The Dirty War
Pearce, Jenny
AT THE PASCUAL GUERRERO SPORTS STADI- um in Cali, a soccer game was abruptly suspended in December 1981 when thousands of leaflets were dropped from a small plane flying slowly overhead. They...
...the fate of the others was unknown as of mid-March...
...after four hours of fighting, we won again...
...Amnesty International, Colombia: Human Rights...
...Everyone knew who the assassins were...
...On December 30 of that year MAS chained a young woman to the doors of the Medellin-based daily El Colombiano, claiming she was the wife of the M-19 guerrilla who had kidnapped the daughter of a mafia drug baron, Jorge Luis Ochoa...
...I Meanwhile assassinations continued: on July 4, Antonio Roldin Betancur, the Governor of Antioquia...
...The assassination of UP leader Jaime Pardo Leal in October 1987 by drug-funded sicarios, and or Giuarin the following month by the FAKC further fueled a process of acute polarization...
...Peace," he said, "is the product of military and political victory, to make the conquered sit at the negotiating table and impose conditions on them...
...When Chac6n was killed, the people went out onto the streets, declared a general strike and put up barricades...
...3. The region became the FARC's fourth front...
...They view themselves as successful businessmen, and do not consider their behavior to be any more criminal than that of the elite which shuns them...
...La Prensa (BogotA), Aug...
...Today, no political project-Right, Left or Center-can claim a national following...
...It helps to build and repair roads and even has its own communications center...
...Semana, March 1989...
...O NE OF THE REGIONS INTO WHICH MAS expanded after 1983 was Urabi, a lowland region near the Panamanian border, where workers were struggling for basic trade union rights on the banana plantations...
...Still others specialized in killing artists, intellectuals, journalists and lawyers who were thought to be critical of the political order...
...Aerial bombardments and indiscriminate shooting in Meta and the Magdalena Medio around the towns of Yondo and San Pablo, drove hundreds of peasants from their homes in January and February...
...On the contrary, the Barco administration gave priority to increasing the state's capacity to repress the challenge from the organized and mobilized poor, thus enhancing the impunity with which the army and its political allies operated...
...Puerto Boyaca's military mayor, Capt...
...Boh6rquez notwithstanding, President Barco was unwilling or unable to move against the armed forces, the institution whose complicity made the political war possible...
...Members of AUGURA seemed incapable of distinguishing between guerrilla activity and the workers' struggle for more humane conditions...
...It is with the Coordinadora that the state has to negotiate...
...When the army returned the next day, they were surprised to find the militias there...
...The removal of Lt.Col...
...He paid a hotel bill in Medellin for several members of the death squad that traveled from Puerto Boyac...
...In 1987, a new level of struggle was reached after attacks against peasant leaders and leaders of the UP...
...Workers were putting in an average of 67.2 hours a week, with overtime and Sundays paid at the normal rate...
...The story of the FARC in the Puerto Boyaci region is closely linked with the rise of the organized Right...
...United Brands exported only 22% of Urabd's bananas that year...
...Local peasants have reported that army bombardments were coordinated with MAS incursions...
...We had to save the journalists, run with them, help them with their equipment...
...The eleventh front's tactics created divisions within the FARC, and the guerrillas seemed unable to protect people from army abuses...
...This is when they began to shoot at people indiscriminately...
...Two major guerrilla organizations, the FARC and the M-19, are known to have made money from coca production-the least profitable and most elementary link in the drug trade-but their pragmatic relationship to drugs can hardly be compared with that of the drug barons who produce and market cocaine...
...Franklin Quintero, commander of the Antioquia police, and later on that day, the most shocking assassination of all: that of Luis Carlos Galin...
...Miguel Maza Mdrquez, then head of DAS, put it in October, reported to have 2,000 men in arms and to have at least 20,000 part-timers and supporters...
...1 6 The paramilitary may have been a useful ally for the elite against the Left, but once the popular threat receded last year, the death squads became a greater threat to the state than the forces they had been repressing...
...9. E. Merino, Sobreexplotacidn y desproteccidn delproletariado bracero de la zona bananera de Urabd (Medellin: Cenasel, 1987...
...instructors...
...Puerto Boyaci has become a kind of independent paramilitary republic...
...Barricades went up, tires were burned...
...Until the 1950s the population clustered around the river ports, particularly the oil towns: first Barrancabermeja, later Yondo and Puerto Boyaci...
...When the Barbuld infantry's third battalion was installed in Puerto Boyaci in 1982, and the fourteenth brigade in Puerto Berrfo the following year, led by two high-ranking officers schooled in counterinsurgency, Col...
...In this way the military hoped to make up for its own limitations....What we are talking about purely and simThe people of Barranca put up barricades again and took over the main streets...
...In February, a UP town councilman from Norte de Santander department was murdered...
...Reformer Luis Carlos Galin re-entered the Liberal Party last year on the condition that the presidential candidate be chosen in a primary election, instead of through back-room deals...
...El Tiempo, April 20, 1989...
...The new party would run candidates in the 1990 local and congressional elections, both in the Magdalena Medio and other parts of the country...
...The local prosecutor bravely began a case against them, but he had to leave town soon after...
...Opcidn, Feb...
...four others were tortured for several days and then released...
...On August 18, Col...
...In Urabi and the Magdalena Medio, where class conflict is particularly acute, polarization has generated virtual civil war...
...Indeed, after nearly a decade of working together to wage the dirty war, nouveau riche drug barons have become integrated into a significant portion of the economic, if not the political, elite...
...As one rancher described it, "Twenty-three years ago, the guerrillas began asking us for a hat, some boots, some shirts, a hen or a cow....Then their demands grew, 'voluntary quotas' of 20 or 50,000 pesos which at the beginning we paid so that they would let us work....There were times when we brought guerrillas to BogotA for medical treatment making it look as if they were our workers...
...The paramilitary groups NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICASorganized by drug lord Gonzalo Rodriguez Gacha, which had been particularly strong in the Magdalena Medio, were weakened by the loss of their patron and financier, killed by police in December...
...But Yondo's mayor Braulio Mancipe declared, "To date we can confirm that the wounded and dead have been civilians....The army has not been able to show one dead or wounded guerrilla to prove the truth of its claims...
...One plantation owner claimed that he "no longer [had]...to go to Cuba or Nicaragua to see a communist revolution, because [he had]...lived it in Urabi...
...Barrancabermeja became the region's epicenter, and the struggles of its oil workers wrote important chapters in the history of the country's popular movement...
...The power of the regional bosses remains essentially intact...
...As ACDEGAM grew, so too did the need for more funds...
...Semana, Dec...
...There were five days of fighting...
...Along the river are a number of ports: Puerto Boyaci, Puerto Berrio, Barrancabermeja, Gamarra and El Banco...
...The bodies, or rather VOLUME XXIII, NUMBER 6 (APRIL 1990)27 VOLUME XXIII, NUMBER 6 (APRIL 1990) 27Re"44 onL to Aw4reA Colombia remains, of two other workers were found on April 4. Dynamite had been attached to their bodies and exploded...
...It has even run the town for short periods...
...Eventually 60% of the region's agricultural land was turned into pasture...
...The campaign against "subversion" reached new heights when ACDEGAM started to eliminate trade unionists, peasant organizers and even Liberal Party dissidents...
...It maintains ties to all the region's political representatives, including members of Congress.' 4 The Right then laid siege to Barrancabermeja, the center of Left activity...
...The political war is about who should control those resources and whose interests they should serve...
...Though he did not live to see it, that primary was held on March 15 and his annointed successor, C6sar Gaviria, won the vote...
...There were other important moments that year, such as on May Day and after the death of Pardo Leal in September...
...shortly before the killings...
...In the late 1960s and early 1970s the Popular Liberation Army (EPL) guerrillas, who had been active in the mountains of Sindi in C6rdoba, moved to Urabi to escape encirclement by the army...
...They announced the creation of a new organization: "Death to Kidnappers" (MAS), created to exterminate "kidnappers, guerrillas and communists...
...Before, let's say 1987, there were regional crime waves, as if the assassins covered the entire country, bringing their trail of death first to Meta, then Huila, then Magdalena Medio, and so on...
...Their role, and the relationship between "official" and "private" violence are nowhere more evident than in the Magdalena Medio and Urabi, two regions which are perhaps extreme examples -- extreme because important resources are at stake...
...Cien Dias, April-June 1988...
...Nelson Mejfa, DAS removed Lt...
...We were in the barricade of Haz de Copas, which we had held throughout the night, and at 7 a.m., when we were being interviewed on television, without warning the army began shooting at us...
...On April 14 the federal government placed the region under direct military control, replacing civilian authorities with a general from the ministry of defense...
...Near this macabre institution, they uncovered communal graves, with the bodies of 100 grassroots leaders...
...5. Ibid, p. 80...
...6 In 1984 a new organization was created to give the paramilitary and self-defense groups legal cover in the wake of the attorney general's report, the Association of Peasants and Ranchers of the Magdalena Medio (ACDEGAM...
...These formed one prong of the right-wing counter-offensive...
...They are peaceful Colombians...
...It took responsibility for the political and military defense of the region and gave socio-economic assistance to peasants who supported it...
...It was even photographed...
...A death squad "Wanted" poster in Call offers rewards for turning in local progressive activists and guerrillas 1988, half the area planted with bananas and all the most modem estates were controlled by 22 producers, who also owned businesses, shops, transport systems and cattle ranches...
...That initiative, NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 22more than anything else, convinced the landowners, businessmen, army officers and others who feared the rising strength of the guerrillas, that the government was incapable of stemming the advance of the popular movement...
...Boh6rquez, today a key supporter of the ultra-right MORENA party, and the 1300 soldiers under his command had accompanied paramilitary patrols and given refuge to its leaders.' 8 The president finally admitted what most had known for many years: "These groups are not simply common criminals, but constitute real terrorist organizations...
...The war may not be centrally planned-though some claim there is national coordination-and it may be waged primarily by local elites and regional military commanders, but the weakness and ambivalence of the central government undoubtedly enabled paramilitary violence to grow...
...The Congressmen who denounced the fraud made use of their legitimate right and asked to be shown the list to check the number of votes cast against the number of persons who responded to the call to vote...
...We demanded respect for human rights, and we accused the military of being agents of the dirty war...
...Colombia Hoy, No...
...La Prensa, Oct...
...The attorney general located Puerto Boyaca as the center of the operations and identified the involvement of local ranchers and members of the Barbuld battalion...
...When Barranca rises, the Coordinadora controls events...
...In the end, only one-a watereddown agrarian reform-passed, and that amid wellfounded accusations of fraud...
...Two hundred popular leaders and activists were killed during 1988, including a much-loved poet and oil worker, Manuel Chac6n...
...They killed Chac6n in the commercial center of the town and calmly got into their car and drove away...
...This gave it much more power to negotiate with the state...
...A total of 72 UP members were assassinated in the first three months of this year.23And on March 22, UP presidential candidate Bernardo Jaramillo Ossa was murdered at the Bogotdi airport...
...Semana, May 17, 1988...
...Puerto Boyacd became the bastion of the Right, while Barrancabermeja remained a focal point for workers' struggle and left-wing opposition...
...Twelve of them were released...
...Armed militias were seen in Barranca...
...The wave of killings sparked a government investigation completed in February 1983...
...The workers then went out on VOLUME XXIII, NUMBER 6 (APRIL 1990) I 25Re44 on t4 Aeica4s Colombia UrabB: "The prolongation of Central America" where average wages buy 34% of the minimum needed to survive strike, whereupon the army moved in and forced them back to work...
...Two of the "disappeared" were sighted two days later in the military base of San Pedro de Urab...
...The ranchers and peasants association ACDEGAM runs its own schools and clinics...
...76, Feb...
...The National Liberation Army (ELN) set up its first front in the south of Santander around San Vicente de Chucurf in 1964, while the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) was particularly active around Puerto Boyaci...
...The plantation owners association, AUGURA, also dominated the region politically through Liberal senator, political boss, and banana producer, Jaime Enrique Gallo...
...Not only is the crisis of legitimacy in the state's relationship with the people unresolved, but the state now faces an equally serious crisis of authority, as it grapples with the political challenge of the cocaine mafia and its private armies...
...The army organized the population into "selfdefense" groups and put them on the front lines of the war against the guerrillas, a strategy made possible by widespread disenchantment with the FARC...
...The strike lasted two complete days...
...2 0 And the President was not prepared to acknowledge that the army's "official" repression-bombardments, disappearances, torture and murder-was as serious a threat to the legitimacy of government as the "unofficial" kind...
...Much has been made of the role of the drug mafia in the political war, but landowners and the armed forces have played an even greater part...
...On February 15, 1988 they murdered Manuel Gustavo Chac6n, a compafiero with a long history of struggle, a union leader and member of A Luchar...
...As the people of Barranca-as the town is affectionately known-struggled to remain organized, the extreme Right of the Magdalena Medio took their cause to a new level...
...others took on the guerrilla organizations and their sympathizers...
...Like the Magdalena Medio, UrabA is a region of considerable economic importance...
...In 1983 SINTAGRO had 150 members...
...Barco's constitutional reform was scuppered in Congress and his social programs barely got off the ground...
...Ochoa's daughter, Marta Nieves Ochoa Vdsquez, was released unharmed on February 17...
...Amnesty International, Colombia Briefing (London: 1988...
...He was referring to efforts by President Betancur to talk peace with the guerrilla organizations...
...In reality, the majority of their victims are not guerrillas...
...Then, with the help of allies in the armed forces, notably Gen...
...He was born a peasant in Charala, Santander, where Jos6 Antonio GalAn the leader of the Comuneros [Revolt in 1781] was born, and had come to Barranca in search of work...
...Amnesty International, Colombia: Human Rights...
...That is where true peace is born, not in unfulfilled truces...
...As landowners in the Magdalena Medio, where guerrillas and a combative popular movement grew increasingly active, they became anxious to lend a hand to pacify the countryside...
...7. According to a July 1988 report by the Departamento Administrativo de Seguridad (DAS...
...Days after the judge issued arrest warrants, she received death threats and was forced to leave the country...
...He would say, 'When I leave this region, it will be very hard and difficult for my successor, because I have come to have some 300 adopted children, so that the peasants no longer say general, but compadre, and they feel proud that I am their godfather...
...On August 9, Daniel Espitia, national treasurer of the ANUC peasant federation...
...5, 1990...
...The commander of the Fifth Brigade in the Magdalena Medio claimed the operations were to prevent the FARC from filling the vacuum left by the collapse of drug baron Rodriguez Gacha's "selfdefense" groups...
...They agreed to provide financing for the armed group to work with the army...
...Their bodies were later found in different fields or in the sea, their hands tied and bullet wounds in their heads...
...Many of this latter group went into exile in the mid-1980s when their names appeared on death lists...
...2 2 During the final week of February, six local UP leaders were massacred in the town of Ungfa, the UP mayor of Apartad6 was assassinated, and a journalist and three peasant leaders-all UPmembers-were gunned down...
...In Urab...
...At midday, about 30 counterinsurgency police began beating the workers, insulting us and shooting into the air...
...At the town's entrance a billboard announces it as the "anti-subversive capital of Colombia...
...The Coordinadora felt it had a military arm...
...JP NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS __ 24ply are officers who break all bounds when presented with the temptation to multiply their capacity for action, and who make use of private citizens whom they initially take as 'guides' and 'informants,' collaborators and auxiliaries in general, and end up using them as a hidden arm and as contract killers who can do unofficially what cannot be done officially...
...4. Consideraciones generales...
...The average wage covered only 34% of the minimum needed for a family to survive.' The establishment in 1964 of the Communist Partyinfluenced SINTRABANANO union represented the first real attempt to unionize the workers...
...11, 1989...
...The FARC created its fifth front in Urabi in the 1970s and, as worker repression increased, guerrilla movements garnered support...
...Barrancabermeja houses the country's most important oil refinery...
...In the mid-1980s the cocaine mafia began to invest huge sums into turning MAS and other groups into private right-wing armies which, when not murdering peasant and labor leaders, could help defend the drug industry...
...When Barco came to power in 1986, he presented Congress with 20 reform projects, all of which his government considered vital...
...22, 1987...
...Another new element was the support of the guerrilla organisations for the popular struggle in the town-notjust with a few leaflets or banners...
...They carted off 43 young peasants in two trucks...
...Durdn Dussin tried to distance himself from such backing, but did not deny it...
...The reward was kidnapping...
...after coffee, oil, coal and textiles, bananas are the country's largest export, and Colombia is the world's fifth largest banana exporter...
...Guerrilla movements also established themselves in the region...
...Not until March 1989, when Congressman Jos6 Antequera of the UP national directorate was gunned down (and Liberal Senator Ernesto Samper was wounded) while in line at the Bogota airport, did the collective fear of the elite and the cumulative weight of international criticism force the government to confront the growing power of cocainefunded death squads...
...The murderers were denounced by name and rank...
...8 They saw no need to change the backward, authoritarian pattern of labor relations that United Brands had established on its plantations in Santa Marta, in which there were no labor codes, social provisions or proper wages...
...Those involved, including the police commander of Puerto Boyacd and officers from the Voltigeros battalion, were subsequently arrested...
...The convoy managed to pass two army roadblocks at the Vl61ez and Condor battalion headquarters without a problem...
...The political war, meanwhile, resumed at the end of 1989, after a brief respite at the height of the government's crackdown on the cocaine barons...
...Nor did the actions just involve individual assassination...
...Initially designed to protect the ranchers against kidnappers, MAS soon became a movement against "subversion" in the widest sense...
...7 Parallel to the rising strength of the Right was the growth of the popular movement and new guerrilla groups nationwide...
...8. Opcidn (BogotA), June 1988...
...In the 1920s and 1930s many came in search of jobs in the oil industry...
...The Dirty War 1. Consideraciones generales para el tratamiento delfendmeno de violencia en el Magdalena Medio Boyacense, caso Puerto Boyacd, mimeo, (BogotA, 1989...
...WITH A POPULATION OF 800,000, THE Magdalena Medio lies along the valley of the middle section of the Magdalena river between the Andes' central and eastern ranges...
...13,000 marched in February 1987...
...But now in Barranca there are permanent organizations, which don't depend on great leaders...
...2 1 The Liberal Party's majority in Congress guaranteed Barco nothing...
...2 Repression, both official and unofficial, and far in excess of the real "threat" from the popular movements or the guerrillas, did win a breathing space for the ruling elites-at a cost of over 8,000 lives in three years...
...In the large cities, where there are no clear options other than cocaine and crime, violence breeds violence...
...Tob6n refused and, five days later, was murdered...
...Military abuses continued into 1989...
...in the 1950s and 1960s many more arrived fleeing La Violencia elsewhere...
...Further investigations implicated members of MAS, including the mayor of Puerto BoyacA, Luis Alfredo Rubio Rojas...
...In response, employers dismissed workers, murdered union leaders and, when the workers went on strike, called in the army...
...Luis Boh6rquez of the Barbuld battalion from his post...
...He traveled to the villages with his songs...
...In September 1988 a civilian court judge, Martha Lucia GonzAlez, made public evidence that an army major, head of the intelligence unit of the Voltigeros battalion, had provided the paramilitary groups with the names of workers considered guerrilla sympathizers...
...on the same day, we have deaths in different parts of the country, which suggests several groups of assassins working in coordination....[The drug mafia] are financing this crime wave, but they could not operate without a high degree of complicity from entire structures of the armed forces...
...On December 14, Jos6 Parmenides Castro, a peasant leader and member of the UP was assassinated in Mesetas in the department of Meta...
...On Feb...
...By May DAS had established that the massacre was carried out by hired professional killers from the Magdalena Medio, directly supervised and assisted by the regional military command...
...they were in a military car and they were members of the army...
...1990...
...9, 1989...
...Yanine, today a general and chief of the VOLUME XXIII, NUMBER 6 (APRIL 1990)23 VOLUME XXIII, NUMBER 6 (APRIL 1990) 23Colombia Bogoti police, is a charismatic figure who seemed to understand the peasants...
...local ranchers' committee, political bosses, shopkeepers and traders to request their assistance in battling subversion...
...With the murder of Chac6n, they struck at the backbone of the popular movement and also at the heart of its culture...
...A twelve-year-old boy wounded in the attack was taken to the hospital under guard because he was suspected of being a guerrilla...
...By the end of the 1970s, when its influence had spread, FARC had six or seven more fronts...
...Peasants were unable to market their produce or buy provisions without a safe-conduct pass from the army...
...DESPITE THE WANTON VIOLENCE, THE TWO major banana unions merged at the end of 1989 and in Urabi the movement remains strong...
...In 1986 the UP won majorities on the municipal councils of Apartad6 and Mutata, and in the 1988 election both the UP and the Frente Popular did exceedingly well...
...A few hours before he was shot dead, UP leader Jos6 Antequera insisted that there was national coordination: "There is no doubt that there is a paramilitary organization of a national type, well coordinated...
...In March, members of the Voltigeros battalion arrested a group of banana workers in the municipality of Apartad6...
...Many Liberals and Conservatives had indeed come to accept the need for some institutional and political reform...
...Widening the cracks a fraction to preserve bipartisan rule was as far as the politicians would go...
...p. 56...
...Banana production came to be controlled by a decreasing number of modem absentee banana entrepreneurs...
...29, 1988...
...In early 1982, not long after MAS announced its appearance at the soccer game in Cali, the group began to work in earnest in the Magdalena Medio...
...The appearance of MAS is often considered the starting point of the political war...
...on July 29, Maria Diaz P6rez, the judge who had ordered the arrest of drug baron Pablo Escobar and those responsible for the Urabi massacres...
...The rural areas of Magdalena Medio were populated in various waves of colonization...
...There was a general strike and the people took control of the town...
...Following the March massacre, 20,000 banana workers and their families marched in protest...
...These activities, which were not combined with any attempt to organize the peasantry politically, created fertile ground for the growth of the Right...
...Some were even taken to the plantations and made to point people out in person...
...In 1979 only 46% of the estates had any labor agreements at all...
...Army counterinsurgency theory gave ideological cohesion to the local ranchers' drive to regain control of the region...
...2 4 Official army operations continue to affect civilians in areas where the guerrillas are active...
...This was a blow to the popular movement...
...In Barrancabermeja the people had their own popular and political organizations, and their own means of countering the influence of the Right...
...For president it endorsed the right-wing Liberal politician, Hernando Durdn Dussin...
...and by 1987, 12,600 on 144 plantations...
...Although death squads (such as the "Death to Revolutionaries of Urabi") carried out most of the killings, the heavy military presence and frequent roadblocks facilitated the work of paid assassins...
...By DE TU TIER,, DE TUS HIJOS LAS" AUTORIDADES ANTISOCIALES NDE LOS VEA 98 ,- ' SON SECUESTRADOREf-TIFICACION o PORWAA UNO " Y EN SILE NCIO S...
...Cattle ranchers constantly threatened their precarious existence, dislodging many colonos by force...
...Of these only a quarter had resulted from negotiations with the union, the rest having been imposed by the employers...
...Others, however, continue their campaigns of assassination and terror...
...On August 4, an attempt on the life of Luis Carlos Galdn was frustrated...
...Oscar Echandia, met with representatives of the Texas Petroleum Company, members of the AN ACTIVIST FROM BARRANCABERMEJA SPEAKS T f HE 1980S HAVE SEEN A REAL RESUR"j gence of direct struggle...
...Yes, it is no longer isolated officers who sponsor this....There are command structures who are accomplices in the dirty war...
...In August of last year, Ivan Roberto Duque Garcia, general secretary of ACDEGAM, announced the formation of a political party, the Movement of National Restoration (MORENA...
...workers fought a terrible battle to establish a union in the 1930s, only to lose it later to company stooges...
...Then when a little girl, Sandra Rend6n, who was a witness to the attacks on the compaiieros, was killed, another three days of struggle began with massive demonstrations of about 30,000 people...
...SHORTLY AFTER MIDNIGHT ON MARCH 4, 1988, 17 workers were massacred in Urabi on the Honduras banana plantation near Currulao...
...An organization emerged to lead the movements of Barranca, the Coordinadora Popular, made up of all the democratic organizations, political and trade union bodies, peasants, workers and community organizations...
...They were taken to the battalion headquarters in Carepa...
...The FARC then began to harass medium and small farmers and farm managers...
...Each of the opposition political movements of recent history won support here...
...In May 1989, her father, the ex-governor of the department of Boyaci, was gunned down...
...In the end they had to retire them from active duty...
...A total of 100 people had been killed in the region during the first three months of 1988...
...DURING 1988 THE PARAMILITARY GROUPS extended their control over much of Magdalena Medio, successfully driving the guerrillas from what had been a major stronghold...
...It caused panic at first, but then we fought back and won back the barricade...
...It was quickly followed by a plethora of mostly local death squads who used anticommunism to justify the murder of a wide array of targets...
...In May three helicopter gunships, four armed personnel carriers and a Mirage fighter jet bombed the village of San Pedro de UrabA, destroying six houses and killing at least five civilians-officially referred to as "guerrilla casualties...
...Initially, in the 1960s, FARC concentrated on building support in rural areas, where its ally the Communist Party, which had won a number of municipal council seats, could not participate openly without fear of reprisal...
...The right-wing offensive began to look like good business, as the exodus of peasants enabled others to appropriate their lands...
...But the violence continued...
...on July 30, Henry Cuenca Vega, President of the National Federation of Cement Workers...
...in Urabi, a UP activist was killed in Apartad6, and the Liberal councilman from Mutata was kidnapped...
...In 1965, a group of Colombian producers formed the Association of Banana Growers of Urabd (AUGURA) and their own banana-exporting company, the Union of Banana Producers of UrabA (UNIBAN...
...on August 16, Carlos Ernesto Valencia, a magistrate who had called for the drug barons to be put on trial for the murder of Guillermo Cano, editor of El Espectador...
...Popular support for the Left was growing...
...NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 26It grew increasingly clear that the landowners were losing the battle against unionization...
...In October 1985, Liberal Party congressman Pablo Guarin-named by the attorney general as a member of MAS-addressed the Fifth Assembly of Boyacd in a region known as the Magdalena Medio...
...Despite the climate of terror, the people refused and paralyzed the region with two civic strikes in October...
...They had become a virtual "state within a state," as Gen...
...In 1985 the army strengthened its presence in the region with five of the Tenth Brigade's battalions, each with 1,500 soldiers, and the Voltigeros battalion, frequently denounced by local workers for human rights abuses...
...When the people decided to go on strike, to demonstrate, to mount barricades, to confront the power of the military, that's when they have won their demands...
...MAS first targeted members of the Communist Party, FARC, and their suspected sympathizers...
...By 1984, Urabd's municipalities of Apartad6, Chigorod6 and Turbo were producing 92% of the country's banana exports...
...The region has considerable agricultural and ranching potential, as well as oil, natural gas and coal reserves...
...Although there was no military confrontation, their presence gave us strength...
...He was a singer, a poet...
...A school for training assassins was set up in Puerto Boyacd, with Israeli, German, British and U.S...
...This, "the most democratic nation in Latin America," is permeated by the sense that the system and the society are breaking down...
...Faruk Yanine Diaz, army tactics moved from crude intimidation and terror to the carefully planned pacification characteristic of lowintensity conflict...
...In September 1989, Amnesty International reported: "In several cases documented by Amnesty International, members of the armed forces involved in multiple killings and 'disappearances' are still free and apparently in active service months after judges have ordered their arrest....Amnesty International is concerned that despite the determination of civilian court judges to seek to arrest members of the armed forces and to hold them criminally liable for human rights violations, military authorities are persistently refusing to comply with such decisions and arrest warrants generally remain unenforced...
...2 The drug barons also believed that by joining the Right in the war against subversion they could enhance their status in the eyes of the political establishment...
...27 of this year, he was detained for a few hours until a paramilitary band sprung him from the Puerto BoyacA jail...
...Another said that, "if you see the map, you will realize that Urabd is the prolongation of Central America and we are living through the processes of revolution and counter-revolution that they are living....It is a confrontation between democracy and communism...
...Over the following ten weeks, MAS took responsibility for more than 100 assassinations...
...An army lieutenant and corporal from the same unit were accused of participation in the massacre...
...Luis Lorduy Lorduy, secretary of the House of Representatives, refused to hand over the list and, taking advantage of the confusion, got it to the table of C6sar Prez, president of the House, from where it disappeared....The episode concluded three hours after the vote, when, list in hand, the fraud was proved...
...7 In April 1989 DAS, the only Colombian security agency responsible directly to civilian authorities, closed down several paramilitary training schools and camps, including the "University of Assassins" in Puerto L6pez in the Magdalena Medio...
...The guerrillas were present, particularly the ELN...
...Criminal actions are shielded in vain behind anticommunism and the struggle against the guerrillas...
...By 1985, when the first of two bomb attacks on the SINTAGRO offices in Currulao took place, it had 4,000...
...But Gaviria was never a member of Galin's breakaway movement and is considered to be cast more in the Barco mold...
...They called out the victims' names from a list before killing them...
...In Puerto Boyacd, further down the river, the Texas Oil Co...
...A 1979 case was typical: Upon receiving a list of demands from workers, the owner of the Revancha Galofre plantation offered the local union leader, Armando Tob6n, 50,000 pesos to withdraw the demands...
...The list showed that 115 representatives were present and 117 ballots were deposited in the box...
...We lost the barricade...
...The army tried to make everybody in Urabi carry identity cards...
...Once the unions won the confidence of the black workers from Choc6, they grew rapidly...
...It was followed in 1972 by SINTAGRO, in which the Marxist-Leninist Communist Party (PCC-ML) gained a following...
...Some engaged in "clean-up" operations to eliminate petty criminals, prostitutes and homosexuals...
...Daniel Garcia Echeverri and Col...
...The plantation owners became even more insecure when the guerrillas began to demand protection money from them and from ranchers...
...Those previously sympathetic to the guerrillas began to lose confidence and many fled...
...They are men, women and even children, who have not taken up arms against institutions...
...El Tiempo, Feb...
...the paramilitary group, MAS, was another...
...p. 121...
...M AY'S ELECTIONS APPROACH WITH THE modernizers in the ruling elite looking considerably weaker than at the beginning of the Barco administration...
...in 1985 drug barons Pablo Escobar, Jorge Luis Ochoa and Gonzalo Rodriguez Gacha-all local landowners-contributed generously to ACDEGAM's military groups...
...According to Luis Alfredo Rubio Rojas, former mayor of Puerto Boyaci, "I heard Faruk Yanine say many times that whoever had the people would win the war...
...El Diario-La Prensa (New York), March 1, 1990...
...Although later he went into hiding after being indicted for participating in massacres in UrabA department, Luis Alfredo Rubio Rojas was elected mayor in the March 1988 elections...
...Mery Garcia Martinez, Diagn6stico de la zona de Urabd (Medellin: IPC, 1987...
...The oil workers' union was badly affected by the repression after the November 1981 strike when about 30 activists lost their jobs...
...The army established a permanent presence in the region in the late 1970s, militarizing roads and stepping up the arrest and torture of suspected Communists...
...3 In 1979, when the region came under the command of its eleventh front, FARC began financing its operations by kidnapping and robbing local ranchers...
...Asked his response to accusations that MORENA was a fascist party, Duque Garcia replied, "Well, if fascism implies defending private property and the family with vigor and energy, defending the state, defending democracy and shaking off the dangerous specter of communist totalitarianism, then let them call us fascist...
...From hiding he managed to give interviews on television and in the press, in which he talked of meetings he had had with army officers after the warrant for his arrest was issued...
...Urabd's banana industry began in 1963 when blight forced Frutera de Sevilla (a subsidiary of United Brands) which controlled most of Colombia's banana production, to shift its operations from Santa Marta on the coast...
...But renovating the system was simply not on the agenda...
...The army worked closely with the landowners (who were rumored to pay it for protection), patrolling estates and threatening workers...
...The army stepped up its activities, with frequent bombardments...
...Investigations by both DAS and the attorney general found that he had allowed the battalion to be used as a communications and training center for paramilitary groups in the Puerto Boyacd region...
...Work stoppages, known as "days of grief," were declared after every murder...
...a group of 40 armed men dressed in military and civilian clothes burst into Pueblo Bello, near the town of Turbo on January 14 at 8:30 a.m...
...Then the assassins moved on to La Negra plantation and shot three more...
...An investigative team from the federal Department of Administrative Security (DAS) established that, before the murders, the Voltigeros battalion had arrested and held several people from the area, and forced them to identify local people with alleged EPL links...
...the regional political bosses operated according to a logic of their own...
...Elsewhere, however, the political war succeeded in forcing the popular movement to retrench...
...1990, p. 27...
...Allegiances shifted from the Revolutionary Liberal Movement (MRL) in the 1960s, to the National Popular Alliance (ANAPO) in the early 1970s, and, finally, to the Communist Party in the late 1970s, particularly in the countryside around Puerto Boyaci...
...SINTRABANANO had 4,600 members on 78 plantations.'" That year, by which time 96% of the work force was organized, the unions forced the first industry-wide wage negotiations...
...2. Between 1979 and 1988 the mafia is reported to have bought one million hectares in C6rdoba, the Magdalena Medio, UrabA, CaquetA, Meta, Sucre and elsewhere, investing huge sums in improving the land (Semana, BogotA, Nov...
...Meanwhile, MAS extended its operations throughout the Magdalena Medio and even into other regions...
...On December 30, Ram6n Emilio Arcila, a respected civic movement leader in eastern Antioquia, was assassinated after receiving numerous threats...
...Some ranchers left the region to become absentee landlords, but many more left and took their cattle with them...
...On April 11 armed men in military fatigues kidnapped 25 peasants from the village of Coquitos near Turbo, a site of a number of land conflicts...
...They launched an offensive which combined aerial bombardments of regions in which guerrillas were active, with parallel efforts to win the hearts and minds of the people...
...But the town was more difficult to pacify than Puerto Boyacd...
...Three years later the attorney general told Congress, "MAS was an authentic paramilitary movement....The perverse habit of the military of relying on private citizens to carry out its counterinsurgency activities is spreading...
...As businessmen, the drug barons shared the anticommunism of the ruling elite...
...To minimize its own risks, the company encouraged investment from the Antioquia and Bogota elites, offering them ample credit and cheap land made available by displacing peasant colonizers...
...Many peasants headed for the towns or left the region altogether...
...6. Quoted in Amnesty International, Colombia: Human Rights...
...They killed 699 people, mostly banana workers, between 1982 and February 1988, 200 of them in 1987.12 Huge demonstrations were held to protest the killings...
Vol. 23 • April 1990 • No. 6
