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.
