There Are No Dead Here: A Story of Murder and Denial in Colombia by Maria McFarland Sánchez-Moreno

Author:Maria McFarland Sánchez-Moreno
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Nation Books
Published: 2018-02-27T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 13

FRAME JOB

BOGOTÁ, COLOMBIA, OCTOBER 9, 2007.

Colombian president Álvaro Uribe sounded aggrieved. He spoke slowly, choosing his words with care, but he couldn’t quite mask the rage brewing underneath. “We’re dealing with one of three possibilities here,” he said on La FM radio station’s popular early-morning news show. “Either the president of the republic is a murderer; or the prisoner… is lying; or there is some machination, a machination by an assistant justice… against the president.”

The story had already been all over news shows the previous night, after Uribe first issued a press release about it and then proceeded to make multiple media appearances on the topic. But that morning, he explained yet again why he was so concerned: some time earlier, Uribe had received a letter from a man named José Orlando Moncada, who went by the alias “Tasmania.” A low-level member of the paramilitaries’ “Southwestern Antioquia Block,” Tasmania was serving time in the Itagüí maximum-security prison on the outskirts of Medellín on charges of extortion and kidnapping. In the letter, which was publicly released and dated September 11, 2007, Tasmania reported to Uribe that Assistant Supreme Court Justice Iván Velásquez had asked him to accuse the president, along with an influential Antioquia businessman and landowner, of involvement in the attempted assassination, in 2003, of a paramilitary leader from Southwestern Antioquia known as “René.” In exchange for his testimony, Tasmania said, Velásquez had offered him a sentence reduction, admission to a witness protection program, and the relocation of his family. The letter concluded: “My concern, Mr. President, is that Mr. Velásquez, it appears to me, wishes to harm you. It is the only thing that interests him. In exchange for that, he will give anything.”

The claim that Uribe would have ordered an assassination seemed, as one of the radio hosts put it, “delusional.” But what disturbed him about all of this, Uribe emphasized, was the behavior of the Supreme Court. The court had no jurisdiction to investigate the president, so what was Velásquez doing, trying to get Tasmania to testify against him? The implication seemed clear: Velásquez must be trying to frame the president for murder. And at this point, Uribe said, he felt he had no other choice but to publicly call on the attorney general to conduct a criminal investigation into Velásquez’s actions.

Uribe’s appearance on La FM that morning went on for nearly an hour and a half. Finally, he hung up to take more calls on the Tasmania letter from other radio stations. Broadcast radio still had a huge following among the nation’s more than 45 million inhabitants. People across Colombia—from the northern Caribbean towns of Cartagena and Santa Marta, to the lush coffee-growing regions in the mountains, to the flatlands on the eastern border with Venezuela, and to the Amazon rainforest farther south—listened to Uribe, fascinated and confused, as they started their day.

To most Colombians, the story about Tasmania’s letter came out of nowhere. They had never heard of René or Tasmania. It seemed odd for the president to devote so much energy to what a low-level criminal wrote from prison.

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