí prison, where the paramilitary leaders were staying, from the prison where he was at the time.
In December 2007, Leal said, Hurtado and Tabares ordered her to visit Diego Álvarez, the lawyer for Don Berna (Diego Murillo Bejarano, former head of the Envigado Office and the Cacique Nutibara Block of the AUC), who needed “technical support” to record Henry Anaya on video. According to Álvarez, Anaya was supposedly trying to extort money from Berna on behalf of the Supreme Court—Leal said she was later surprised to learn that Anaya didn’t even work for the court. After the recording was completed, both Hurtado and Tabares were eager to get the video, apparently because the president’s office was also following events closely. Leal also recalled having had to purchase a recorder for Don Berna to record his conversations in prison with Rafael García, after Álvarez requested it—though she didn’t specify who instructed her to make that purchase.
Tabares, the intelligence director—and Leal’s boss—was also a witness. He described a breakfast meeting that he and Hurtado had in early September 2007, when Hurtado had just taken over as DAS director, with Bernardo Moreno, President Uribe’s chief of staff, at the upscale Metropolitan Club in Bogotá. At the meeting, Tabares said, Moreno told them that President Uribe was interested in having the DAS keep him informed about four subjects: the Supreme Court, Senator Piedad Córdoba, Senator Gustavo Petro, and journalist Daniel Coronell (who had broken the Yidis Medina story on the scandal involving Uribe’s reelection bill, and had previously had to go into exile because of death threats against his family, which Coronell had attributed to a former congressman who was close to Uribe). Hurtado agreed, and, according to Tabares, instructed the various branches of the DAS to carry out work in accordance with Moreno’s instructions, though Tabares claimed they did not monitor Coronell.
Both Leal and Tabares talked about being ordered to monitor the activities of the Supreme Court president, César Julio Valencia, and his lawyer, Ramiro Bejarano, after Valencia’s falling-out with President Uribe. And both recalled that the DAS made payments to a journalist who—soon after the Yidis Medina scandal—claimed that Medina had links to the ELN guerrillas.
BY OCTOBER 2010, prosecutors were saying they had enough information to indict Hurtado, who had been replaced as DAS director in January 2009, when Felipe Muñoz had been named to the post. But within weeks, she had fled to Panama, which granted her asylum. On June 17, 2011, prosecutors charged Hurtado and Bernardo Moreno, the president’s chief of staff, with “organizing, directing and promoting a conspiracy to commit crimes” against justices of the Supreme Court and some members of Congress, “who were categorized and treated as ‘political targets,’ as well as against one journalist [Daniel Coronell] and one lawyer [Ramiro Bejarano].” Specifically, the goal of the conspiracy, according to prosecutors, was to use the intelligence services to illegally obtain information that could be used to discredit these individuals, and handing this privileged information over to third parties and to the media. Prosecutors also charged Hurtado with ordering intelligence activities with no justification, among other offenses.
Another case that would come to an end soon afterward was the investigation of the slander and insult (known in Spanish as injuria) charges that President Uribe had started against Supreme Court president César Julio Valencia. The Accusations Committee closed the case in May 2012, after failing to find any merit to the president’s charges. The president had brought in two key witnesses who he said could back him up, Claudia Blum and Carolina Barco, the Colombian ambassadors to the United Nations and the United States, respectively, but they had failed to do so. Blum’s statement was full of gaps: she said she had overheard Uribe as he had made several calls that day, but didn’t know who they were with; she recalled that he had mentioned Tasmania in one of the calls, but did not recall him mentioning Mario Uribe. Meanwhile, Barco said that she had been near Uribe when he was speaking to Valencia, but that she had arrived after the call had already started, and that out of “respect and good manners, I didn’t pay attention to the conversation.”
In August 2010, the attorney general’s office charged Sergio González, Tasmania’s attorney, with slander against Velásquez. The assistant justice had testified in the case, as had Tasmania and Iván Roberto Dugue, repeating the same facts that had been made public when Tasmania first confessed to Velásquez. In January 2012, González would be convicted and sentenced to nearly six years in prison.
But Velásquez was disappointed in the way the investigations had been conducted. González’s sentence seemed disproportionately long for the crime for which he was convicted, and that offended Velásquez’s notion of justice. Yet the charges against González only scratched the surface of what Velásquez felt he had done. More importantly, prosecutors had shown little interest in pursuing other people who might have been involved in plotting against him—for example, Tasmania had repeated his claims about Mario and Santiago Uribe, but prosecutors had not investigated that angle.
Velásquez and Calderón had similar concerns about the DAS case: yes, some important testimony had been brought to light, and there had been a number of convictions, but the early prosecutors handling the DAS investigation had paid little attention to the surveillance of the court. By the time new prosecutors took over, the government was starting to take the DAS apart, making it difficult to track down witnesses.
VELÁSQUEZ’S DIFFICULTIES with the Supreme Court finally came to a head in August 2012, when the criminal chamber asked him to give up his role as coordinator of the parapolitics investigations. The members of the chamber offered little explanation beyond stating that the coordinator role should rotate among various assistant justices. In the following days, the journalist Cecilia Orozco published an op-ed in El Espectador titled “Homage to a Brave and Decent Judge.” She praised Velásquez, who, she wrote, “in his infinite solitude has borne the greatest threats and conspiracies against his life, good name, and honor.” She criticized the majority of the members of the court, calling them corrupt bureaucrats who were primarily concerned with paying back other officials for getting them their jobs. That same day, Velásquez recalled, some of the justices called him to complain about the op-ed. They told him he was a loose cannon, that he didn’t follow instructions, that he should have publicly made clear that he was not the “star justice” of parapolitics, and that it was unacceptable for him to be receiving international awards. They asked him to go to the media and publicly correct Orozco. The only one who didn’t attack him, Velásquez recalled, was María del Rosario González. Velásquez did not do as they asked, and a few days later, after more pressure from the court, he tendered his resignation.
STILL, THE PANDORA’S BOX that Velásquez and Calderón had opened could no longer be shut. After years of near-total silence, some of the paramilitary leaders extradited to the United States completed their plea negotiations with US prosecutors or started serving out their sentences for drug trafficking. The United States had shown little obvious interest in pursuing the paramilitaries’ allegations against their accomplices in the political system—though at least one source indicates that US prosecutors did attempt to do so—and none of the paramilitaries faced charges in the United States related to their human rights abuses. But some of the paramilitaries were beginning to talk more openly about their crimes, associates, and relationships with politicians. Their statements would slowly allow Velásquez to piece together a clearer picture of what lay behind the attacks against him in recent years—and even the murders of his friends and colleagues years before.
Juan Carlos “El Tuso” Sierra, Tasmania’s protector in Itagüí, denied Tasmania’s claims about how he (El Tuso) and the lawyer Sergio González had manufactured the letter that Tasmania sent to the president—he said the letter was genuine and reflected what Tasmania told him about his meeting with Velásquez and his colleague. However, El Tuso went on to say that the government gave the paramilitaries a number of benefits in exchange for their cooperation on the letter: they took Macaco (Carlos Mario Jiménez), from the AUC’s Central Bolívar Block, off the ship where he was being held, moved Don Berna from the maximum-security prison in Cómbita to La Picota, and moved Tasmania to Patio 1 of Itagüí prison, where he could be with the paramilitary leaders. El Tuso went on to say that he and other paramilitary leaders had participated in plots with the government to smear Yidis Medina, the former congresswoman who claimed that Uribe administration officials had bought her vote for the amendment allowing for Uribe’s reelection—in the smear campaign, they had tried to link her to the ELN. He also admitted that they had recorded Velásquez, in the hope of catching him doing something wrong. And he said that the government, at the peak of its confrontation with the Supreme Court, was desperately asking the paramilitaries for help in trying to discredit the court. The paramilitaries, he said, had helped to fabricate a letter from Francisco Villalba which had him withdrawing his claim that President Uribe and his brother Mario were involved in the El Aro massacre.
A 2015 court ruling noted that El Tuso also turned over a list, which has not yet been made public, of people who supposedly worked with the Envigado Office, including Mario Uribe and several other members of Congress and the military as well as businesspeople.
Setting aside El Tuso’s claim that he hadn’t pressed Tasmania to manufacture the letter, which Velásquez assumed was a lie because El Tuso didn’t want to incriminate himself, Velásquez thought many of his statements were credible—they were consistent with other evidence Velásquez had seen. In 2014, El Tuso would be released from prison in the United States, after serving less than six years for drug trafficking; even though he was facing multiple serious charges in Colombia, he was never deported back to the country, apparently having successfully argued that he faced a risk of torture if he returned.
As early as November 2008, after his extradition to the United States, Mancuso had also begun to talk. He gave more details about the paramilitaries’ entry into Ituango in 1996 and 1997, which he and Carlos Castaño had arranged in close collaboration with members of the military. In fact, Mancuso said, he met with Alfonso Manosalva, the head of the Fourth Brigade of the army, at least ten times to get information and coordinate the paramilitary incursion in the region. Mancuso said the paramilitaries had help from other parts of the government as well: they had coordinated directly with Pedro Juan Moreno, then chief of staff to Álvaro Uribe, who was governor of Antioquia at the time, to establish the “Convivirs” that the paramilitaries were using as cover for their activities. Mancuso said that at a meeting at a ranch in Córdoba, Carlos Castaño himself, in front of Mancuso, had given Moreno detailed information about their plans to go into El Aro, supposedly to reduce the guerrilla presence in the region and rescue some hostages the FARC was holding. For the massacre, Mancuso said, the paramilitaries had coordinated directly with army troops in the nearest town, Puerto Valdivia. “The army in the area knew everything that was happening, [and] the police knew everything that was happening,” he said. Mancuso also provided more details about the helicopters he had mentioned before: There were four helicopters flying over the massacre site, he said. One belonged to the guerrillas, who used it to evacuate their leadership. Another belonged to the paramilitaries, and Mancuso flew in that one, taking in ammunition, removing bodies, and taking in wounded paramilitaries. The third, he said, was yellow and orange, and belonged to the Antioquia governor’s office; he said he watched it fly over as the paramilitaries were conducting the operation. The fourth belonged to the army and flew over the site as the paramilitaries were leaving the town.
In 2012, Mancuso publicly stated that the paramilitaries had actively campaigned for Uribe’s reelection in 2006. That same year, Mancuso stated before a Justice and Peace Tribunal that he had contributed financial support to Uribe’s 2002 campaign. He also said that, at his request, the members of Congress Eleonora Pineda and Miguel de la Espriella (who were later convicted in the parapolitics cases) had met with Uribe at his ranch, El Ubérrimo, to tell him that the paramilitaries had contributed large sums of money to his campaign, and that if he won, the paramilitaries wanted to start peace negotiations. Pineda and De la Espriella backed Mancuso up in court.
Mancuso also stated that he had maintained a close working relationship since 1995 with Pedro Juan Moreno, and that this relationship continued until Moreno’s death in a helicopter crash in 2006. He claimed that he had met with Álvaro Uribe himself when Uribe was governor of Antioquia, and that during the presidential campaign, he had continued to be in touch with the candidate through Moreno (in addition to Pineda and De la Espriella). At one point during the campaign, he said, Moreno had told him he was concerned about the damage that the paramilitaries’ ongoing massacres might do to Uribe’s image, and urged them to instead focus on more targeted operations. As a result, the paramilitaries agreed to hold off on massacres in the lead-up to the election.
In other statements, Mancuso said he had actually met Uribe in social settings before Mancuso joined the paramilitaries. But he said that he had formally met with Uribe once when Uribe was governor of Antioquia. Mancuso was already a paramilitary—“and the governor knew that as such.” He said they met at Uribe’s ranch, El Ubérrimo, in Córdoba, and that a police officer from Córdoba had introduced Mancuso as the man who was “helping” them with security in the state. Mancuso recalled that Uribe had said he was happy that Mancuso was helping them, and that they spoke specifically about an attack that the FARC was supposedly planning against Uribe and his ranch, and their efforts to figure out who exactly was involved in the plot.
Mancuso’s statements didn’t get as much public attention as they might have, in part because Calderón had already reported similar allegations in the past. In an interview with Fabio Ochoa Vasco, a major drug trafficker, that Calderón published in 2007, Ochoa claimed that he had witnessed Mancuso contributing substantial sums of money to Uribe’s presidential campaign, as well as Mancuso organizing the paramilitaries to get out the vote for him, because he had been promised a favorable peace deal.
Uribe responded by issuing a statement strongly denying the claims of both the paramilitary leader and the former members of Congress, adding that he had contacted the US ambassador to Colombia because he had heard that Mancuso was improperly applying pressure on the former members of Congress to get them to make statements against him. He also announced, via Twitter, that he was planning to press criminal charges against them for making false statements. Eventually, Uribe sued Mancuso for slander and insult (injuria) and asked that he be removed from the Justice and Peace process for supposedly lying about him. Uribe’s lawyer, Jaime Granados, told the media that Mancuso was making the statements out of a desire for revenge, because Uribe had arrested and extradited him.
DON BERNA, WHO in 2009 was convicted of drug trafficking and sentenced to thirty-one years in prison in Miami, also began talking in later years. He confirmed much of Semana’s reporting about his efforts with Job to smear the Supreme Court, as well as what he described as regular meetings between Job and representatives of the presidency and the intelligence service.
Berna also made disturbing new statements about the witness Francisco Villalba and the El Aro massacre. A little over a year after he first made his statements against Uribe, Villalba had suddenly received permission from a judge to serve his sentence under house arrest, supposedly on account of health concerns. In April 2009, twenty-three days after his release, as he was walking down the street with his wife and four-year-old daughter, three men came up to him and shot him to death.
According to Don Berna, Sergio González (the lawyer who represented Tasmania and El Tuso, and who was reportedly close to Mario Uribe) had approached him to see what could be done to keep Villalba from talking about El Aro. Berna said he later learned from a prosecutor that “the boss”—whom the prosecutor identified as President Uribe—was very concerned about Villalba’s statements. So, Don Berna said, he met with Villalba in prison and tried to bribe him to stop talking. According to Berna, Villalba refused, because for him, talking about it was a form of “catharsis.” So instead, Don Berna paid another paramilitary who had participated in the massacre, a man known as “Pilatos,” to sign a statement disputing Villalba’s claims. Berna said that he “had no doubt” that Villalba’s murder was a “crime of state.” He said that “powerful sectors of the country were involved in the death of Villalba because he was uncomfortable because of his knowledge of the El Aro massacre, because he was constantly talking about it, because he was insistent in continuing to implicate certain people of the establishment.”
Prosecutors later ordered new investigations into Uribe’s alleged role in the massacre and in Villalba’s murder, but Uribe has strenuously denied any role in either, pointing to the many inconsistencies in Villalba’s statements over time—such as his claim that General Manosalva was present at a meeting shortly before the massacre, even though Manosalva had been dead for months. In a letter to the newspaper El Espectador complaining about its coverage of the story, Uribe also noted that Mancuso at one point called Villalba a liar and said Uribe had nothing to do with El Aro. The ex-president emphasized that the national chief of police, General Óscar Naranjo, attributed Villalba’s death to a dispute between criminals. Uribe also asserted that the prosecutor mentioned by Don Berna had contradicted the paramilitary leader and later sued him for defamation.
But to many investigators and victims of paramilitary crimes, several of Don Berna’s revelations about their past seemed credible, and even confirmed their long-held suspicions. He spoke about the paramilitaries’ involvement in a series of major assassinations that happened in the 1990s, for example, in some cases linking government officials to the crimes. These included the 1999 murder of beloved thirty-eight-year-old comedian Jaime Garzón, who had been involved in negotiations for the release of FARC hostages when he was gunned down by paramilitaries in his car in Bogotá. They also included the dramatic May 1997 killing of a married couple, Elsa Alvarado and Mario Calderón, who were investigators for the Center for Research and Popular Education (Centro de Investigación y Educación Popular, or CINEP), a Jesuit foundation working for social change: in that case, the couple opened the door to their Bogotá apartment in the middle of the night to find armed men identifying themselves as CTI members. The men barged in and shot the couple, as well as Alvarado’s father, Carlos, to death. Their baby, Iván, survived because he was hidden in a wardrobe.
Don Berna also shed light on the killings of the CTI investigators who had worked with Velásquez in Medellín in the late 1990s, explaining that, at the time, Castaño had viewed the investigators in the attorney general’s office as enemies, because they were investigating the paramilitaries. Through Uber Duque, a member of the CTI whom the paramilitaries had put on their payroll, they were able to obtain detailed information about the investigations as well as the names and addresses of key investigators to target. Don Berna specifically highlighted the Padilla parking-lot investigation as the reason for some of the murders, explaining that the accounting information that Velásquez’s team had found in the parking-lot shack was about “the sponsors of the self-defense forces,” and that “it was very important.” As a result, he said, Castaño had ordered the killings of the investigators who had participated in the Padilla search. The purpose of those killings was “to intimidate them and ensure that they would not continue with those investigations and end up identifying the people who worked with the AUC, since there were many businessmen, [and] ranchers.”
Berna’s statements about the Padilla parking-lot investigation were consistent with what other paramilitaries in prison would later say. One, Rodrigo Zapata, who had once been Vicente Castaño’s right-hand man, stated in an interview for this book that the prosecutors’ discovery of the paramilitaries’ accounting records and the arrest of Jacinto Alberto Soto (aka “Lucas”), the accountant, in the parking-lot shack “hit the spot where all the investments of the groups in the area, all the financial backers, were. Everything was centralized.… Everything was left without a head, because Lucas kept all the accounts.”
In another interview for this book, Raúl Hasbún, a wealthy banana businessman who had eventually run a paramilitary group in the Urabá region of Antioquia and Chocó, agreed about Lucas’s importance as the accountant for Carlos and Vicente Castaño. He said the paramilitaries were surprised when the Padilla investigation did not end up having more of an impact on them or their supporters.
Éver Veloza, a paramilitary commander known as “HH” who was extradited to the United States in 2009, also talked about Lucas, confirming that he had been a key figure. Lucas had received all the contributions to the paramilitaries from banana growers and other businesspeople and had played a major role in managing the paramilitaries’ relationships with military figures and politicians. HH recalled waiting for Lucas in a car while Lucas had meetings with commanders in the Fourth Brigade at the army’s headquarters in Medellín. He said that Lucas had six separate beepers to manage his contacts with different officials, and that “he even had one for the governor, who in those days was Uribe.” HH recalled accompanying Lucas to several meetings, including one with Pedro Juan Moreno, then Governor Uribe’s chief of staff in Antioquia. After his escape from prison, Lucas participated in the demobilization process, but he had not been forced to go through the Justice and Peace process because there were no serious charges pending against him—he was now free. Given that Lucas had a wealth of information about the paramilitaries’ accomplices, HH found it surprising that prosecutors weren’t going after him to find out what he knew. It was easy for Uribe and others in power to argue that HH and other former paramilitaries were simply making up these statements out of a desire for revenge over their imprisonment or extradition. But as HH saw it, “it turns out we were extradited precisely to discredit our truths, the knowledge we have of the war. We were extradited to protect the interests of many people.”
Hasbún, the former banana businessman who ran a paramilitary group, also claimed in an interview for this book that he had maintained a close relationship in the late 1990s with the governorship of Antioquia. At the time, Hasbún said, he personally set up fourteen Convivirs—the security cooperatives that then governor Uribe was promoting in the region. But, Hasbún made clear, “the Convivirs were the AUC—at least mine were, and I assume that Mancuso’s and others were, too. It was a way to legalize the contributions of ranchers, businessmen, etc. to the AUC.” At the beginning, he said, officials in the governor’s office may not have had reason to know that the Convivir members belonged to the AUC. “But afterward, they did.” According to Hasbún, Pedro Juan Moreno, would go to Hasbún’s house, “where there was a guard standing outside holding an AK-47. We would meet with Lucas and speak openly about issues related to the AUC, to financing. He was happy about it.… Moreno never financed us directly, but through the Fourth Brigade he gave us weaponry, munitions for the self-defense forces—it was clear it was not for the Convivirs.”
TO VELÁSQUEZ, much of what Don Berna said confirmed what he had already suspected for years. If in his early days as a lawyer and prosecutor Velásquez had been naive about the criminal networks operating around him, his experiences in Medellín and then Bogotá had cured him of that. Nevertheless, having one of the killers make these statements before prosecutors and judges vindicated his pursuit of justice through law. And in May 2012, Don Berna offered new evidence in the case that had, in a way, started Velásquez down this frustrating, endless search for the truth: the murder of Jesús María Valle.
In the intervening years, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights had found the state of Colombia liable for the death of Valle and its failure to adequately investigate his murder, and it recommended that the government conduct an exhaustive investigation in the case. In response, in 2011, the Supreme Court annulled the ruling acquitting the brothers Jaime Alberto and Francisco Antonio Angulo, the landowners whom Velásquez’s team in Medellín had originally charged in connection with the killing. That cleared the way for prosecutors to reopen that investigation, though there were no public reports on the status of the case. It also remained unclear whether anyone within government had played a role in Valle’s death. Don Berna’s statements offered new evidence on that front.
According to Berna, AUC leader Carlos Castaño had ordered the Medellín-based gang “La Terraza,” which answered to the paramilitaries and was run by a man known as “Elkin,” to carry out the killing of Valle because Castaño believed that the human rights defender was helping the FARC. Berna said that he was part of the conversations about this, and that he was the person who had summoned Elkin to talk to Castaño about the planned murder. Elkin then sent a woman who worked for La Terraza to Valle’s office to pose as a prospective client and collect intelligence on him. Based on that information, she and two other La Terraza members eventually went to his office and executed him.
But Berna also made another point: “I want to add that this action was a request by Dr. Pedro Juan Moreno, because he [Valle] was conducting an investigation of the events in El Aro.” Specifically, he said, in early 1998 Pedro Juan Moreno had gone to a ranch where Carlos Castaño often met with officials, and told Castaño that Valle was conducting “an investigation” that was affecting members of the military and the government. “Carlos believed that whoever made that kind of accusation against the military was collaborating with the guerrillas.” And so he agreed to have Valle assassinated. According to Berna, Castaño gave the assassination orders to Elkin, explaining that Valle was “uncomfortable” for members of the state because of his accusations over cases like the El Aro massacre.
AT THE PODIUM in Dubai, back in November 2011, Velásquez read a passage from Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. It described character José Arcadio Segundo’s efforts to tell his disbelieving neighbors about a massacre that he had just witnessed, in which thousands were killed. Velásquez paused. He had known many José Arcadio Segundos in Colombia, he said, but he wanted to mention one of them: Jesús María Valle, who told the truth, and who paid for it with his life. “We didn’t believe in José Arcadio Segundo,” Velásquez went on: “We never believed him. Perhaps because the blood that was spilled by the assassins in the night was cleaned in the morning and the bodies thrown into the river.” In giving him this award, Velásquez said, the International Bar Association was recognizing all the José Arcadio Segundos who were fighting for the truth, those who “even today, choke on the question—‘why?’—stuck in their throats.”