They link General (r) of the Police in case of torture and disappearances in jail Model

[Akrapovic]

The Prosecutor's Office was put in the task of investigating the horror that was experienced in this prison in Bogotá between 1999 and 2003. Apparently, the crimes committed there would have had the participation or collaborations of a general and a retired major, a director and a deputy director of the prison.

What happened at the La Modelo prison in Bogotá between 1999 and 2003, in broad daylight and under the supervision of the criminal authorities and the Inpec guards, was literally the terrain of a rough war between groups of self-defense groups. and guerrillas. People quartered, poisoned. Missing remains and torture. All this happened in one of the most important prisons in the city, but, only until last year, the investigations began to run.

The investigations of the Office of the Prosecutor already allowed to link characters that could have been key in this context of violence. For this reason, the investigating entity called general (r) Fabio Campo Silva, general manager of the Inpec, between February 2000 and July 2001; Major (r) Jaime Gallo Zuleta, external advisor of the Inpec between 2000 and 2001; Colonel (r) Luis Bernardo Maldonado Bernate, Deputy General Manager of the Inpec between April 1999 and July 2001; and to Reinaldo Fierro, director of La Modelo between November 1999 and July 2000.

(In context: The unknown record of disappearances in the Model prison)

According to the investigations, the harassment that was lived in the prison would have had the participation or collaboration of these officials who will now have to explain to justice what they knew about the situation inside the prison and what they did, not only to avoid it, but to finish it What is known so far is rough. According to the investigations of the Prosecutor's Office, an illegal armed structure formed by men deprived of liberty who exercised total control of the establishment was constituted within this prison.

On the one hand, in the south wing, were the members of the self-defense groups. And at the other extreme, the guerrillas. Although separated, all lived armed with rifles, grenades, submachine guns or guns. “What should be did not happen,” said the investigating body in a report, admitting that instead of the prisoners of the illegal groups living under state custody to purge sentences for their crimes, they deployed “a conflict within the conflict ”, that is, a territory of war.

(You may be interested: What happened in The Model?)

That report, revealed by this newspaper in its March 26 edition last year, is today the key piece of research. According to the findings, with blood and fire, the majority condition of the self-defense groups was imposed in La Modelo through a structure called Capital Internal Bloc, which normalized selective homicides, massacres, forced disappearances, torture, crimes sexual, kidnapping, drug trafficking and weapons, the demands for financial contributions to those who were subjected to their opinions.

The Capital Internal Bloc was made up of at least 200 men, who offended under the orders of Miguel Arroyave Ruiz, aka Arcángel, who arrived in prison in May 1999, syndicated as a czar of chemical inputs to process cocaine in the Eastern Plains. In fact, he was an old acquaintance of the brothers Fidel, Vicente and Carlos Castaño Gil since their days of common adolescence in Amalfi (Antioquia), and when he left prison in 2001 he went on to run the fearsome Centauros Block.

The transition between the jail and the command of one of the strategic war fronts of the United Self-Defense Project of Colombia (AUC), whose criminal occurrence is linked to another murderous network taking shape at that time: the Capital Front or Capital Block. The least documented record of the Colombian armed conflict. The structure that developed its selective murders or collection offices from outside the Model, in a tacit alliance of common interests and complicities.

(Here you can see an explanatory video about what was experienced in La Modelo between 1999 and 2003)

The Prosecutor's Office has collected key testimonies of the horror that was experienced in La Modelo. “Once some visitors arrived. I understand that they were from the Capital Block, they went to square accounts with Belisario and two or three were retained. The guard came looking for them and what they were told was that they had gone drunk and that is why they had left the ID cards. It was a lie. I was being held in jail. They were killed and thrown in the aguamasa, in the lavaza for the pigs (...) On one occasion, the lord of the aguamasa told the guard that he had found some fingers and had to remain silent, ”said one of the interviewees.

“The poison was used a lot. Cyanide to kill people. That entered through Patio 3 and a vial or dust was given to each patio control, it was given to the one that had to be silently killed. It was given in the mouth or with a syringe (…) they said that the smaller the more lethal dose. (...) I participated once there were four dead the same day and gave the order for two of my subordinates to do so (...) The bodies were thrown at the armored door