There Are No Dead Here: A Story of Murder and Denial in Colombia

by Maria McFarland Sanchez-Moreno

Overview

The bloody story of the rise of paramilitaries in Colombia, told through three characters — a fearless activist, a dogged journalist, and a relentless investigator — whose lives intersected in the midst of unspeakable terror.

Colombia's drug-fueled cycle of terror, corruption, and tragedy did not end with Pablo Escobar's death in 1993. Just when Colombians were ready to move past the murderous legacy of the country's cartels, a new, bloody chapter unfolded. In the late 1990s, right-wing paramilitary groups with close ties to the cocaine business carried out a violent expansion campaign, massacring, raping, and torturing thousands.

There Are No Dead Here is the harrowing story of three ordinary Colombians who risked everything to reveal the collusion between the new mafia and much of the country's military and political establishment: Jesús María Valle, a human rights activist who was murdered for exposing a dark secret; Iván Velásquez, a quiet prosecutor who took up Valle's cause and became an unlikely hero; and Ricardo Calderón, a dogged journalist who is still being targeted for his revelations. Their groundbreaking investigations landed a third of the country's Congress in prison and fed new demands for justice and peace that Colombia's leaders could not ignore.

Taking readers from the sweltering Medellín streetss where criminal investigators were hunted by assassins, through the countryside where paramilitaries wiped out entire towns, and into the corridors of the presidential palace in BogotáThere Are No Dead Here is an unforgettable portrait of the valiant men and women who dared to stand up to the tide of greed, rage, and bloodlust that threatened to engulf their country.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781568585796
Publisher:	PublicAffairs
Publication date:	02/27/2018
Pages:	336
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Maria McFarland Sánchez-Moreno is the executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance. Previously, she held several positions at Human Rights Watch, including as the organization's senior Americas researcher, covering Colombia and Peru, and as the co-director of its US program. She grew up in Lima, Peru, and now lives in Brooklyn.

Table of Contents

Prologue: Land of Smoke and Mirrors 1

Part I Death: Medellín, Colombia, 1996-1998

1 The Prophet 9

2 Early Warnings 27

3 Deaths Foretold 49

4 For Those Who Speak the Truth 59

Part II The Hunt: Medellin, Colombia, 1998-1999

5 The Investigators 67

6 In Plain Sight 79

7 "Things That Can't Be Investigated" 87

8 The Enemy Within 95

Part III Hope: Bogotá, Colombia, 2000-2008

9 Heroes 107

10 The Commanders' "Friends" 125

11 Close to the Bone 141

12 "I'm Calling You from Prison" 157

13 Frame Job 167

14 Betrayal 179

Part IV Truth: Bogotá, 2008-2010

15 Confessions 197

16 Inside the Presidential Palace 207

17 Spies 219

18 The End of an Era 239

19 The Question Stuck in Their Throats 247

Afterword: Peace? 267

Acknowledgments 281

Glossary 283

Main Characters 285

Notes and Sources 291

Part Opener Image Captions and Credits 307

Index 309

Editorial Reviews

11/06/2017
The horrific violence in Colombia during the 1990s and 2000s is made painfully palpable in this account of three men who risked their lives to make public the atrocities committed by paramilitary forces and the Colombian government. McFarland Sánchez-Moreno, who had investigated Colombia for Human Rights Watch for six years beginning in 2004, explains that when she arrived in Colombia, 10% of the population—three million people—had been forced to flee their homes due to drug-related violence, and hundreds of thousands more had been killed. She uses the stories of journalist Ricardo Calderón, attorney-activist Jesús María Valle, and prosecutor Iván Velásquez to provide a human dimension to those shocking statistics. All three men persisted—despite threats to themselves and their families—in asserting that paramilitaries, in collusion with the country’s army, were trafficking narcotics and carrying out massacres. Valle paid with his life for his efforts to get the government to stop the paramilitaries from decimating his constituents. Their struggles, McFarland Sánchez-Moreno writes, exposed the “horrors... perpetrated in the name of counterinsurgency,” as well as the corrupt deals that many politicians struck with murderers. This is a necessarily grim narrative about the effects of government corruption in Colombia, with rays of hope to be found in Calderón’s, Valle’s, and Velásquez’s impressive achievements against formidable odds. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

"This well-researched and beautifully told history explains how three civilians rewrote Colombian history."—Booklist


"A deeply informed account of Colombia's decades long civil war and the many figures who profited from it... An admirable work of journalism in the interest of human rights."—Kirkus Reviews

"In her masterful work, Maria McFarland Sanchez-Moreno unravels the intrigue, politics, and history between Colombia's government and its paramilitaries. Through her precise reporting and elegant prose, There Are No DeadHere paints a vivid and harrowing portrait of three brave individuals who, despite death threats and great risk to themselves and their families, expose some of their country's darkest secrets. This book is a must for anyone fascinated by Colombia's complex history."—Melissa del Bosque, author of Bloodlines


"The horrific violence in Colombia during the 1990s and 2000s is made painfully palpable in this account of three men who risked their lives to make public the atrocities committed by paramilitary forces and the Colombian government.... A necessarily grim narrative about the effects of government corruption in Colombia, with rays of hope to be found in Calderón's, Valle's, and Velásquez's impressive achievements against formidable odds."—Publishers Weekly


"A gripping and illuminating portrait of three far from ordinary Colombian whose courage, leadership, and perseverance continue to influence and inspire the fight for justice throughout Latin America. In a way, this story provides a roadmap of the hard, daring journey toward hope."—Francisco Goldman, author of The Interior Circuit

"Maria McFarland Sánchez-Moreno has written an important, gripping account of how three individuals heroically risked their lives to fight terror and corruption in their country. The violent dramas and acts of human bravery that are told in There Are No Dead Here unfold in Colombia, but also offer lucid insights into the fragility of civil society-and of rule of law-anywhere. At a time when the boundaries between tyranny and democracy, truth and falsehood, become increasingly opaque, McFarland's book offers a narrative that is unerring in its moral clarity."
—Jon Lee Anderson, author of Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life


"Maria McFarland Sanchez-Moreno has woven together a remarkable tale about drugs, violence, greed, corruption and — far above all else — human courage. A deep knowledge of Colombia and the people who live there is threaded through every page of the story, yet the book's relevance reaches far beyond that country's borders."—Monte Reel, author of Between Man and Beast

From the Publisher

2017-12-12
A deeply informed account of Colombia's decadeslong civil war and the many figures who profited from it.The title of this journalistic account by Peruvian-American activist/writer Sánchez-Moreno, the executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, is richly ironic. The civil war has led to countless deaths, as it pitted rival figures within the government and military against rightist paramilitaries, leftist guerrillas, and the drug cartels—but also produced strange alliances among them. As the author writes, "the war between the government and [revolutionary group] FARC certainly had ideological roots, but after forty years it had become much murkier." Not that things were ever quite clear under the cartel's terror campaign under Pablo Escobar, but one thing was certain: Colombia was a dangerous place to be, and if things are now much improved, there are plenty of ghosts around. At the heart of this story, among other atrocities, is a 1997 massacre of suspected guerrillas by paramilitaries, the investigation of which revealed how interlocked the players were and explained why the Colombian government had been so slow to intervene, even as Colombians were being raped, mutilated, and murdered by the thousands. The president of the nation was also implicated. Among Sánchez-Moreno's crusading heroes, those who brought all this to light, are a government prosecutor and a reporter drawn into the story by a leak from a police intelligence agent, even as other agents "had put together lists of trade unionists and activists and passed those along to paramilitaries." The story winds and unwinds, and although it sometimes staggers under its own weight, the author manages to keep all the threads together. In the end, readers are perhaps more numbed than surprised by how much corruption was revealed in the course of the investigations—though relieved as well that at least some remedies have been effected.An admirable work of journalism in the interest of human rights.

Kirkus Reviews

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