There are biographies that are the recent history of a continent. Personalities that seem designed to ride alone facing titanic challenges from the cradle. It doesn’t matter if it’s Diomedes Díaz with the accordion or Iván Velásquez with the toga.
He debuted as a prosecutor in Pablo Escobar’s Medellín in the early 1990s, he was the star prosecutor who dismantled the structure of Álvaro Uribe’s ‘parapolitics’ and seven years later, in 2018, he ended up expelled from Guatemala with a suitcase with clothes for a week. The hatred towards him was such that at some point Colombia and Guatemala were connected by volcanoes, the Caribbean Sea and spray-painted walls. Those from Colombia read “Iván Velásquez communist” and those from Guatemala added “communist and foreigner.”
Only those who have gone through all this can return at the age of 67 to head the Colombian Ministry of Defense, the most crucial position of the ‘Petro era’. As of August 7, this gray-haired judge with the air of a professor who lost his voice teaching class, will be the new Minister of Defense and the man commissioned by President Gustavo Petro to dismantle one of the most powerful armies in America Latin. The shadowy institution that has marked the course of Colombia in recent decades, whether to confront the guerrillas or to relate to the United States.
Before taking office, Velásquez spent four years in Central America, heading the Commission against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG). Created in 2006, the CICIG was a novel invention of the United Nations that was launched when Guatemala asked for help in the face of the possibility of becoming a failed state, kidnapped by corrupt businessmen, soldiers and politicians. The answer was the creation of a super prosecutor’s office equipped with top-level researchers, financed by international cooperation and shielded from abroad, far from the temptations of bribes. Since its creation, it was directed by combative prosecutors such as the Spanish Carlos Castresana or Velásquez.
During the years he was in office (2014-2018) Velásquez lived like a seminarian locked in a cement bunker and barbed wire in the center of the Guatemalan capital, from where he only left on Sundays to go to mass. He and a group of young prosecutors cracked down on white-collar corruption, pursuing both irregular party funding and public spending on alcohol and celebrity travel. During these years he obtained prison sentences for the former president, Otto Pérez Molina, his former vice president, seven ministers and dozens of deputies and businessmen. Its impact was such that Honduras copied the model (Maccih) and something unprecedented was achieved: for the first time the living conditions in prisons or the harshness of the criminal code became the subject of public debate since presidents, ministers and businessmen began to enter prison.
His investigations, however, crossed the invisible line into family and jailed the son of Guatemalan President Jimmy Morales for three months over unreported bills of less than $10,000. For an evangelical president, proud of the “traditional family”, that was the turning point of a father fed up with the humiliations of the Colombian. For the boy, now 27 years old, it was to stop being a young promise of a soccer team in the first division with aspirations of one day reaching the Guatemalan national team, to become the laughingstock of a country that reminded him that his level sport did not go beyond the bench: that of his team and that of the cell.
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When Morales decided in September 2018 not to let him enter the country after a work trip, the Guatemalans had already made him the falcone Central American. The polls confirmed that 70% of the population approved of his administration and demanded his return, compared to 15% who supported the president. Finally, the CICIG was dissolved in 2019 and with it the chapina spring and a feeling of orphanhood settled in the country.
During his years in office, Velásquez is accused of having imposed terror among the country’s great fortunes, the abuse of preventive detention or the excessive punishment received by the president’s son. The powerful trembled every time the CICIG cars appeared because Velásquez’s objective was not only to investigate and arrest, but also to be seen. That the citizens knew that something was being done and that Guatemala was changing.
“Former Minister Alejandro Sinibaldi (2012-2014) had several drums seized with millions of hidden dollars, dozens of mansions, jewelry, helicopters, boats… Is that normal in a country where half the population lives in poverty?” , the Guatemalan journalist José Luis Font wondered then. “The CICIG had the ability to channel the anger of the population and change it for hope.”
When on the eve of Christmas 2018, this journalist interviewed Velásquez, he had been in exile in El Salvador for three months, where he had arrived with a suitcase “and clothes for a week.” After that, he has held positions related to Human Rights in the United Nations and now he returns to the front line of fire with a colossal challenge: purge the armed forces that gulp when they imagine Petro with the presidential sash across his chest, which you will receive within two weeks. In that interview under the Central American heat, Velásquez was a man committed to the fight against corruption and convinced of creating a culture of justice in such a hostile place. In the final stretch of his last mission as a prosecutor, Velásquez lamented that he had not correctly measured the size of his enemies or the dimension of the challenge he faced. A reflection that could be the bedside book of the new stage.
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