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V
I R G I N I A V A L L E J O
THE OFFICIAL WEBSITE |
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     Virginia Vallejo in 1969 Virginia Vallejo in 1987 The television and radio journalist Virginia Vallejo in 1997 Virginia Vallejo in 2009 |
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Virginia in Miami. Copyright Dora Franco 2009  |
On Receiving Asylum in the United States |
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My questioning has ended. The judge has listened attentively as I described the “false positives” scandal and how every single one of the soldiers that killed 3,000 poor teenagers in 2008 to claim $700 rewards for “rebels killed in combat” were acquitted. I have explained key contents and some of the revelations made in my book: the role of Pablo Escobar in the 1985 Palace of Justice siege, the massacre of the Supreme Court Justices and one hundred people by the Army, and the torture, rape and disappearance of all the detained in bathtubs filled with sulfuric acid; the extermination of an entire political party of 4,000 members and the assassination of four presidential candidates in the late 80s by the Army and the Medellin cartel; and the role of Alvaro Uribe - director of the Civil Aviation Agency in 1980-1982 - in the boom of the cocaine industry that turned his cousins Jorge Ochoa and Pablo Escobar into overnight billionaires at a time when there were only thirteen of them in the United States. |
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- What I have described are key episodes in a genocide that has left
more than one million peasants dead and five million displaced. Now,
I put my life in your hands, Your Honor. God will tell you what to
do with it, and I will humbly accept your decision. Calmly, in the most impeccable and efficient exercise of intellect, concentration and synthesis that I have witnessed in sixty years of life, the lady in the long black robe begins to list almost one hundred and fifty reasons why my professional background, the atrocities and impunity that I have described during almost four hours, the murder of witnesses in the cases in which I have testified against politicians and Military Intelligence, my political opinion on the present and upcoming Colombian Governments, and the sheer dimensions of the collective hatred expressed in documentary evidence “that brings to the mind the Edelstein papers” have evidently put my life in extreme danger in the event that I am returned to Colombia. After more than sixty minutes, with a soft but firm voice, under the precepts of the American Constitution, the Geneva Convention Against Torture and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the judge grants me political asylum in the United States of America. I am overwhelmed with gratitude, too exhausted to search for the right words to express it, too dumbstruck to find the tears to release a fountain about to burst inside my heart. All I can say to this brilliant and compassionate human being is that I bless her country for saving my life, and her court for allowing me to earn my living with my writings. Three years before, I had said in the final pages of my first book, to be published in English in 2011 as “Loving Pablo, Hating Escobar”: |
 Virginia in Miami. Copyright Dora Franco 2009 |
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| “As I stand there, watching from the balcony of my 36th floor all the lights that shine below and the stars twinkling above, I ask myself if someday I, too, will love this country with all my heart, the place where I have been so happy and where almost every dream is possible: The nation of the Statue of Liberty and the thousand universities where one hundred Nobel laureates teach the future ones to think, of California and the Grand Canyon, of Cahokia and New York. The land of the great inventors and perpetual innovators, the visionary engineers and futuristic architects, the revolutionary artists and bestselling authors, the geniuses of cinema and the legends of music and of sports. The country of the mythical entrepreneurs and the titanic philanthropists, of the trips to the Moon and to the stars, the Apollo missions, the Hubble telescope, the Galileo and Cassini odysseys and the galactic ones to come. The one nation made from one thousand ethnicities with the sounds and flavors from every corner of the Earth, the new homeland to the persecuted of the human race that arrived here with empty pockets and built it with ambition and sacrifice, one original idea in a stubborn head, one dream of work in their hands, one song of faith in their heart. | ||||
 Virginia in Miami. Copyright Dora Franco 2009 |
I am just one of the million refugees who on one ordinary day—but
one historic in their lives—fleeing from their enemies or hunger,
set foot on these shores. And from this place to which God brought
me on one unforgettable day of 2006, I could finally begin to tell
the story of a man and a woman from opposite worlds who, a long time
ago and in a country at war, loved each other for a brief and tragic
time that forever changed their lives and the destiny of their
country. And I tell it from this land, because in the one where I
was born it would have been impossible to begin or finish writing
it, or to ever see it published.” |
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