The Paramilitarization of the War in Colombia

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 defeat the guerrilla
insurgency.
Over the course of six consecutive days between
July 15 and 20, 1997, over 100 heavily armed
men seized control of Mapiripdn, a small coca-
growing town in southeastern Colombia, torturing and
killing an estimated 30 villagers. 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. Those who were massacred in Mapiripin,
Castafio said, “were the most dangerous and most despi-
cable among the population. I will never apologize.” His
self-defense patrols were winning the war in Colombia,
he said, “not by killing peasants but by killing guerrillas.
These were not innocent peasants. They were guerrillas
dressed as peasants.”‘
The Mapiripdn massacre was carefully planned and
executed. 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. Two
days before, Castafio moved his men by plane from his
stronghold in the northern regions of Urabd and C6rdoba.
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. regions of the eastern plains-an area
strongly influenced by the
Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).
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. 2 Witnesses spoke of the paramil-
itaries carving up body parts of live victims and dump-
ing them into the river and decapitating victims with
chainsaws. They also described the resurrection of well-
known 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 grizzly
orgy of violence turned Mapiripdn into a ghost town.
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. They joined the growing numbers of internally
displaced peasants, now believed to have surpassed a
million people nationwide.
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. 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. This delay, coupled with the para-
militaries’ use of the army-guarded air strip, indicates a
high degree of army complicity in the massacre. The
bloodbath in Mapiripin also reveals that the paramili-
taries have moved to the forefront of Colombia’s coun-
terinsurgency war.
Indeed, paramilitary groups in Colombia have
embarked on an ambitious project, seeking to transform
themselves from local to national-level actors. Castafio
and his paramilitary forces, for example, are now claim-
ing to be leading a national paramilitary strategy of all-
out war against the FARC. 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. 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. It is doubtful that the para- bourq militaries will be able to duplicate their
success in the northern cattle-ranching and
banana-growing regions. It is more likely that they will
continue using air transport and other means to make
periodic incursions into guerrilla strongholds in south-
eastern Colombia to commit the kind of atrocities seen
in MapiripAn.
The paramilitaries do not confront the guerrilla
directly-their principal target is the civilian population.
Towns are “cleansed” of anyone suspected of support-
ing 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. The stories
are so mind-numbingly similar that, in many quarters,
they no longer spark outrage. 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.
Counterinsurgency in Colombia, like many other
internal wars from Guatemala to South Africa, is
essentially a dirty war against individual collabo-
rators and suspected supporters of the insurgents. Entire
communities are often forcibly displaced in order to dis-
rupt guerrilla control over a particular area. But unlike
other internal wars, the paramilitary violence in
Colombia is not a subordinate strategy designed to com-
plement the activities of the military. In fact, the para-
militaries have increasingly come to replace the armed
forces, which are mired in crisis as a result of their fail-
ure to defeat the insurgents. The figures for political
violence during the first nine months of 1997 are reveal-
ing in this sense. While only 7.5% of armed attacks were
attributed to the army, 60% were attributed to paramili-
taries, and 23.5% to the guerrilla. 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. The scope of the
army’s involvement in paramilitary activity is believed
to be broad. It is unlikely, for example, that the paramil-
ny found
g ally for
military
egy in
ia’s land-
g narco-
leoisie.
itaries could have projected themselves into
new areas like Mapiripin with such force
without the careful collaboration of the
armed forces.
There used to be a certain amount of
coherence-at least in the dominant narra-
tive of the left and right-to Colombia’s
violence and low-intensity war of the last
30 years. Until recently, the standard
account was as follows. Guerrilla groups
took up arms in the absence of political
channels under a closed and increasingly
repressive regime forged through the exclu-
sionary National Front coalition, estab-
lished by the warring Liberal and Conservative parties
to bring an end to the decade of violence between 1948
and 1958. The state responded with repression, expand-
ing the powers of the military through successive states
of emergency. The violence today, however, no longer
conforms to this narrative. The state has become a col-
laborator rather than principal actor, while the paramili-
taries have taken center stage in the conflict.
Over the past several years, meanwhile, the FARC’s
military power and territorial control have grown dra-
matically. 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.
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 state-
maintaining order, officiating at weddings, births and
divorces, organizing education, mediating conflict and
administering justice, and marketing agricultural prod-
ucts. 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.
The paramilitaries, however, have increasingly sought to
fill this power vacuum as well.
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. 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). 4 From 1965 to 1980, the army’s
paramilitary strategy was low intensity, as was the war.
There was little combat between guerrillas and military
units, and combat-related deaths of guerrilla and soldiers
numbered a few hundred a year. Paramilitary activity was
local and only a minor factor in the conflict. After 1984,
however, when the government of Belisario Betancur
(1982-1986) signed a cease-fire agreement with four guer-
rilla 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 counterinsurgency prohibited as a result
of the cease-fire agreements, the army decided to exer-
cise its legal “right” to arm civilian populations in order
to stop the political advances of the guerrilla.
The army found a willing ally-as well as a major
source of financing-in Colombia’s new land-owning
narco-bourgeoisie. Land was an attractive investment for
the drug barons not only for its material value but also
for the social status it bestowed. 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. This rapid expansion
of Colombia’s cattle frontier has provided the social base
for Colombia’s modern paramilitary forces. As the traf-
fickers 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. 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. This agrarian counter-reform has resulted in
the concentration of land ownership, and has turned thou-
sands of peasants into refugees and, in many instances,
into recruits in the paramilitary or guerrilla armies. 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. 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.
Through the mid-1990s, these paramilitary projects
were mostly based at the local level, and reflected a close
alliance among drug barons, landowners, regional polit-
ical bosses and the military. 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.” By the mid-1980s, more than a hundred of
these local paramilitary groups existed in Colombia.
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.
These paramilitary groups were not only aimed at sub-
versives, but also became a key link in Colombia’s bur-
geoning drug trade. The Castafio brothers’ links to the
cocaine trade go back to the early 1980s. In Urabi, which
is strategically located on the Atlantic Coast across the
waters from Panama, paramilitary units played a deci-
sive role in securing the transportation routes for the
export of illicit drugs and for importing arms.
While the armed forces were crucial to the creation of
many of these paramilitary groups, they did not fully con-
trol them. In addition to their antisubversive and drug-
running 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. As long as the
paramilitaries and their narco-allies had their guns turned
on the guerrilla, left-wing activists, human rights work-
ers and even amnestied guerrillas, the army was content
to allow them free reign. But soon the guns turned against
government ministers, judges, governors, senators and
presidential candidates. 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.
Still, the armed forces-and by extension the govern-
ment-have proven unwilling to crack down on the para-
militaries. 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. The result, as expected, has been to add one more
armed group to the mosaic of armed actors in the
Colombian countryside.
T he evidence is overwhelming that the military con-
tinues to facilitate paramilitary operations. Military
leaders mistakenly believe that the paramilitaries
represent a useful and successful counterinsurgency stra-
tegy for defeating the guerrilla because they have been
able to recapture control of certain areas like parts of
Magdalena Medio. But the armed forces also understand
that the paramilitaries are not accountable to them or to
any other state authority. Even by the standards of the
Colombian armed forces, the “success” of the paramili-
tary strategy is questionable. As the paramilitary violence
has escalated, so has the FARC’s military power, territo-
rial control and geographic reach. Official statistics place
the guerrillas in over half the national territory, in 622 of
1,071 municipalities in 1997. In 1985, they maintained a
presence in only 173 municipalities. 5 The paramilitaries
have wrested a few key zones from guerrilla control, but
in general they do not seem capable of mounting a sus-
tained military campaign against the guerrilla. In effect,
the paramilitaries have increased the violence, not
controlled the insurgency.
Yet the very fact that the government remains unable
or unwilling to dismantle the paramilitaries is testimony
to their political strength. When Castafio announced the
launching of his national paramilitary project last year,
he insisted that there could be no peace with the guerril-
las without the participation and cooperation of the AUC.
Castafio says that the paramilitaries have a political pro-
ject and are performing functions that the state has aban-
doned, particularly in relation to counterinsurgency. The
move into Mapiripfin last July was not only an attempt to
bring the dirty war into the center of the guerrilla zones.
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 negoti-
ated settlement with the guerrillas in late 1998 or 1999.
The guerrillas have stated that they will not sit down
at the negotiating table with the paramilitaries. They
reject the idea that the paramilitaries have a political
agenda separate from the interests of cattle ranchers,
narco-landowners and drug traffickers. They view them
simply as agents of state terror.
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. 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. as the FARC has
and the armed forces is internally fractured into mul- demanded. is a
pressing issue which has yet to be
tiple parts. Achieving a lasting peace will depend on the resolved.6 But
any negotiation will be. as Gabriel GarcIa
delicate and immensely complex task of bringing these Marquei recentl
y said, a negotiation among losers. All three actors together to reach viable, pragmatic agree- sides have lost
in this war. 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. 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. loss.
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.
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. State Department, Report on Human Rights: Colombia
1997 (Washington, D.C., 1998), pp. 2-3.
4. Francisco Leal Buitrago, El Oficio de la Guerra: La Seguridad
Nacional en Colombia (BogotA: TM Editors, IEPRI, 1994).
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. 19-22.