Yarumal's victims find voice after Santiago Uribe conviction for paramilitary killings

In December 2017, Álvaro Uribe came to Yarumal to campaign for a presidential candidate. The former Colombian president moved through the crowd surrounded by admirers, their voices rising in a chant. Among them stood Olga Torres, a small woman of 41, her arms raised, her voice steady above the noise. She asked him directly: who killed her brothers?

Torres had asked this question for nearly three decades. Her brothers, Carlos Guillermo and Omar Darío, had worked on La Carolina, a cattle ranch owned by the Uribe Vélez family. They had calloused hands from honest labor. In July 1993, twenty-five masked men came to her house—men she had seen before at the ranch, now dressed in military gear, carrying machine guns. They killed her brothers, then 33 and 22 years old. The bodies bore marks of torture: cigarette burns, mutilation. When she confronted Uribe that day in 2017, asking him to name the killer, he turned to her and said: tell me, you seem to know already. She could not speak. She knew it was his brother, Santiago Uribe, but fear silenced her.

On November 25, 2024, a court in Antioquia convicted Santiago Uribe of 28 years in prison. The tribunal found him guilty of organizing Los 12 Apóstoles, a paramilitary death squad that operated throughout the 1990s under the banner of "social cleansing." The group killed at least 300 people in Yarumal, a dairy farming town of 45,000 nestled in the Andes. Official counts place the total number of victims—direct and indirect—at 10,858, roughly a quarter of the town's population. The court determined that the violence was not random or isolated. It was systematic. The paramilitaries maintained a blacklist of the "undesirable" to be eliminated.

For Olga Torres, the conviction arrived a month ago. She now says she no longer fears speaking the truth aloud. "Now I am not afraid to tell him it was his brother who killed mine," she said. Her father died waiting for someone in authority to confirm what the family already knew: that her brothers were innocent, that they were good men. The sentence came 31 years too late for him, but it allows her, she says, to die at peace.

Yarumal had lived under the weight of this violence for three decades, but the town had also internalized a narrative that made victims complicit in their own deaths. Police dismissed complaints. Neighbors whispered that the dead must have done something to deserve it. The paramilitaries operated with the knowledge and protection of local security forces. Santiago Uribe's brother, the former governor of Antioquia, provided political cover. The aura of impunity was absolute. Sulma María Vásquez Jaramillo lost her brother Yohany Humberto in November 1994. He was 19, shot in the head, a piece of arepa still warm in his hand. His crime: he had spent the night with the ex-girlfriend of one of the paramilitaries. When Sulma reported it to police, they told her he was killed for being drunk. Then grenades appeared at her door. Anonymous callers asked about her three children. She wanted no money, she said. She wanted her brother's name cleared. She wanted someone to look her in the eye and say he was murdered because Los 12 Apóstoles could do it and face no consequence.

In the Casa de la Cultura, a small room called the Aula del Nunca Más—the Classroom of Never Again—holds the collective memory of the town's grief. Sixty victims contributed letters to the dead, photographs of favorite meals, drawings of empty chairs and empty chocolate pots. "They took my brothers. May God keep them in his glory." "They killed my son and I felt such loneliness and fear." "The flower pot from the house where I was displaced with my family." "It took me years to dream again." These unsigned phrases speak for an entire community.

Olga Torres found her own path to repair. Her brother Carlos Guillermo had once planted a wax palm in front of their parents' house before moving to a home the Uribes provided. He told them: when you see the palm, remember I am here. Decades after his death, Olga built a nursery on her own land. She now cultivates more than 60,000 wax palms, the national tree of Colombia, endangered by deforestation and the Palm Sunday trade. Children come on school trips. Biologists visit. Victims of the conflict sit with her for hours as she explains how the extinction of the palm mirrors the erasure of her dead and her neighbors' dead. Then they plant together, with intention. She tells them she learned to forgive through the earth because she could no longer carry the weight of hatred. "The transformation of pain is possible," she said, "but no sentence and no money gave it to me. I found it myself." The conviction, arriving so late, at least allows her to believe her story will not die with her.