There Are No Dead Here: A Story of Murder and Denial in Colombia

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. (Feb.)