Plan Colombia and Beyond

New Rainbow Corporation Director León Valencia in February, flanked by former Defense Minister Rafael Pardo (left) and El Tiempo Director Rafael Santos (right).

Despite its hippie-dippy name, the New Rainbow Corporation (Corporación Nuevo Arco Iris) is one of Colombia’s most serious, thoughtful and assertive think-tanks. Founded in the mid-1990s by leaders of a group of moderate ELN guerrillas who demobilized en masse, the group puts out first-rate analyses of Colombia’s security situation and trends in the conflict and violence.

Its director, León Valencia, is a regular columnist in El Tiempo, Colombia’s most-circulated newspaper, as well as the principal dailies of Medellín and Cali. We have featured Valencia and his work on two occasions.

The New Rainbow Corporation has also been one of Colombia’s leading investigators of the so-called “para-politics” scandal, in which a rapidly increasing number of politicians are accused of colluding with paramilitary death squads. (63 members of Colombia’s Congress are now under formal investigation or in jail awaiting trial.) León Valencia and associated investigators like Claudia López and Laura Bonilla helped break the story in 2006, and a second edition of their book on the subject has just been released.

The Corporation has begun focusing more intensely on ties between paramilitaries and the political elite in Antioquia, the populous, relatively wealthy department (province) whose capital is Medellín. This is more dangerous than investigating “para-politics” in poorer, more peripheral departments like Sucre or Casanare: there is a lot of drug money in Antioquia, and some of the politicians involved – for example, Álvaro Uribe’s cousin Mario, who was jailed last week – are well-connected on a national level.

The danger is increasing for the New Rainbow Corporation. Its directors have gotten word that an order to kill them has been issued by the so-called “Envigado Office.” The name, which refers to the Medellín suburb where narcotraffickers long ago set up a “collection office,” is synonymous with organized crime, narcotrafficking and paramilitary activity in Antioquia. At least until recently, the very powerful and feared organization was headed by Medellín paramilitary leader Diego Fernando Murillo, alias “Don Berna.”

Word of a specific threat from the Envigado Office is terrifying, even for a figure like León Valencia, who maintains cordial relations and regular interaction with the Colombian, U.S. and other foreign governments. Colombia badly needs to see its judicial system successfully carry the “para-politics” investigation to its full conclusion. To see it truncated by threats and intimidation would be devastating to Colombian democracy.

Here is a translation of a report posted to its site yesterday by the Popular Training Institute (IPC), a Medellín-based non-governmental organization, explaining the alarming new threats against León Valencia and his colleagues.

“Envigado Office” has ordered the killing of para-politics investigators
4/30/08

The so-called “Envigado Office” has issued an order, it would appear several months ago, to assassinate the investigators from the New Rainbow Corporation who are carrying out academic work on the relations between paramilitary groups and regional politicians, which now have several of them in jail.

“This all seems very serious to me,” said León Valencia, executive director of the New Rainbow Corporation and columnist for several dailies in the country. Based on a source to which he gives full credibility, he learned that the order to kill him and one of the New Rainbow investigators, Laura Bonilla – who along with Claudia López carried out the work on relations between paramilitarism and the country’s political class – came from the so-called “Envigado Office.”

This criminal organization, which acts from this locality in the southern Aburrá Valley [the Medellín metropolitan area], since more than a decade ago was under the command of Diego Fernando Murillo Bejarano, alias don Berna, now held at the jail in Cómbita, Boyacá under the “Justice and Peace” process. Since last year it has been coordinated by Carlos Mario Aguilar, alias Rogelio, who has surrounded himself with criminal groups who act according to paramilitary methods. These are based in Itagüi municipality, in the south of the metropolitan area.

In a conversation with the IPC Press Agency, the investigator explained that on April 4, a trusted person – the brother of a disappeared person – approached a paramilitary member related to the Envigado Office to seek information about his relative. The paramilitary told him that he had no information, and spontaneously commented to him that “the situation was going to get very hard, because there had been an order to kill León Valencia and Laura Bonilla.”

“We found out from third parties that this organization had an assassination order against us. We found out by pure accident, which is worrisome,” said Valencia.

The death order is added to several intimidating acts and threatening expressions, such as e-mail, intimidating phone calls and theft of computer equipment from the Corporation’s Bogotá offices. This series of aggressions increased in the second half of last year, when the results of their investigation of Colombia’s “new political map” – which showed a high influence of paramilitary groups – were released.

Most troubling is that the threats and intimidation worsened when the investigators increased their focus on Antioquia, showing that revealing ties between regional politicians and paramilitaries has become a security problem, and that powerful illegal armed structures remain active in the Aburrá Valley.

But in the department, the New Rainbow Corporation not only has to suffer death threats. Legal actions have also been taken against them, among them one initiated by the governor of Antioquia, Luis Alfredo Ramos Botero, against investigator Claudia López for libel and slander. The governor is one of the politicians who, according to the academic investigation, benefited from an atypical voting pattern in various regions of the department, above all in zones with a high paramilitary presence, which may indicate possible agreements to favor him electorally.

In addition to the Antioquia governor’s critics, a regional daily newspaper’s editorial pages have questioned their methodology and faulted them for a lack of academic rigor. Valencia defended the investigation by indicating that it has been so precise that it has coincided with the judicial declarations of ex-paramilitaries and several of the ex-congresspeople.

“They are polemical about our validity and rigor, but neither is purely academic; the reality is that the judicial system has accepted these investigations and the actors themselves have recognized this situation. So the debate has now been settled,” Valencia explained. From both processes originated the phenomenon known as “para-politics,” which today has 31 congresspeople in jail and 63 under investigation. Of those, five from Antioquia are in prison and at least six more are being investigated.

The hard-line language of the arguments against the results of the academic investigation of the political class’s relations with the paramilitary project may have incited the Envigado Office’s decision to order the New Rainbow investigators’ death. Valencia is conscious of this, and sees a contradiction.

“The paramilitaries themselves are confessing, the people are accusing the politicians, so I don’t understand why they threaten us, who carried out a social and academic investigation of the issue. This position is a little strange,” argued the Corporation’s executive director, since he recognizes that there is a peace process with the government and that evidence indicates that some sectors of paramilitarism are still committing crimes.

One explanation could center on various social and political sectors’ pronouncements against the investigation, which could be the fuel that stimulates the illegal armed groups to use paramilitary methods against any whom they view as an adversary who does not fit within the dominant ideological parameters.

For now, the New Rainbow Corporation’s investigators are evaluating the risk from the threats and the order from the “Envigado Office.” For the moment they have in their favor a pronunciation from the President of the Republic indicating that their investigative work is legitimate, though controversial and critical of the government; they also have a commitment from the authorities to improve the threatened people’s protection if they decide to stay in the country.

The situation is not easy for the para-politics investigators, and because it is a tension generated from Antioquia it becomes a challenge to the authorities. It makes clear that the so-called “Envigado Office” is not a myth, as some authorities have claimed. And it calls for decisive actions against the Office – to arrest those behind it and to dismantle it, once and for all.

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