“If this country knew the whole truth, it would fall apart,” Rodrigo Zapata announces, smirking at me. We are uncomfortably perched on a couple of battered plastic chairs next to a grimy desk in the stifling visitors’ room in Itagüí prison, on the outskirts of the Colombian city of Medellín. This is the very same city that, while in the grip of cocaine kingpin Pablo Escobar more than two decades earlier, was known as the “murder capital of the world,” on account of its astronomical rate of killings. When we meet, it is June 2014, and news coverage of Medellín is more likely to fawn over the city’s world-class metro and libraries than to focus on the brutal realities on which its gleaming infrastructure rests. But if anyone knows about those realities, it’s Zapata.
A soft, large man in his forties, in new sneakers, jeans, and a fresh blue-and-white-checked shirt on which he has affixed a small pin with the image of a Catholic saint, Zapata looks nothing like what you’d expect in a hardened criminal charged with multiple murders. A former senior member of the country’s vicious cocaine-running paramilitary groups, Zapata had worked for one of their top commanders, Vicente Castaño—a man said to be so cold-hearted that he had his own brother assassinated.
Starting in the late 1990s, the paramilitaries carried out a bloody expansion campaign throughout much of Colombia. Fueled by an endless stream of drug profits, they committed gruesome massacres in the name of defending the country from the brutal Marxist guerrillas of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia). They killed trade unionists, human rights activists, journalists, schoolteachers, and judges. They gouged out the eyes of their victims, tore off their limbs, and raped them in front of their families.
Nobody, it seemed, was trying to stop them: vast sectors of the government and military secretly supported them. The United States, more interested in the appearance of success in its “war on drugs” than in stopping the carnage in a country that few in the United States understood, largely ignored them even as it poured billions of dollars into Colombia’s military. Those who did dare to stand up to the paramilitaries almost always ended up dead.
Swatting at the gnats hovering around us, Zapata tells me that he was mainly a financial adviser to Castaño, helping him with acquisitions for his farms and handling some of the group’s “political” work, though he doesn’t really explain what that means. He would later be convicted of leading a paramilitary unit operating along the Pacific coast of Colombia—one of the nation’s poorest areas. The paramilitary onslaught in the region had forced thousands of Afro-Colombians and indigenous persons along the coast to flee their farms; in several cases, their land ended up fraudulently registered in the name of the paramilitaries’ cronies. Even though the groups have supposedly disarmed, many of the original owners are still too terrified to return.
But things are starting to change. Over the past few years, some of the truth about the paramilitaries’ relationships with senior members of Colombia’s military forces and government has started to trickle out. My sources have described Zapata as a key player in handling those relationships. So I’m hoping that he will tell me more than what is already publicly known.
He doesn’t. Sitting in front of me, Zapata is friendly, chatty, and far from frightening. He speaks with a child’s glee at a new toy, and through his grin I catch a glimpse of tiny front teeth. Combined with his saucer-shaped eyes, they give him an almost cartoonish appearance, like an oversized toddler or teddy bear. Could this guy really be as bad as people say?
But few things in Colombia are what they appear to be.
***
The first time I traveled to Bogotá, Colombia’s mountainous capital, a hailstorm hit the city. It was November 2004, and as my colleagues and I weaved our way through traffic from the airport to our hotel, clumps of ice the size of golf balls pounded the car’s windshield. A gray haze enveloped us, obscuring the mix of run-down old homes, modern red brick buildings, and tall mountains that give the city its contours.
The hail surprised me. Having grown up in neighboring Peru in the 1980s and early 1990s, I thought I would be able to predict certain things about Colombia, including the weather. Rain was common in the mountain cities that I knew in Peru, but I had never seen hail. It was only the first time my expectations were shattered during that and countless other visits to Colombia over the next six years, when I covered the country as an investigator for the international organization Human Rights Watch.
Like the Peru of my childhood, Colombia had for years been ravaged by a brutal internal war between left-wing guerrillas (in Colombia the most prominent were the FARC) and government forces. Even the wealthier classes in the major cities were affected by the war: it was hard for them to travel on highways or visit their country homes, be- cause of the risk of kidnapping by the FARC. But, as in Peru, it was the country’s poorest and most vulnerable—indigenous people, peasants, Afro-Colombians—who, trapped between the warring factions, bore the brunt of the violence.
Of course, I knew going into Colombia that things would be different. In Peru, the war had been ideological, fought between the government and the Shining Path guerrillas, who adhered to an extreme interpretation of Maoism that was similar to that of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. In Colombia, the war between the government and the FARC certainly had ideological roots, but after forty years it had become much murkier, in part because of the explosion of the drug war, which in the 1980s and early 1990s pitted the Medellin and Cali cocaine cartels against each other and the Colombian government. Under the leadership of Pablo Escobar, the Medellín cartel had carried out a bloodbath: bombings, assassinations, and kidnappings were in the news every day, and thousands were killed every year in Medellín alone.
A joint US-Colombian operation had led to Pablo Escobar’s killing on the roof of one of his safe houses in 1993, but former Escobar associates linked to the country’s shadowy right-wing paramilitary groups had picked up the reins of a cocaine business far too profitable to drop. These groups portrayed themselves as heroes trying to defend the country from the FARC. Instead, they operated like a massive mafia, seizing peasants’ land for themselves or their associates, taking over key drug-trafficking corridors, and killing anyone who got in their way.
By the time I started working on Colombia in 2004, the violence had forced more than 3 million people—nearly a tenth of the country’s population—to flee their homes. Hundreds of thousands of Colombians had been killed, and thousands more were being held hostage or had been forcibly “disappeared.” Massacres had become so common that nobody could say for sure how many had taken place over the previous decade or two, as no one was counting. Guerrillas had recruited hundreds of children to serve in their ranks and laid antipersonnel landmines around rural communities, regularly maiming civilians to protect their turf. The paramilitaries were enforcing their control in towns and cities through torture, threats, and murder, and hardly anyone was ever prosecuted or even investigated for these crimes.
It often seemed as though everyone I met—cashiers at grocery stores, taxi drivers, newspaper editors, and doctors—had a story; everyone had been touched by the war in one way or another.I knew many of the facts—the numbers, historical events, and names—but nothing could prepare me for what I would encounter in the reality of the mother who told me about how paramilitaries had suffocated her seven-year-old daughter with a plastic bag, or another who described how she had attempted suicide after losing a leg—and her ability to work in the fields—to a guerrilla landmine. They would not prepare me for the courage of an activist in Villavicencio, Meta, who insisted on helping me meet with people to talk about the threats against them, even though every single one of her colleagues had been assassinated only a few years earlier. They would not prepare me for the news that the FARC had shot her as she traveled by boat down a nearby river—though, thankfully, she survived. They would not prepare me for the effervescence of a young politician in Medellín who, full of smiles, and without pausing, told me a long story about how paramilitaries were trying to take over local city councils. Nor would they prepare me for his murder in broad daylight by those same paramilitaries two years later.
Colombia is a country of extremes. There are extremes of weather, ranging from hail and sharp cold to tropical heat; and of terrain, with mountains, beaches, and rainforest within only hours of each other, and sometimes jumbled together. Fabulously luxurious homes and exclusive tourist resorts sit within miles of slums overflowing with people who live in crushing poverty. Joyful carnival celebrations and a rich heritage of music and dancing coexist with daily stories of tragedy and indescribable pain.
The suffering was on a scale that, as a relatively inexperienced activist in my twenties, I had not imagined. It often seemed as though everyone I met—cashiers at grocery stores, taxi drivers, newspaper editors, and doctors—had a story; everyone had been touched by the war in one way or another. So many of the people I interviewed had witnessed or survived massacres and the destruction of entire towns, rapes, bombings, or the killing or disappearance of their parents, spouses, or children. And the nightmare was ongoing.
But behind some of these grim stories, there were also more subtle lessons, about right and wrong, about truth, and about hope. Many Colombians display a daily honesty, courage, and nobility in the face of grave danger that I still find hard to explain. Perhaps the best way to account for it is that in such a difficult place, sometimes integrity is the only solid thing to hold onto. At the same time, it is hard to match the capacity for cruelty, ruthlessness, and deception of some of the people I met.
All this is not to say that Colombians are themselves unusually good or bad people. But the circumstances in which they have found themselves are exceptional. So many Colombians have spent their lives in constant fear of death, of losing their families and homes, of being kidnapped. They have also lived knowing that, if they made certain choices—to take the bribe, join the local gang, or simply look away from their neighbors’ and leaders’ crimes—they could not only protect themselves and their families but also, perhaps, acquire wealth and power beyond their wildest dreams.
I am lucky never to have faced such stark choices. And who is to say what any of us would do in a similar situation? Living in a world shaped by these desires, opportunities, and fears, perhaps it is no surprise that some people grow as twisted and knotty as seaside trees battered by powerful, unpredictable winds. What is more surprising is that so many do not, and that, incredibly, a few go on to engage in acts of tremendous, if largely forgotten, heroism.
This book tells the stories of three such people—a prosecutor, a human rights activist, and a journalist—who, since the late 1990s, have made extraordinary sacrifices to expose the truth about the brutality and corruption that were engulfing their country long after the end of the government’s war against Pablo Escobar, and to fight for a more just and humane society.
In some ways, Zapata is right about the impact the full truth would have on Colombia: the country’s success story is built on the quicksand of lies and half-truths. Getting to the bottom of it will require that Colombians begin to weave a new understanding of themselves, their society, and their leaders. To many, including the people whose stories I tell here, that fight is well worth it.
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Excerpted from There Are No Dead Here: A Story of Murder and Denial in Colombia by Maria McFarland Sanchez-Moreno. Copyright © 2018. Available from Nation Books, an imprint of Perseus Books, LLC, a subsidiary of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
