Palace of Justice Siege - The Assault

The Assault

The operation to retake the building was led by General Jesús Armando Arias Cabrales, commander of the Thirteenth Army Brigade in Bogotá; he appointed Colonel Alfonso Plazas, commander of an armored cavalry battalion, to personally oversee the operation. The retaking of the building began that day and ended on 7 November, when Army troops stormed the Palace of Justice, after having occupied some of the lower floors during the first day of the siege. After surrounding the building with EE-9 Cascavel armored cars and soldiers with automatic weapons, they stormed the building sometime after 2 pm. The EE-9s knocked down the building's massive doorway, and even made some direct hits against the structure's external walls.

The official version of the attack holds that, in an effort to complete one of the 2 objectives they had assaulted the palace for, the M-19 guerrillas burnt different criminal records containing proof and warrants against many members of the group. It is also believed, but argued whether they also burnt records against Pablo Escobar, one of the nation's biggest drug traffickers at the time. However, "no one knows with absolutely certainty what happened. The results of the tests carried out later by ballistics experts and investigators demonstrated the most likely cause to have been the recoil effect of the army's rockets. Tests proved that if fired by a soldier standing twenty feet of wood-lined walls of the library that housed Colombian legal archives, the intense heat generated by the rocket's rear blast could have ignited the wooden paneling. In any event, in a shelved area stacked high with old papers, files, books, and newspapers, the quantity of explosives used by the military virtually guaranteed a conflagration." In total, over 6000 different documents were burned. The fire lasted about 2 days, even with efforts from firemen to try and smother the flames. An investigated theory to the "disappearance" of the missing entities in the siege is that they were charred in the fire, and were not able to be identified in any way, and without having been found, these entities are regarded as missing in action. This theory is still being studied in the different trials of the case.

More than 100 people died during the final assault on the Palace. Those killed consisted of hostages, soldiers, and guerrillas, including their leader Andrés Almarales and four other senior commanders of M-19. After the raid, another Supreme Court justice died in a hospital after suffering a heart attack.