Calabazo, Colombia: Skinny but imposing with aviator glasses, a bushy moustache and a toothy smile, Julio Henriquez Santamaria was leading a community meeting in this sylvan hamlet when he was abducted by paramilitary thugs, thrown into the back of a Toyota pickup and disappeared forever on February 4, 2001.
Ahead of his time, Henriquez had been organising farmers to substitute legal crops like cacao for coca, which the current Colombian government, on the verge of ending a civil war fuelled by the narcotics trade, is promoting as an anti-drug strategy.
But Hernan Giraldo Serna, or his men, didn’t like it, or him.
From his early days as a small-time marijuana farmer, Giraldo had grown into El Patron, a narcotics kingpin and paramilitary commander whose anti-insurgent mission had devolved into a murderous criminal enterprise controlling much of Colombia’s mountain-draped northern coast.
Henriquez was hardly his only victim; Giraldo, whose secondary alias was the Drill because of his rapacious appetite for underage girls, had all kinds. But Henriquez became the emblematic one, with a family tenacious enough to pursue Giraldo even after he, along with 13 other paramilitary leaders, was whisked out of Colombia and into the United States on May 13, 2008, to face drug charges.
It happened in a dead-of-night extradition that stunned Colombia, where the men stood accused of atrocities in a transitional justice process that was abruptly interrupted. In the whoosh of a jet, and at the behest of the Colombian president, Alvaro Uribe, the US-led war on drugs seized priority over Colombia’s efforts to confront crimes against humanity that had scarred a generation.
Victims’ advocates howled that it was like exporting “14 Pinochets.” Henriquez’s family, meanwhile, quietly vowed to hold at least one of them accountable for the Colombian blood that stained the cocaine shipped to US shores.
“We hope that the effort we have made over all these years means that things won’t end with impunity,” said his daughter Bela Henriquez Chacin, 32, who was 16 when her father was murdered and hopes to speak at Giraldo’s sentencing in Washington next month. The Henriquezes will be the first foreign victims ever given a voice in an international drug smuggling case in the United States, experts believe.
Whether this recognition is more than symbolic remains to be seen. Giraldo’s fellow extradites have received relatively lenient treatment for major drug traffickers who were also designated terrorists responsible for massacres, forced disappearances and the displacement of entire villages, an investigation by The New York Times found.
Once the paramilitary Colombians — several dozen, all told — have completed their US prison terms, they will have served on average seven and a half years, The Times found. The leaders extradited en masse will have served an average of 10 years, at most, for drug conspiracies that involved tons of cocaine.
By comparison, federal inmates convicted of crack cocaine trafficking — mostly street-level dealers who sold less than an ounce — serve on average just over 12 years in prison.
What’s more, for some, there is a special dividend at the end of their incarceration: a green card. Though wanted by the Colombian authorities, two have won permission to stay in the United States, and their families have joined them. Three more are seeking the same haven, and still others are expected to follow suit.
Now, eight years after the paramilitaries were extradited, Colombia has reached a peace deal with their mortal enemies, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (the FARC). Facing an Oct. 2 vote on the accord, the country is in the midst of a polarising debate about crime and punishment for the FARC, informed by what went wrong during the paramilitary peace process. Nobody is advocating that justice be abdicated to the United States this time.
Using interviews, recently unsealed legal briefs, transcripts of hearings, internal government documents, and information obtained from Colombia and the United States, The Times examined the cases of 40 extradited paramilitary members and associates.
Most were handsomely rewarded for pleading guilty and cooperating with US officials; they were treated as first-time offenders despite extensive criminal histories in Colombia; and they received credit for time served there, even though the official rationale for their extradition was that they were committing crimes in Colombian jails.
US officials think the extraditions served a critical purpose at a historic juncture, “demonstrating to the Colombian people that there are no such things as untouchables,” as one put it. Eventually, said a Department of Justice spokesman, Peter Carr, the Americans provided the Colombians with “unique and unprecedented” access to imprisoned foreign defendants so that the transitional justice process, called Justice and Peace, could continue.
“It’s crazy,”’ said Roxanna Altholz, the associate director of the International Human Rights Law Clinic at the University of California, Berkeley, who represents the Henriquezes. “These individuals are the worst of the worst. They are drug lords and war criminals. Why should they be getting any benefits?”
Giraldo, 68, will be the last of the extradited paramilitaries sentenced.
Shortly before midnight on May 12, 2008, Giraldo was jostled awake in a jail in Barranquilla, instructed to pack a small suitcase and then hustled onto a flight to Bogota, the capital. No explanation was offered.
After years of declining to turn over the men, President Uribe had suddenly made an urgent appeal to the Americans: Those wanted paramilitary leaders? Take them. Immediately.
Why did the US government go to such lengths to accommodate a Colombian president who, as it turned out, may have had political motivations of his own?
“The driving policy during the Bush administration was cooperation on anti-narcotics efforts,” said Jose Miguel Vivanco, the director of Human Rights Watch’s Americas division. “Not human rights, not atrocities, not to make victims of crimes against humanity committed by these bastards have a day in court in Colombia.”
After 2000, when paramilitary troops reportedly committed at least 75 massacres, Washington shifted its perspective. On Sept. 10, 2001, a day before his attention turned elsewhere, Secretary of State Colin Powell designated the United Self-Defence Forces of Colombia, known as the AUC, a foreign terrorist organisation, just like the FARC.
Drug indictments of key paramilitary leaders followed, and Uribe, elected in 2002 with a vow to crack down on leftist rebels, used the threat of extradition to motivate the paramilitary leaders to lay down their arms.
Much to Uribe’s consternation, the leaders then began confessing not only their war crimes but also their ties to his allies and relatives. The Colombian Supreme Court — responsible for investigating lawmakers — undertook an aggressive “para-politics” inquiry that ensnared many in the president’s coalition.
Then in April 2008, Mario Uribe, the president’s cousin and a former Senate president, was arrested and accused of conspiring with paramilitary death squads. A few weeks later, Colombia woke up to police photos of the paramilitary leaders being boarded onto US planes.
“The whole country was shocked,” said Miguel Samper Strouss, a former vice minister of justice in charge of transitional justice policy. “It was like they had extradited our chances for knowing the truth and for getting justice and reparation for our victims.”
By 2008, the Justice and Peace process, while slow and flawed, had become a real process. Some 200,000 victims had registered to participate; thousands of crimes had been confessed and thousands of hidden graves revealed.
“Those extraditions marked a before and an after,” Sen. Ivan Cepeda, who founded the influential Movement for Victims of State Crimes, said. “If the intention really was to achieve silence and impunity, it was obtained to a high degree. Only now, after so many years, are we starting to see results.”
