The Palace of Justice siege, a wound still open in Colombia 35 years later
Fabiola Hernández, Libardo Durán's widow, brought flowers to her late husband's grave every day for 30 years at the Cementerio del Sur in the Colombian capital, Bogotá. Five years ago she received a call: the Prosecutor's Office informed her that the place where she had gone to pray all this time was not where the remains of her husband rested, but where her murderers, two M-19 guerrillas who had taken over the Palace of Justice on 6 November 1985, were buried. They did so to protest against institutions which, they understood, were failing to comply with the peace agreements reached between the government and the guerrilla. However, as the hours passed, this led to a massacre, with the army entering the building in blood and fire. Durán was only the escort of magistrate Reyes Echandía: two of the many innocent victims.
Pain and conflict. This is what revived in Colombia the question of the Palace of Justice siege between November 6 and 7 of 1985, which is closer now than ever before. Occupied by M-19 guerrillas, the latter believed that, as they were holding hostages, the government of then President Belisario Betancur would not dare enter by force and would be forced to negotiate after failing to comply with the bilateral ceasefire agreements of 1984. They were wrong. The army recovered the building by firing with everything it had, including tanks. The result, a fire, 98 dead and 11 missing. It is the families of the latter who have since fought another fierce battle to find out what happened to them. Their struggle is today more controversial than ever.
It all started at the end of August last year. Jorge Ricardo Sarmiento, one of the prosecutors in charge of the case, went out to tell the local media that they had identified six of the 11 disappeared. He did so, the young prosecutor explained to Atalayar, happy, thinking that after so many years of pain and uncertainty, Colombian justice could finally shed some light on the anguished families. "I didn't expect so many reactions of rejection," Sarmiento says.
In his opinion, the discovery of these bodies ruled out, at least in these cases, an idea defended over all these years by many of the relatives of the disappeared: that, in the midst of the explosions, the fire, the coming and going of bullets and explosions, they left the Palace alive and were taken by the authorities to one of the adjacent buildings where, mistaken for M-19 guerrillas, they were shot by the military.
The forced disappearance of innocent people from the Palace of Justice in 1985 is more than just a hypothesis. In the countless legal proceedings in the country about the tragedy, the relatives of the 11 disappeared from the Palace and their lawyers have presented all kinds of evidence to support this version, from testimonies of witnesses who saw their relatives leave the Palace on their own feet to recordings from television cameras (including those of TVE) where some of those who would later disappear appear running from one side of the building to the other. Such was the flood of evidence presented that the Colombian Supreme Court was forced to consider it proven that at least a group of survivors were taken to the Casa del Florero, on the corner of the Palace of Justice, and that torture and disappearances took place there by an army that confused innocent officials with the guerrillas. As a result, General Jesús Armando Arias Cabrales, Colonel Edilberto Sánchez Rubiano, and Major William Vásquez were convicted.
" Throughout all these years, I have felt a lot of pain, but the day that the Prosecutor's Office went to the media dismissing the idea of enforced disappearance, I felt as if my mother had died again," told Atalayar Rosa Milena Cárdenas, daughter of Luz Mary Portela, one of the disappeared. In the trial of Arias Cabrales, four witnesses claimed to have seen Portela leave the Palace alive. "My mother was replacing my grandmother, she did not have to be there. I think she suffered the same fate as the rest of the forcibly disappeared," said Cárdenas.
An investigation fraught with errors
In view of the uproar, sources in the Public Prosecutor's Office were quick to point out, against the impression of the relatives, that they did not rule out any idea yet. "We are only guilty of wanting to right the wrongs of the past," they said.
The errors of which the Prosecutor's Office speaks are precisely those that have given rise to situations like that of Hernández, who prayed for three decades at the grave of her husband's executioners. The investigation into what really happened at the Palace of Justice was twisted from the start, something that experts had already warned about in several reports commissioned by the government in the late 1980s and early 1990s. To begin with, the military themselves made the work of identifying the bodies difficult: they removed all the weapons from the bodies, piled them up on the first floor and stripped them all of their clothes and belongings. The result was that, from the beginning, it became almost impossible to distinguish victims from executioners.
The confusion among the bodies, many of them charred by the fire caused by the tank bombings, was complete. The alarm was raised in 2001, when the body of Ana Rosa Castiblanco, the first missing person to be found, was finally identified. "The day they handed me the body of my mother, I felt that everything had become real and she had finally died," says her daughter, Carmen Castiblanco.
In 2005, Cristina Guarín was found in Isabel Ferrer's grave; in 2015 the case of Portela occurred; and this same year, two people were identified in Emiro Sandoval's grave, but neither of them corresponds to his DNA, which has finally been found in Bogotá's Southern Cemetery. And this goes on and on.
One of the last cases was that of Bernardo Beltrán, identified in the tomb of Judge Jorge Alberto Echeverry. "This is a subject that breaks my heart and creates anguish and desolation in me, especially now that my brother has disappeared after 34 years of resignation. Neither the guerrillas, nor the Army, nor the State, nor Legal Medicine are responsible, and we were vilely deceived," says Carlos Eduardo Echeverry, Jorge Alberto's brother.
When Sandra Beltrán, Bernardo Beltrán's sister, tells what she thinks happened to her brother, she stares at the reconstructed Palace of Justice as if he were still there himself, walking the facade from one side to the other: "My brother was taken out of the Palace with his right arm, I think he was limping. I am sure he came out, he was recorded by the television cameras and we recognised him". Like the rest of the family gathered on 6 November in the Plaza de Bolívar, amidst flowers and portraits of their loved ones, Beltrán is demanding the truth. "If he is not a missing person, please explain to me how and why my brother broke free from the military man's arm and went back into the Palace. More than three decades later, his doubts and those of many others remain unanswered.