Headlines, Human Rights, Latin America & the Caribbean

COLOMBIA: New Videos Shed Light on Palace of Justice Massacre

Constanza Vieira

BOGOTA, Aug 29 2007 (IPS) - Judge Carlos Horacio Urán walked out of Colombia’s Palace of Justice alive after it was seized by guerrillas in 1985. But his body was found inside the building when the 27-hour siege came to an end.

The local TV news station Noticias Uno aired three videos Sunday showing Urán limping out of the courthouse and being met at the door by supposed rescue workers, who carried him away on a stretcher.

On Nov. 6, 1985, the Movimiento 19 de Abril (M-19) guerrillas occupied the Palace of Justice, taking around 300 hostages, including the members of the Supreme Court and the Council of State (the highest court of administrative law).

The army immediately launched an assault, ignoring the order from Supreme Court president Alfonso Reyes to hold their fire. The order was issued by radio from within the building when the insurgents were already giving up in the face of the heavy military response.

According to official figures, between 89 and 115 people were killed that day in the courthouse, including all of the rebels, 11 Supreme Court magistrates, three auxiliary magistrates, 19 judges and 11 people who were working in, or just happened to be passing through, the cafeteria at the time. Some 200 hostages were rescued.

A few hours into the siege, a fire broke out and burned numerous court records, including the files from key cases, as well as evidence of what occurred at that time.

One of the videos broadcast by Noticias Uno shows the exact time that auxiliary magistrate Urán stumbled out of the courthouse: 14:17 on Thursday Nov. 7, the second day of the siege.

But on Friday, Urán’s body showed up inside the Palace of Justice, and was turned over naked to his wife, Uruguayan researcher Ana María Bidegaín.

The forensic exam showed that Urán was shot point-blank in the head with a 9 mm gun.

In May, an Attorney General’s Office search of a records warehouse of the B-2 military intelligence service turned up a list of "M-19 guerrillas, gunned down in combat" that included the names of Urán and another magistrate killed in the courthouse, Manuel Gaona.

Also found in the warehouse was Urán’s billfold, containing his identity card, his driver’s licence and a photo of his family with a bullet hole through the middle, Noticias Uno reported.

Bidegaín said that for 22 years she had believed that her husband died in crossfire between the rebels and the armed forces.

At the time, Urán was investigating the torture case of Dr. Olga López, an M-19 guerrilla fighter. He had also been a member of the National Popular Alliance (ANAPO), a left-wing party, where he met Andrés Almarales, who later became an insurgent – and years later led the M-19 occupation of the Palace of Justice.

Gaona, the other magistrate on the list, had ruled against a judicial reform implemented by the government of Julio César Turbay (1978-1982) which made it possible for civilians to be tried by military courts.

Both the Supreme Court and the Council of State had been handing down convictions of members of the armed forces in cases like that of López and hundreds of civilians and insurgents tortured and killed by the security forces.

The courts "had issued a sentence in June that year against former defence minister Luis Carlos Camacho Leyva, former president Turbay, and then defence minister Miguel Vega Uribe," Maureen Maya, director of the Fundación Cese al Fuego (Ceasefire Foundation), which is working to clarify the Palace of Justice massacre, pointed out on Monday.

Magistrate Nilson Pinilla, a member of the Truth Commission set up by the Supreme Court in 2005, announced that the videos would be included in the commission’s final report as "an extremely important point of reference."

Urán’s case "was not included" in the commission’s preliminary report last November "because we only had unconfirmed rumours," he told journalists.

Legal experts mentioned different reasons to argue that the statute of limitations had not run out on the case, such as the fact that the security forces had altered or concealed evidence.

René Guarín, whose sister Cristina disappeared after the siege and assault on the Palace of Justice, has received death threats in the last few weeks.

His sister, the cashier in the courthouse cafeteria, left the building uninjured, as seen in another tape seized in July from Colonel Alfonso Plazas, who led the military assault. However, she never reappeared.

Plazas is now under arrest in connection with the case.

For several years after the tragedy, threats were received regularly by the families of the 11 people who disappeared from the cafeteria, most of whom were employees there.

Although the threats stopped after five years, they started up again when Attorney General Mario Iguarán restarted the case, and the Supreme Court Truth Commission began to function in late 2005.

Relatives have received threatening phone calls, and report being followed by a white vehicle that has appeared with two different licence plates.

In addition, thick files were stolen from 87-year-old former judge Enrique Rodríguez, the father of Carlos, the cafeteria manager. In a video recording confiscated from Colonel Plazas, Carlos Rodríguez can be seen leaving the building unhurt. However, he was never heard from again.

Guarín told IPS that he discovered that "both of the licence plates used by the white car are from the DAS (Departamento Administrativo de Seguridad)" intelligence agency.

The security that the Attorney General’s Office’s Witness Protection Programme offers the 44-year-old computer engineer and father of two "consists of me quitting my job and my kids (ages nine and 11) dropping out of school, while they would bring us groceries once a week and pay our utility bills for eight months."

Later, "they would give us four million pesos (some 2,000 dollars) for a ‘productive enterprise’," he added, which, he said, was barely enough to "open a soft-drink stand" in a resort town.

Nine years ago, the prominent human rights lawyer who was assisting the families, Eduardo Umaña Mendoza, was murdered in his office.

Plazas’ arrest has raised some hopes among the families, whose efforts to recover the bodies of their loved ones have run up against "very powerful interests that seek to conceal evidence and testimony," the families say.

For that reason they set up their own Truth Commission in May, with the aim of shoring up the work of the Attorney General’s Office, which, they say, "has dragged on in total inertia for 20 years."

Among other goals, the families hope to get the courts to accept the testimony of former torturer Ricardo Gámez, who is living in exile in Europe, and whose version of events is – they believe – the most accurate heard so far.

The former police officer had already given a written deposition to the office of the inspector general (Procuraduría General de la Nación) in 1989. But the official who took it found no grounds for opening an investigation.

Gámez says he is a former member of what he describes as "the intelligence service’s pseudo-personnel" – a group of 25 civilians working under military orders and paid out of secret expense funds.

Gámez has stated on camera, for example, that a non-commissioned officer kept a baby who was born in an army truck during the assault on the courthouse. The baby’s mother, Rosa Castiblanco, a cook at the cafeteria, was "disappeared."

The families are also demanding explanations from the Attorney General’s Office as to why no army generals have been charged or called on to testify in the case, or subjected to disciplinary or corrective actions.

Gámez said that just a few days before the siege, the Casa del Florero, a historical building in front of the courthouse, was set up as an army operations centre.

According to Maya, one faction of the M-19 turned to druglord Pablo Escobar for help in buying weapons for the occupation of the courthouse. But he merely warned the army, and did not provide assistance, apparently due to the logistical shortcomings of the insurgent group’s plan.

During the military assault, the Casa del Florero served as the base of operations used by Plazas, who at the time was the head of the Escuela de Caballería, an army training school.

It was Plazas who decided which of the hostages brought out of the Palace of Justice were to be tortured, and they were then sent to different military and intelligence facilities, said Gámez.

The torturers did not cover their faces or conceal their identities, he said, because it was clear from the very start of the operation that the tortured hostages were to be killed.

But Plazas was not in charge at 14:17 on Thursday, when Urán was taken out of the building.

His superior, General Jesús Armando Arias, commander at the time of the 13th army brigade, had replaced him there with two other officers, one of whom was Carlos Fracica, assistant commander at the Escuela de Artillería (artillery school), one of the places where hostages were tortured. Fracica, now a general, is military attaché in Chile.

In any case, according to Gámez, the Casa del Florero was just "an alternate centre of command, which was in direct contact with the Army Command."

That is why the hostages’ families have their sights set on the higher-ranking officers who planned and coordinated the operation.

Guarín told IPS that the families plan to testify before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, which is studying the case of the 11 victims of forced disappearance, to disseminate the new evidence that has emerged.