An Unlikely Hero: Valdivieso's Crusade Against Drug Corruption
Carrigan, Ana
Prosecutor General Alfonso Valdivieso has set himself the goal of separating Colombia's political elite from its murderous friendships and entanglements with drug mobsters. The "ruling class" is...
...Moreover, land ownership conferred on them status as well as wealth...
...But that requires hope that things can change and that an alternative exists...
...Samper was given a temporary reprieve in May with the decision of a congressional commission to exonerate him of drug-corruption charges...
...permission for the DEA to accompany the Colombian army and police on all searches and arrests...
...To prove his pro-U.S...
...Galin was murdered on the campaign trail in order allegedly to clear the path to the Presidential Palace for more pliable men who would cut deals, not fight...
...Two years later, Samper's unlisted phone number was found by the Spanish police on Cali cartel leader Miguel Rodriguez Orejuela when he was arrested in Madrid...
...The law suspends bilateral aid, and requires the U.S...
...Prosecutor General Valdivieso got off the ground by doubling the number of investigators on his staff from 10,000 to 20,000...
...Alfonso Valdivieso, the man on whose wall Galdn's portrait hangs, is Galin's cousin...
...permission for the presence in Colombia of a new CIA drug;ident Ernesto Samper opens a special session legislature in January to investigate accusatik his electoral campaign received money from di fickers...
...They exterminated a generation of opposition leaders, including the entire active membership-over 2,000 people-of the left-wing Patriotic Union (UP...
...Medina also provided investigators with vital campaign financial records...
...The Colombian guerrilla forces, who had been "narcoguerrillas" months before, were now discovered to be outside the loop of cocaine production and shipment to the United States...
...It has claimed responsibility for a string of bizarre murders and the kidnapping in early April of former president C6sar Gaviria's brother...
...verything in Colombia begins with land...
...But the political context has changed...
...A favorable decision, to be reached by secret ballot, is widely anticipated...
...intervention...
...They hired and trained hitmen and set them loose to kill the "communists...
...In Colombia, hope is in short supply...
...The trip was a catastrophe for the new government...
...Recordings surfaced of a telephone conversation, presumably taped by the DEA, between the Cali cartel's Rodriguez Orejuela and a journalist who was the mafia contact and "bag-man" for Samper electioncampaign officials...
...With 13 of the 15 members of the commission investigating the case for the President's impeachment under investigation themselves for drug corruption, the verdict was virtually preordained...
...6NMJLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS Ana Carrigan won several awards for her independent film, Roses in December...
...In late May, the commission exonerated Samper of all charges...
...There is, after all, nothing new about the intersection of drugs and politics in Colombia...
...On February 14, Valdivieso filed criminal charges against the President...
...The legacy of Barco's defeat produced the 1991 Constitutional ban on extradition...
...But with the U.S...
...Colombian investigators and prosecutors have unlimited access to DEA, CIA and U.S...
...Yet he has essentially lost control of the process of governing...
...The mafia would help the politicians to cleanse these areas of sundry "communists," radicals, and campesino and union leaders...
...The Commander-in-Chief of the army was forced, under U.S...
...government to oppose-though not veto-new loans from multilateral financial institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank...
...The terms of his deal with the Cali leaders had committed his administration to allowing them to surrender under the lenient terms of the existing 1991 legislation according to which they would serve minimum sentences and emerge from jail with their vast wealth intact...
...policymakers neglected to notice that Colombia's counterinsurgency war had changed dramatically...
...Throughout 1995, as allegations that he knowingly paid for his election with drug money continued to surface, Samper reluctantly agreed with Botero to the arrest of the Cali leaders...
...n the heart of downtown BogotA, about three blocks from the Presidential Palace, a lonely graffiti reads: "In the Crisis of the State, No Side Serves the People...
...According to the official scenario that the U.S...
...The Cali cartel Vol XXX, No 1 JULY/AUG 1996 2 Z > B 7UPDATE / COLOMBIA delivered the bodies, and the Medellin cartel was disbanded forthwith...
...pressure, to retire...
...In the short term, the U.S...
...The two graffiti bear a single message: the Colombian people are sitting this crisis out...
...And judges...
...This pact continues to operate to this day, leaving a trail of blood in its wake...
...The recent emergence of a sinister new terrorist organization, "Dignity for Colombia," provided chilling evidence apons by that even from jail, the sed after drug traffickers continue to threaten and manipulate Colombia's future...
...The Clinton administration was not impressed by Samper's protestations of innocence of drug ties...
...In 1982, as campaign manager for Alfonso L6pez Michaelsen's second presidential bid, Samper allegedly arranged for a $300,000 contribution from the Medellin cartel and the free use of the Cali cartel Ochoa brothers' private fleet of airplanes...
...U.S.- police a Colombian relations under- the polit went a seismic shift...
...The perceived threat to U.S...
...they were crooks...
...a two-year program to eradicate poppy and coca crops...
...Security measures were increa ical crisis escalated...
...In the process, he created a civil-military government with the military in the driving seat for the first time in recent Colombian history...
...The mafia has bought land in over 400 of the 1,067 municipalities nationwide...
...And lawyers...
...Arrested in July, 1995, Medina accused Defense Minister Fernando Botero, Samper's former campaign director, of opening a secret fund to receive the drug contributions...
...This organization is allegedly comprised of an alliance of Cali cartel hit-men, corrupt elements of police and army intelligence, paramilitary followers of the notorious Fidel Castano, and former members of the guerrilla...
...On June 29, 1994, just 10 days after his electoral victory, Samper and Fernando Botero Zea, his closest colleague, made their first visit to Washington...
...For the first time, a political outsider-an unknown quantity-infiltrated and took control of one of the most powerful institutions in the Colombian state...
...By the mid-1980s, it had become a murderous struggle for control of territories and populations, fought between a guerrilla force and a narco-military alliance...
...Journalists died...
...The U.S...
...The Minister of the Interior, the Foreign Secretary, and the Minister of Communications were charged with complicity in the cover-up of drugmafia contributions to the Samper campaign...
...This was a period of political upheaval and violence on the large estates...
...Looking at the landscape through the distorting lens of the Cold War, Washington was apparently unable, or unwilling, to see what was happening in front of its eyes...
...they were landholders and agro-businessmen...
...In the office of the Prosecutor General hangs an immense photograph of the late dissident Liberal Party leader and anti-mafia crusader, Luis Carlos Galdn...
...traf Then, 48 hours before the 1994 presidential elections, the so-called "narco-cassettes" scandal erupted...
...Only the Prosecutor General knows the extent of the evidence against Samper, who has consistently maintained ignorance of what was done "behind my back...
...A highly organized campesino movement, which had been promised land reform since the 1950s, was in revolt, marching, seizing cattle, and joining the guerrillas...
...In the early 1990s, when President C6sar Gaviria's government went to war with Pablo Escobar and the Medellin cartel, Gaviria was forced to rely on the intelligence network of the Cali cartel...
...And a large commitment from Washington to stay with the process...
...At first, the drug traffickers paid a tax to the guerrillas to leave them in peace...
...government used its leverage over Samper to lay down tough terms for the future of U.S.Colombian relations...
...The Colombian military that had fed at the Cold War trough for decades was now deemed a hive of human rights abusers in alliance with the unchecked power and violence of the transnational drug cartels...
...The Sandinista victory in Nicaragua was just over the horizon, while the civil war in El Salvador was about to erupt...
...The United States turned a blind eye at Turbay's ties to the drug mafia, and ignored the evidence of drug money infiltrating the Congress...
...In any other country in the hemisphere, a government scandal of these dimensions would have the population in the streets, yelling for the heads of the crooks...
...Such sanctions would have devastating implications for Colombian exports like the $400 million industry in cut flowers...
...The politicians struck a deal with the drug mafia...
...fighting force which would collaborate with the DEA...
...Now, as the deals these politicians struck and the crimes they allowed to go unpunished have come under scrutiny, Galdn's restless ghost has returned to haunt his killers...
...And thousands of campesinos...
...In building his case against President Samper and the hierarchy of the Liberal Party establishment, Valdivieso has had the unconditional trust and support of the Clinton administration...
...In 1978, the United States was still fighting the Cold War...
...The drug mafia's friendships and entanglements, not just with the Samper administration, but with governments over the past 25 years, may finally come to light...
...In Colombia, the decertification provoked predictable outrage from infuriated citizens...
...action backfired by unifying the country behind the embattled President and against U.S...
...foreign policy towards a country whose political elites have had Washington's unswerving support for the past 50 years...
...Valdivieso's appointment in August, 1994 was a watershed moment...
...A strong anti-U.S., nationalist sentiment has emerged this year among the corrupt members of the High Command, who feel abandoned by their erstwhile U.S...
...and the arrest of the Cali cartel's leaders...
...It is said by those who know him that Valdivieso has adopted Luis Carlos Galin's unfinished mission and will not rest until it is completed...
...The "ruling class," with its celebrated flexibility and its unfailing instinct for survival, is being out-smarted and humiliated at every turn...
...In the late 1970s, when the drug traffickers made their first billions, they began buying up land...
...The Cali cartel then gave Gaviria and his chief prosecutor general, Gustavo de Greiff, the bill for services rendered: surrender to the Colombian authorities on their own terms...
...government promoted, Colombia's valiant democrats in the two traditional parties were fighting for their lives against the combined forces of communist "narco-guerrillas" and the violence of ruthless drug mafias...
...Only if Valdivieso's investigation is allowed to run its course will Colombians have the opportunity to redefine and reinvent their national identity...
...By late July of 1995, six of the top seven Cali traffickers were in jail...
...In response, the mafia unleashed a wave of phenomenal violence, which forced Barco's efforts to an abrupt halt...
...decision to "decertify" Colombia confirmed a major shift in U.S...
...foreign policy towards a country whose political elites have had Washington's unswerving support, through thick and thin, for the past 50 years...
...government finally removed its Pedestria Cold War blinders...
...The decertification decision confirmed a major shift in U.S...
...Today, according to a recent study by National University professor Alejandro Reyes, 42% of the best land in Colombia is owned by the drug mafia...
...n March of this year, the Clinton administration made its feelings about the crisis clear with the decision to "decertify" Colombia for insufficient progress in the fight against drug-trafficking...
...NACIA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 6UPDATE / COLOMBIA Prosecutor General Alfonso Valdivieso at a news conference in Bogotd this year...
...But after five months in jail, a failed conspiracy to derail Valdivieso's reappointment for an additional two years, and the exoneration of Samper by a preliminary congressional investigation into Medina's charges, Botero changed his testimony...
...For the first time ever, Washington's only friends in BogotA are to be found in left-wing intellectual circles, where gratitude for U.S...
...So although the United States was fully aware of the drug cartel's influence in Colombian politics, Turbay promptly made friends with Washington upon assuming office...
...security from "communist" guerrillas "in our own backyard" defined Washington's relationships throughout the hemisphere...
...The drug mafia needed to protect their new investments from protesting, land-hungry campesinos and guerrillas...
...Because if the crisis dragged on, it would be hard to postpone trade sanctions indefinitely...
...With its mission to separate Colombia's political elite from its murderous friendships and entanglements with drug mobsters, Valdivieso's investigation is off and running...
...8 NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS g g I z NACIA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 8UPDATE / COLOMBIA Valdivieso's first target was Samper's campaign treasurer, Santiago Medina...
...The bitterness between landowners and campesinos was so intense that the landowners were no longer able to enjoy or exploit their estates...
...The Comptroller General and several army generals were reportedly denied visas to the United States allegedly for drug-related activities...
...Initially, Botero denied everything and insisted on Samper's innocence...
...His lack of political profile may explain Samper's last-minute addition of his name to the list of candidates for consideration by the Council of State...
...Today, there is alienation, silence, indifference...
...They were no longer just drug traffickers...
...credentials, he instituted a Draconian security statute to fight the guerrilla insurgency and to clamp down on civilian opposition...
...As president, Samper could only be tried by a congressional commission...
...Nor is this the first time that the drug mafia has had access to the Presidential Palace...
...On occasion, they killed an honest establishment politician: Former Minister of Justice Enrique Low Murtra and Attorney General Carlos Maura Hoyos were both gunned down in the early 1990s...
...U.S...
...The United States' new belligerency towards Colombia's leaders seems puzzling at first glance...
...Eight Congress members have also been arrested, while a further 170--out of a total of 230--are under investigation for drug corruption...
...In that same general election, 10% of the national Congress were allegedly elected with mafia money...
...His ongoing investigation of the links between the Cali cartel and the election campaign of current President Ernesto Samper has triggered the gravest political crisis in Colombian history...
...allies...
...She is the author of The Palace of Justice: A Colombian Tragedy (Four Walls Eight Windows, 1993...
...Justice Department information at a moment when U.S...
...Both sides were operating not against each other, but against the civilian population living within the opponent's zone of control...
...the appointment of the DEA's choice of General Jos6 Serrano as chief of the Colombian police...
...The drug mafias were happy to buy it because the land gave them what they needed-a legal investment with which to launder their illicit wealth...
...By the time he ran for the presidency in 1989, he had become a serious threat to the mafia's encroaching grip on the Colombian political establishment...
...National amnesia has long erased the memory of a better time before the drug mafias took over the store...
...uspicions of his ties to the drug cartels have dogged Samper throughout his career...
...help in prying their country loose from the grip of the mafias is mingled with a sense of ironic astonishment at the suddenness of their own pro-gringo conversion...
...Key DEA informants working undercover within the Cali car- of tel have also handed over arm- ons ug fuls of incriminating documents...
...And teachers...
...Three weeks later, Valdivieso arrested Botero...
...The rest of the established political forces have since chosen to look the other way, while the power of the state has slipped away from them...
...The U.S...
...When the Berlin Wall crumbled, the U.S...
...The drug traffickers took their assignment seriously...
...They condemned what they called Washington's heavy-handed effort to destabilize the Colombian government and force Samper from the Presidential Palace...
...In the court of public opinion, the principle of the President's presumption of innocence until proven guilty has worn thin...
...By May, 1996, one government minister and the Attorney General were behind bars...
...In 1989, an informant from the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) claimed to have witnessed a meeting between Samper and Cali leaders Rodriguez Orejuela and Jos6 Santacruz Londono, from which the future president allegedly walked away with Pres the several briefcases stuffed with that $300,000 in cash...
...And human rights activists...
...In return, the mafia would be given a free hand to pursue its business interests and develop its properties...
...They eliminated grassroots organizations and local community groups wherever they found them...
...No quick fixes are in the offing given the complexity and darkness of the Colombian scenario...
...If so, the current crisis may figure as a prelude to a drama more fascinating and more terrible than any seen so far...
...reads: "The Wars Between the Elites Change Nothing...
...So, the landowners were happy to sell their land...
...government turning the screws, Samper lost his room to maneuver...
...Friends were no longer friends...
...When the Cali and Medellin cartels went to war with each other in the late 1980s, they bought and used the state intelligence services in their internecine conflicts...
...That would shatter the distorting myths and lies which have projected a smokescreen of confusion behind which an institutionalized 97% impunity rate has perpetuated so much evil...
...Power and wealth have traditionally been concentrated in the hands of those who own land...
...They had an idea: Just as this new wealthy class, with money to burn, had solved the problems of the old landlords, so too could the mafia solve the "security" problems in these regions...
...It will take time...
...When they got fed up with the pay-offs, they made a marriage of convenience with the military to recruit, train and arm their own private armies...
...Since 1978, the only Colombian president who has used the power of the government to try to dismantle these alliances and to attack the drug cartels directly was Virgilio Barco (1986-90), who declared war on the mafia after Galdin's death in 1989...
...The regional politicians and the Liberal leaders in Bogoti took note of how the mafias were disbanding and cleaning out the campesino organizations...
...Mafia land investments, and the paramilitary squads which accompany them, have driven some 800,000 campesinos from their villages and small farms over the last decade...
...On January 22, 1996, he accused Samper of soliciting the drug funds from the Cali cartel...
...Valdivieso is an unlikely hero...
...He got the Chief Prosecutor's job by capturing the judges' imagination with his vision of an activist approach to law enforcement based on the model of the Italian magistrates' assault on the Cosa Nostra mafia...
...In the longer term, however, the discretionary power that the law gives the U:S...
...The office of the Prosecutor General, established by the Constitution of 1991 to deal with drug traffickers and terrorists, would now be turned on the government itself...
...But by then, things had already begun to unravel for Samper...
...The case for impeachment will now be decided by the full Congress, where Samper's allies vastly outnumber his critics...
...Another message, scrawled on the ruins of an abandoned shack within the National University campus, ans in downtown BogotJ are checked for we nd the military...
...intelligence gathering in Colombia has intensified...
...Vol XXX, No 1 JULY/AUG 1996 9UPDATE / COLOMBIA Throughout the 1980s, the United States intensified its support for the Colombian military...
...The U.S...
...president to invoke sanctions, such as the revocation of trade privileges or a reduction in the sugar quota, increases pressure on Samper...
...As time went on, the drug mafia penetrated and corrupted the intelligence organizations of the state...
...Throughout the 1980s, as the drug cartels flourished and the killings escalated, Galn pressed his attacks on the corruption of his own political class...
...Dignity for Colombia's ugly presence is a warning from the drug chiefs that they will not allow their deals with Colombia's political establishment to be betrayed without reprisals...
...The "ruling class" is being out-smarted and humiliated at every turn...
...Nevertheless, the facts and the testimonies of the principal actors are part of the public record, and the key events that they document leave little room for doubt...
...Samper wanted to satisfy Washington, but he felt trapped...
...Valdivieso's investigation offers the only shard of hope...
...Drug traffickers purportedly contributed to Liberal Party candidate C6sar Turbay Ayala's campaign in his successful race for president in 1978...
...government demanded Samper's support for a multipronged strategy designed to wipe out the Cali cartel: an increase in the size of the permanent DEA task force...
Vol. 30 • July 1996 • No. 1
