Paramilitaries, Drug Trafficking
and U.S. Policy in Colombia
by Samia Montalvo
Dollars and Sense magazine, July / August 2000
At 32 years old, Carlos Castano leads Colombia's largest paramilitary force, the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (AUC), or United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia. The AUC has earned the nickname "The Head Cutters" because its victims are usually tortured, mutilated, and then decapitated. Waging a relentless war against Colombia's leftist guerrillas -the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the National Liberation Army (ELN)-the paramilitaries both launch attacks on guerrilla-held territory and target those they suspect of being guerrilla "sympathizers" (including labor-union leaders, peasants, peace advocates, and human-rights workers).
According to the U.S. State Department, there were 399 massacres in 1999 (up from 239 in 1998), 80% of which were carried out by the paramilitaries. The Colombian Armed Forces, meanwhile, often turn a blind eye to atrocities committed by the paramilitaries-their allies in the counterinsurgency war.
THE "DRUG WAR" AND THE GUERRILLA WAR
Colombia is already the world's third-largest recipient of U.S. military aid, having received $308 million in 1999. In January 2000, however, the Clinton administration proposed a $1.28 billion Colombia aid package, most of which is earmarked for the Armed Forces and National Police, for the next two years. The House of Representatives has since approved $1.33 billion in aid for this period. The Senate is currently considering an aid package of about $1 billion. Though the Clinton administration is selling the "Alianza Act" as a drug-war measure, the real aim of the proposed new aid is to help the Colombian government defeat the guerrillas.
This is not the first time the United States government has, in the name of "counterinsurgency," armed and trained armies with links to death squads. Remember El Salvador and Guatemala during the 1980s? Yet the U.S. has failed to learn from what it now claims were the "mistakes" of the Cold War era. Last September, U.S. Ambassador Curtis Kamman formally announced, in a Bogota press conference, that aid to the Colombian military would "bolster its fight against drugs and the guerrilla insurgency."
Guerrilla groups like the FARC are, as the U.S. government claims, involved in the drug economy. The FARC controls up to 40% of Colombia's territory, mostly in the coca-producing southern states of Putumayo and Caqueta. It taxes peasants who grow coca and in exchange protects their crops. FARC combatants fire on aircraft spraying herbicides over the coca-growing regions.
Right-wing paramilitary forces, however, also benefit from the drug trade, perhaps even more than the guerrillas.
Groups such as the AUC not only protect coca fields, but also laboratories where the coca leaf is processed into cocaine paste. On May 6, 1999, the Colombian National Police raided three cocaine laboratories under paramilitary protection in the Magdalena River Valley of northern Colombia. The three labs were capable of producing eight tons of cocaine a month. Over the following three months, Colombian officials uncovered twelve more cocaine labs under paramilitary control in the same northern region.
FROM "SELF DEFENSE" TO THE OFFENSIVE
During the 1980s, the FARC kidnapped, and in some cases killed, numerous landlords in Colombia's north-central Magdalena Medio region. One of those killed was Carlos Castano's father. After their father's death, Castano and several of his brothers signed on as guides for the Colombian army's Bombona Battalion, XIV Brigade, which armed and trained the first civilian autodefensas, or "self-defense" groups. Funded by large landowners and cattle ranchers, the autodefensas became today's paramilitaries. The Colombian Army openly armed and trained paramilitary groups until 1989, when the government banned them due to their ties with drug traffickers. Ties between the Army and the paramilitaries, however, have not been severed completely.
More:
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/South_America/Paramilitaries_Colombia.html~~~~Colombian Paramilitaries’ Successors Called a Threat
By SIMON ROMERO
Published: February 3, 2010
CARACAS, Venezuela — Criminal armies that emerged from the ashes of the Colombian government’s attempt to disband paramilitary groups are spreading their reach across the country’s economy while engaging in a broad range of rights abuses, including massacres, rapes and forced displacement, a human rights group said Wednesday.
A report by the group, Human Rights Watch, detailed the activities of the paramilitary successor groups, which feed off Colombia’s cocaine trade. The drug trade remains lucrative despite Washington’s channeling of more than $5 billion of security and antinarcotics aid to Colombia, making it a top recipient of United States aid outside the Middle East.
“One major reason why combating these groups is not a priority is that it’s hard for the current government to acknowledge that a significant part of its security policy is failing,” said José Miguel Vivanco, Americas director for Human Rights Watch, speaking in Bogotá, Colombia.
Seeking to influence the Obama administration’s policies toward Colombia, the group recommended delaying ratification of a long-awaited trade deal until Colombia’s government vigorously and effectively confronts the criminal groups, which succeeded paramilitaries formed by landowners decades ago to combat guerrillas.
President Obama said in his State of the Union address last week that he would like to strengthen trade ties with Colombia.
The Human Rights Watch report comes at a delicate time for Colombia’s president, Álvaro Uribe, who is keeping the country on edge as to whether he will seek a third term in May. In 2006, during his administration, the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, a coalition of 37 paramilitary groups, officially demobilized, and Mr. Uribe has won support for lowering violence. But he has not secured a definitive victory against these flourishing new criminal armies, or the leftist guerrillas who have waged insurgencies that have lasted for decades. And murders connected to the paramilitaries’ successors are surging once again in Medellín, a city where there had been a respite from such violence.
More:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/04/world/americas/04colombia.html~~~~In Medellín, a Disturbing Comeback of Crime
By Nadja Drost / Medellín Thursday, Feb. 25, 2010
This is a day in the life in Medellín. One recent morning, students waved white flags calling for peace — even as they mourned a 13-year-old classmate killed by a stray bullet just days before. In the afternoon, police captured 21 alleged criminal gang members who had slipped back into the paramilitary drug world after pledging to give it up. By night, around 10:30 p.m., police were hauling a dead body into their "necro-mobile" — a truck that collects bodies — and remarking how light a night it had been so far. It was only the second murder of the night.
Medellín has always had trouble living down its reputation. In the 1980s and '90s it was one of the most dangerous cities in the world — first as the headquarters of Pablo Escobar's cocaine cartel and then as the playground of right-wing paramilitary groups. But Medellín's murder rate dropped steadily after paramilitary fighters started putting down their arms in 2003 as part of a peace agreement with the government — and the city, one of the most dynamic industrial centers of Colombia, slowly re-established itself as a metropolis to reckon with.
(See pictures from the life of the drug lord Pablo Escobar and his son.)
But last year was not a good one for Medellín. Murders doubled in 2009, to 2,899, according to the National Institute of Legal Medicine and Forensic Science. It was the largest number of homicides since 2002, when there were some 5,000 murders (there were an estimated 6,500 in 1991). The situation is directly attributable to a drug war that has once again engulfed the hillsides ringing the city. Reports in the Colombian press had the number of murders at 230 in January of this year. Behind the surge of violence is a battle over power and territory between warring factions of a cartel-like network of criminal bands called the Office of Envigado that controls the vast majority of drug trafficking in Medellín.
More:
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1967232,00.html
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