On 4 September, speaking from Riohacha, President Abelardo de la Espriella announced that a Police commando had killed alias Bendito Menor, an alleged leader of the Autodefensas Conquistadoras de la Sierra Nevada (ACSN), in an armed confrontation. Hours before that death, the magazine Semana had published, citing military intelligence sources, that the paramilitary group itself had executed its commander for insubordination, a version it withdrew and replaced half an hour later, while the man was still alive according to sources close to his partner. El Tiempo would confirm days later that the leak was part of a deliberate strategy, one that led Bendito Menor to deny it publicly and allowed American intelligence to locate him through his mobile phone. Twenty-two days later, an investigation by the magazine Raya documented that the facade of the house where he died remains intact, that no neighbour heard gunfire that night, and that the Police arrived at the scene only towards dawn, once the bodies were already cold. The case does not end with that death, it opens a negotiation still under way, under a one-week deadline set by De la Espriella himself, with alias Pinocho, the man who now leads the structure and whose lawyer warns that the alternative to a deal is «more bags, more raids, more corpses».
A truth leaked, denied, and leaked again
At 2.29pm on 3 September, Semana published an article whose headline did not survive half an hour, alias Bendito Menor was allegedly killed by the Autodefensas Conquistadoras, intelligence verifies the information. The text attributed the order to alias Patilizo, the group’s alleged military chief, over a supposed rupture with the rest of the command. At 3pm, thirty-one minutes later, the magazine replaced that article with another that framed the same death as a possible manoeuvre by the criminal himself to mislead the authorities. The first text stopped being available and its address was redirected to the second version, recoverable today only through archiving tools. At 4.47pm that same afternoon, the ACSN published a statement on the social network X denying it had executed its commander, a denial that regional outlets such as El Pilón picked up the same day.
That editorial back-and-forth was no drafting error. El Tiempo later reconstructed the mechanism, intelligence agencies spread across several outlets, Semana among them, the version of an internal execution, with the declared aim of provoking a reaction from Bendito Menor himself. He responded with a public statement declaring that he was alive, a moment that, according to that reconstruction, allowed United States intelligence to track his location through his mobile phone. Hours later, the man was dead. What remains unexplained is why, if the operation concluded as planned, the narrative sustaining it had to change entirely into the version of an armed clash with a police commando, a version maintained across the fifteen articles Semana devoted that weekend to the «pinpoint» operation.
The first version of Semana’s article stayed published for thirty-one minutes, between 2.29pm and 3pm on 3 September, before being replaced by a second that framed Bendito Menor’s death as a possible manoeuvre of his own to evade the authorities.
The facade nobody forced
Whether that location led to a police raid, as the official version holds, or to a handover by his own group, as Raya’s reconstruction suggests, is precisely what the crime scene allows one to examine. The two-storey house in the Los Olivos neighbourhood of Riohacha, where Bendito Menor died alongside his partner Rosangélica Tarazona, alias La Bebecita, and two trusted men, Orlando Javier Paternina and Keiner José Moscote Martos, still shows, twelve days later according to Raya’s reconstruction, an intact pedestrian door and vehicle gate, with no signs of forced entry, and an untrampled garden. No neighbour interviewed by that magazine, nor by the independent journalists César Molinares and Ramón Campos, reported hearing gunfire that night. Several did describe vehicles with tinted windows passing hours before, and the Police arriving only towards half past four or five in the morning, when, according to those accounts, all that remained was to remove the bodies. On 22 September, Infobae revisited those findings citing Raya explicitly as its source, without contributing its own interviews with other neighbours, a fact that does not by itself confirm the internal-execution hypothesis, nor does it amount to a second independent source, two outlets citing the same investigation count, for corroboration purposes, as one. What that amplification does confirm is the reach the hypothesis gained in the Colombian press, with no point-by-point official response from the Presidency, the Police, or the Dijín on record as this piece closes.
To that doubt over what happened that night is added an older one, over who Bendito Menor really was. The press that celebrated his death as a blow against narco-paramilitarism described him as leader, chief, or, in El Heraldo’s words, «the face» of the Autodefensas Conquistadoras. The researcher Lerber Dimas, director of the Sierra Nevada Human Rights Defenders Platform, offers a different picture, that of a third-tier commander leading an urban unit of some twenty men, well below the central command running the bloc from the mountain. «Whoever controls the mountain controls the urban area», Dimas summarised weeks later, referring to the strike that would paralyse Santa Marta. A third-tier corpse can, however, function as a first-tier trophy, if nobody corrects its rank in the official record in time.
Two days after the burial, videos circulating on social media showed Bendito Menor’s funeral procession crossing Riohacha to the sound of corridos at full volume, with bursts of gunfire into the air as a farewell, in the same city where a blow against narco-paramilitarism had been announced days earlier. The coverage consulted for this piece records no arrests arising from that armed display. If the goal was to dismantle a threat, the funeral scene suggests that the real threat, the one that carries weapons and fires them into the air without documented consequences, remained intact.
A second-in-command who was never second
On 22 September two facts coincided that coverage at the time never put in conversation with each other. The same day Infobae was spreading the internal-execution hypothesis about Bendito Menor, the same agency reported that, after the death of alias Cholo, the structure’s military chief, the chain of command was now headed by alias Pinocho. Two commanders of the same organisation had died within three weeks, and the public narrative remained fixed on the more visible of the two, not the more important one. When the ACSN declared an armed strike that shut down commerce and transport in Santa Marta and drove the Government to militarise the city, much of the press, Pulzo among them, attributed the move to the death of «its second-in-command», the same rank inflation that Raya’s and Infobae’s own reporting had already cast doubt on the day before.
The Defensoría del Pueblo had warned eight times about the ACSN’s levies and controls in the Sierra Nevada before that week, without any of those alerts leading to a measure against the extortion economy sustaining the structure. What did arrive, once the strike shut down Santa Marta, were troops and a martial discourse. A State that answers the death of an urban commander with a media shield, and eight warnings about the rent financing the entire organisation with administrative silence, is not managing a threat, it is managing an image.
Bendito Menor had been identified by the Prosecutor’s Office for years without being captured. Under the previous government, that of Gustavo Petro, several reports asked why a man with a public social-media profile, known in Riohacha, never fell in an operation. De la Espriella, who took office on 7 August, presented his death, less than a month later, as proof of a will his predecessors lacked. That the blow landed on a third-tier commander, and not on the structure that actually exercises territorial control, was not part of the announcement.
The lawyer who negotiated for the AUC now sets the deadline for their heirs
Abelardo de la Espriella reached Colombia’s presidency in June, with under a single point of advantage, after a career built as defence lawyer for paramilitary chiefs during negotiations with the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia and as founder of FIPAZ, a platform that accompanied those negotiations. That same man signed, on 26 August, the reactivation of the extradition to the United States of Carmen Evelio Castillo Carrillo, alias Muñeca, and made a priority of capturing his brother Fredy, alias Pinocho, both direct heirs of Hernán Giraldo’s old bloc. Muñeca has his extradition signed and remains in Colombia. Pinocho, who once served as the previous government’s negotiator during the so-called total peace and now leads the structure after the deaths of Bendito Menor and Cholo, remains a fugitive.
Pinocho is no stranger to the State that now names him a priority target. Under the Petro government he was a recognised interlocutor in the total-peace talks with the AUC’s successor structures, a status he lost when De la Espriella broke off those negotiations on taking office. Days before his lawyer spoke of submission, the Police captured his partner, identified as alias La Mona, in an operation the lawyer himself cited as part of the context pushing Pinocho to negotiate. First the partner captured, then the lawyer speaking of surrender, then the organisation denying any negotiation, the sequence replays in miniature the same pattern of advances and denials that had already marked Bendito Menor’s death.
On 25 September, Pinocho’s lawyer stated that his client is prepared to submit to Colombian justice as soon as a submission law exists that allows it, and summed up the alternative in a phrase that needs no adornment.
«It isn’t about more bags, more raids, or more corpses», Pinocho’s lawyer declared on 25 September, setting out his client’s willingness to submit to Colombian justice.
De la Espriella responded by giving his ministers of Defence and Justice a week to secure that surrender. A day later, the ACSN itself came out to deny that Pinocho was negotiating his surrender with Colombia and the United States, calling the information false. Between those two versions, that of a paramilitary chief willing to give himself up and that of an organisation denying it, lies exactly the same space that separated, three weeks earlier, Semana’s first version from its second, the space occupied by any fact that someone, at some point, found it convenient not to confirm in full.
Bendito Menor’s death opened that negotiation without anyone naming it as such. A third-tier corpse served as the cover story while the real file, that of the men who actually decide in the Sierra Nevada, remained and remains open. De la Espriella built his career speaking for that structure before the courts, now administers it from the presidency, and the public that celebrated a trophy in Riohacha still does not know whether what follows will be an extradition or one more statement denying what the press had just taken as fact. The one-week deadline the president set for himself runs for the press and for public opinion, not for a structure that has spent three decades managing exactly that kind of deadline…
G.S.
Sources
- Revista Raya, “El Bendito Menor fue citado por su propio grupo a la casa donde terminó muerto en Riohacha”
- Semana, versión original redirigida, “Alias Bendito Menor habría sido asesinado por las Autodefensas Conquistadoras”
- Semana, segunda versión, “Tras muerte de Bendito Menor, inteligencia verifica posibles sucesores”
- El Pilón, “ACSN contradice versión de inteligencia sobre la supuesta muerte de alias Bendito Menor”
- El Tiempo, “La jugada de la inteligencia que permitió ubicar a alias Bendito Menor en La Guajira”
- Infobae, “A Bendito Menor y La Bebecita los habrían ejecutado sus propios compañeros”
- El Heraldo, “Bendito Menor, el rostro de las Autodefensas Conquistadoras que cayó vencido en Riohacha”
- Canal 1, “Quien domina la montaña, domina la zona urbana, Lerber Dimas tras el paro en Santa Marta”
- Infobae, “Así quedó la línea de mando de Los Pachenca tras la muerte de alias Cholo y Bendito Menor, Pinocho a la cabeza”
- Pulzo, “Militarización y cierre de Santa Marta, paro armado de las ACSN tras muerte de su segundo comandante”
- El País (Colombia), “Autodefensas de la Sierra Nevada anuncian finalización del paro armado en el Magdalena y La Guajira”
- Infobae, “Abelardo de la Espriella es el nuevo presidente de Colombia para el periodo 2026-2030”
- El Callejero, “Muñeca y Pinocho, uno extraditable, el otro sigue prófugo”
- Infobae, “Quién es alias Pinocho, el nuevo objetivo de De la Espriella tras muerte de Bendito Menor”
- Infobae, “Alias Pinocho, máximo cabecilla de Los Pachenca, podría someterse a la justicia colombiana”
- Infobae, “Las ACSN desmintió los planes de Pinocho para negociar su rendición con Colombia y Estados Unidos”
- Yahoo Noticias / AFP, “De la Espriella da una semana a MinDefensa y MinJusticia para lograr el sometimiento de Pinocho”
