The Paramilitarization of the War in Colombia
Chernick, Marc W.
Paramilitary violence is not complementary to military strategy. In fact, the paramilitaries have come to replace the armed forces, which are mired in crisis as a result of their failure to...
...Carlos Castafio, the man who heads the paramilitary group known as the United Self-Defense Units of Colombia, unabashedly took credit for the carnage in an interview published by the weekly Cambio 16...
...While only 7.5% of armed attacks were attributed to the army, 60% were attributed to paramilitaries, and 23.5% to the guerrilla...
...4. Francisco Leal Buitrago, El Oficio de la Guerra: La Seguridad Nacional en Colombia (BogotA: TM Editors, IEPRI, 1994...
...There are at least three, negotiating table, as they insist and as the government and each of the three the guerrilla, the pararnilitaries seems to fav or, or are dismantled...
...It is obvious that there are no longer only two actors Whether the paramilitaries are invited to sit at the involved in Colombia's conflict...
...This rapid expansion of Colombia's cattle frontier has provided the social base for Colombia's modern paramilitary forces...
...Guerrilla groups took up arms in the absence of political channels under a closed and increasingly repressive regime forged through the exclusionary National Front coalition, established by the warring Liberal and Conservative parties to bring an end to the decade of violence between 1948 and 1958...
...The army battalion based in the region did not arrive until the last day of the killing spree, on July 20, even though the town's municipal judge had called requesting NACIA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS Marc W Chernick teaches in the Department of Government at Georgetown University and is a member of NACLA's editorial board...
...Counterinsurgency in Colombia, like many other internal wars from Guatemala to South Africa, is essentially a dirty war against individual collaborators and suspected supporters of the insurgents...
...Entire communities are often forcibly displaced in order to disrupt guerrilla control over a particular area...
...Nonetheless, in areas under their control, particularly in regions in eastern and southern Colombia where the state's presence has been historically weak, guerrillas perform many of the local-level functions of the statemaintaining order, officiating at weddings, births and divorces, organizing education, mediating conflict and administering justice, and marketing agricultural products...
...Military leaders mistakenly believe that the paramilitaries represent a useful and successful counterinsurgency strategy for defeating the guerrilla because they have been able to recapture control of certain areas like parts of Magdalena Medio...
...The Mapiripdn massacre was carefully planned and executed...
...T he evidence is overwhelming that the military continues to facilitate paramilitary operations...
...Yet the very fact that the government remains unable or unwilling to dismantle the paramilitaries is testimony to their political strength...
...is a pressing issue which has yet to be tiple parts...
...2. For a discussion of types of violence in the 1940s and 1950s, see Alfredo Molano, Los Afos del Tropel (BogotA: CEREC, 1985) 3. U.S...
...2 Witnesses spoke of the paramilitaries carving up body parts of live victims and dumping them into the river and decapitating victims with chainsaws...
...The scope of the army's involvement in paramilitary activity is believed to be broad...
...When Castafio announced the launching of his national paramilitary project last year, he insisted that there could be no peace with the guerrillas without the participation and cooperation of the AUC...
...It is more likely that they will continue using air transport and other means to make periodic incursions into guerrilla strongholds in southeastern Colombia to commit the kind of atrocities seen in MapiripAn...
...The move into Mapiripfin last July was not only an attempt to bring the dirty war into the center of the guerrilla zones...
...5. Jose No6 Rios and Daniel Garcla-Peha, Building Tomorrow's Peace: A Strategy for National Reconciliation, Report by the Peace Exploration Committee (Bogota), September 9, 1997, p. 7. 6. Joss No6 Rios and Daniel Garcla-Peha, Building Tomorrow's Peace, pp...
...As long as the paramilitaries and their narco-allies had their guns turned on the guerrilla, left-wing activists, human rights workers and even amnestied guerrillas, the army was content to allow them free reign...
...While the armed forces were crucial to the creation of many of these paramilitary groups, they did not fully control them...
...5 The paramilitaries have wrested a few key zones from guerrilla control, but in general they do not seem capable of mounting a sustained military campaign against the guerrilla...
...And as state authority has deteriorated in many areas of the country in recent years, the FARC has been able to extend its influence beyond its traditional strongholds...
...Towns are "cleansed" of anyone suspected of supporting the guerrillas-or any leftist party, union, social movement or progressive church organization-to demonstrate to the population at large what awaits them if they become involved in such activities...
...And in a move that further undermined the government's credibility, the Samper Administration authorized the creation of new civilian rural defense units known as Convivir in 1994, in an effort to create new groups over which the government could exercise more control...
...Achieving a lasting peace will depend on the resolved.6 But any negotiation will be...
...Army supporters They landed in a community airfield march in a military heavily guarded by the Colombian parade in Apartado, army, deep in the coca-growing in the province of UrabA, in July 1997...
...His self-defense patrols were winning the war in Colombia, he said, "not by killing peasants but by killing guerrillas...
...In 1985, they maintained a presence in only 173 municipalities...
...The Paramilitarization of the War in Colombia 1. "'Esta Guerra no da mas': Carlos Castaho," and "Entrevista a Carlos Castano: 'Soy el ala moderada de las autodefensas,'" Cambio 16 (BogotA), December 15, 1997 and December 22, 1997...
...VOL XXXI, No 5 MARCH/APRIL 1998 29REPORT ON CHIAPAS & COLOMBIA Colombia has a long tradition of paramilitarism, going back to the violence during the 1940s and 1950s...
...19-22...
...Castafio and his paramilitary forces, for example, are now claiming to be leading a national paramilitary strategy of allout war against the FARC...
...But unlike other internal wars, the paramilitary violence in Colombia is not a subordinate strategy designed to complement the activities of the military...
...Weeks before, members of the paramilitary group traveled to the region to prepare the terrain for a military attack on the town and to select the victims...
...Indeed, paramilitary groups in Colombia have embarked on an ambitious project, seeking to transform themselves from local to national-level actors...
...as the FARC has and the armed forces is internally fractured into mul- demanded...
...Over the course of six consecutive days between July 15 and 20, 1997, over 100 heavily armed men seized control of Mapiripdn, a small cocagrowing town in southeastern Colombia, torturing and killing an estimated 30 villagers...
...loss...
...The stories are so mind-numbingly similar that, in many quarters, they no longer spark outrage...
...But the seeds of today's paramilitarism were planted in 1965, when the government granted the army the legal authority to arm civilians in order to counter the spreading guerrilla warfare launched by the FARC, the National Liberation Army (ELN), and the Popular Liberation Army (EPL...
...After 1984, however, when the government of Belisario Betancur (1982-1986) signed a cease-fire agreement with four guerrilla movements-the FARC, the EPL, the April 19th Movement (M-19) and the Workers' Self-Defense Movement (ADO)-paramilitary groups became an increasingly central part of the army's counterinsurgency strategy...
...With a solid base in UrabdI and C6rdoba, where the paramilitaries built alliances with wealthy narco-landowners and cattle ranchers and violently extirpated the FARC and its political wing, the Patriotic Union, The arn Castafio is now setting his sights on the a willin southeastern parts of Colombia where the guerrilla's presence is strong and growing...
...They reject the idea that the paramilitaries have a political agenda separate from the interests of cattle ranchers, narco-landowners and drug traffickers...
...Paramilitary activity was local and only a minor factor in the conflict...
...But soon the guns turned against government ministers, judges, governors, senators and presidential candidates...
...In addition to their antisubversive and drugrunning roles, the paramilitaries were also selectively used by their narco-allies to battle government officials and party leaders who supported antinarcotics policies, especially extradition to the United States...
...This agrarian counter-reform has resulted in the concentration of land ownership, and has turned thousands of peasants into refugees and, in many instances, into recruits in the paramilitary or guerrilla armies...
...It is unlikely, for example, that the paramilny found g ally for military egy in ia's landg narcoleoisie...
...as Gabriel GarcIa delicate and immensely complex task of bringing these Marquei recentl y said, a negotiation among losers...
...The grizzly orgy of violence turned Mapiripdn into a ghost town...
...As the traffickers consolidated their landholdings, they began to create private armies to guarantee their security in the face of the constant guerrilla pressure for monies through extortion ("revolutionary taxes") and kidnapping...
...The guerrillas have stated that they will not sit down at the negotiating table with the paramilitaries...
...It was also an attempt to create "facts on the ground" that establish the power of the paramilitaries as the country begins to look toward the presidential elections of May 1998 and what will likely be a new attempt at a negotiated settlement with the guerrillas in late 1998 or 1999...
...its pari Castafio's announcement last April that he was renaming the Peasant Self-Defense strat Units of C6rdoba and UrabA (ACCU) the Colomb United Self-Defense Units of Colombia (AUC) reflects his shift to a national para- OWn in military strategy...
...This delay, coupled with the paramilitaries' use of the army-guarded air strip, indicates a high degree of army complicity in the massacre...
...regions of the eastern plains-an area strongly influenced by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC...
...The Castafio brothers' links to the cocaine trade go back to the early 1980s...
...Land was an attractive investment for the drug barons not only for its material value but also for the social status it bestowed...
...The paramilitaries do not confront the guerrilla directly-their principal target is the civilian population...
...There are daily reports of assassinations and massacres by unidentified armed groups that freely enter into areas heavily patrolled or occupied by the army-further evidence of their close collaboration...
...There used to be a certain amount of coherence-at least in the dominant narrative of the left and right-to Colombia's violence and low-intensity war of the last 30 years...
...They view them simply as agents of state terror...
...4 From 1965 to 1980, the army's paramilitary strategy was low intensity, as was the war...
...The paramilitaries, however, have increasingly sought to fill this power vacuum as well...
...The result, as expected, has been to add one more armed group to the mosaic of armed actors in the Colombian countryside...
...By the end of the 1980s, drug traffickers had become the largest landowners in the country, turning large swaths of rural Colombia into large, unproductive cattle ranches...
...They also described the resurrection of wellknown historical forms of killing in Colombia-such as the "necktie," formed by slitting the throat of the victim and pulling down the tongue-which have not been seen since the violence of the 1940s and 1950s...
...The figures for political violence during the first nine months of 1997 are revealing in this sense...
...There is little doubt that there can he no peace Colombia mig ht emerge on the heels of this tragic in Colombia unless the paramilitary issue is addressed...
...Through the mid-1990s, these paramilitary projects were mostly based at the local level, and reflected a close alliance among drug barons, landowners, regional political bosses and the military...
...All three actors together to reach viable, pragmatic agree- sides have lost in this war...
...This dynamic has been strongest in the agricultural lands in the north of Colombia, as well as in Magadelena Medio, the eastern plains and parts of the Andean region...
...In effect, the paramilitaries have increased the violence, not controlled the insurgency...
...Those who were massacred in Mapiripin, Castafio said, "were the most dangerous and most despicable among the population...
...There was little combat between guerrillas and military units, and combat-related deaths of guerrilla and soldiers numbered a few hundred a year...
...In Urabi, which is strategically located on the Atlantic Coast across the waters from Panama, paramilitary units played a decisive role in securing the transportation routes for the export of illicit drugs and for importing arms...
...These private armies also became powerful tools to displace local peasant populations, thus serving the dual functions of opening up land and destroying the social base of the guerrilla...
...I will never apologize...
...They joined the growing numbers of internally displaced peasants, now believed to have surpassed a million people nationwide...
...They were guerrillas dressed as peasants...
...These were not innocent peasants...
...It is doubtful that the para- bourq militaries will be able to duplicate their success in the northern cattle-ranching and banana-growing regions...
...The violence today, however, no longer conforms to this narrative...
...This explosion of narco-violence against the state led to a Supreme Court decision in 1989 that declared the 1965 law that authorized the military to arm civilians unconstitutional...
...Official statistics place the guerrillas in over half the national territory, in 622 of 1,071 municipalities in 1997...
...As the paramilitary violence has escalated, so has the FARC's military power, territorial control and geographic reach...
...The reports that filtered out of the region reveal a scene of terror that rivals the worst days of earlier periods of violence in Colombia...
...The bloodbath in Mapiripin also reveals that the paramilitaries have moved to the forefront of Colombia's counterinsurgency war...
...With counterinsurgency prohibited as a result of the cease-fire agreements, the army decided to exercise its legal "right" to arm civilian populations in order to stop the political advances of the guerrilla...
...The final question that ments for a cease-fire, and then the conditions for build- remains to he answered is whether the outlines of a new ing peace...
...itaries could have projected themselves into new areas like Mapiripin with such force without the careful collaboration of the armed forces...
...Two days before, Castafio moved his men by plane from his stronghold in the northern regions of Urabd and C6rdoba...
...Still, the armed forces-and by extension the government-have proven unwilling to crack down on the paramilitaries...
...Even by the standards of the Colombian armed forces, the "success" of the paramilitary strategy is questionable...
...Over the next decade, they grew into strong regional paramilitary groups-the Death to Revolutionaries Movement in Magadalena Medio, the paramilitaries of Chucuri in Santander, and the now infamous Peasant Self-Defense Units of C6rdoba and Urabi, led by Carlos Castafio and his brother, Fidel...
...Such was the case in Puerto Boyaci in the Magadalena Medio river valley in central Colombia, which greeted arriving visitors with a sign hailing the city as the "Antisubversive Capital of Colombia...
...In fact, the paramilitaries have come to replace the armed forces, which are mired in crisis as a result of their failure to defeat the guerrilla insurgency...
...By the mid-1980s, more than a hundred of these local paramilitary groups existed in Colombia...
...It has also extended toward the agricultural frontier, as cattle ranchers buy up colonized land, displace peasants or incorporate them into precarious social and agricultural arrangements, and create paramilitary armies to protect their new holdings...
...Those who managed to survive flooded into makeshift refugee camps, shantytowns and new, hastily constructed barrios on the outskirts of urban centers throughout the region...
...Castafio says that the paramilitaries have a political project and are performing functions that the state has abandoned, particularly in relation to counterinsurgency...
...These paramilitary groups were not only aimed at subversives, but also became a key link in Colombia's burgeoning drug trade...
...3 But while the military is increasingly disengaged from the conflict, it remains deeply involved in aiding and assisting the development of a large-scale paramilitary project...
...Until recently, the standard account was as follows...
...He has taught at the University of the Andes and the National University of Colombia and is currently completing a book on the Colombian peace process.REPORT ON CHIAPAS & COLOMBIA immediate assistance a total of eight times since the first day of the carnage...
...The state has become a collaborator rather than principal actor, while the paramilitaries have taken center stage in the conflict...
...In fact, the paramilitaries have increasingly come to replace the armed forces, which are mired in crisis as a result of their failure to defeat the insurgents...
...State Department, Report on Human Rights: Colombia 1997 (Washington, D.C., 1998), pp...
...Over the past several years, meanwhile, the FARC's military power and territorial control have grown dramatically...
...The state responded with repression, expanding the powers of the military through successive states of emergency...
...At the same time, however, they have been unable to project that military might into political power at the national level, partly because in recent years they have prioritized military rather than political strategies...
...But the armed forces also understand that the paramilitaries are not accountable to them or to any other state authority...
...The army found a willing ally-as well as a major source of financing-in Colombia's new land-owning narco-bourgeoisie...
Vol. 31 • March 1998 • No. 5
