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Author: David Rhys-Jones | Date: February 2003
News broke on 27 November 2002 that the Catholic church had been facilitating preliminary peace negotiations between the government of hardline President Alvaro Uribe Velez and the nominally outlawed paramilitary organisation the AUC (United Self Defence Forces of Colombia). The AUC receives little attention from the international media, yet according to the United Nations, it is responsible for 80% of the approximately 8,000 politically motivated murders that occur each year in Colombia. It is also the world’s largest drug cartel.
The AUC is Colombia’s right-wing death squads. Their stated aim is to defend the State from communist insurgency, and they employs two strategies to do this. The first is the selected assassination of members of the legal left and social movements; the second is the indiscriminate terrorising of the civilian population, a policy that the paramilitaries refer to as “taking the water away from the fish” (the fish being the guerrillas; the water, the civilian population in which the guerrillas hide).
Paramilitary violence against opposition political groups has decimated the social movement. Colombian trade unionists talk of the genocide of their movement, which has resulted in the murder of 1,500 union leaders since 1985. Human rights defenders, women’s organisations, peasant organisations and black and indigenous communities have all suffered similar losses. The Union Patriotica, a political party born from the union between the Communist Party and disbanded FARC guerrillas, was completely wiped out by the paramilitaries, who assassinated 3,500 of its leaders and activists over a 10-year period. Not only has this had dire consequences for political organisation, it has deepened Colombia’s civil war by leaving many leftists little choice but to join the armed insurgency.
However, the majority of the victims of paramilitary violence come from the unarmed rural population. AUC fighters use the most bloodthirsty methods imaginable to spread terror throughout whole regions. The rural population has witnessed mass killings with chainsaws and sledgehammers, dismemberment of pregnant women, and groups of children thrown into deep ravines. Often entire villages are burned down, forcibly displacing the population from the land.
Colombia is currently home to two million internal refugees (the highest number of any country outside Africa) who have been forced to abandon the land by paramilitary violence. This has allowed large land owners to extend further their land holdings. In 1984 0.4% of the population owned 32% of the land. By 2000 the same number of people owned 62%.
Foreign multinationals are alleged to be paying paramilitary groups. Coca Cola is currently defending itself from a court action that accuses the company of paying paramilitaries to assassinate trade unionists organising in its bottling plants. Nestlé, Anglo-American and BHP Billiton (both British mining conglomerates) face similar accusations. The oil giant BP is alleged, in a court case currently awaiting hearing in Colombia, of paying for the assassination of a government environmental regulator.
That the paramilitaries of the AUC collaborate closely with the Colombian police and army is an undeniable fact. Even the Colombian government admits that they share weapons, transport, intelligence information and even personnel, that they mount joint operations and often patrol together. Large death squads are regularly able to pass through army road blocks to occupy villages and carry out massacres in rural areas. The government and its supporters in North America and Europe blame this collaboration on rogue elements of the army acting contrary to government policy to combat paramilitarism. But the shear extent of this mutual assistance, the huge number of senior military personnel involved, and the extent of paramilitary influence within all branches of the Colombian state, government ministries, the judiciary and even the state human rights department, has drawn both Colombian and international observers to the conclusion that paramilitarism is a “dirty war” policy, sanctioned at the highest level. Many now believe not only that is this the case but that paramilitarism is now the driving force behind the government of Alvaro Uribe and the entire neoliberal project in Colombia.
Paramilitarism was an important element of Colombian politics throughout the twentieth century, used by the established political parties to assassinate their rivals and by the landowning elite to protect their property from invasions by landless peasants. However it was not until the mid 1980s, fuelled by the profits of Colombia’s cocaine boom, that the paramilitaries were able to develop the military capacity, political agenda and autonomy that characterises their existence today.
As the cocaine barons amassed enormous wealth and land holdings they became targets of guerrilla extortion. Leading gangsters, such as Rodriguez Gacha of the Medellín cartel, ploughed huge sums of money into paramilitary groups, providing them with sophisticated weapons and training from British, Israeli and South African mercenaries. Their control of the cocaine trade allowed them to fund vicious anti-communist crusades on behalf of the drug barons and ultra conservative cattle ranchers and land owners who hired their services.
The political establishment also paid the groups to carry out their own political terrorism. During the eventual collapse of the Medellín cartel, the Colombian government, with the blessing of the US Drug Enforcement Agency, entered into a tacit agreement with a group of drug traffickers known as the “Pepes” which allowed them to take control of the cocaine trafficking routes in northern Colombia in exchange for assistance in bringing down the billionaire international cocaine trafficker, Pablo Escobar.
The Pepes were led by Carlos Castano, an associate of Escobar. Castano, who now heads the AUC, was another rabid anti-communist – his brother Fidel had been kidnapped and executed by the FARC. He was also extremely well connected among the political elite of the Antioquia department, where he owned vast amounts of land and which continues to be his paramilitary stronghold today. Alvaro Uribe, who is now President of Colombia, was soon to be elected Governor of Antioquia. Uribe too came from narco landlord stock. His father was a well known drug trafficker and the subject of an ultimately unsuccessful extradition warrant by the USA.
It was a $300,000 bribe from his father that gave Uribe his first job in politics as mayor of Medellín at the tender age of 25. Despite being removed from the job after only a few months, when his links with drug trafficking became an embarrassment for the national government, Uribe used this and successive positions to further the interests of the drug traffickers and land owners.
As Governor of Antioquia, he set up the Convivir, legally armed civilian security groups intended to defend the population from attack by the guerrillas. The Convivir soon degenerated into legalised death squads, massacring and assassinating people throughout Antioquia. Uribe refused to disband the Convivir and lent them his vocal support until they were outlawed by the government. They then essentially fused with the Pepes, creating the AUC, the most powerful and richest paramilitary force in Colombia. Carlos Catano and Salvatore Mancuso (a known associate of Uribe), formally leaders of the Pepes and Convivir respectively, still head the AUC.
Uribe’s government programme has its roots in his experience with the Convivir and paramilitaries as Governor of Antioquia. As Castano himself admitted during one of his numerous TV interviews, the AUC’s political ideology is closely matched with that of the new government. In areas controlled by the paramilitaries, voters were forced to cast their ballots for Uribe.
The AUC claims that its candidates form 30% of Congress. Their common ideology can be summed up as a fusion of the virulent anti-communism of the drug cartels and paramilitary groups, with the ultra social conservatism and feudal worker-boss relationships of the traditional land owning classes. Areas under AUC influence are often subject to harsh social controls. Single women are not allowed out alone. Punishment beatings have been meted out to girls who wear miniskirts. Men have had earrings ripped out and their hair forcibly cut. So called “social cleansing” is commonplace, in which drug addicts, homosexuals and street children are simply “disappeared”.
Uribe’s reform programme has concentrated on the erosion of workers’ and trade union rights, and the slashing of public sector wages and welfare provision to pay for huge militarisation. He has doubled military and police budgets and developed projects to set up a network of one million paid informers and 150,000 campesino soldiers, a national version of the Convivir. Two areas of the country have already been placed under direct military rule in what are called “zones of rehabilitation and consolidation”. Movement within these zones is severely restricted and the army has assumed police powers over the civilian population. The erosion of labour rights, and the violent pacification of protest have created ideal conditions for the super-exploitation of the Colombian people. The multinationals are taking full advantage.
The current peace negotiations between the government and the AUC are expected to lead to the wholesale incorporation of paramilitary forces into Uribe’s campesino soldier army, once again creating a legalised form of paramilitarism. Pardons and an amnesty are expected to be granted for drug trafficking and crimes against humanity. Many observers have pointed out that negotiations are unnecessary as the AUC and Uribe are generally in complete agreement and have always enjoyed a ceasefire. It is not, they say, an end to paramilitarism, but the first step in the complete paramilitarisation of the state.
The Colombia Solidarity Campaign (UK) is a grass roots organisation campaigning in conjunction with the social movement in Colombia, for human rights and peace with social justice, and an end to foreign military intervention in Colombia. For more information about Colombia, or to join the campaign, contact us at:
Colombia Solidarity Campaign, PO Box 8446, London N17 6NZ; email: colombia_sc@hotmail.com; www.colombiasolidarity.org.uk
© Searchlight Magazine 2003