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three days, I was denied anything to drink. I was also prevented from sleeping, and I was made to undergo questioning that was very fierce and that happened day or night. I was charged with supporting a guerrilla movement in Colombia.” His interrogators accused Palmera of being a member of the ELN (Ejército de Liberación Nacional, the National Liberation Army, Colombia’s second-largest guerrilla group), but at the time, Palmera had never met a member of any guerrilla group. He finally convinced the army of hisinnocence. After he had been forced to sign documents stating that he had been treated well and had not been tortured, the army released him. “When I returned to Valledupar, I learned that a few days after my capture they had also detained the doctor José David López, the lawyer René Costa, and the labor and syndicate director Víctor Mieles. Years later, the three were assassinated by the army.”
    Palmera’s experience with the army fortified his rebellious spirit. By 1982, the Liberal party bifurcated, and the offshoot movement that Palmera joined, dubbed “New Liberalism,” stood on the dangerous platform of antidrugs and anticorruption. “Basically, the program was to solve the problems of political corruption in the traditional parties, to fight against drugs, and to promote democracy,” Palmera recalls. “Already in 1982, the drug problem had permeated throughout the entire Colombian society. The Atlantic region, the north region of the country, where I was living, had already suffered the negative consequences of drug trafficking very severely.” Palmera became part of a civic movement that supported teachers and students from the university as candidates for the city council of Valledupar. Along with other left-leaning professionals, Palmera began to attend meetings to try to find ways to help the multitude of destitute Colombians who, they believed, were oppressed by the entrenched oligarchy. “It was all pure ideology for Ricardo,” Edgardo Pupo, a close friend of Palmera told
The New York Times
in 2004. “He was convinced that the system here didn’t work and that only a communist system would.” Another friend and political colleague, Imelda Daza, remembers that Palmera became more and more fanatical in his views. “He was always criticizing us when he discovered us at parties, drinking rum and dancing. ‘By drinking we are not going to change this country,’ he’d say.” Palmera was a known admirer of Joseph Stalin, and because of his increasingly severe nature, his contemporaries nicknamed him “the German.”
    In 1984, the FARC agreed to a cease-fire after successful negotiations with the government. For the first time since its formation, Manuel Marulanda’s guerrilla army was gaining mainstream political acceptance. Out of the negotiations came a new political party, the Unión Patriótica. “It was not only the party of former guerrillas; it had a very wide political agenda,” says Palmera, who immediately became amember. “Many people joined it—the Liberals, Conservatives, priests, democrats, patriots, people from many walks of life who were not necessarily Communist, socialist, or leftist.” The new movement quickly became a political phenomenon; in 1986, its members were elected to seats in both houses of Congress and captured dozens of state and municipal executive and legislative offices. But the fragile peace that had come with the cease-fire and the FARC’s induction into mainstream politics would not last long. The startling success of the Unión Patriótica was a threat to the Liberal and the Conservative parties, which had divided power for nearly two centuries, and the situation rapidly translated into violence. Unión Patriótica senators and mayors were assassinated, one after another. Party members were threatened with death and told to