The luxurious Montecasino estate in Medellin was the site of a plot to assassinate a presidential candidate and massacre citizens accused of supporting left-wing guerrillas, according to former attackers.
These include Carlos, Vicente and Fidel Castano, leaders of the United Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), which was formed to fight the FARC guerrilla group and is known for human rights abuses.
Murderous drug lord Pablo Escobar attends meetings and parties at his home in El Poblado, Medellin’s most exclusive residence.
The house, with marble floors and a large garden, was seized by the state in 2010 after a relative died.
Five years later, the Colombian Victims Unit, a team created to identify and help the approximately 9.5 million people affected by the country’s decades-long civil conflict, was founded.
Initially leased to a private entity, Montecasino is now run by the country’s judicial police at the behest of Colombia’s first left-wing president, Gustavo Petro.
There, he will set up a laboratory to identify corpses in a country where more than 111,000 people are believed to have disappeared over decades of ideology, territory, human trafficking routes and revenge.
“Nobody can imagine all the crimes and abuses in this house,” Claudia Patricia Vallejo Montecasino, director of the victims’ department, told AFP.
“A lot of people were hurt there,” he said.
Luz Galeano, 60, hopes the initiative will finally reveal the fate of her husband, Luis Laverde, who disappeared in 2008.
“I’ve been looking for him everywhere, but I still don’t know what happened or who’s responsible,” he said.
Laverde was abducted from a bus in Medellin, surrounded by AUC fighters targeting sectors controlled by city-dwelling guerrillas.
At his inauguration on August 7, 2022, Petro promised to use the assets seized from criminal gangs in a “productive economy” to serve those most in need.
The sale or lease of thousands of acquired properties has been handed over to the Special Housing Unit (SAE) of the Ministry of Finance.
SAE President Daniel Rojas recently pointed out that only a fifth of the 33,000-odd properties controlled by the department generate revenue, a figure that has not been updated.
Colombia’s Comptroller General’s Office recently reported the theft of luxury watches and other items from properties managed by SAE, with millions in losses.
Chia, near the capital Bogotá, witnessed the inaccessible status and prosperity of Colombia’s drug lords: a huge castle built in 1898 to serve as the presidential palace and bought by Escobar’s brother, Juan Camilo Zapata.
After Zapata’s assassination in 1993, Castillo de Marroquin was seized by SAE and leased to a company that organized weddings and concerts there.
Under the guidance of Petro, this castle will be handed over to the National Pedagogical University with about 9,000 students.
The building itself will be turned into a museum, and most of the grounds will be dedicated to academic, cultural and sports activities.
For university chancellor Helbert Choachi, channeling criminal assets for the benefit of society should not be an individual government decision, but a national policy. “From the drug trade to the many human rights abuses in this country, all assets must go through reparations to civil society organizations and the communities that suffer the most,” he told AFP.
