Them

James [00.00.03] The meeting took place at Las Colinas, a bar and motel leisure complex that had been commandeered by paramilitaries. It was on the outskirts of Segovia, the Andean town that, at that moment in the early 2000s, was the cradle of Colombian blood gold.

Years later, two of the former union leaders who were there at that meeting, Leonel Carvalho and Guillermo Vélez, who we met last episode, took us there.

At the time of the meeting, the complex was a bustling spot known for lively parties. But when we went there, it was a relic of a time long since past. The motel’s ceiling had collapsed, and the walls were crumbling. The floor was a mix of tall weeds and broken tiles. The remains of a flume jutted over a malaria pit of algae and sludge that was once the pool.

As we walked the grounds, they told us what happened that day, a day etched in their memories forever. 

Guillermo [00.01.11] Tenían centinelas en todos los alrededores armados con armas largas, como si fuera un ejército.

James [00.01.21] The paramilitaries had sentinels armed with long guns posted around the site, just like an army, Guillermo told us.

Leonel [00.01.28] Nos fueron requisando. Entonces entramos acá por esta puerta y allá nos estaba esperando. 

James [00.01.35] The guards patted them and the other union leaders down, then ushered them in, Leonel said. Inside, waiting at a table running across the dance floor, was a lineup of paramilitary commanders. 

Leonel [00.01.48] Varios personajes de comandantes de las autodefensas, entre ellos Macaco quein fue el que nos citó.

James [00.01.58] Among them, Carlos Mario Jimenez, alias “Macaco.”

Macaco was a drug trafficker and a warlord. He was pudgy, middle-aged, with a beefy, sagging face, and a gruff beard. And, as Leonel and Guillermo described for us, he dominated the meeting.

Guillermo [00.02.15] Lo primero que dicen es nosotros somos el Bloque Central Bolívar. 

James [00.02.23] “We are the Central Bolivar Bloc,” Macaco began, identifying his paramilitary faction within the AUC – or United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, which had taken over Segovia in the months prior. 

Guillermo [00.02.37] Los hemos citado. Pero si ustedes le han dicho algo a la Policía o al Ejército y aquí aparece uno de ellos, ustedes se mueren ,

James [00.02.49] “We have called you here, but if anyone tells the police or the army about this, then you’ll die,” he said.

Guillermo [00.02.55] Todo el mundo tiene que colaborar. Y el que no quiera, nosotros nos las arreglamos con él.

James [00.03.02] “If anyone goes to report us to the Attorney General’s Office, we’ll know. We have our people there who will tell us, and we’ll fix them.”

It was a chilling message. But it was what he said next that hit the hardest. 

Leonel [00.03.16] Y nos dijeron que ya ellos habían hecho unos acuerdos con la administración, porque ellos necesitaban financiarse. 

James [00.03.25] The union had just held an assembly for the workers and pensioners of their company, Frontino Gold Mines. There, they had all voted to take control of the company for themselves. However, Macaco told them, the paramilitaries had come to their own agreement with the Frontino management. The union was not to interfere in this process, he said. If they didn’t keep quiet and relinquish their claim on the company, then they would have to fix them as well. 

The message was clear: Frontino, which had been the social and economic heart of Segovia for 150 years, would soon belong to them.

From InSight Crime, this is The Shadow of El Dorado, a series about the intricate web of corruption, violence, and complicity behind the gold trade in Segovia. And the story of how this once-thriving Colombian mining town became a mafia stronghold. 

I’m James Bargent

Mat [00.04.22] And I’m Mat Charles

This episode, we will explore how organized crime and Colombia’s conflict took over Segovia. This is Episode 3: Them. 

The paramilitaries had first announced to the world that Segovia was theirs long before the meeting at Las Colinas, years, even, before Macaco had entered Colombia’s war. 

It was a Friday afternoon. The day’s work was done, and the town’s miners were packing into the bars, billiard halls, and brothels to begin the weekend. But then… the power went down, and the phones went dead. A convoy of pickup trucks rolled into town. They were filled with heavily armed men, many in military fatigues that bore no insignia.

They opened fire into crowds of civilians, and pulled people out of their houses to put bullets in their heads. 

By the time they rolled out again, 46 people were dead. Some of them were targeted, their names written down on a list. Others, though, were just in the wrong place at the wrong time – Segovia, Colombia, November 11, 1988. 

The slaughter was carried out by a group calling themselves Muerte a Revolucionarios del Nordeste – Death to the Revolutionaries of the Northeast – a reference to Northeast Antioquia, where Segovia is located.

At that time, such groups were springing up across Colombia. Ostensibly, they were set up by terrorized landowners to fight the leftist guerrillas that extorted them with demands for what was euphemistically called vacuna, or a vaccine. But in reality, many were mercenaries for business elites, corrupt politicians, the police, the military… and drug traffickers. 

Soon after the massacre, Muerte a Revolucionarios no longer really existed. But since that moment, there have always been paramilitaries in Segovia. Each generation a new mutation, but always with the same cryptic moniker: ellos, them. And they always had Segovia’s gold in their sights. 

At the time of the meeting at Las Colinas in 2003, they were at the peak of their power, in Segovia and in Colombia. They had not only captured territories all around the country, they had captured politicians, parts of the attorney general’s office, the police, and the military. And, as they would later testify, they had helped elect the president of Colombia himself: Alvaro Uribe.

Alvaro Uribe 00.07.15] Thank you, Mr. President, for this warm welcome. We need the support of your country, the support of your government, your personal support for my country to solve problems of violence, economic and social problems.

Mat [00.07.31] Colombia has a habit of electing either a war president or a peace president, often one after the other. Álvaro Uribe was a war president. He was elected in 2002 on the promise of taking the fight to the guerrillas, who by that point had been trying to topple the state for 40 years. 

George W Bush [00.07.50] Mr President, welcome to the Oval Office. It is my honor to welcome this good man, this friend of freedom, to the Oval Office. I have been incredibly impressed by his vision for a peaceful Colombia.

Mat [00.08.06] Uribe’s war would be bankrolled by the administration of US President George W Bush. To the US government, Uribe was the consummate international ally. He was one of Bush’s most prominent supporters in his global “War on Terror,” adapting its rhetoric for his own civil conflict with Marxist insurgents. And he was a fervent missionary for the US’ economic vision of unleashed markets and frictionless trade. 

So enamored were the Americans with Uribe they paid little attention to the disquieting intelligence reports they’d received for years about his alleged ties to drug trafficking. And, as diplomatic cables later revealed, they dismissed his connections to the paramilitaries while he was governor of Antioquia as something that “goes with the job.” 

Within months of taking office, Uribe announced a policy that would become one of his most important – and controversial – legacies: peace negotiations with the paramilitaries. From the beginning, it was a strange set-up. The paramilitaries were government proxies and Uribe, as far as they were concerned, was their guy. 

Still, formal talks began in July 2003. And by the time Macaco’s paramilitaries arrived in Segovia, negotiations were progressing rapidly. As were the fears about what that might mean for Colombia.

Newscast [00.09.34 In Colombia, right-wing paramilitary forces have pledged to demobilize by the end of 2005. If the promise is kept, more than 10,000 fighters will be disarmed. Many of them were responsible for some of the worst massacres in Colombian history. 

Mat [00.09.50] Still, when Macaco summoned the Frontino unionists to that meeting at Las Colinas, his involvement in the peace talks had actually given Leonel and Guillermo hope. Just the month before, the union had made a move to claim legal ownership of Frontino based on the Act of New York – the document in which Frontino’s departing foreign owners ordered the company’s assets to be transferred to its workers and pensioners to pay off their labor and pension debts.

Leonel [00.10.19] Entonces pensamos que también iban a respetar el proceso que nosotros traíamos de recuperar la empresa para nosotros.

Mat [00.10.28] They thought that because the paramilitaries were making peace with the Uribe government, they would respect the union’s process to recover Frontino, Leonel tells us.

Leonel [00.10.37] Y no, la cuestión fue totalmente diferente.

Mat [00.10.41] But, he said, “the issue was totally different.” During the meeting, Macaco told them the agreement they had struck with Frontino was precisely because they were demobilizing. In other words, Macaco saw Frontino as part of his pension plan. But that was not all. Before the meeting ended, Macaco turned to a man dressed in civilian clothes.

Leonel [00.11.05] Mucho antes de terminar la reunión, apareció para ellos, era el doctor. Les presentamos al doctor

Mat [00.11.14] We want to introduce you to “El Doctor” – the Doctor – Macaco said. Doctor is a generic honorific for lawyers and other qualified professionals. El Doctor was there to talk to them about Frontino and the future of the company, he told them. 

El Doctor spoke briefly, making them bristle with comments about how Frontino had done nothing for the people of Segovia and it was time for something new. They left the meeting reeling from the devastating realization that the paramilitaries now stood between them and their dreams of owning the company. But they thought little about the mysterious El Doctor and what his appearance at the meeting meant.

Until, that is, the next day. 

Leonel and Guillermo were called to a union meeting at the mechanical workshop. There, they were introduced to Raul Lalinde. Lalinde, they were told, was one of a team of special advisors sent to represent President Uribe in the matter of Frontino Gold Mines. 

Leonel recognized him straight away. It was El Doctor, the same man Macaco had introduced them to at the motel.

Suddenly, they understood: Lalinde was there to push through plans to liquidate and sell off Frontino Gold Mines. And it wasn’t just Macaco that was in on this deal, it was the government too.

Leonel [00.12.40] Aparecieron ellos por allá, y que eran enviados por el presidente Álvaro Uribe Vélez asesorando la liquidación. Esa liquidación fue arreglada de tal forma de que nosotros no nos diera la oportunidad defendernos y ya tenían todo listo)

Mat [00.12.55]When El Doctor Lalinde and Uribe’s other presidential advisors showed up supporting the liquidation, everything became clear to us, Leonel said: the liquidation was a fix, everything had already been arranged.

As the peace process progressed, Frontino was placed into liquidation – almost exactly a year after the meeting at Las Colinas in 2003. And Macaco checked on what he believed was his investment. At one point, he led a small convoy of trucks to the gate of Providencia, Frontino’s most lucrative mine. 

“Let us in,” Macaco told the guard. “I want to see what I’m going to buy.” 

Startled but resolute, the guard asked if he had a permit to enter. And after Macaco told him he didn’t, the guard held his ground: no permit, no entry. 

One person who was there that day told us that Macaco smiled. “Good man,” he said to the guard. “When I run this place, you can work for me.” 

And then he left.

A month later, Macaco demobilized along with almost 2,000 of his men, handing the government 1,200 rifles, 500 grenades, 13 rockets – and two helicopters, each fitted with a 50mm machine gun.

James [00.14.26] When we heard the story of Macaco’s Frontino deal, it turned our investigation on its head.

Until that point, we had looked at mining in Segovia as two separate worlds. There were the big mines run by the big companies – first Frontino, then later Gran Colombia Gold, now known as Aris Mining. Controversial, definitely; exploitative, quite possibly; but legal and regulated. Then there were the informal miners, who were the economic and social heart of the town, but existed in an unregulated, grey area that had been filled by mining mafias and armed groups like Macaco’s paramilitary army. 

With Macaco’s deal, though, those two worlds began to merge in one. And our concept of blood gold began to expand. We realized it was not only gold extracted from informal mines that was tainted by conflict, corruption, and criminality, but also the gold produced by major corporations.

But that story left us with a lot of questions: What was Macaco’s Frontino deal, exactly, and what became of it? What was his relationship to Lalinde? And did President Uribe know what was happening here? 

In search of some answers, we tracked down a former Frontino general manager. 

Mario Piedrahita lives in a neat middle-class house, in a quiet middle-class suburb in the city of Medellín. It looked like he had left Segovia far behind. He had a little yapping dog and a prim wife, who happily chatted with us about Christmas holidays and family visits. 

But Mario is of the same breed as the old unionists, Leonel Carvalho and Guillermo Vélez – he is one of the Frontino men. And he had not left Segovia, or Frontino, behind. They were right there, in his back room, packed into cardboard boxes. 

Looking at his boxes with an exhausted pride, he began to thumb through the documents, thousands and thousands of pages that have filled not only his past but also his present. Mario has the gaunt look and wiry frame of a man who has seen too much of life, but his eyes lit up with the thrill of a righteous fight when he talked about Frontino. 

Mario [00.17.07] Hay una cantidad de documentos de toda esa lucha que hemos tenido durante 12 años. Hay amenazas. Hay documentos importtantes, otros no tan importantes

James [00.17.21] He showed us the files that explain why he has the Frontino boxes in the first place: over 1,000 notarized signatures of ex-Frontino workers and pensioners granting him the power to lead the legal struggle to deliver on the promises of the Act of New York.

But for Mario, leading this fight has not only meant documenting the legal claims of the workers and pensioners to Frontino, it has also meant documenting the shadowy characters they were up against. Among them was Raul Lalinde, advisor to both Macaco and President Uribe on the Frontino issue. 

Mario [00.17.57] Cuando estaban en este proceso de liquidación, de vender la empresa, el presidente de la Republica, el doctor Álvaro Uribe Vélez, tenia unos asesores. Estos aseres enfrentaron alla en el pueblo a los trabajadores

James [00.18.11] Mario told us how Lalinde and Uribe’s other advisors would meet with the workers and pensioners to push plans to liquidate and sell Frontino. While they didn’t explicitly mention Macaco and the paramilitaries, the Frontino men knew Lalinde was also advising Macaco, and fear hung heavy over these meetings.

Mario [00.18.31] Ahi no hay nada claro, todo es oscuro

James [00.18.35] “There is nothing clear about what happened, everything is murky,” he said. 

Our own investigation into Lalinde found deep ties between him and Macaco. We uncovered evidence that he had been a frontman for businesses tied to Macaco; that he had acted as an intermediary in dealings between politicians and Macaco’s paramilitaries; and that had been charged with crimes related to forcible displacement in a case involving lands stolen by Macaco’s paramilitary bloc.

It was Lalinde that proves, the Frontino men say, that what happened with Frontino was part of a criminal conspiracy. 

Mario turns to a report that shows they tried to warn President Uribe about this, to make sure he knew that they had inserted themselves into the Frontino liquidation process. It was a briefing the union had prepared for Uribe and pressed into his hands when he made a rare personal appearance in Segovia in 2008.

It tells Uribe that since they discovered the Act of New York and started agitating for the company to be handed over to the workers and pensioners, union members have suffered murders, threats, displacement, and false imprisonment. It alleges that one of Uribe’s special advisors was siphoning off money from the company payroll. And describes how another – Raul Lalinde – had introduced himself as an advisor to Macaco and his paramilitaries.

“Señor Presidente Álvaro Uribe Vélez,” it reads. “We can see that this liquidation woke the ambitions of people both known and unknown, who have blinded people into thinking the only solution to resolve this conflict is the sale of the company; but we know that the only possibility they have to cover up the corruption seen over the last 33 years is by auctioning the company off, and not to the highest bidder, and so closing the possibility of any investigation.”

They never heard back. 

We tried to contact Uribe, but he and his handlers did not respond to our questions. 

Lalinde was harder to find, but through commercial records we traced him to a series of businesses around the city of Medellín.

 So we’ve come to the address listed for his mining company and we’ve found a cement plant…

All we’ve got is, this looks like a freight company or something, and these car dealerships…

Mat [00.21.22] Maybe it just doesn’t exist.

James [00.21.25] Yep, quite possible.

137…organic nails…I don’t think this is the business we’re looking for.

After chasing a few dead-ends, we tracked down him down to a heavy machinery company whose offices were at an industrial park on the outskirts of the city.

Estamos buscando el señor Raul Lalinde

We got through the gates, and up to his office, where…. 

Hola buenas tardes, estamos buscando a Raúl Lalinde. 

ANON [0022.01] Ah Raúl no se encuentra. 

James [00.22.04] Ah pero su oficina es aquí?  Él va a estar más tarde hoy? 

ANON [00.22.10] De pronto mañana

…they told us he was out, and wouldn’t be back until after we’d left town. We left him a handwritten note, and that was enough to get a phone call from his lawyer, who we sent a detailed list of questions. But we got no answers in return. 

Around the time the union handed their urgent report to Uribe, the president found himself and his peace process under fire. 

Uribe was facing a backlash because numerous paramilitary leaders, including Macaco, were still running militias and criminal networks after demobilizing  So, Uribe kicked them out of the peace process. Then, in May 2008, he extradited them to the United States.

Newscast [00.22.59] Arriving on US Soil, 14 senior paramilitary leaders from Colombia extradited on drugs related charges

James [00.23.07] Macaco’s deal to take over Frontino was dead…Or was it?

Mat [00.23.14] The extradition of Macaco and the other commanders reshaped the Colombian underworld at a stroke. Gone were the leaders of the most powerful drug trafficking groups in Colombia, many of whom were starting to get intimately involved in the gold trade.

But it may not have spelled the end for Macaco’s Frontino deal. 

Back at Mario’s house, he dug out a copy of a contract from one of his boxes. Dated a week after Macaco’s extradition, the contract essentially rented out a sector of Frontino’s most productive mine, Providencia. That sector would become known as La Empalizada.

Mario [00.23.52] Lo que pasa es que el sistema de explotación de nosotros en Segovia, en la empresa de Frontino, es un sistema que se llama cámaras y pilares 

Mat [00.23.59] La Empalizada, Mario explains, was different from anything that had been done previously in Segovia mining – at least what had been done legally. Frontino was an industrial scale, mechanized mining operation. They worked using what is known as room and pillar mining, where they would dig “rooms” out of the rock to get at the ore it contains, but leave giant pillars to prevent the ceiling collapsing. 

Even though the pillars contained a lot of gold, they would be left untouched until the mine was exhausted, at which point the miners could close it down, bit by bit, blowing up the columns behind them before finally sealing off the mine. 

Mario [00.24.38] Ellos no, sacan las cuñas, reemplazan por unos palos. Por eso la llaman empalizada. 

Mat [00.24.43] In La Empalizada, though, they took another approach. Working with the most rudimentary tools, they blew up the pillars to get at the gold that the industrial approach had left behind, and replaced the rock columns with wooden planks. Basically, they worked like what were known as machuqueros – the gangs of mine robbers that had invaded the Frontino mines to steal their ore: They went for the quickest, easiest gold they could find. To hell with safety or the future of the mine. 

This was not so much mining as it was looting. These people were sacking Providencia, Mario said, and they were being contracted to do it. He flicked through the contract to the back page to show us who “these people” were.

Mario [00.25.29] Aquí está uno de los contratos que hizo la Superintendencia por intermedio del liquidador con con con el señor Toño Marrano. 

Mat [00.25.35] There were two signatures. One, was the government-appointed Frontino liquidator who had approved the contract. The other was a retired Frontino miner. But, Mario said, they were just the public face of the operation. 

Mario [00.25.50] Detras de este contracto era Jairo Hugo, el tzar de oro. 

Mat [00.25.53] The real power behind La Empalizada was Jairo Hugo Escobar,  a man who would go on to be known as the Gold Tzar of Segovia. He was a business partner of Macaco and his paramilitaries. He was even identified in some reports as the inheritor of Macaco’s mining titles. 

Many in Segovia point to this as evidence that the Frontino mines ended up in Macaco’s hands after all. But the story we uncovered after obtaining witness testimonies given to police, prosecutors and in court, though, painted a more complex – and opportunistic – picture. 

Jairo Hugo had worked with Macaco’s paramilitaries as a local level drug trafficker and financed machuquero operations. The La Empalizada contract came about not because of Macaco’s negotiations with Frontino, but because when his machuqueros tunneled right into the main fronts of Providencia, instead of burning down their operation, the government appointed liquidator made a deal to legalize it. 

That deal not only made those involved very rich very quickly, it also established a new model for the Frontino mines, a model based, not on modern, technical mining, but on the practices of small-scale informal miners – and of the very same machuqueros that had been stealing from the mines.

Afterwards, the Frontino mines were carved up and rented out to mining operations working in this way. From this point on, Frontino, and later Gran Colombia, were more rent collectors than mining companies. And among their contractors were more shadowy characters with connections to machuqueros, to the paramilitaries … and to Macaco.

James [00.27.44] I found one of these contractors not far from Mario’s house, although at the time I was working on a story for a print outlet, so the audio for the interview we did is not the best. 

Sat behind his desk of his glass-walled office in a shining tower block in the posh part of Medellin, Julio Erazo’s bullish shoulders hunched into his bullish neck. He had a fierce stare that was both earnest and menacing. His close-cropped head crumpled with tension. And then, he said the quiet part out loud. 

Julio [00.28.17] Más hacia atrás de eso,  James, yo te voy a contar algo. Con un gran riesgo, que no sé cómo lo vayas a colocar.

James [00.28.30] “I’m going to tell you something, James,” he started, “and this is risky, I don’t know how you are going to see this -I have never told it to a journalist before. 

Julio [00.28.42] Tengo un lado oscuro de mi pasado, yo soy desmovilizado de un grupo autodefensa.

James [00.28.48] “I have a dark side to my past. I am a demobilized member of a paramilitary group.” 

Julio then told me he’d joined the ranks of Macaco’s paramilitary bloc in 2001, not as a fighter but as an administrator, managing finances and logistics. Two years later, when Macaco set up a new base in Segovia, Julio followed.

What he found there was the chaos of La Batea – the paramilitary-backed ransacking of the Frontino mines by machuqeros that we talked about last episode. Julio, though, who was a numbers person, recognized the economic potential in gold mining. 

Julio [00.25.29] Esta gran riqueza, nos puede llevar a ser bien administrada.

James [00.29.35] Where others saw quick profits, Julio saw a long-term business. He went to his commanders and told them they should stop the looting and organize the miners. But they didn’t listen, he said.

Julio [00.29.47] Entonces para uno era muy difícil y tuve problemas, muy fuertes, muy marcados. Llegué prácticamente a ser expulsado de esa región. 

James [00.29.57] He kept on insisting – to the point where it started causing him serious problems in the organization, he said. But to no avail.  

After demobilizing with Macaco in Segovia in 2005, he struck out on his own. At least, that is the story he told me.

Soon, Julio caught wind of the Frontino contracts. As some were going to retired miners, he partnered with a Frontino pensioner, he said, and in 2008, they landed their first contract.

He recruited for his team the same people who had been sacking the mines under the protection of the paramilitaries – the machuqueros. 

Julio [00.30.34] Entonces los tengo vinculados y les doy lo que les gusta a ellos. Les defiendo los que lo que les gusta a ellos.

James [00.30.43] He convinced them to work with him, he said, because he understood them, he defended their way of working. And he gave them what they wanted – a cut of the gold instead of a wage. 

But he still had to clear his new business with his old AUC comrades. Many of them had lingered in the area after the demobilization, and they had formed a new iteration of them. They had shed their counter-insurgent facade and were now interested in just one thing – money.

Julio [00.31.13] Pero nosotros paralelamente, así como hemos crecido,  siempre tuvimos un, digámoslo así, un karma cargando encima y era el estar sometidos a un modelo extorsionario, 

James [00.31.27] It was karma, Julio said. He was able to stay in 2008, because there were still paramilitary commanders that he knew. But, he stresses, his position was the same as anyone else, just a normal citizen.

Julio [00.31.43] Te quedas, pero igual ya sabes como es la sistema, pagas extorsion, pagas vacuna 

James [00.31.48] They said to him, “Ok, you can stay, but you know how this system works – you pay the vacuna – the vaccination – employing the same term the guerrillas used to refer to their extortion of landowners. 

Even though he just had a short-term contract for a tiny corner in a bad sector of the mine, Julio went in with the intention of “doing things right,” he said – unlike the other contractors who had the idea of simply grabbing as much gold as they could get however they could get it.

Throughout our conversation, Julio had a sincerity about him, an earnestness beyond that air of latent menace that accompanies most conversations with current or ex criminals. He painted his story as one of redemption, of crossing from the underworld to the legal world and bringing a group of illegal miners with him. But he also knew his would never be a simple story to sell.

Julio [00.32.43] Yo siempre le digo a cualquiera de la institución, yo sé que ustedes se sientan conmigo y ustedes ven dos personas,

James [00.32.52] Whenever he met with the government, he said, they looked at him with suspicion.  “They always see this other person sitting there as well,” Julio said. “They always see the shadow of my past.”

When I met Julio, I didn’t know about the Frontino story, at least not about Macaco and his deal; about the presidential/paramilitary advisor El Doctor Lalinde; and about La Empalizada – the contract handed out to a mobster and his machuqueros that marked a massive shift from long-term mining to short-term plunder. 

So I didn’t ask him a lot of questions that I would have had we talked again later. Like why his commanders would have rejected his plans to get into legal mining in Frontino. Wasn’t Macaco himself trying to do such a deal? Or about what came first, the contract or the mine, in other words, did his operation start out as a machuquero invasion like La Empalizada? And if so, how does that fit into his idea of ‘doing things right’? 

I also didn’t know as much about Julio as I would learn later. So I didn’t ask him why, if he was such a nobody in the paramilitaries, he would be at Macaco’s side on foreign trips for delegations of top paramilitaries, or act as Macaco’s spokesperson, representing his political front after the demobilization. Or why he would still be working for Macaco just months before getting his first Frontino contract. Or … about the rumors in Segovia that he is Macaco’s in-law, a relative of his ex-wife.

We tried to contact Julio many times after I did that first interview with him. On the last occasion, I sent him all of those questions and a few more. He never responded. 

For all our lingering questions, though, we found no concrete evidence to tie Julio or his mining businesses to Macaco today. Nor could we trace any direct connections between Macaco and La Empalizada and the other Frontino contracts.

But while the contractors might not have inherited Macaco’s Frontino deal, they did inherit the world it left behind, a world where the differences between legal and illegal mining and between legitimate business and organized crime had been rendered all but meaningless. And where the riches of Frontino were fair game for anyone cut-throat enough to play for them. 

And while Macaco didn’t end up buying the Frontino mines, those mines would soon be sold. And the new owners did have close connections to another major player in the Frontino drama: Colombia’s then President Alvaro Uribe.

That’s next time on the Shadow of El Dorado