A hoax, a mistake and a massacre: 20 years after the kidnapping of the deputies of Valle del Cauca, justice is still not served

The year with the highest number of kidnappings in Colombian history left for memory an emblematic case of this heinous crime, which ended in massacre. On a day like today 20 years ago, on April 11, 2002, members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), stronger than ever before, deceived all institutions and media in the city of Cali into kidnapping the deputies of the Valle del Cauca Assembly.

That day the deputies had scheduled to debate the sale of the Valle Tourism Corporation (Cortuvalle), as managed to rebuild the National Center for Historical Memory in the report The Case of the Valley Assembly. By 10:00 in the morning, most of them were already in the compound and were waiting for others to complete quorum. By then, a circular had been adopted stating that those who did not attend would not receive payment for the day.

But they could not argue because, while they were setting up the session, around 10:15, when the building guard changed shifts, eight uniformed and armed men entered the Assembly, claiming that they belonged to the “anti-explosive unit of the First Numancia Battalion” and were going to defuse a bomb.

A tall man entered the Carlos Holmes Trujillo hall and told President Juan Carlos Narváez that they should evacuate due to a terrorist alert. The officials were led to the Governorate Park and the deputies were taken through another door, to a special vehicle for their transfer.

It was a bus, where they took Jairo Hoyos, Ramiro Echeverry, Nacianceno Orozco, Alberto Quintero, Sigifredo López, Edison Pérez, Silvio Valencia, Rufino Varela, the deputies who were in the hall at that time. The alleged military reiterated that it was only protection for them, other officials should be protected by their own means.

The other deputies Hector Arismendy, Francisco Giraldo and Carlos Barragán had arrived a few minutes later, but not enough to save themselves. In the midst of their bewilderment, one of the supposed soldiers at the access gate had them picked up in the bus, half a block away, to supposedly provide them with protection.

Two men had dressed in Telepathic vests and were recording everything that happened. This is an accessory to the enormous deception that the FARC had built to commit the largest political kidnapping in its history, executed by the Manuel Cepeda Vargas Urban Front and the Arturo Ruiz Mobile Block of that structure.

Another of those resources to build the deception was to make a sound, but not destructive, explosion that would generate greater chaos in the center of the city and allow the guerrillas to leave more easily. Two of them proceeded to install black powder in the bathroom on the second floor and perform the detonation before the escape.

They did not find the bathroom and they collided with the deputy mayor of the police Carlos Alberto Cendales, who had been in the institution for seven years and was part of the security of the Assembly. They asked him where the bathroom was and he, according to testimonies of Gustavo Arbeláez Cardona, head of the Urban Front, asked them what they were looking for it for.

The guerrillas, pretending to be from the Army, told him there was a bomb. Cendales told them that he was accompanying them to review the situation, but apparently he had already noticed the deception. He tried to disarm one of the men, but at that time he was stabbed and killed with his throat cut.

By that time the bus with the deputies had already left, supposedly for the Third Brigade to protect them. Inside the bus, politicians looked at each other surprised by the whole situation, but they even joked, confident in what they thought was a security situation, not knowing that they were already under the power of the FARC.

Other policemen entered the Assembly and found Cendales' body. One of his companions, unable to lift the second lieutenant's body, went out into the streets frustrated and fell to the floor while crying in disconsolation, as seen in the images of the documentary The Day the Deputies of Journalist Diego Medina were kidnapped.

Even then, they even said that a soldier had shot a policeman, but it was already known that what had happened was not the work of the military forces. The journalist Diego Parra called the president of the Assembly, apparently, and told him that what had happened was a kidnapping.

Deputy Edison Pérez had also noticed the situation, seeing that the route on which the bus they had been boarded was going had taken the route of the Hotel Intercontinenta l, to leave Cali and not to the Brigade. He asked the alleged commander to clarify where they were going. Alias J.J. in response told them: “We are the FARC.”

The bus headed towards the Peñas Blancas village in the village of Pichinde, but it was stranded several kilometers before arriving and they had to continue on board a Turbo truck. Along the way, the guerrillas took more vehicles to move the men who couldn't fit in that other car.

When they reached the village, they negotiated the release of non-deputy officials who had boarded the bus Doris Hernández, Juan Muñoz, Gloria Charry and Silvio Valencia, to which the guerrillas agreed. When they returned to the city, they found the soldiers who were on foot, and on their way to liberation.

The guerrillas had established a security circle of nearly 300 men to prevent the kidnapping from being frustrated. For that reason, the Army decided on an air landing to try to free the deputies with troops of the 37th Counter Guerrilla Battalion, in three Black Hawk helicopters and one Harpy helicopter as support in the landing sector, rebuilt the CNMH.

A fierce RCN News team that had covered the situation of the Assembly, pursued the bus to try to get the full information of the facts. In the Army rescue operation, Walter Lopez, the team driver was killed. Cameraman Hector Sandoval was injured by a leg impact. The journalist who accompanied them, Juan Bautista, tried to seek help and warn that they were journalists and not criminals, but it was not worth saving his companion.

By that time in 2002, the FARC had just abandoned a negotiating table with the government of Andrés Pastrana that allowed them territorial control in several areas of the country, such as El Valle, Nariño and Cauca. In addition, there was an atmosphere of pressure for humanitarian exchange, about which Jorge Briceño, alias Mono Jojoy, had declared: “If you don't want the exchange for your soldiers and police, you'll have to go for politicians.”

Hector Julio Villarraga Cristancho, known by the alias “Grillo”, commander of the FARC's 60th Front, declared in 2020 before the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP), that the Urban Front took the deputies kidnapped by Farallones and handed them over to that front in mid-May in very poor conditions.

They had been subjected to long days of up to 12 hours of hiking through the jungles of the southern Colombian Pacific, with little food of legumes and grains and punishments bordering on torture. At first they were divided into two groups through various river channels in the departments of Cauca and Nariño.

Under pressure from the Army, they regrouped them and placed them in the custody of 25 members of the 60th Front. By 2007, each of the deputies had a guard assigned to accompany him all the time, on the occasion of becoming the executioner if there was a possibility of losing control of the kidnapped person. The order of the Monkey Jojoy, in charge of this kidnapping, was that in case of assault they should shoot the deputies.

The guerrillas prevented them from having privacy, they had to relieve themselves in front of others, they enchanted them as punishment for beds or trees, while in turn suffering the inclement weather, until June 18, 2007.

That day, around noon, a sentry alerted the Front about the irregular incursion of a lone guerrilla fighter. The man had shot and threatened to cross the area. Alias Grillo thought that he was a deserter in the service of the Army who were going to ambush them and gave the order they had had had at the trigger finger in recent years.

A flurry of rifle shots that lasted about a minute killed 11 deputies from Valle del Cauca, after five years of kidnapping, while they were bathing. The shots were at close range and only Sigifredo López survived, who at that time was not with the group and remained under kidnapping for two more years.

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