Colombia (Lonely Planet, 5th Edition) - Jens Porup [12]
FARC’s fortunes continued to rise, though, particularly when President Belisario Betancur negotiated peace with the rebels in the 1980s. This, along with the M-19 siege, so irritated defense secretary general Fernando Landazábal that he created a major autodefensa (paramilitary) funded by landowners. The roots of these groups – all generally offshoots of the military – began in the 1960s, but grew in the ’80s. For example, Landazábal’s XIV Brigade would soon kill hundreds of suspected FARC collaborators in the Magdalena Valley. Paramilitaries also targeted members of FARC’s political party, the Unión Patriótica (UP; Patriotic Union), which gained over 300,000 votes in the 1986 presidential election; their increased exposure, however, led to more than 300 murders of UP politicians in just six months.
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For accounts from FARC and paramilitary leaders, Steven Dudley’s engaging Walking Ghosts: Murder & Guerrilla Politics in Colombia (2004) follows the rise and fall of FARC’s Unión Patriótica party. Mario A Murillo’s Colombia & the United States: War, Unrest & Destabilization (2004) is another left-leaning take.
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As communism collapsed around the globe, the political landscape for the guerrillas shifted increasingly to drugs and kidnapping (kidnapping alone, by one account, brought FARC some US$200 million annually), and paramilitary groups were given license to be involved with drug cartels as long as they kept after the guerrillas – even if it occasionally meant killing off young people in villages supportive of the FARC or ELN.
After 9/11, ‘terrorism’ became the new buzz word applied to guerrillas, and even some paramilitaries. One group that made the US list of international terrorists, and which had notoriously been paid US$1.7 million by Chiquita fruit company, was the infamous and brutal Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (AUC; United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia). Linked with cocaine since 1997, it was inspired by paramilitary groups previously under the watch of the slain Medellín cartel leader Rodríguez Gacha. The AUC was later run by brothers Fidel and Carlos Castaño, who set out to avenge their father who was slain by guerrillas. AUC, with a force of up to 10,000 troops, were as well known for terrorizing the countryside as the guerrillas. When the Uribe administration Click here offered lenient sentences for paramilitaries or guerrillas who demobilized, AUC handed over their guns in 2006.
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Guardabosques, a 2008 UN/Colombia social program, began offering coca planters US$100 monthly to switch from coca to coffee or honey, or even ecotourism. Most were used to earning over 300% more growing coca than crops such as bananas.
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But the violence is not over. In 2008 the number of deaths of union leaders rose, paramilitary groups formed under new names (eg Black Eagles) and FARC continued the bloodbath by planting land mines that killed 180 civilians in 2007. In all, paramilitaries and guerrillas each killed about 300 civilians in 2007 according to Amnesty International, who also said in a 2008 report, ‘The Colombian authorities are in absolute denial, even refusing to admit there’s an armed conflict in their country.’
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THE DISPLACED
Caught in the crossfire between paramilitaries and guerrilla forces, and sometimes outright targets in what the UN says is a ‘strategy of war,’ one in 20 Colombians (about 3 million) have become desterrados (dispossessed, or displaced) since the 1980s, making Colombia home to more displaced persons than any country except Sudan.
The situation is ugly. About 860 additional people become displaced daily, forced out of their homes at gunpoint – usually stolen for the land, livestock or its location on drug transport routes – sometimes not until after a loved one is murdered. Most of the dispossessed are left to fend for themselves, living in tarp-covered huts