Crimes Of War Project > Magazine > The U.S. Foments Colombia‘s War

Into the Abyss: The Paramilitary Political Objective
By Ana Carrigan

August 2001

The lights are going out in Colombia. In the last two years, the growth in the military and political power of the paramilitaries (known as the "United Self-Defense Groups of Colombia," "Auto-Defensas Unidos de Colombia" the AUC), has brought a brutal, illegal army within reach of gaining political control over Colombia's future.

Colombian officials admit that the AUC are responsible for 80% of all political murders and massacres in the past year. The AUC's founder and longtime commander-in-chief, Carlos Castaño, is the subject of 22 arrest warrants for massacres, kidnapping, assassinations, and drug trafficking. The American Ambassador in Bogotá, Anne Patterson, and the U.S. Commander in Chief of Southern Command, General Peter Pace, have both warned that the AUC now represent the most serious threat to Colombia’s democracy.

Meanwhile, the peace process between President Andrés Pastrana and the major guerrilla group, the FARC, founders. To support their insurgency, the guerrillas continue to terrorize the urban middleclass through kidnapping and extortion. And growing numbers of Colombians, believing the AUC is the only force capable of ridding Colombia of the guerrillas, are listening to Castaño, who skillfully portrays himself as the "defender of the middleclass." As Colombia prepares for presidential elections in June 2002, many believe that the AUC's military offensive is close to achieving its long-term objective: to insinuate the political agenda of the AUC's far right sponsors into Colombia's political mainstream.

Traditionally Colombians have voted for the center. Now the center is overwhelmed by chaos and polarization and Castaño's backers, an ideologically extremist coalition of cattle ranchers and businessmen, narco-traffickers, regional politicians, and retired, cashiered, and active service army officers, have been positioning themselves to fill the vacuum. Hardliner Alvaro Uribe Velez, the Oxford and Harvard educated independent presidential candidate whom political analysts -- among them former president Alfonso López Michelsen and the country’s most influential columnist, Roberto Espinoso ( El Tiempo's "Dartagnan") -- have publicly stated fronts for Castaño, is on a roll. In the latest Gallup poll, in April, 25% of those surveyed supported him, compared to 17% in December 2000 and 3% in August 2000.

Uribe, whose father was killed by the FARC, is ideally qualified to exploit rising popular rage and despair. As governor of Antioquia, he promoted citizens' self-defense groups, which on his watch evolved into murderous paramilitaries. He has said that, if elected, he would create a national civilian militia and arm a million rural Colombians to patrol the countryside and provide the army and police with intelligence. Uribe was present when this idea was first proposed by the cattle ranchers at their National Conference in Cartagena, last November, where, amid scenes of a crowded convention hall filled with cattlemen giving the falangiste salute, it was received by a standing ovation. Critics say Uribe's plan sounds like the legalization of the paramilitaries.

At stake, as Colombia unravels, is a political program far more revolutionary and more radically opposed to Colombia's democratic constitution than anything on offer in the rather muddled and old-fashioned Marxist Leninist socialism espoused by the guerrillas. Propelled by the military muscle of Castaño's AUC, Colombia risks finding itself with the first democratically supported totalitarian government in Latin America, with a mandate to launch an all-out war of extermination against its internal, guerrilla enemy.

THE PARAMILITARY BUILD-UP

Until recently, officials in Bogotá and Washington, obsessed with the difficulties of the peace process, the explosion of drug crops, and increased guerrilla terrorism, have ignored the paramilitary threat. So it came as a shock when Ministry of Defense figures, released in December 2000, revealed that in the last two years, the membership of the AUC doubled, from 4,000 to over 8,000 troops. Army analysts forecast that if the paramilitaries keep growing at this rate, they will soon overtake the forces of the FARC's peasant army, which currently stands at 17,000 fighters.

Yet these figures may already be out of date. Since last summer, in all the areas where the AUC has recently expanded its operations, AUC commanders have been conducting an aggressive, even forcible, recruiting drive. In a recent letter to President Pastrana, Castaño claimed to have 11,000 men under arms, and last May he told Madrid's "El Mundo," the current figure was over 10,000. While record levels of poverty and rural unemployment drive young peasants into the ranks of both guerrillas and paramilitaries, the paramilitaries pay better than the guerrillas: their troops live better, eat better, travel in larger cars, and, in the villages and cities where they have established permanent bases, it is reported that they pick up more women.

Base pay for the troops runs between $200 and $400 a month. Through a range of front companies, Castaño provides health insurance, even social security for his troops who reportedly get 10 days R&R every four weeks. The mafioso character of the AUC, however, emerges most clearly in the recruitment of front commanders. Commanders are selected according to an established profile. If possible, a commander should have a background in intelligence. He will be offered a complete change of identity, including plastic surgery to transform his appearance, if he wishes. But he is prohibited from ever returning to his previous life, and he must commit to the AUC for a minimum of 10 years. A commander is responsible for forming a unit of 50 men, divided into three groups, each of which controls an area 250 hectares square. He must carry out the orders for atrocities and train his troops to execute them. Commanders can make $4,000 a month.
Castaño claims that 1000 former army officers and soldiers, including many dismissed from the Colombian army for what are officially described as "disciplinary problems," now serve in AUC ranks. Many have signed up to be commanders. AUC forces now operate, virtually at will, in 26 of Colombia's 32 provinces and maintain a permanent presence in over 400 of Colombia's nearly 1000 municipalities. Within the last two years, they have extended their operational capacity from their traditional stronghold in the north, south to Putumayo and the Ecuadorian border, and east to Colombia's border with Venezuela. Castaño told "El Mundo" in May that the AUC is active in 70% of Colombia's territory.

TERROR AS A MILITARY STRATEGY

In the language of García Márquez, every massacre is "foretold." The population in the location selected for the next attack always receives advance threats (via flyers, graffiti, and word of mouth) in a process Colombian peasants refer to as "the witches' postal service," ("el correo de las brujas.")

Then the death squad arrives. Heavily armed men in trucks arrive at the selected location by day or by night and block all entry and exit points. Next, they assemble the population in some central, public place, usually in the town square, and the informant, a hooded figure, bearing a list of names, moves silently among the crowd, selecting individuals for the coming slaughter, pointing them out with his finger. The informant, usually a neighbor, someone known to the community, identifies those henceforth defined as "guerrilla-auxiliaries." To be an auxiliary, it suffices to have sold something to a guerrilla, to have taught a kid who joined the rebel ranks, to have lost one's identification papers, or even to be wearing the wrong kind of clothing.

When the informant's work is done, the condemned men and women are taken to the place of torture and execution while the population is forced to witness the agony of their neighbors and relatives. When the killing ends, the withdrawal of the death squad also follows a pattern. Frequently they force one of the village women to cook and feed them a meal. Before leaving, they loot, set fire to some of the houses, and warn the survivors that they will be back, to finish a work in process.

"The "Chainsaw Massacre" is for real in Colombia," a shaken Ernesto Cifuentes, the People's Advocate, told Colombian reporters on his return from the site of a recent paramilitary atrocity. During Holy Week, an estimated 200 AUC paramilitaries went on a killing spree in twelve, impoverished Indian and Afro-Colombian farming communities, located in an isolated and abandoned region of southwestern Cauca, along the river Naya. Cifuentes, a conservative former Constitutional Court judge, had accompanied judicial officials who were only able to reach the scene in army helicopters.

Dazed with shock, the officials wandered amid the burnt and looted ruins that had been home for the 20 or more victims, whose bodies and parts of bodies they scooped up from fields and streams, loaded into nets hung beneath the helicopters, and took away. Many had been beheaded with machete strokes. Others had been mutilated and killed with chainsaws. The authorities were unable to reach more distant hamlets, where survivors insisted more bodies of their friends and neighbors would yet be found. There are no roads in the Naya.

There are important lessons to be learnt from what happened in Naya. In Naya, as in other atrocities, death alone was not the objective. Take the massacre in the tiny northern village of El Salado in July 2000, where the death squad danced and cheered as music blared over the village loudspeaker, while they took two and a half days to torture, rape, bludgeon and sometimes strangle to death, 36 people, tying them first onto a table in the center of the village basketball court. Or the Chengue massacre last January, where 50 paramilitaries drove their trucks into a community of avocado farmers at 4:30 in the morning, dragged 28 people from their homes, lined them up in the square, and crushed their skulls with rocks and a sledgehammer. In these and similar scenes the paramilitary objective is to instill terror and so force the surrounding population to flee, thus clearing the land for their backers.

Castaño knows the futility of the body count in a country where a long history of rural violence has failed to change anything. According to this logic, it is how you kill, the degree of pain and terror that can be inflicted through the act of killing, that counts. That is the message of Naya, of El Salado, of Chengue.

A Lethal Alliance: The Paras, the Army, and Civilians

The paramilitaries who committed the Naya massacre belonged to a unit of the AUC known as the Farallones Front. The Farallones, and two companion fronts, the Pacífico and the Paez, were formed last year. They are offshoots of an AUC unit—called the Calima Front--that surfaced in the city of Cali in the summer of 1999, shortly after a mass kidnapping in a local church by ELN guerrillas. Government investigators established that the Calima Front was organized by the Colombian Army's Third Brigade with the assistance of Carlos Castaño and a group of wealthy local people, including narco-traffickers. The civilians provided the financing for the new front's operational needs, active-duty Third Brigade officers provided intelligence and logistical support, and Castaño supplied the troops.

Human Rights Watch, whose research into the Calima Front confirmed the findings of Colombian officials, also reported that many of the commanders for the Calima were recruited among the ranks of former army officers. Government and United Nations human rights investigators insist that the ease with which the Farallon, the Pacifico and the Paez paramilitary fronts have consolidated and expanded their operational capacity throughout southwestern Colombia in the past year, would be impossible without a continuing relationship between the AUC and the Cali based Third Brigade.

In Bogotá, in the days following the Naya massacre, Eduardo Cifuentes denounced the government's failure to prevent "a massacre foretold." The people of Naya, he said, had been clamoring for protection since last December. In the weeks prior to the massacre, the O.A.S. Human Rights Commission had instructed the Colombian government to extend special protections to the Naya communities. The United Nations Human Rights Office reported that it had alerted the authorities two days before the killings began that a 300-strong paramilitary force was advancing into the Naya area. But in a pattern repeated somewhere in Colombia, week in, week out, the army did not lift a finger to protect the endangered population.

Days later, in what was described as the largest military operation to date against the paramilitaries, soldiers reputedly arrested 57 participants of the massacre. President Pastrana flew in from Bogotá to preside over a display of captured prisoners and war matériel. But the truth was less glorious. The army's "captives" were fleeing an encounter with the guerrillas, when soldiers saved their lives.

Recently, intense international pressure on the Pastrana government to crack down on army-paramilitary collusion is starting to show results. The Commander-in-Chief, General Tapias, understands the imperative to sunder the umbilical cord between his forces and the AUC, and that message has begun to reach individual commanders in the field, like the commander of the Vth Brigade in the Magdalena Medio, General Martín Orlando Carreno. But the relationship between the AUC, its backers, and the political and military establishments, is rooted in a common history, linked by a common enemy and promoted by widespread corruption--AUC commanders have no lack of funds to buy co-operation in the field from poorly paid army officers. Moreover, the synergy between the forces of the state and the AUC has been permitted to grow through official passivity, denial, and a climate of social tolerance for paramilitary crimes.

Just weeks ago, a diplomat, who requested anonymity, returned from a visit to northern Colombia, where he had seen, "with my own eyes," the infamous "co-patrullajes" (joint police-paramilitary patrols). Driving up the street in full daylight, he said, was the police car, and cruising just behind, a truck with armed and uniformed AUC troops. When BBC reporter Jeremy McDermott landed in Puerto Assís, Putumayo last August, looking for the local paramilitary headquarters, all he needed to do was hail the first taxi outside his hotel and ask the driver to take him there.

"He did not even blink," McDermott reported, "simply put the car in gear and sped down the potholed streets, passing the army checkpoint and into the countryside outside town." When he reached his destination McDermott found a luxurious villa set back from the road, "a five minutes drive past the local army base," and "a scene reminiscent of the drug barons' heyday in Medellín a decade ago," complete with covered gym, open air pool tables, and beautiful girls lounging around a swimming pool with their crew-cut paramilitary boyfriends.

He also met a former Colombian army sergeant, who introduced himself as the training officer of the AUC's 800-strong Southern Bloc that controls the town and surrounding region. Commandante "Yair" proudly informed McDermott that he was passing along the skills learnt during his training sessions by US Special Forces in Fort Benning and Fort Worth.

Not all Colombian institutions have been passive, however. The Prosecutor General's office has sustained a lonely crusade against Castaño, and recently formed a coalition for combined offensives with like-minded members of the army and police. On May 24th, at the conclusion of a two-year investigation, Prosecutor General Alfonso Gómez Méndez dispatched a joint task force of judicial investigators, police agents, and army Special Forces to the Córdoba provincial capital, Montería, headquarters of Castaño's primary financiers -- the cattlemen of Antioquia, Córdoba and Santander. Police made 36 pre-dawn arrests in three cities. In Montería, investigators raided the offices of the powerful Cattlemen's Federation of Córdoba (Ganacor) and removed documents and computers. They searched residences and businesses belonging to leading regional figures, including a senator, the former President of Ganacor, and the residence of Castaño's right-hand collaborator and longtime military strategist, Salvatore Mancuso. The son of Italian immigrants, Mancuso is a wealthy, cattle rancher and paramilitary commander. He is also the subject of 10 arrest warrants for massacres and assassinations.

This raid is the most significant victory scored by the Prosecutor General and his staff in the last four years, but the price for their relentless, lonely struggle has been exorbitant. Between January and September 2000, eleven investigators were killed, three others narrowly survived attempts on their lives, 11 were 'disappeared,' and 21 others received death threats. It is also known that in the last two years, intelligence agents for Castaño have infiltrated the prosecutor's offices.

Castaño as Media Star

Since he first appeared in a ground breaking 90-minute television interview in March 2000, Castaño has become a media star (www.caracoltv.com.) With his hair cropped very short, wearing casual yet impeccably pressed cotton slacks, shirt, and tie, he sat on a fake antique chair, insisting, "My ethic does not permit me to assassinate an innocent person." Talking very fast, his restless, dark eyes burning with nervous intensity, he justified all the killings-- all "guerrillas dressed as civilians,"-- and portrayed himself as the tormented savior of his "beloved Patria;" the sole defender of "la gente de bien," abandoned to their fate by the establishment. He said he read the Bible nightly and talking with God "calms me, nourishes me." He named Oriana Fallaci and García Márquez as his favorite authors, and ended the interview by reciting an entire poem by Mario Benedetti. The next day, 38% of those polled said their opinion of him had changed, said he was intelligent, made sense and, unlike those lying guerrillas, "he spoke the truth."

That night, Castaño's transformation from gangster to media star was off to a flying start. Nine months later he was back on the competing channel, RCN, wearing a white fisherman’s sweater and "talking with great charm and simple logic," according to Time Magazine (November 28, 2000). In a recent interview with Le Monde, Castaño explained, "[the AUC] are not paramilitaries, but a patriotic, anti-civilian-subversion movement, [that is] unique, world-wide. Our only enemy is the guerrillas, who have turned the middleclass into their military objective."

Castaño is not running for office, yet the political objectives of his media campaign are clear. He believes in the ideology he serves, and needs to find a way to the negotiation table, to assimilate his paramilitary project into the political mainstream, block negotiations with the guerrillas, and receive amnesty for his crimes. He wants to be a kingmaker, and as he builds his personal image, Colombian analysts see further evidence of the synergy between him and Uribe. Castaño is opening the space for an authoritarian leader who shares his goals.

And he may be doing so by literally removing himself from the public arena. On May 27, Castaño announced his "irrevocable" retirement as AUC’s Commander in Chief. And he hasn’t been seen since.

Experts are mystified. Has he been eliminated—literally or politically? Is he more powerful than ever, behind the scenes? One thing is certain: his vision of Colombia’s future already exists in numerous places.

The Future According to Castaño

To get a sense for what life in the Colombia of "Peace with Order" might be like, one need only visit any of the AUC-controlled regions, where the new model for rural life is up and running. Tim Johnson, a Miami Herald correspondent who visited Apartado, a town controlled by paramilitaries on the northern coast of Uraba, reported that the politics of this tropical city on the edge of the Darien peninsula had moved so far to the right, that the only comparison that came to mind was fascist Italy in the years before World War II. Gunmen patrolled the streets, fear and mistrust hung heavily in the humid atmosphere. Everyone watched everyone else; no one dared speak their mind on any subject. In areas where Castaño's forces are the law, every manifestation of private or community life must conform to a rigid set of behavioral regulations: no earrings or long hair for men, no mini-skirts or trousers for women; philosophy is banned from the schools; only certain kinds of music are permitted in the discos; cultural and ethnic festivals and many religious ceremonies are prohibited -- a few years ago in certain villages of Córdoba, Castaño banned Christmas celebrations -- travel is restricted; arbitrary curfews mandated.

On the northern coast, in parts of Córdoba and Magdalena Medio, Castaño also controls the selection and election of local authorities. Mayors, councilors, even congressmen and governors are all his people. When French philosopher Bernard Henri-Lévy, who recently interviewed Castaño on his Córdoba ranch, (Le Monde June 2, 2001) asked him why he had ordered the killing of a local mayor, Castaño replied, "because our job is to bring to power the representatives of the people. If anyone in Córdoba insists on presenting himself when he's not wanted, then of course we threaten him. It's true. It's normal."

But there is another dimension. In the 'liberated zones' of Córdoba and Uraba, where the AUC have driven out the guerrillas and re-populated the zone with their own supporters, Castaño has introduced the second stage of his political project, a campaign to win over hearts and minds that is filling the historic vacuum of the state. FUNDIPAZ is a "foundation" set up by Castaño two years ago, co-financed --from drug wealth -- by the AUC and the smaller ACCU, (Self Defense Groups of Córdoba and Uraba, the origins of the AUC.). Administered by his sister-in-law, Teresa Gómez, FUNDIPAZ has financed roads, schools and housing, and offers free medical brigades, subsidized medicine, universal schooling, housing, and adult education. Many on the receiving end of such services have become converts. Against a background of pervasive intimidation and ruthless social and behavioral controls, it is hard to gauge the depth of this support. Yet for people who have never known security, protection, or public services, Castaño's largesse represents a transformation of their world.

THE DIRTY WAR

This spring, after hundreds of murders and a year-long terror campaign in the streets and barrios the AUC completed their seizure of the of the strategic oil producing port of Barrancabermeja--the first major city to fall under Castaño's control.

In May, they brought the rural war to the capital. As is his custom, Castaño had announced the presence of his forces in Bogotá long before the bombs started to explode. He told the press in January that a new AUC front, the Frente Capital, would soon dismantle the guerrillas' Bogotá supply network and identify and eliminate "subversives," who are characterized by Castaño as "military objectives."

So who is a subversive? Writing last January from exile, where he had been driven some weeks earlier by paramilitary threats, Sergio Otalora Montenegro, analyst and weekly columnist for the independent Bogotá newspaper, "El Espectador," described the political objective served by Castaño and the AUC. "The sinister origins of the paramilitaries and of their real protectors are not exclusively rooted in a conflict to the death with the guerrillas," he explained. "The truth is, that behind the death squads there have been 15 years of dirty war [designed] to take apart [desarticular] every legitimate, organized, popular movement, and thus destroy any real possibility of constructing a democratic alternative in open opposition to the traditional parties." What Otalero describes is the political agenda that, in combination with the land-clearing rural massacres, Castaño and his paramilitaries so faithfully execute on his backers' behalf.

This is the lethal political agenda that now menaces the coming election campaign, and motivates the serial assassinations of Colombia's intellectuals and peace leaders, labor organizers, honest judicial workers, human rights defenders and journalists, ethnic and community activists. In the last four years, over 50 judicial officials and more than 40 human rights activists have been killed and scores more forced to flee the country. Most of Colombia's experienced investigative journalists have died or had to flee because of their work.

This year and last, the paramilitaries have intensified their infiltration of the trade unions and the universities. Union executives, college professors, and students, are being killed and terrorized into silence. When asked by Bernard Henri-Lévy in Le Monde why he killed union members, Castano replied: "Because [unions] stop people working." Last year, 129 union members were killed by paramilitary death squads, a further 44 have been murdered this year, and three recent attempts on the lives of union leaders have been foiled by their bodyguards. Hundreds more are under threat.

Those Otalora refers to as the paramilitaries' "real protectors," may not remain faceless, nameless forces, operating from the shadows, much longer. As the crisis deepens, and the opportunities to move from anonymity into the public sphere increase, gradually, forces hitherto only referred to in Colombia as "the Dark Forces," (Las Fuerzas Oscuras") are emerging into focus.

In Memoriam: one dirty war victim

One November evening in 1997, in a friend’s house in Bogotá, Eduardo Umana Mendoza, one of the most courageous Colombian human rights lawyers of his generation, predicted the present moment. "It is over for this country," he said. "Corruption has criminalized everyone—the politicians, the army, the courts, the church, the police. The left does not exist in Colombia. The guerrillas? They are criminal too, and absurd besides. The only people left who count for something are the trade unionists, and they are being systematically destroyed. If you want to know what is going to happen in Colombia, look to the right. The extreme right are the only people in Colombia who know what they want, and they will get it. They are the only organized force in this country and they are on track to seize control. Opposition? Colombians have their right-wing media, especially their television."

I had been away for three years and didn’t want to believe him. It was easier to tell myself that Eduardo was burnt out. But that night was the last time I saw him. On a Saturday morning in April 1998, he was murdered as he sat at his desk. His three killers, who included a smartly-dressed young woman, had gained access to his apartment by posing as journalists.

Last year, the Prosecutor General charged Carlos Castaño for Eduardo Umana’s death. The investigation concluded that the killers were from a criminal organization in Medellín called "La Terraza," and had been contracted for the mission by Castaño. The investigation also implicated the army’s Twentieth Intelligence Battalion, based in Bogotá, for coordination between Castaño and the death squad.

There was a devastating logic about Eduardo Umana's assassination. He belonged to an endangered species: those Colombians whose efforts to promote political tolerance and dialogue threaten the warriors on all sides. It was no accident that his assassination exposed the army-paramilitary alliance that kills to prolong and deepen the war.

After Eduardo’s death, and under pressure from then American ambassador Myles Frechette, the Colombian Defense Ministry disbanded the Twentieth Battalion. But the Ministry failed to dismantle the secret cells of the battalion’s death squad, and so re-cycled those intelligence agents to serve in other army brigades around the country.

The arrest warrant for Carlos Castaño for the murder of Eduardo Umana gathers dust in some army or police barracks.

In December 2000, Mary Robinson, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, visited Bogotá, knowing full well that the country was bleeding to death. Even so, there was much that shocked her. She could not fathom the indifference of political leaders who had never found it important to make an "acta de presencia" at any of the funerals of the massacres of their own citizens. And she was appalled by the discovery that large numbers of Colombians sided with the murderer and not the victim.

At her December 4 press conference, she was emphatic: "I have a very real sense of the desperate need ordinary people have in this country for greater security…" she said, " [but] I urge the people of Colombia not to fall into this trap… The paramilitary groups are not your friends. They do not support the civilian population. They are in breach of the law. They are undermining the legitimacy and authority of the government.… It is intolerable that week in week out the paramilitary phenomenon grows."

Mary Robinson could not be expected to understand the pathology of Colombian society. Colombians have hitched their dreams of the future to a myth that says that Castaño can defeat the guerrillas, and when the war is won, he will put down his guns, and everything will return to "normality."