The Coke Machine - Michael Blanding [87]
By all accounts, the conflict began sixty years ago in a period appropriately called La Violencia, a sectarian bloodletting pitting the two major parties, Liberal and Conservative, against each other following the killing of a popular liberal leader in 1948. Caught in between, communist rebels fled into the hills around Bogotá for protection, eventually consolidating themselves under the leadership of a guerrilla captain called Manuel Marulanda—better known by his nickname Sureshot for the quickness with which he dispatched any government forces encroaching on his territory.
When the two major parties reached a power-sharing accord in 1958, the communists were left out. The army attacked their bases, scattering them into the jungles, where they took on the new name of Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia), or FARC, and adopted a Marxist philosophy and guerrilla tactics of ambushing government troops and bases operating in their territories. While most fled south, some spread northward into the relatively un-populated area of Urabá, where they used their Caribbean location to import weapons from Panama and tax drug shipments bound farther north, kidnapping or killing anyone who opposed them. By some accounts, the FARC also infiltrated the unions in the banana-processing plants run by United Fruit Company.
At any rate, businessmen throughout Colombia had much to fear from the guerrillas, especially from a smaller guerrilla offshoot known as the ELN (National Liberation Army), which operated in the center of the country along Colombia’s largest river, the Río Magdalena, and pioneered the guerrillas’ most feared tactic—kidnapping and holding wealthy people for ransom. When it wasn’t doing that, it was extorting money from the oil refineries and other businesses—including the ultimate symbol of capitalism, Coca-Cola. Starting in the 1990s, the ELN “taxed” bottling plants 20 cents for every crate of Coke sold. When the company didn’t pay, it declared war, stealing and burning its delivery trucks and killing several distributors.
It was these kinds of tactics against businessmen that led to the formation of the first paramilitary groups to fight back. Civilian “self-defense” groups, or autodefensas, had existed in Colombia for decades, authorized by law in 1965. But the paramilitaries didn’t come into their own until the mid-1980s, when some businessmen and ranchers banded together in Colombia’s Middle Magdalena Valley under a grizzled rancher named Ramón Isaza.
Boosted by drug money from Pablo Escobar’s Medellín cartel, they began killing FARC and ELN “tax collectors,” cutting up their bodies and sinking them in the rivers. Soon they were conducting increasingly brutal massacres in villages and towns suspected of giving support to guerrillas and targeting policemen and liberal politicians to silence opposition. The paramilitaries went too far in 1989, when they killed a judge and a team of government prosecutors, and were declared illegal by the federal government.
But they didn’t disappear; they merely went underground, reconstituting themselves under the leadership of a murderous band of brothers, Fidel, Carlos, and Vicente Castaño. The Castaños originally came from the coffee belt of Córdoba, just south of Urabá, but soon expanded their operations nationally to create the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia, or AUC. Openly declaring itself in 1997, the new paramilitary coalition began a reign of terror against anyone it suspected of collaborating with guerrillas, including community leaders, human rights activists, and union workers.
Urabá was controlled by the brutal Freddy Rendón Herrera, also known as “El Alemán” (The German) because of his light hair and eyes, and whom human rights groups accuse of killing, disappearing, or forcibly displacing as many as two thousand people