COLOMBIAN PRESIDENT JUAN MANUEL SANTOS walked with a small girl up to a giant door on an immaculate white stage, pulled out a large key, and opened it. Heads of state from around the region walked in, including the presidents of Venezuela, Ecuador, Peru, Chile, Mexico, and Argentina, as well as King Juan Carlos of Spain; the US secretary of state, John Kerry; and the UN secretary-general, Ban Ki-moon. A team of government peace negotiators, and then representatives of the FARC guerrillas, followed. All the people on stage, as well as the approximately 2,500 members of the audience, were clad in white. White flags joined the leaves of tall palm trees, waving in the breeze, and the late-afternoon sunlight glinted off the waters of the Caribbean Sea that were lapping the concrete edges of the convention center. It was September 26, 2016, and they were in the balmy, brightly colored, ancient port city of Cartagena. The audience and the dignitaries on stage had come to witness what they believed would be the end of the longest-running war in the Western Hemisphere.

For the past four years, the Santos government and the FARC, now under the leadership of the heavily bearded, round-faced Rodrigo Londoño Echeverri (aka “Timochenko”), had been engaged in peace talks in Havana, Cuba, and they had recently finished a final draft of a 297-page peace agreement.

On the stage in Cartagena, after performances of the national anthem and of a song commemorating the event, Timochenko walked up to a table, tripping once on the way, and, grabbing a pen made from recycled bullet pieces, signed the peace agreement on behalf of the FARC. He was then joined by Santos, who, after signing on behalf of the government, took a pin off his lapel—a white dove of peace that he had been wearing for years—and handed it to Timochenko, who affixed it to his own lapel. They then clasped each other’s shoulders and shook hands.

Later on, they each gave speeches about their hope that the agreement would set the country on a path toward reconciliation. Near the end of Timochenko’s speech, he added, to enormous cheers from the audience: “In the name of the FARC-EP, I offer sincerely our desire for forgiveness from all the victims of the conflict, for all the pain we may have caused in this war.” Santos, for his part, stressed that “what we are signing today is a declaration of the Colombian people before the world that we are tired of war, that we do NOT accept violence as the means to defend ideas, that we are saying—strongly and clearly: No more war! No more war!”

By that time, Colombia’s Center for Historical Memory had reported that more than 220,000 people had died in Colombia’s fifty-two-year war with the FARC and other guerrillas, though some estimates were much higher. Millions had been forcibly displaced from their homes by war. Hundreds of thousands had been forcibly “disappeared.” Countless more had had their lives ruined by kidnappings, extortion, torture, the loss of their limbs from antipersonnel landmines, the loss of their land, livestock, and livelihoods, and the loss of their loved ones. Could it finally be over? Millions hoped so.

Six days later, on October 2, their hopes were dashed when, surprisingly, around 6 million Colombians voted “No” in a national referendum on the peace agreement, just barely defeating the “Yes” vote and throwing the peace process into disarray. The overwhelming majority of voters—around two-thirds—didn’t vote at all.

What had happened? In the days leading up to the plebiscite, polls suggested that the “Yes” vote would easily win. There were endless analyses in the aftermath: a hurricane on the Caribbean coast had dampened voter turnout in one of the strong “Yes” regions. Perhaps the Santos government had grown overconfident, had relied too much on campaigning for the “Yes” vote through major media, and had not done enough to campaign on the ground, talking to people. The “No” campaign, led primarily by the former president, Álvaro Uribe, had ably convinced evangelical Christians that language in the agreement about the rights of women and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people was bad for “families.” Maybe the “Yes” campaign had underestimated the hatred that many Colombians felt toward the FARC, and their discomfort with parts of the agreement, including some of the concerns that Uribe was raising—in particular, that FARC leaders would serve no prison time, and that they were guaranteed to get some seats in Congress.

TO IVÁN VELÁSQUEZ, the outcome was a grave disappointment. He had felt conflicted about the agreement with the FARC; initially, in fact, he had been very critical of it, because essentially it gave the FARC a pass for its worst crimes—the massacres, the murders, the rapes, the massive use of children as soldiers. When Uribe had proposed a similar pass for the paramilitaries, Velásquez had opposed it, and he acknowledged that, in a way, it was “incoherent” for him to oppose such a deal for the paramilitaries and then accept one for the FARC, just as it was incoherent for Uribe to support a deal for the paramilitaries and oppose one for the FARC. After all, Velásquez believed in justice, including some form of punishment for serious crimes, and he thought it was deeply problematic to simply give that up in the name of peace. Plus, the peace agreement contained some provisions that were absolutely unjustifiable; they would let members of the Colombian military responsible for murders—the thousands of “false-positive” cases under investigation, in which members of the military killed civilians and then claimed them as guerrillas killed in combat—off the hook for their crimes.

But ultimately, Velásquez had supported the FARC agreement. Unlike Uribe’s initial proposal for the demobilization of the paramilitaries, he reasoned, the FARC deal included mechanisms, such as a Truth Commission, that he felt could, if effectively implemented, finally contribute to uncovering many truths. “As a victim, I’ve come to the belief that truth has to come ahead of justice. As a victim of the DAS, it would have been more important for me to know who ordered [the persecution] than to have a captain sentenced to eight years in prison,” he said. Plus, Velásquez felt that this agreement could actually lead to an end to the war—and, even more important, to an end to the war serving “as an excuse for the lack of social progress.” If Colombia’s government no longer had a war to justify pouring all its resources into the military, perhaps now it could finally address the country’s millions of other injustices—the devastating poverty of many regions, the lack of education and health care, the hunger and social marginalization of so many of its people. The war had also served as an excuse for the harsh repression of all sorts of people—trade unionists, activists, community leaders—who had opposed the powerful in the country. If a peace agreement took away that excuse, then perhaps the country could finally put the persecution of dissidents behind it. Of course, there was no guarantee that the agreement would lead to any of these outcomes; but, in the end, perhaps, more than anything else, Velásquez’s support of the agreement had more to do with his innate idealism.

RICARDO CALDERÓN saw things differently: “Obviously, the end of the war: everyone supports that,” he said, “but not like this.” In his view, the government had made many more concessions than it needed to; it was in too much of a rush to complete the agreement before the next presidential elections took place. The deal was going to lead to a “false peace,” he said. Much as the paramilitary negotiations had left behind scores of “new” groups led by former midlevel paramilitaries, who were still threatening people, killing their foes, and running their drug businesses, he thought it was likely that many FARC members would return to criminal activity. “There’s a lot that sounds good on paper, but I don’t see how they’ll implement it, or with what resources.” The government had no way of ensuring sufficient resources to fulfill all the promises it had made to those who demobilized. Particularly in coca-producing areas, it was hard to imagine what incentives the government could possibly put in place that would keep demobilized guerrillas from returning to their profitable illicit activities. And the lack of prison terms for the worst crimes, he believed, almost guaranteed that there would be new outbursts of violence.

Calderón was also disturbed by the agreement’s provisions allowing the military to evade justice for its atrocities. What would members of the military who had been under prosecution do once they got released? Their careers were over, so Calderón thought the likeliest scenario was that these men would simply join criminal groups.

THE FAILURE OF the peace deal was an enormous victory for former president Álvaro Uribe. Since leaving the presidency, the image of the former head of state had lost some of its luster. After backing Juan Manuel Santos’s candidacy for the presidency in 2010, Uribe had quickly turned against the new president once Santos had started peace talks with the FARC. In the 2014 presidential elections, Uribe had backed another candidate, Óscar Iván Zuluaga, who was running against Santos, but Zuluaga had lost. Uribe himself had won a Senate seat in 2014, and from that perch, he had been vociferously criticizing the Santos government—but his stridency hadn’t seemed to match the public’s mood.

Uribe’s image had also been tarnished by numerous scandals. His former chief of security, Mauricio Santoyo—with whom he had worked since the 1990s, when Santoyo was in the Medellín police force and Uribe was Antioquia’s governor—pled guilty in the United States to providing material support for terrorism for having collaborated with paramilitary groups from 2001 to 2008. He was sentenced to thirteen years in prison. Moreover, the attorney general’s office had charged Uribe’s younger brother, Santiago, with homicide and conspiracy, partly on the basis of the testimony of a former police officer, Juan Carlos Meneses, who had testified that the younger Uribe had been one of the leaders of the paramilitary group known as the “Twelve Apostles,” which was said to have committed numerous killings in the mid-1990s in Yarumal, Antioquia, where Santiago had a ranch known as “La Carolina.” The Supreme Court had convicted Uribe’s former minister of agriculture, Andrés Felipe Arias, on corruption charges. Former DAS chief María del Pilar Hurtado, who had sought asylum in Panama, was extradited back to Colombia in 2015; she was sentenced to fourteen years in prison in connection with offenses committed while she ran the DAS. Uribe’s former chief of staff, Bernardo Moreno, was also convicted in connection with the DAS scandal; his sentence was eight years of house arrest. In its decision convicting Moreno and Hurtado, the Supreme Court formally communicated to the Accusations Committee of the Colombian Congress a request by the victims that Uribe be investigated in connection with the DAS scandal. Jorge Noguera, Uribe’s first DAS chief, had already been convicted in 2011 and sentenced to twenty-five years in prison; José Miguel Narváez, who worked in the DAS under Noguera, would also be convicted in 2016 for his involvement in wiretapping. The Supreme Court also convicted the former president’s cousin, Senator Mario Uribe, in 2011 for conspiring with the paramilitaries. In total, more than sixty members of Congress or candidates—nearly all of them from Uribe’s coalition—had been convicted in connection with the Supreme Court’s parapolitics investigations, and many other officials had been convicted in cases brought by the attorney general’s office. On June 22, 2017, the Colombian attorney general’s office announced that it had charged former presidential legal counsel Edmundo del Castillo; César Mauricio Velásquez, the former press secretary; and the lawyers Sergio González and Diego Álvarez with conspiracy. The charges were based on their alleged involvement in a plot to smear the Supreme Court, and particularly Iván Velásquez, in retaliation for the parapolitics investigations.

Former president Uribe himself was facing the possibility of new investigations, in addition to the one involving the DAS. These included an investigation into the death of his former right-hand man in Antioquia, Pedro Juan Moreno, in a 2006 helicopter crash. Moreno and Uribe had grown distant in the years before Moreno’s death: according to one of Uribe’s advisers, Moreno had expected Uribe to establish and allow him to control a new agency overseeing all of the government’s intelligence services, and had felt betrayed when Uribe did not do so. During his presidential campaign, Uribe had also become closer to other advisers, such as the wealthy entrepreneur Fabio Echeverri, who disliked Moreno. Perhaps as a result, after Uribe’s presidential election, Moreno had become harshly critical of people near the president, routinely lambasting Uribe’s team through his magazine, La Otra Verdad (The Other Truth), and writing stories or bits of gossip that seemed designed to undermine the administration. When Moreno died, the official results of the investigation said there had been a technical malfunction in the helicopter, and that no evidence of foul play had been found. But rumors had swirled about Moreno’s death ever since.

In 2010, General Rito Alejo del Río—whom Uribe had honored during a ceremony in 1999, after the Pastrana administration had cashiered the officer—stated to prosecutors that the helicopter crash that had led to Moreno’s death had been no accident. Moreno, Del Río claimed, had been murdered (Del Río was later convicted of homicide in an unrelated matter, and as of this writing he remained under investigation for a paramilitary massacre in Mapiripán, Meta, in 1997). In February 2016, after a former paramilitary known as “Don Mario” claimed that Uribe had been involved in Moreno’s death, the attorney general’s office asked the Supreme Court and the Accusations Committee of the Colombian Congress to investigate.

In response to written questions for this book, Don Berna also stated that Pedro Juan Moreno had died as a result of “sabotage” to the helicopter he was riding in—“an action that was carried out on Uribe’s orders.” However, he offered no way to verify his claim or evidence to back it up. When pressed on the basis for his statement, Don Berna only said that “in the world of illegality, one knows many things, but because they are illegal they cannot be proven. It’s like when a policeman ask[s] you for a bribe, he will never give you a receipt.”

Uribe has forcefully denied these allegations. He stated that Moreno had never given any signs of closeness to paramilitary groups. “With the cowardice of criminals,” Uribe said, people had started to accuse Moreno of links to paramilitaries after his death, but not when he was alive. In a 2016 radio interview, Uribe expressed pain at the possibility that the new investigation might make Moreno’s family wonder whether he was involved in his former chief of staff’s death. He challenged the credibility of Don Mario, noting that during his administration he continually pressed for the former paramilitary’s arrest until it was achieved. He didn’t respond to written questions for this book about Don Berna’s statements, though he has repeatedly questioned the credibility of the extradited paramilitary leaders.

In a February 2015 ruling by the Justice and Peace Tribunal of Medellín, the court instructed the attorney general’s office to investigate Uribe in connection with the reports that a helicopter from the Antioquia governor’s office had been seen flying overhead as the El Aro massacre happened.

And in a September 2015 ruling signed by a different judge from the same tribunal, the court ordered that Uribe be investigated for promoting, supporting, or conspiring with paramilitary groups and the Convivirs linked to them, either as governor or as president. The court mentioned the many examples of people around Uribe who had links to the paramilitaries, as well as situations and cases involving the paramilitaries or public officials—such as the El Aro massacre—that occurred when he was governor of Antioquia. “It can’t be the case that he did not know everything that was happening in these cases, or that all of these actions were committed behind his back,” said the court, noting that “it’s not a matter of testimony. It’s about logic and reasons. As the director of the newspaper El Espectador Fidel Cano Correa once said, it’s not possible to be in a swimming pool and not get wet.”

Uribe argued that many of these issues—such as the presence of a helicopter from the governor’s office during the El Aro massacre—had been thoroughly investigated before. And he continued to insist that the charges were part of a political vendetta against him and his allies, now led by the pro-Santos camp, and that the paramilitaries’ statements against him were in retaliation for their extradition.

While there have been many allegations against former president Uribe, and in some cases these may result in investigations, as of this writing he had not been indicted in connection with any offense, and he may never be. Uribe remained a very high-profile and influential politician and a polarizing figure who sparked intense feelings, both positive and negative. Many people close to him have been convicted of serious crimes, but it is up to Colombia’s institutions of justice to determine what, if any, knowledge or role he may have had in them. So far, there have been no public reports about the Accusations Committee of the Colombian Congress or the attorney general’s office moving forward on any of these investigations.

WITH THE VOTE against the peace deal in 2016, Uribe was once again in the thick of things, claiming to represent the opposition. Many of his critics were concerned that, now that his hand was strengthened, he would make any renegotiation of the peace deal impossible—or, at best, that he would do irreparable damage to some of the positive elements of the agreement, such as the provisions allowing for some measure of land reform. With new presidential elections only eighteen months away, Uribe might have another chance to put one of his close allies in office.

On November 24, 2016, President Santos—who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize a few days after the plebiscite—and Timochenko signed a new peace deal, again using a pen made out of bullets, though this time, there was less fanfare. Santos claimed that they had made adjustments to the agreement that addressed the concerns of its critics: the new deal didn’t allow foreigners to participate in special peace tribunals, limited the period during which investigations could be conducted, and required FARC members to disclose all the information they had about drug trafficking and reveal all their assets. However, as expected, Uribe dismissed the changes as cosmetic and demanded that the government hold another plebiscite. Santos refused, instead taking the deal directly to the Colombian Congress, which approved it on November 30. The Colombian Constitutional Court later ruled that Congress had been authorized to approve the deal; as a result, there was no longer any need to submit it to a plebiscite.

DESPITE THEIR DIFFERING positions on the original peace agreement, both Ricardo Calderón and Iván Velásquez agreed that the failure of the plebiscite had created a much more precarious situation than had previously existed in the country. Former president Uribe and his allies would continue to claim that the final version lacked legitimacy because the public had not approved it. The true outcome of the process would probably not be known for years: Would the FARC truly demobilize? If they followed through, would other groups and individuals fill their shoes? Would Colombia’s war ever end?

Both men were also appalled by an adjustment to the deal that Santos made after the FARC signed off on it, apparently under pressure from the Colombian military. That change distorted the international concept of “command responsibility” as it applied to the military, meaning that in thousands of pending criminal cases involving military killings of civilians, troops might be held accountable, but their commanders could be completely off the hook.

In the first few weeks after the deal was finalized, the FARC announced that five of its commanders in the state of Guaviare had gone into “dissident” status: they were still at war. There was also a spike in reported killings of activists and community leaders, which appeared to be tied to their promotion of the peace process. Dozens were killed in 2016, and many local organizations were blaming groups calling themselves paramilitaries that were increasingly turning up in small towns.

It was not a surprise. As both Velásquez and Calderón knew from experience, whenever things looked like they might be improving, their country had a way of smacking people back into reality. But whatever the outcome of this particular negotiation, neither Velásquez nor Calderón had given up on the hope that through their work they could make a difference for others.

Since 2013, Velásquez had been serving as the new head of the United Nations Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala, where he had been leading groundbreaking investigations into organized crime linked to that Central American country’s security forces and political establishment. In September 2015, one of his joint investigations with a special prosecutor’s office into high-level corruption in the country’s customs office contributed to massive nationwide protests, which ultimately led to the resignation and then jailing of the president of Guatemala at the time, Otto Pérez Molina. Pérez Molina’s vice-president and dozens of other officials were also prosecuted and jailed. In the aftermath of Pérez Molina’s downfall, Velásquez continued his investigations, although—as in Colombia—he was facing constant efforts by the targets of his investigations to smear, discredit, and remove him.

In August 2017, Guatemala’s new president, Jimmy Morales, declared Velásquez persona non grata and ordered him to leave the country after Velásquez’s office and Guatemala’s attorney general’s office sought to have Morales’s immunity lifted so they could investigate him for alleged campaign finance law violations. As of this writing, the country’s Constitutional Court had invalidated Morales’s decision, allowing Velásquez to remain in the country.

Iván Velásquez at his office in Bogotá in late August 2013. © Rainer Huhle.

Life in Guatemala was difficult for Velásquez. He slept in the same dark bunker where he worked, 24/7, and he could not step outside of his offices without a heavy armed guard. He had to live far from his family, as María Victoria couldn’t leave her job in Colombia, so he was lonely—though he made a point of flying back to Bogotá every few weeks and talking with his wife and children as often as he could. María Victoria hated the fact that he was away so much, but she knew that most doors in Colombia were closed to him, and she understood his need to continue doing work that was meaningful to him.

And so far, Velásquez felt that his work in Guatemala was producing results. He wanted to see how far he could take the investigations. After that, he hoped to make it back to Colombia. He had many enemies waiting for him there, but that was, after all, home.

Calderón was still doing investigative work at Semana and continuing to uncover big scandals. He had done a series of stories about corruption in the military prison of Tolemaida, which he had labeled the “Tolemaida Resort.” He had found that many of the 269 members of the military in prison there, who had been convicted of terrible crimes, were enjoying extraordinary privileges: getting paid when they shouldn’t be, organizing parties, having their relatives spend the night, and even being allowed to leave the prison to go on vacation or to nightclubs in the area. One of the cases Calderón highlighted involved a sergeant who had been sentenced to forty years for having killed four people, including two children and a six-month-old baby. The sergeant, Calderón reported, had his family living on the military base where he was imprisoned. He was also permitted to leave the base once a month on “medical visits” to Bogotá that lasted for several days. Calderón’s stories had upset the military establishment and forced some reforms within the prison, but he kept writing about how many of the abuses continued.

On May 2, 2013, Calderón drove out of town to meet with a source in connection with his ongoing Tolemaida investigation. He waited all day, but, after receiving a number of strange phone calls, realized the source was not going to show up. At dusk, Calderón started to head home. It was a new road, with lots of traffic but few stores or rest stops. So at one point, Calderón, who needed a bathroom, pulled over on the side of the road and got out of his car. As he approached the front of his car, he heard another car pull up next to him, and someone called his name. Calderón turned around and saw only the two hands that started to shoot at him. He ran and rolled into a grassy ditch, holding his breath. Was this the end? After a while, he heard the other car drive off, but he stayed in the ditch for several minutes, waiting. He had left his phones in the car, so all he could do was lie there. Finally, he crawled up and looked around. The driver’s side window of his car was shattered. Calderón got in and drove until he found the highway police. He stopped, but he could barely get out of the car to talk to them—he had not been hit but could not feel his legs from the shock of the attack. The police officers pointed at his car: he had not even noticed the five bullet holes in it. Subsequent investigations pointed at the involvement of members of the military, working with paramilitaries, in the attack.

After the attempt on his life, Calderón received several offers to leave the country and work elsewhere, but he didn’t want to abandon his investigations. He continued publishing.

Later that year, at age forty-two, Calderón became perhaps the youngest journalist ever to receive the Simón Bolívar Award for Lifetime Achievement (Vida y Obra), Colombia’s highest journalism honor. Calderón had received other awards in the past, and usually he had ignored them—throwing certificates into his fireplace and letting his secretary keep the little trophies—because he believed that one shouldn’t do journalism for awards. “It’s like being a priest: you don’t go out there to say, ‘Look at what I did.’ You have to do your work in silence and not expect anything in exchange.” But this time, he agreed to overcome his tremendous fear of public speaking to give a speech, mainly because he viewed this award as a way of recognizing other journalists around the country who have worked quietly, and anonymously, in the face of grave danger. “Many of them,” he said, “… would not have been able to climb onto this stage to receive this award if they had won it. In this country, where the press is corralled by the pressure of criminal groups and local and national powers, I’m privileged to be able to be here. That’s why this award is not mine. It belongs to all journalists.”

As for the value of his own work, to Calderón it was all very simple: “It has helped to expose the bad guys.” Even with all the problems, that fact, that he had ultimately been able to expose what was going on in the DAS, which in his opinion was “the darkest thing” that had happened in government, mattered.

Velásquez had a similar take on the parapolitics investigations: “It was like telling the people that despite all that power [against us], it was possible to confront crime.” In a society where there were hardly any critical voices, “the fact that the court stayed firm, persistent, acting like it was supposed to, probably gave heart to many people.” He acknowledged that “justice does not transform reality,” but believed in what it could do: “help to create some different conditions in a country so that the government and people can work better, have greater participation and better construct democracy.” Ultimately, the “fight against corruption” should not be fought for its own sake; instead, its value should be measured in “the extent to which it contributes to creating dignified social conditions for people.” In that sense, the true impact of his work, both in Colombia and Guatemala, had yet to be seen.

Still, Colombians now know much more than in years past—not only about the horrors that paramilitaries perpetrated in the name of counterinsurgency, but also about the deals that many politicians were striking with killers. And even if, deep down, they suspected the truth, the efforts of Valle, Velásquez, and Calderón—as well as their closest colleagues, family, and friends, and so many anonymous, forgotten Colombians over the years—have made them begin confronting it. Colombia has not, as paramilitaries like Rodrigo Zapata warned, “fallen apart” as a result of these disclosures. Instead, its government has been forced, however imperfectly and partially, to begin a conversation about how it will address its worst crimes and injustices.

MEANWHILE, in Jesús María Valle’s birthplace of La Granja, Ituango, in a school named after the activist, teachers regularly tell their students about the noble man who twenty years ago gave his life for their rights. Armed men calling themselves paramilitaries passed through the community of about 1,500 people again in early 2017. Nobody was hurt—this time. But the courage and commitment that Valle exemplifies might well be needed again. So may the conviction he shared with them: that even in the darkest of times, as long as some people insist on telling the truth, there will be a reason for hope.