There Are No Dead Here

November 6, 2017
The horrific violence in Colombia during the 1990s and 2000s is made painfully palpable in this account of three men who risked their lives to make public the atrocities committed by paramilitary forces and the Colombian government. McFarland Sánchez-Moreno, who had investigated Colombia for Human Rights Watch for six years beginning in 2004, explains that when she arrived in Colombia, 10% of the population—three million people—had been forced to flee their homes due to drug-related violence, and hundreds of thousands more had been killed. She uses the stories of journalist Ricardo Calderón, attorney-activist Jesús María Valle, and prosecutor Iván Velásquez to provide a human dimension to those shocking statistics. All three men persisted—despite threats to themselves and their families—in asserting that paramilitaries, in collusion with the country’s army, were trafficking narcotics and carrying out massacres. Valle paid with his life for his efforts to get the government to stop the paramilitaries from decimating his constituents. Their struggles, McFarland Sánchez-Moreno writes, exposed the “horrors... perpetrated in the name of counterinsurgency,” as well as the corrupt deals that many politicians struck with murderers. This is a necessarily grim narrative about the effects of government corruption in Colombia, with rays of hope to be found in Calderón’s, Valle’s, and Velásquez’s impressive achievements against formidable odds.

January 1, 2018
A deeply informed account of Colombia's decadeslong civil war and the many figures who profited from it.The title of this journalistic account by Peruvian-American activist/writer Sanchez-Moreno, the executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, is richly ironic. The civil war has led to countless deaths, as it pitted rival figures within the government and military against rightist paramilitaries, leftist guerrillas, and the drug cartels--but also produced strange alliances among them. As the author writes, "the war between the government and [revolutionary group] FARC certainly had ideological roots, but after forty years it had become much murkier." Not that things were ever quite clear under the cartel's terror campaign under Pablo Escobar, but one thing was certain: Colombia was a dangerous place to be, and if things are now much improved, there are plenty of ghosts around. At the heart of this story, among other atrocities, is a 1997 massacre of suspected guerrillas by paramilitaries, the investigation of which revealed how interlocked the players were and explained why the Colombian government had been so slow to intervene, even as Colombians were being raped, mutilated, and murdered by the thousands. The president of the nation was also implicated. Among Sanchez-Moreno's crusading heroes, those who brought all this to light, are a government prosecutor and a reporter drawn into the story by a leak from a police intelligence agent, even as other agents "had put together lists of trade unionists and activists and passed those along to paramilitaries." The story winds and unwinds, and although it sometimes staggers under its own weight, the author manages to keep all the threads together. In the end, readers are perhaps more numbed than surprised by how much corruption was revealed in the course of the investigations--though relieved as well that at least some remedies have been effected.An admirable work of journalism in the interest of human rights.

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December 15, 2017
Sanchez-Moreno charts Colombia's history from 1996 through 2010, when a brutal war between the FARC, a left-wing guerrilla movement, and the government had already been raging for decades. Hundreds of thousands of civilians had been killed, with thousands more being held hostage. Ordinary citizens lived in a constant fear of dying, losing families and homes, or being kidnapped. But was the FARC solely to blame for these horrific living conditions? This story follows three Colombiansactivist Jesus Maria Valle, prosecutor Ivan Velasquez, and journalist Ricardo Calderonwho, despite threats against their lives and the lives of their families, decided it was time to shine a light on the atrocities committed not just by the FARC but by the Colombian government as well. They sought to expose that together the paramilitary and the country's army were murdering thousands to feed the hungry drug trade. Sanchez-Moreno spent six years in Colombia as an investigator for the international organization Human Rights Watch, and this well-researched and beautifully told history explains how three civilians rewrote Colombian history.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)