Colombia’s northern plains were made for
cattle. C~bu and Brangus cattle graze along
the SinO River, which occasionally wanders out
of its shallow bed, turning the land into a vast marsh.
A colleague and I were on our way to meet Carlos
Castahio. The drive was calm and tense, uneventful
and deeply threatening. I’m tempted to say it’s a
Colombian kind of feeling, this marriage of quiet and
menace, the smell of wet earth amid a limitless potential for violence.
At a ranch, Castaio and his elite guard waited. For
a man so legendarily ruthless, Castahio is pleasant
looking. Compact and fair-skinned, he has the gruff
paisa accent of his Antioquia childhood. He is young.
The 30 equally young men guarding him had Uzis,
AK-47s and machetes. Before sitting to talk, Castaho
removed a silver Beretta from his belt, shook my
hand and called for a tinto, the coffee that accom-
panies any serious conversation in Colombia.
Castaho grew up in the shadow of his eldest brother, Fidel, who apprenticed in cattle sales before
moving on to more lucrative cocaine. Fidel invested his profits in land, and made his mother and 11 sib-
lings millionaires. Although it is rumored that he had
cashed out of trafficking by 1990, Fidel remained a
powerful figure in the market, and a vengeful one. When Pablo Escobar tortured and killed two associ- ates, Fidel retaliated by blasting Escobar from his lux-
urious hiding places and, ultimately, into the gun sights of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA)
and the Colombian police. Fidel shared with his younger brother his hatred of
the guerrillas. A colleague who once interviewed Fidel
at Las Tangas, a Castaho ranch, told me Fidel wanted no revenge for the FARC’s 1981 kidnapping of his
father, who died in the guerrilla’s custody. Fidel hated
his father with the venom first-born sons reserve for
an abusive and hard-drinking parent. Fidel hated the
guerrillas for other reasons-because they stole his
Robin Kirk is a researcher at Human Rights Watch and author of The Monkey’s Paw: New Chronicles from Peru (University of Massachusetts Press, 1997).
beloved cattle, because they killed his
younger siblings because of their last name,
because they got in his way. Castan
Fidel vanished in 1994, perhaps in the war. An’ Darien Gap, perhaps to a Portuguese rest home for the mentally unstable. Carlos part be Castaho inherited his brother’s wealth and hatreds. He left middle school after his him, so
father’s death. Ever since, he’s been at .
war. of his
Castaho leads the Peasant Self-Defense
Units of C6rdoba and Urab6 (ACCU), the
1990s outgrowth of Fidel’s Tangueros, who
took their name from the Castafio ranch. The Tangueros
perpetrated the most gruesome massacres of the pre-
vious decade. The look, however, is new. Castafio has recruited not a band of professional hit-men, but a pri- vate army, which he describes without irony as a new
kind of guerrilla. The men guarding him have blue uni- forms with baseball caps printed with the letters
“ACCU.” They have wartime regulations, a joint chiefs-
of-staff, and even “hearts-and-minds” civic-outreach
campaigns.
And they have a goal. “We are going to end this war once and for all,” Castaho says. To this end, Castahio
has since forged an alliance of like-minded paramili-
taries, which he calls the United Self-Defense Units of Colombia (AUC). The AUC is his attempt to propel his
regional war into the national arena.
Castafo admits what he calls “errors”- the killing
of innocents. “Especially at the beginning, we made
mistakes, since we had poor training,” he says. “But
we have matured as a fighting force. We now have
units throughout the country, and have recuperated many areas from guerrilla domination.”
But war is not all he thinks about. He has hired soci- ologists, anthropologists and agronomists, he told me,
to come up with solutions to Colombia’s problems.
The ACCU sponsors grade schools, cooperatives, land
reform and agricultural credits. As we spoke, he drew
from a battered rucksack a sheaf of neatly printed reports, on ACCU letterhead. One surveys problems
facing poor youth. Another addresess the elderly.
These reports, Castafio explained, also served as intelligence, the work the ACCU does before launch-
Castano’s life is
war. And in large
part beause of
him, so is the life
of his country.
“ing an attack. For instance, he explained, they had recently discovered that the
guerrillas were “laundering cattle.” After stealing a herd, guerrillas would
trade several steers to a peasant in
exchange for onefor one “clean” steer. The
reduced but “laundered” herd would
then be sold to the slaughterhouse.
“Butchers were helping fund the
guerrillas through this process,”
Castaio said, “so we had to send them
a message that it would no longer be
tolerated.” The message was direct. The bodies of butchers
began to appear on the country roads of Cordoba.
“What if the butcher did not know the origin of
a steer?” I ventured.
“If he didn’t know,” Castaio countered forcefully,
“he should have.”
Castafo argues that most of the hundreds of
murders attributed to the ACCU annually are guer-
rillas-either trained fighters or supporters who,
in his view, are equally guilty. He categorically
denies allowing his men to torture or mutilate,
although the evidence is overwhelming that such
practices are common. But in Castahio’s world,
almost any activity-boarding a bus, buying beef,
treating a patient, paddling a canoe-can seem
like part of a vast, silent conspiracy. Just as guer-
rillas threaten and kill suspected paramilitary sup-
porters, so do paramilitaries threaten and kill
suspected guerrilla supporters. Who will be left
when the fighting is finished?
Castahio is sure of one thing-he will likely die
before he reaches his goal of a guerrilla-free
Colombia. The million-dollar reward the govern- ment has put on his head annoys him, if only
because he believes that he has done more for
Colombia than anyone. Sometimes, he says, he
thinks of what he will do when it is over-work the
cattle, which he loves, have his wife and children
near. But he knows, better than most, that a man
with so many enemies is unlikely to see a Colombia
at peace. His life is war. And in large part because
of him, so too is the life of his country.
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