There Are No Dead Here is the untold story of three brave
Colombians who stood up to the paramilitary groups that, starting
in the mid-1990s, decimated the country in the name of
counterinsurgency and drug profits. With the complicity of much of
Colombia's military and political establishment and in a climate of
widespread fear and denial, the paramilitaries massacred, raped,
and tortured thousands, and seized the land of millions of peasants
forced to flee their homes. The United States, more interested in
the appearance of success in its own War on Drugs, largely ignored
them. Few dared to confront them. Drawing on hundreds of hours of
interviews and five years on the ground in Colombia, Maria
McFarland Sanchez-Moreno takes readers from the sweltering Medellin
streets where criminal investigators constantly looked over their
shoulders for assassins on motorcycles, through the countryside
where paramilitaries wiped out entire towns in gruesome massacres,
and into the corridors of the presidential palace in Colombia's
capital, Bogota. Throughout, she tells the interconnected stories
of three very different Colombians bound by their commitment to the
truth. The first is the gregarious Jesus Maria Valle, whose
prophetic warnings about the military's complicity with the
paramilitaries got him killed in 1998. A decade later, Valle's
friend, the shy prosecutor Ivan Velasquez, became an unlikely hero
when his groundbreaking investigations landed a third of the
country's congress in prison for conspiring with paramilitaries,
and put him in the crosshairs of Colombia's then wildly popular
president, US protege Alvaro Uribe. When Uribe's smear campaign
against Velasquez threatened to bury the truth, the scrawny
investigative journalist Ricardo Calderon exposed the lies,
revealing that the paramilitaries' reach extended all the way into
the presidency. Thanks to the efforts of Valle, Velasquez, and
Calderon, Colombians now know the truth about the brutality and
corruption that swept like a lethal virus through the country's
society and political system. And slowly, the country is breaking
free from the paramilitaries' grip.
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