My parents were close with the Colombian family that facilitated our adoption. The baby finder was a woman named Margarita, and she had four or five kids, including a daughter named Vicky who stayed with my family for an entire summer once, and who remained pen-pals with my mother for nearly two decades after that.
I’ve only found two or three of those letters in my mother’s things (all of them from the late 1970s, when we were babies and Vicky was a teenager). But I still remember reading one in the early 1990s, when I was in junior high. It explained that paramilitary men had visited the family’s farm and expelled them from their own land: Just pounded on the door one morning, brandishing weapons, and told them to leave immediately with only the clothes on their backs, or else.
The letter filled me with both relief and worry, I remember: I was grateful for the fact of my adoption and that I was being raised in the United States. But I wondered about my biological family, and if they were safe, and if Vicky and her family would be ok. It also made me deeply curious: What on earth was going on down there? And how could it be allowed to continue?
There Are No Dead Here: A Story of Murder and Denial in Colombia by Maria McFarland Sanchez-Moreno, answers those questions in more detail than anything I’ve read so far on the subject. The book is about the atrocities paramilitary groups committed against peasant farming communities deep in the Colombian mountains in the mid-1990s — and about the people who tried to stop those atrocities, expose them, and hold the guilty to account for them. The outcome of those efforts is aptly summarized in the book’s title, as Camila Osorio notes in her review for The New Yorker:
“There Are No Dead Here” is a paradoxical title for a book in which I recorded, in the margins, at least forty-nine murders. The phrase is borrowed from Gabriel García Márquez’s “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” in which one man, José Arcadio Segundo, is a witness to the state-sponsored murder of three thousand union workers. He is doomed to solitude when no one, not even his brother, will believe him. “The official version,” Márquez wrote, was finally accepted: “There were no dead.”
Anyway, the book came out in 2018. I’m revisiting it now because a new chapter of the story is unfolding in real time.
The backstory
A quick, crude history, here: It started with La Violencia – a nearly decade-long crush of violence that erupted in the late 1940s after the assassination of leftist politician Jorge Eliecer Gaitan. It got so bad that a siege was declared and Congress was temporarily suspended. It only ended after the government was wholly restructured to allow for power-sharing arrangement between left and right, and by then some 200,000 people (out of 12 million total) had met brutal ends.
Some groups refused to put down their arms, though, and the municipalities they controlled were deemed independent republics. Those groups eventually morphed into Guerrilla outfits, like FARC and ELN, which still exist today. In the 1960s, the U.S. began pressing the Colombian government to launch aggressive counterinsurgency programs in those regions — which the government did and which involved dropping bombs and napalm on small peasant communities across Antioquia. That only made things worse, of course: by the mid-1980s, the Guerrilla groups were well-established, and a violent struggle between them and the Colombian government was well underway.
It was from this morass that paramilitaries emerged. “While also describing themselves as “self-defense” groups organized to protect their communities from guerrillas,” McFarland Sanchez-Moreno writes, “the paramilitaries were hard to distinguish from death squads for the military or private armies for wealthy land owners and drug lords.”
Here’s McFarland Sanchez-Moreno on the net result:
In Colombia the war between the government and the FARC certainly had ideological roots, but after 40 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…. Former Escobar associates 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, taking over key drug trafficking corridors and killing anyone who got in their way.
By 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…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.
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, doctors — had a story; everyone had been touched by the war in one way or another.
The real heroes
The book has three protagonists: Jesús María Valle, the lawyer and human rights activist who first drew attention to what the death squads were actually doing in the remote reaches of the country; Ivan Velasquez, the prosecutor who took Valle’s extensive documentation and pressed forward to seek justice; and Ricardo Calderon, the journalist who worked with Velasquez to shine a light on the horrors. Valle was murdered by sicarios for his efforts; Velasquez and Calderon received death threats for years and were periodically forced into hiding, but they soldiered on to great effect.
Here’s what McFarland Sanchez-Moreno writes about Valle:
In Valle’s view, the mission of a lawyer should be to serve the poor. Even though he could have made large sums of money as a defense attorney, he spent much of his time on his activism and working for the people of Ituango. He lived extremely frugally – that was why he had never bothered to update or replace the manual typewriter in his office, or to install a security camera outside its door, even when there were threats against him. He gave most of his money to his family, buying a house where he lived with many of his siblings, and, once his parents retired, a plot of land near Medellin, where they could grow some of their own food and raise animals, more for fun than out of need. He had a habit of giving money and things away – once in a while, decorative items around the house would disappear. His sister Magdalena would ask Valle about them and he would explain: “Oh so-and-so was here and really admired it, and she’s very poor while you have lots of things, so I gave it to her.”…
Valle’s colleague and friend Beatriz Jaramillo was struck by one incident in particular around 1997, when he called her at 5:30 a.m. to tell her that they needed to go to Blanquizal a squatter community on the outskirts of Medellin, because the city government was about to evict its residents to make way for a highway construction project. They had to protect those people, he told her. Once in Blanquizal, he called the community together to talk about the problem. Seated on a modest little bed in one of the houses, “he spoke to them so beautifully, making them feel important, telling that they were Colombia, that they had rights,” she recalled. Repeatedly, he asked them “not to respond to violence with violence.”
Eventually the police and the bulldozers arrived and started to demolish the precarious little houses. It was tragic, Jaramillo recalled, to see how they loaded the municipal garbage bins with the pieces of wood the residents had used to cobble together their homes, “knowing that the wood was the fruit of enormous efforts to get some way to protect themselves from the elements at night.” … At one point, a young pregnant woman, with a toddler in her arms, came out of one of the few houses in the community that was built out of bricks. She started to cry, wondering what she would do now. As the bulldozer approached, Valle sat in front of the house: if they wanted to bulldoze the house, they’d have to drive over him….
Over time, Valle would represent the entire community in proceedings against the city, and he ultimately succeeded in getting them resettled in good housing elsewhere in town.
I appreciated these bits especially, because I’ve been frustrated by how readily the story of Colombia is reduced to one charismatic villain – Pablo Escobar — and the sheer audacity of his run. Escobar cultivated a Robin Hood image, which we’ve allowed him to keep for far too long because it lets us marvel at his exploits without feeling as guilty. Those exploits are a marvel, to be sure: He got elected to Congress, killed presidential candidates and federal officials with impunity, blew up a plane, blew up a capitol building, built his own prison, had his own pet hippos, and wooed a famous television news anchor who was supposed to be reporting on him. He also remained one of the richest men in the world, even as he was forced into hiding and living on the run.
But the far more impressive story, the far more moving one, is of the many honorable men who took a stand against Escobar — and the paramilitaries — and in many cases paid with their lives. That sacrifice might sound pointless, foolish or even dull (what does martyrdom achieve amid so much bloodshed?). But these are people who held to their principles, even in the face of death and even while so many around them succumbed to fear or bribery or both. The list of such heroes is long (Hector Abad, Rodrigo Lara Bonilla, Guillermo Cano Isaza to name just a few) though casual observers will not recognize a single name on it.
The actual massacres
There were far too many to account for all of them, as Chomsky and McFarland Sanchez-Moreno both note. This book focuses on the one in El Aro which McFarland Sanchez-Moreno describes in clear and devastating detail:
The paramilitaries stayed in the town for five more days. Miladis later heard from other townspeople who fled to Puerto Valdivia that the day she left, they killed Marco Aurelio Areiza after accusing him of selling food to guerrillas. Ignoring the pleas of Areiza’s domestic partner, who insisted that he had only sold the food under guerrilla threat, the paramilitaries had dragged him away. His body was later found tied to a tree near the town cemetery with his eyes gouged out, deep knife wounds in his ribs, and his testicles cut off and stuffed in his mouth.
She also heard that paramilitaries had forced a young woman to lead them to a guerrilla campsite nearby – Miladis heard that the young woman might have belonged to the guerrillas but had deserted them. Later on, Miladis said, people found only the bottom half of her body. It was rumored that the paramilitaries had thrown explosives at her.
The paramilitaries raped more women after the family left, though the victims remained too afraid or ashamed to tell the authorities. Survivors did report that the paramilitaries had gang-raped Elvia Rosa Areiza, a woman who did domestic work in the priest’s house. They had then dragged the young mother of five through the streets, transforming her face into a purple bloody mess before tying her up in a pigsty, where they left her to die of thirst.
People said that the paramilitaries laughed as they talked about how they had killed Miladis’s little brother. He kept crying, they said, calling for the Virgin Mary to protect him and for them to let him go back to his mother.
By the time they left, the paramilitaries had killed fifteen people. They finally ordered the remaining residents to leave as they burned down most of the town, leaving only eighteen houses and the church standing. In total, more than seven hundred people fled El Aro and the surrounding region as a result of the operation. Over time, one of Miladis’s aunts – an elderly woman whom the paramilitaries had forced to cook for them during their incursion – would tell her that she had seen aa helicopter arrive nearby. Another young man talked about how the paramilitaries had forced him to tie the bodies of dead combatants to the legs of a helicopter.
During the entire hellish week, nobody — neither the military nor law enforcement – responded to pleas for help from the community. Nor did anyone stop the paramilitaries as they left, taking with them as many as 1,200 head of cattle that they had forced townspeople to herd for them from neighboring farms.
We lost touch with Vicky and Margarita and their family many years back, but we know that they made it to safety: Vicky and her brothers got visas and settled in the U.S.. Margarita passed away (a few years back, we think), but appears to have lived in a decent apartment in Medellin in her later years (a fellow adoptee that I know traced her there). One of my most ardent hopes for the coming year or two is to find Vicky and her brothers and see what their part of this story actually was. They were middle-class landowners so I don’t think it was quite as dire as the peasants McFarland Sanchez-Moreno writes about. But I know it involves displacement and loss.
The future is unwritten
Alvaro Uribe is best known in the U.S. as the Colombian president (2000-2010) who rescued his country from the brink of failed statehood by defeating both the Guerrillas and the Narcos with a sustained U.S.-funded counterinsurgency initiative. We gave him the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom for this feat.
But he was governor of Antioquia before that, and he’s long been suspected of playing a role in the atrocities that unfolded as the paramilitaries expanded there. How deep his complicity goes depends on who you talk to, but McFarland Sanchez-Moreno does an excellent job of laying out the case against Uribe in narrative detail — including, among many other details, the fact that Valle pleaded with the Governor to intervene in El Aro, to no avail.
After his presidency, Uribe served as a Colombian Congressman (2014-2020), a position that protected him a bit from prosecution. But he recently resigned that seat amid scandal, and is now under house arrest for witness tampering and facing a fuller Supreme Court investigation into his other alleged crimes. No less a figurehead than U.S. Vice President Mike Pence has called for Uribe’s release, touting him as a freedom-loving hero to make the case. But, however oblivious the U.S. is, most Colombians know better.
