Jhon Jairo Velásquez Vásquez was born on April 15, 1962 in Yarumal, in the Colombian department of Antioquia, and in the 1980s he became the chief of hitmen for the Medellín cartel under Pablo Escobar. He gave himself up to the authorities in 1992, a year before Escobar died, and was sentenced to 30 years in prison in proceedings in Medellín. The judge who presided over those proceedings later said the sentence covered 46 murders, and that the counts also included kidnapping, terrorism, robbery and extortion.
He left prison on conditional release in August 2014 after about 23 years, having served roughly three fifths of his term with the reductions Colombian law allowed for study and conduct. Over the years he said he had personally killed between 250 and 300 people and had helped coordinate about 3,000 more killings for the cartel. Those figures are his own account and not the findings of a court. His testimony did help convict others, among them the former minister and senator Alberto Santofimio Botero, in the case of the 1989 killing of the presidential candidate Luis Carlos Galán.
In May 2018 he was arrested in Medellín on accusations of extortion and conspiracy to commit crimes. He declared himself innocent, and the trial had not been concluded when he died in Bogotá on February 6, 2020, at the age of 57. A second case, over the 1986 killing of Guillermo Cano Isaza, had reached the stage of a detention order in 2019 and also ended without a verdict.
Velásquez was born in Yarumal, a town in northern Antioquia, in 1962. He later described a childhood in a violent environment. He took courses with the Navy and with the police, and he spent a period as a sailor, before he became one of Escobar's close associates. He was working as a bodyguard for a beauty queen when Escobar invited her one night and he went along; Escobar asked him to work for him, and he was soon employed by the Medellín cartel.
Through the 1980s, the cartel's bloodiest years, he rose to become the head of the group of hired killers that carried out the organization's orders. He called Escobar a murderer, a terrorist, a drug trafficker, a kidnapper and an extortionist, and also said that Escobar was his friend. The cartel shipped cocaine to the United States and Europe, and its leaders fought a campaign against the extradition of Colombians to the United States. Escobar ordered the killing of judges, cabinet ministers and journalists to resist it.
Guillermo Cano Isaza was killed in Bogotá on December 17, 1986. More than three decades later, prosecutors said that Velásquez had taken part with Escobar and other cartel leaders in the decision to kill him. Velásquez was summoned to give testimony in November 2018. On May 27, 2019 a prosecutor from the Fiscalía's human rights directorate ordered him held as presumed co-author of aggravated homicide, to take effect when he finished the sentence he was then serving. No trial took place before Velásquez died.
In January 1988 the cartel, under the name Los Extraditables, kidnapped Andrés Pastrana Arango, then a candidate for mayor of Bogotá and later president of Colombia. The kidnapping began on January 18 and lasted eight days, and it was meant to pressure the government over extradition. On January 25, 1988 the Attorney General, Carlos Mauro Hoyos Jiménez, was killed along with two of his escorts. Los Extraditables confirmed the killing to the press, confirmed the kidnapping of Pastrana and pressed their campaign against extradition. Pastrana was released.
Velásquez said he took part in the Hoyos killing and in the Pastrana kidnapping, and he apologized to Pastrana years later in an interview. He was also named in connection with the 1990 kidnapping of Francisco Santos Calderón, then an editor, who was held for eight months and later became vice president.
Luis Carlos Galán Sarmiento was the leading candidate for the 1990 presidential election and had vowed to extradite the drug kingpins, Escobar among them, to the United States. He was killed on August 18, 1989 at a campaign rally in Soacha, a suburb of Bogotá, in front of thousands of people. A bodyguard and a local official died with him. He was one of four presidential candidates killed before that vote. César Gaviria took his place on the Liberal ticket and won.
Velásquez admitted taking part in the killing on the orders of Escobar and Gonzalo Rodríguez Gacha, and he was reported convicted in connection with it, although no record gives a sentence for that count.
The retired general Miguel Maza Márquez, a former director of the intelligence service DAS, was sentenced by the Supreme Court's criminal chamber in 2016 to 30 years for homicide with terrorist purposes as co-author and for conspiracy to commit crimes. The court found that he had weakened Galán's security by assigning it to a hand-picked agent. Maza Márquez was arrested three years before the ruling and denied the charges. Velásquez was heard by the same court on August 10, 2015 as a witness in that trial.
In April 2005 Velásquez made a further statement to a prosecutor that led to the arrest of Alberto Santofimio Botero, a former minister and senator and a political rival of Galán. He said Santofimio had pushed Escobar to order the killing and that for years he had taken Santofimio to Escobar's hideouts. The prosecutors valued his evidence because he had been a direct participant and not a witness repeating what he had heard.
A judge convicted Santofimio in 2007, citing his hostility toward Galán and his closeness to Escobar, with Velásquez's testimony key to that ruling. The Tribunal Superior de Cundinamarca later acquitted him on grounds of doubt. The Sala Penal of the Supreme Court overturned that acquittal, found that he had instigated Escobar to order the killing, and sentenced him to 24 years.
The candidate's son, later a senator, said Velásquez's testimony had helped convict one of the masterminds, and also said that he understood the public anger at Velásquez's release, because many of the cartel's crimes remained unsolved.
Velásquez left the cartel in July 1992, at the age of 30, knowing that he would be arrested. Escobar died in 1993 during a police operation in Medellín. From 1992 Velásquez served a sentence on charges of terrorism, drug trafficking, conspiracy to commit crimes with terrorist aims, and homicide. He was held in a maximum-security prison in Boyacá for about eleven years.
The proceedings that produced his main sentence were heard in the Palacio de Justicia in Medellín by Tomás Serrano, who sat as a "juez sin rostro", a faceless judge. The file, known as Proceso 766 and titled "Desarticulación del brazo armado del Cartel de Medellín", ran to about 600 notebooks of records and took about five years. Serrano said his court convicted about 70 percent of the cartel, among them drug traffickers, front men and hitmen. Velásquez, as Escobar's chief of hitmen, was sentenced to 30 years in prison. Serrano said the sentence covered 46 murders and that the counts also included kidnapping, terrorism, robbery and extortion.
In an interview in August 2014 Serrano said justice had been done in imposing the maximum penalties of that period. He added that sentence reductions for study, good conduct and work could be applied under the law, and that the state then recognized the right to freedom.
In separate proceedings for drug trafficking and conspiracy, a judge, Óscar Galán, imposed a further sentence of 12 years and 6 months on July 30, 2008. By September 2013 that sentence had not been served, and about seven years of it remained. In that month Velásquez's lawyers applied for conditional release. The judge refused it. He said conditional release could be requested after three fifths of a sentence had been served, or through prison work that reduced the sentence, and he found irregularities in the work certificates presented. The lawyers appealed.
In August 2014 a judge ordered his conditional release, after he had served three fifths of his sentence. He left prison in Boyacá on August 26, 2014 under escort. Relatives of the dead protested. In a handwritten statement he apologized to his victims.
He had written a book with a journalist, published in 2005.
After 2014 he built an audience on YouTube, where he reached more than a million subscribers, and wrote books. He campaigned against the 2016 peace agreement with the FARC and threatened left-wing leaders in public. In 2017 he was found at a party given by a man wanted for extradition to the United States. In the week before his arrest in 2018 he made headlines for threatening supporters of a leftist presidential candidate.
On May 25, 2018 the Fiscalía's Unidad contra el Crimen Organizado, working with the Medellín police and with help from the United States, arrested Velásquez in Medellín. Claudia Carrasquilla, who headed the unit, said he remained tied to organized crime and had set up several offices in Medellín to collect extortion payments. The Fiscalía said he had extorted a family of at least 55,000 dollars, claiming the money was a debt owed to him, and that he had posted messages online urging people to take up arms.
On May 26, 2018 the Juzgado 29 Penal de Control de Garantías of Medellín heard the imputation in an expedited procedure. He was imputed for incitement to terrorism and for threats, over posts on his social media account that were directed at supporters of a presidential candidate. A judge ordered preventive detention while the investigation continued for aggravated conspiracy to commit crimes and extortion. He said the proceedings against him were a setup.
The Fiscalía filed formal charges on September 19, 2018: aggravated conspiracy to commit crimes (concierto para delinquir agravado) and aggravated extortion (extorsión agravada). The case went to the Juzgado Segundo Especializado de Medellín. Prosecutors said he had demanded more than 50,000 dollars from two Medellín families who had received an inheritance, under threat of reprisals, and that he had used his reputation and the fear it created to pressure them over several months. They also said he had formed a debt-collection office in Medellín with two other men. He declared himself innocent. Preparatory hearings were set to continue on February 25, 2019 to fix the evidence for trial.
A trial hearing set for December 2019 did not go ahead. The court had set it by video link, but he could not attend. His lawyer, Andrés Villegas, described the trial as a long one, with extensive testimony from the Fiscalía and the defense. Velásquez was hospitalized in Bogotá on December 31, 2019.
Velásquez died in the early morning of February 6, 2020 in Bogotá, at the age of 57, under the guard of the national prison institute, INPEC.
The relatives of his victims spoke of what remained unanswered. The son of Luis Carlos Galán said the death left the victims' demand for truth unmet. The head of a victims' foundation, whose mother was among the Avianca dead, said he took many truths with him and left impunity for crimes more than 30 years old.
Serrano described Proceso 766 as the case that dismantled the armed wing of the Medellín cartel, tried by a faceless judge sitting in the Palacio de Justicia of Medellín, and said the maximum penalties of that period were applied. Reductions for study, good conduct and prison work allowed release before the full term. Under the rule the judge Óscar Galán set out in 2013, conditional release could be requested after three fifths of a sentence had been served.
That rule, with the reductions, accounts for the difference between the 30-year sentence and the 23 years Velásquez spent in prison before August 2014. Four presidential candidates were killed before the 1990 election. The Avianca flight 203 bombing of November 27, 1989 killed 107 people, and Escobar believed that Gaviria, Galán's political heir, was aboard. Two men were sentenced for that bombing. Velásquez was not one of them.
His own totals, between 250 and 300 killings carried out personally and about 3,000 more ordered, were never tried. The Medellín judge's figure was 46 murders. Police officers and relatives of victims have said some of his accounts were exaggerated, and the former police chief Óscar Naranjo said much of what he knew was second-hand.
He was not charged with or convicted over the Avianca bombing and was not among the two men sentenced for it.
The Cano case and the 2018 case ended without a verdict, and he declared himself innocent in the 2018 case.
April 15, 1962: Born in Yarumal, Antioquia.
December 17, 1986: Guillermo Cano Isaza killed in Bogotá; Velásquez accused in 2019 of attending the meeting that agreed on it.
January 18, 1988: Andrés Pastrana Arango kidnapped; held for eight days.
January 25, 1988: Attorney General Carlos Mauro Hoyos Jiménez killed with two escorts.
August 18, 1989: Presidential candidate Luis Carlos Galán killed at a rally in Soacha.
November 27, 1989: Avianca flight 203 bombing; 107 dead.
1990: Francisco Santos Calderón kidnapped; held for eight months.
July 1992: Velásquez leaves the cartel and surrenders; begins serving a sentence.
1993: Escobar dies in a police operation in Medellín.
April 2005: Gives a statement that leads to the arrest of Alberto Santofimio Botero.
July 30, 2008: Sentenced to 12 years and 6 months in separate drug trafficking and conspiracy proceedings.
September 2013: Request for conditional release refused; lawyers appeal.
August 26, 2014: Leaves prison on conditional release after about 23 years.
August 10, 2015: Heard by the Supreme Court as a witness in the Maza Márquez trial.
May 25, 2018: Arrested in Medellín on extortion and conspiracy accusations.
May 26, 2018: Imputation hearing; preventive detention ordered.
September 19, 2018: Formal charges filed: aggravated conspiracy and aggravated extortion.
May 27, 2019: Detention order as presumed co-author of aggravated homicide in the Cano case.
December 18, 2019: Trial hearing in the 2018 case does not go ahead.
December 31, 2019: Hospitalized in Bogotá.
February 6, 2020: Dies in Bogotá, aged 57.