The Palace of Justice Siege Begins in Bogotá

The Seizure

On the morning of November 6, 1985, a group of about thirty-five members of the M-19 guerrilla movement entered the Palace of Justice on the Plaza de Bolívar in Bogotá. The building housed the Supreme Court and the Council of State, and several hundred judges, staff and visitors were inside. The group said it wanted to put President Belisario Betancur on trial for failing to keep a cease-fire agreement that the government and M-19 had signed in 1984. Soldiers and police surrounded the building, and the Colombian army began an operation to retake it that day.

The Army Operation

Armored vehicles of the army broke into the building, and fighting continued through the afternoon and night of November 6 and into November 7. A fire broke out on the upper floors, and the building was badly damaged. Chief Justice Alfonso Reyes Echandía appealed through radio stations for the shooting to stop, and he was among those who died. The operation ended on November 7 and into the following day. Eleven of the Supreme Court's justices died.

Deaths and Disappearances

Estimates of the number killed are around one hundred, including justices, court employees, visitors, guerrillas and members of the security forces. Relatives later said that a number of people who had left the building alive, among them cafeteria workers and visitors, were taken into military custody and were never seen again. The government's official inquiry in 1986 and a Truth Commission set up by the Supreme Court, which reported in December 2009, reached different conclusions about the conduct of the army and the Betancur government.

Courts and Reports

In 2010 a Bogotá judge sentenced Colonel Alfonso Plazas Vega, who had led the military operation, to thirty years in prison over the disappearances of eleven people. Legal proceedings against other officers and appeals continued for years afterward. In 2014 the Inter-American Court of Human Rights found Colombia responsible for the enforced disappearance of several people taken from the building. M-19 demobilized in 1990 and took part in the 1991 constituent assembly. Questions about what happened inside the building continue to be examined in investigations and by the families of those who died.

Colombia in November 1985

The siege took place during a period of armed conflict between the Colombian state and several guerrilla groups, including M-19, the FARC and the ELN, and of violence connected with drug trafficking. Betancur had begun peace talks with the guerrillas in 1982 and 1984, and the cease-fire with M-19 had broken down in 1985. One week after the siege, on November 13, 1985, the Nevado del Ruiz volcano erupted and mudflows destroyed the town of Armero, killing more than twenty thousand people.