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| Paramilitary fighters: Looking for guerrillas or drug money? |
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| The skull of the victim of a paramilitary massacre. |
Colombia's infamous paramilitary groups slashed a murderous trail thru Colombia during the 1980s, '90s and early 2000s. But, while they were commiting horrors including chainsaw massacres and the forced displacement of entire towns, the 'paras' justified their behavior as necessary to combat the threat of the left-wing FARC and ELN guerrillas, which dominated large parts of Colombia and had ambitions to overthrow the government.
But a new analysis by a Colombian NGO suggests that, more than beating back communism, the paras' main goal was making money from the drug trade.
The organization, 'Ideas for Peace,' studied 531 Colombian municipalities with paramilitary presence and found that in only 100 were the guerrillas a "legitimate menace." In 152 of these municipalities there were no guerrillas at all, according to the report.
But most of those municipalities did have illegal drug plantations.
That made the study's authors ask what the paramilitaries were after, if not drug money.
Of course, it's long been known that the paramilitaries enriched themselves from the drug trade, just as the guerrillas did and still do. Drug money even created a schism amongst the paramilitaries as the old guard, led by Carlos Castaño, opposed participation in narcotrafficking.
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| A protest against paramilitary violence. |
The paras' apparent focus on narcotrafficking also implicates the Colombian military, which long collaborated with the paras, sometimes shielding them from guerrilla attacks while they massacred civilians.
The new report coincides with a court's reopening of an investigation against ex-Pres. Alvaro Uribe for allegedly helping found a paramilitary organization in Antioquia Department back while he was the department's governor from 1985 to '87. The court's decision was only preliminary, and was based on testimony by two imprisoned ex-paramilitary leaders, who've confessed to involvement in crimes including mass murders and whose veracity is questionable. According to their testimony, 600 hundred cattle had been stolen from the Uribes' ranch. In response, Uribe and his brother held meetings on their ranch in which they organized a self-defense organization, which eventually morphed into a paramilitary organization. The self-defense group killed the guerrillas who had allegedly stolen the cattle as well as the traders whom they sold them to.
Uribe denies any involvement with paramilitarism, but suspicions and accusations have dogged him throughout his career.
Paramilitarism, one of the darkest chapters in Colombia's long armed conflict, suposedly ended when the groups demobilized around 2005, but their crimes will likely haunt the country for a long time.
By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours
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12 comments:
It might be better to draw a line in how these crimes are discussed. It is not so important as to which organization done what. By calling up Paramilitaries it can give a very misguided impression that the crimes are due to perpetrators being paramilitaries (even though you lightly try to equal blame to other "groups"). Paramilitaries achieved a lot good in fending off the scourges of Marxist guerrillas and provided protection to populations that the government could not reach. This blog as an influential source of information to English speakers interested in Colombia, needs to do more to be balanced and impartial when talking about Colombia's highly politicized past (and present).
Whether paramilitaries made Colombia more secure is highly contested. Visit a human rights NGO and ask for access to their databases to garner a more accurate impression.
it s important to identify who did what to evolve from a culture of impunity to one of justice and reconciliation. Anonymity cannot achieve this.
elusiveworld, you've again missed the points of my reply to this post and have just perpetrated the same errors. The tiresome debate needs to move away from ideologies and onto criminal grounds.
It seems to me that the paramilitaries are a clear case of the cure being as bad or worse than the disease, with the added evil of state collaboration.
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Mike
"or worse" is not a balanced or educated view but an ideological bias. And on the point of sate collaboration, the state is by no means a saintly organization.
I've often thot that in a moral sense, tho not a legal one, Colombia's guerrillas have a responsibility for the paramilitaries' crimes. After all, the paramilitaries were a predictable and inevitable result of the guerrillas' actions.
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Mike
State-sanctioned paramilitary activity is unconscionable, period. In their heyday, basically they were guns-for-hire, funded by regional stakeholders (cattleranchers, govt. officials (sometimes one and the same)), with the national govt. turning a blind eye (at best). With the dismantling of their hegemony, they splintered into microtraficking gangs, just like the guerilla have become. Unless the state steps up their presence in the provinces, these forces (both "guerillas" and "paras") are just going to fester and grow deep roots..
Something the government would be stupid to ignore.. Alas, their track record ain't too stellar..
Hi Juan,
You are certainly correct about paramilitarism's unconscionability. However, it's not only a matter of establishing government presence thruought this huge country, which is unrealistic, in any case. It's also a matter of eliminating the illegal groups which prey on civilians and almost inevitably produce paramilitarism as a response.
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Mike
If only good people were not denied the rights to protect themselves and their property.
Protecting is one thing. Wholesale slaughter, which the paramilitaries (and the guerrillas) committed, is altogether something else.
Mike
Correct. Which brings us back to my point. Like you say wholesale murder is committed by both sides. It makes no sense reverting to such discussions as an issue of paramilitaries (or guerrillas). Except to propagate a bias, or ideological indication. A much more progressive take would be to focus on the crime rather than the perpetrator for whatever reason(s). To continue talking in such motivated ways does no service to intelligence. There's many dubious people in Europe and North America that like to talk all day long about such paramilitary and governmental crimes but conveniently (for their own ideologies) say nothing of that by the guerrillas. To be fair they have no real knowledge of the conflict from their sources of dubious information. The situation needs to be talked about in a logical (not ideological) sense. Other examples can be cited from elsewhere in the globe if needed.
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