Luxuries, betrayals and a sex change: the story of the 142 Colombian soldiers who found the so-called FARC guaca

On April 14, it was 19 years since the story of Colombian soldiers who found a guaca while patrolling the Macarena mountain range was known. That day, 147 uniformed men found the hiding place of 40 billion pesos, between dollars and Colombian pesos. Initially, the members of the security forces thought they had encountered that stroke of luck that would change them, and it did, but not in the way they expected. That life full of luxuries and debts that they imagined fell apart when they had to be held accountable to the authorities.

The platoon, consisting of 15 officers, three non-commissioned officers and 129 soldiers, belonging to the companies of the Vulture and Demolisher Army, arrived in an unoccupied camp of the then FARC. There, in search of restoring the freedom of three American contractors kidnapped by that guerrilla, five soldiers found a caneca completely full of money. The military was under the command of Lieutenants Ilich Fernando Mojica Calderón and Jorge Sanabria Acevedo. The abductees were Thomas Howes, Keith Stansell and Marc Gonsalves, who were rescued five years later, in the midst of the successful 'Operation Check'.

At the first finding, about 18 were discovered exactly the same as the first one. Buried 50 centimeters deep, the guerrillas kept hidden the money they earned at the cost of their illegal activities.

“We became enemies of the state, until now they persecute us, they continue to intimidate us because they think we have money hidden from that farc guaca (...) We were captured in 2003, I understand that they are trying us with a 2007 law and I think that the law is not retroactive, but since it was something of the moment for me it is something political (...) 19 years later, some former soldiers are still hunting us,” said a former soldier involved in the events, in an interview with Blu Radio.

The then uniformed man was disqualified from holding public office until 2025 and claims to not know what happened to a large part of his colleagues. Just as some died, others disappeared. The ruling of the Military Court of Justice, for 2017, revealed that it had recovered $1,262 of the $40 billion that was in the FARC coves. It was also reported that 56 of the soldiers escaped with their respective mutiny. One of the soldiers, the media reported, underwent sex reassignment surgery with the money he managed to earn.

86 soldiers, for their part, were sentenced to 43 months and 27 days in prison, in addition, were sentenced to pay 149 prevailing monthly minimum wages. After finding the guaca, several of them asked to be removed from office and recalls the national press, they began to make investments that, with their salaries, they could not easily access. According to the military criminal justice judge, the 147 soldiers committed the crime of embezzlement by appropriation.

“After carrying out the investigations by the commanders, it was possible to see an excessive expenditure of money in both Colombian pesos and dollars in different commercial establishments in the purchase of clothing, goods and services in houses of lenocinio in the city of Popayán, by the members of the aforementioned companies,” he says. the Public Prosecutor's Office file that the situation is corroborated by some of the military officers who “claim that the origin of these monies had its genesis in the meeting of cans owned by the FARC full of money, in the area from which they were extracted, which they distributed, omitting the report of them to the Commanders”, read in the file.

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