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great-grandfather Federico Palmera was killed while fighting on the Liberal side during one of the many civil wars in the nineteenth century. His two grandfathers were active members of the Liberal party during the conflicts at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. His maternal grandfather, a successful textile businessman, Rodrigo Pineda, was the mayor of the large city of Bucaramanga in the 1930s.
    In his early life, Palmera had little interest in politics or the elite formal education his family’s social status afforded him. “Ricardo Palmera wasn’t the most sensible of my schoolmates,” says Luis Gabriel Jaramillo, “nor the most studious.” Jaramillo remembers being in awe of Palmera’s exceptional social skills, especially his prowess with the girls, when they attended the Swiss-Colombian School in Bogotá. “Already at our young age—ten, twelve, fourteen years—he presented himself as a successful man of the world. I admired him, and I was delighted with this miraculous sociability, with his grace of a distinguished Valentino.” The schoolboys were all descendants of European immigrants, and most conducted themselves with inherited modesty and timidity. Palmera was the exception, Jaramillo says, “but he assumed his role without any presumption, which embodied him with the spirit of a brotherly leader.”
    Palmera was very close to his mother, Alix, who separated from his father in 1954. After the divorce, Ovidio Palmera would send Alix money each month from the proceeds of his two-hundred-acre farm, Los Mangos, on the outskirts of Valledupar. Although she was now a single mother, Alix never lacked an upper-class lifestyle. She employed a driver for her 1955 Chevrolet Bel Air, lived with her three children in a comfortable apartment in the north of Bogotá, and passed her days playing canasta. Palmera finished high school with terrible grades, buthis social stature enabled him to attend and graduate from the private and left-leaning Jorge Tadeo Lozano University in Bogotá in 1975. After graduating, Palmera worked for an agrarian bank in Bogotá, the Caja de Crédito Agraria, Industrial y Minero, where he provided small loans to rural areas. By mid-1976, he returned to his father’s home department of César with his new wife, Margarita. There, he helped manage the vast farms that belonged to his father, Valledupar’s most prominent lawyer and a former senator from the Liberal party. According to Palmera’s brother Jaime, it was during that period that Palmera and his father, who was a great admirer of Fidel Castro, became close political allies. “I believe that [the political positions of his father] not only influenced but were definitive,” says Jaime. “Dad and Ricardo spent hours and hours talking about politics. I am sure that those chats marked my brother forever.”
    By the late 1970s, Palmera’s wife, Margarita, opened a business in Valledupar, selling imported Italian jewelry. Palmera continued his career in banking and also took a teaching job at a state university. Even in the highest social circles, Palmera was considered a fancy man. He danced in the local clubs, rode horses for enjoyment, and loved the arts and theater. “He was so charming and intelligent,” Lilián Castro, a Valledupar native and former friend of Palmera, told
The New York Times
. “Ricardo Palmera was every bit the gentleman.” Friends would call him jovial, well mannered, and driven. But when it came to matters of social justice, there was a seriousness to Palmera’s drive.
    In 1979, Palmera and several of his university colleagues were captured at their homes and taken by the military to the Popa Battalion in Valledupar. That night, he was handcuffed, blindfolded, and taken in a cattle truck to a military headquarters in Barranquilla. “For five days, I was denied food. The first