Paramilitary massacres had become so commonplace that the media never even covered many of them. Semana itself often just mentioned them in the “In Brief” column. Despite the groups’ savagery, to Calderón it seemed as though many Colombians had concluded that the paramilitaries were the solution to the guerrillas’ violence. With FARC kidnappings and attacks at their peak, and with important parts of the military and various business sectors quietly backing the paramilitaries, it was easy to look away from the massacres and killings, or to accept the paramilitaries’ lines about the victims simply being members of the guerrilla groups.
But Calderón felt strongly that the public needed to grapple with what was really happening. He wrote a piece, entitled simply “Barbarism,” describing the Nueva Venecia massacre in detail.
A few days later, he got his first phone call from the paramilitary commander Salvatore Mancuso: the fishermen, Mancuso said, were exaggerating. Not that many people had been killed. Mancuso wanted a correction. Calderón argued back and held his line. But from then on, he and Mancuso began to speak regularly—in the past, only Castaño had spoken publicly for the paramilitaries; now, several commanders were starting to engage more with the media, always presenting themselves as saviors and accusing their victims of being guerrilla collaborators.
Later, Calderón met Mancuso in person at his posh, three-story house in Montería, the capital of the state of Córdoba. Mancuso was strongly built, with a large, bulbous head squarely set into a thick neck and a face that could easily become intimidating. But he dressed suavely, his thinning hair was neatly trimmed and slicked back, and he had good manners. Calderón thought Mancuso looked more like his idea of a drug lord than a paramilitary leader. Mancuso came from a well-off, half-Italian family from the ranching region of Córdoba, and he had studied engineering at a Bogotá university for a few years before joining the paramilitaries in the early 1990s. His home housed a jumble of Louis XV furniture and rococo-style ornaments, Chinese vases, Japanese sabers, and a collection of fine Italian wines. On one floor, there was a gym and an office from which to conduct AUC business. As Calderón approached Mancuso’s house, he noted police standing guard around it—not to arrest Mancuso, but to protect him.
Calderón got the impression that in their interview Mancuso was making a special effort to come across as a decent person who had had no choice but to go to war in response to the pressure from the guerrillas. Years later, his authorized biography would explain that guerrilla threats against his family had led him to work with a member of the military, Walter Fratini, to establish the paramilitaries in Córdoba in the early 1990s. But he glossed over the bloodshed—including the El Aro massacre—in which he had been implicated.
Mancuso confirmed the paramilitaries’ ties to the public security forces during their conversation, explaining how they “had” people in the police and army, and that one of their more prominent commanders, known as “Double Zero,” was a retired army officer. Through Mancuso, Calderón met Double Zero and other commanders, who began inviting him to meet with them at their campsites or homes. During those visits, Calderón regularly saw members of the military, the intelligence service, or the police with the paramilitaries—the close ties between the paramilitaries and sectors of the public security forces were evident.
Calderón also noticed another trend: a growing fissure within the paramilitary groups over their involvement in the drug trade. Even though the AUC had from its inception been involved in drug trafficking, and the Castaños had been members of Los Pepes, Carlos Castaño had recently been urging his fellow commanders to give it up. Castaño expressed concern that drug trafficking was somehow tainting their “political” objectives of defeating the guerrillas, and that some sectors of the paramilitaries were more interested in seizing territory for cocaine trafficking than in confronting the FARC. Double Zero, who considered himself a “pure” paramilitary, took Castaño’s side. But they were the minority, and Double Zero’s “Metro Block” of the paramilitaries soon found itself at war with another sector of the paramilitaries headed by Diego Murillo Bejarano, or “Don Berna,” who until recently had headed the Envigado Office that had been involved in the CTI killings in Medellín a few years earlier.
Calderón began publishing stories about what he was seeing at his meetings. The paramilitaries didn’t like it, but he had always been clear with them that just because they were meeting and chatting didn’t mean he would refrain from publishing. And from their perspective, it was still worthwhile to try to get their views across to a journalist from a prominent publication like Semana; the massacres were hard to cover up entirely, but at least they could try to divert attention from their savagery and confuse the public. Some of them, like Mancuso and Castaño, also seemed—like Escobar had many years before—to aspire to some form of public approval or even admiration. In their polarized society, in many cases, they got what they were seeking.
MEANWHILE, the FARC peace talks went from bad to worse, finally collapsing in February 2002, when a FARC unit hijacked a commercial airplane and kidnapped Senator Jorge Gechem Turbay, who was on board. A few days later, they kidnapped the French-Colombian presidential candidate Íngrid Betancourt and her campaign manager, Clara Rojas, as they traveled by road to the demilitarized zone. To the vast majority of Colombians, the FARC’s continued kidnappings and cease-fire violations were the final nail in the coffin for the guerrillas’ image: these were not romantic revolutionaries, but a bunch of thugs who cynically took advantage of the talks and demilitarized zone to add thousands of new fighters to their ranks, carry out more kidnappings and killings, and enrich themselves at the expense of ordinary people.
With the end of the peace talks, Colombia’s conflict only intensified. In late April, Colombia’s “public advocate” issued a written report to the heads of the armed forces and other government officials, warning that three hundred paramilitaries were traveling along the Atrato River near the municipality of Bojayá, in the deeply impoverished Afro-Colombian region of Chocó, with the apparent objective of seizing the region from the FARC’s control. The public advocate urged immediate action to protect the people of Bojayá from the imminent violence, but no action was taken. On May 2, FARC guerrillas, in the midst of fighting with paramilitaries in Bojayá, lobbed a gas cylinder bomb into the town of Bellavista, hitting the town church, where hundreds of townspeople had taken refuge from the fighting. The bomb exploded, killing seventy-nine people, including forty-eight children, and injuring another one hundred. Terrified of further bombs, thousands of people fled, many never to return.
IN THE MIDST of the bloodshed, Colombians lost any shred of the hope that had fueled President Pastrana’s efforts to seek peace. Instead, they grew increasingly desperate for someone to bring order to the country. Former Antioquia governor Álvaro Uribe, who was now running for office, seemed to fit the bill: though he rarely smiled, he had a sincere, honest air—fine features and pin-straight posture, neatly parted and combed hair, and upturned brows—that inspired confidence. The way he spoke conveyed strength and commitment. In the autobiography he published after leaving office, Uribe recounted an episode that occurred when he was performing a particularly dangerous move in bullfighting: he was on his knees, but when the bull came out of the pen, the creature charged in another direction. Uribe’s father called out to him: “Álvaro, stay on your knees, stay there.” Uribe did, and eventually the bull came around and charged, and Uribe completed the move. Upon reflection, he later said, he thought that his father was teaching him how to stand up to a threat: to “look it straight in the eye and wink.” Ultimately, he said, “there are only two dignified ways of leaving the bullfighting ring: in a casket on the way to the cemetery, or on the shoulders of the crowd. In this type of life, there is no middle road.” Uribe, it seemed, viewed the entire country as his own enormous bullfighting ring, and he had no intention of leaving it until he succeeded. Over the years, Uribe’s sense of purpose—to lead and save Colombia—
seemed to have eclipsed nearly all of his other interests. He later said that the last film he saw was The Lone Ranger, and he gave up drinking and smoking in his twenties. Although he had been a superb horseback rider in his youth, later in his political career he rarely took the time to engage even in this pastime. His long hours and willingness to travel across the country became legendary, as did his willingness to hold conversations with any and all Colombians: he traveled to countless small towns on the campaign trail, and seemed to connect with people in a way that many politicians from Colombia’s traditional elite were incapable of doing.
His message, too, resonated: the former Liberal was running for president as an independent that year, promising a “firm hand, and a big heart” when it came to the guerrillas, including through commitments to dramatically bolster the size of the military and police forces, to recruit thousands of citizens as informants for the government, and to engage in peace talks with the FARC only if they implemented a full cease-fire, including an end to all kidnappings. According to Uribe adviser José Obdulio Gaviria, Uribe’s position on the FARC ever since he had become a governor was clear: there was no point in negotiating with the FARC, because it was a “terrorist organization that has no interest in changing the political system through negotiations.” During the Pastrana years, Gaviria said, nobody had wanted to listen to Uribe, because politicians and the public were enamored of the idea of negotiating for peace. But in the aftermath of the failed Caguán negotiations, Uribe’s message was perfect: the public was now thoroughly disgusted with the FARC and saw no way out of the war except by escalating it.
Not that Uribe escaped all criticism—some journalists dug up old allegations that Uribe’s father had been a friend of the Ochoa family, some of whose members, the infamous brothers Jorge Luis, Fabio, and Juan David, had become major figures in the Medellín cartel, along with Pablo Escobar. Uribe acknowledged that his father and Fabio Ochoa had known each other many years earlier, in the world of horse fairs, but he firmly denied any connection to the Ochoa clan’s drug trafficking. Others charged that when Uribe had run the Civil Aviation Agency, he had granted licenses to pilots working with Escobar. Uribe denied the claims, stating that the record was clear—he could only grant licenses to people who had relevant certifications from the Ministry of Justice and the military.
Critics also accused Uribe of being, at a minimum, tolerant of the paramilitaries, based in part on his support of the Convivir program when he was governor of Antioquia. In 1999, Uribe had also publicly spoken at an event to honor General Rito Alejo del Río. Then president Pastrana had recently dismissed Del Río over serious allegations that he had colluded with paramilitaries, and had been involved in atrocities in the Urabá region when he had commanded the Army’s 17th Brigade. The United States had also reportedly canceled Del Río’s visa on similar grounds. Yet, at the event, Uribe strongly defended Del Río, whom he had met when he was governor.
But much of the public paid little attention to these concerns. In May 2002, Uribe was declared the winner of the elections in the first round after getting just over 50 percent of the vote.
BY THE TIME Uribe was elected, the paramilitaries were at the peak of their power. Official estimates by the Ministry of Defense put their membership at 12,000 troops—almost as many as the FARC—though it was hard to tell how reliable the numbers were. After their offensives in the late 1990s, the paramilitaries had effectively seized control over much of northern Colombia, establishing a significant presence in large chunks of the coastal areas and Antioquia. In recent years they had even been expanding into the eastern plains of Meta and Casanare, and into territory in the southern states of Nariño, Cauca, and Putumayo. And while on the surface things might have looked normal in many of these regions—local government and businesses were still active, and people seemed to go about their daily activities as usual—residents knew not to cross the paramilitaries or the landowners, businesspeople, and officials who were close to them.
The paramilitaries had thrived in part because they had never had much to fear from Colombian authorities—Carlos Castaño, for example, had at least one conviction for murder hanging over his head, and had admitted his involvement in numerous other crimes, yet he had never been arrested. That began to change on August 5, 2002, two days before Uribe took office, when Colombia ratified the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. The court would not have jurisdiction over past crimes, but, in theory, paramilitary atrocities committed after ratification could one day come under the court’s purview.
What may have been even more significant was an announcement, just a few weeks later, by the US attorney general in the George W. Bush administration, John Ashcroft. At a press conference, Ashcroft announced the unsealing of a US Department of Justice indictment against AUC leaders Carlos Castaño and Salvatore Mancuso, as well as against a man described as an “AUC member,” though in Colombia he was mainly known as a drug trafficker, Juan Carlos “El Tuso” Sierra, on five counts of drug trafficking. Ashcroft made a point of noting that the AUC was on the State Department’s list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations, stressing that the indictments underscored “the convergence of two of the top priorities of the Department of Justice: the prevention of terrorism, and the reduction of illegal drug use.” “As today’s indictment reminds us,” said Ashcroft, “the lawlessness that breeds terrorism is also a fertile ground for the drug trafficking that supports terrorism. To surrender to either of these threats is to surrender to both.”
As Calderón had noticed in his meetings, the paramilitaries were increasingly divided over the issue of drug trafficking, and some had recognized the danger of getting involved in the trade. In a July 2002 letter to his fellow commanders, Castaño noted that “the money from drug trafficking is employed primarily for personal enrichment, and not to fund the organization. Those I’m referring to know it and their wealth is impossible to hide; the only way to legalize it would be through a serious negotiation with the government.” But Castaño didn’t think the paramilitaries were going to succeed against the FARC: despite the AUC’s expansion, the FARC, which had an estimated 13,500 troops, remained strong in many of its traditional strongholds. “We have occupied territory where there were no guerrillas and won others where there were some… but we haven’t eradicated them completely from any state in the center and north of Colombia, which we claim publicly to be under our control, and we prefer to go start groups in other areas in the south of the country, not exactly in search of the enemy but of coca, and we falsely pretend like we’re growing… ; these are lies, what is growing is drug trafficking dressed up as self-defense forces.” And, perhaps above all, Castaño was concerned that, if the paramilitaries didn’t seek a negotiation now, they risked extradition and imprisonment in the United States: “The drug traffickers, whether guerrilla or self-defense forces, are being sought for extradition,” he said. “I think that if we can demonstrate that in the self-defense forces there are no drug traffickers, but rather there was a need to resort to that money to finance the struggle… we could find a solution for everyone.”
Ashcroft’s announcement of the indictments and extradition requests made the threat real. Unless they wanted to risk spending decades in a US prison, the paramilitaries needed to find a way to evade the US charges. Castaño’s preferred solution—to embark on “peace” negotiations with the government—seemed like one promising way out, and the Uribe administration quickly engaged. By November 2002, the AUC had declared a cease-fire, and by July 2003, the AUC leadership and the Colombian government, represented by Peace Commissioner Luis Carlos Restrepo, had entered an agreement. In this pact, known as the Agreement of Santa Fe de Ralito (named for the province in Córdoba where the negotiations happened), the paramilitaries promised to demobilize all their troops by the end of 2005.
But the very next month, in August 2003, Uribe introduced a bill in the Colombian Congress that was so lax on the paramilitaries that it made some people quest
ion the government’s motives. The bill would protect the paramilitaries from prosecution for all their crimes—including the worst massacres and atrocities, as well as drug trafficking—if they agreed to put down their weapons. The paramilitaries would not have to serve any time in prison or even confess their crimes. Nor would they have to give up their illegally acquired wealth, or disclose any details about their accomplices and drug-trafficking networks. All they were asked to do was to provide some form of reparation to the victims, but what that meant was unclear. Victims’ and human rights organizations both within and outside Colombia were horrified at the proposal, which they viewed as a complete pass for some of the worst killers in the country’s history, and began immediately organizing to fight it.
That would not be easy. The president’s popularity had only increased since the elections, as he had quickly moved to strengthen security in Colombia, particularly in areas where the FARC posed a threat. Early on in his term, Uribe decreed a one-time “security tax” on wealth, which helped him to increase defense expenditures substantially. He bolstered the police and military presence along major roads, and during holidays he implemented a new initiative, called “Live Colombia, Travel Through It” (Vive Colombia, Viaja Por Ella), designed to promote internal tourism: the government would organize large caravans of vehicles to drive together, escorted by security forces, to get to their destinations. At the same time, Uribe was building a strong relationship with the United States. By the end of the 1990s, Colombia had already been the third-largest recipient of US security assistance, after Israel and Egypt. Toward the end of the Pastrana administration, the United States had pledged to substantially increase that aid through a package known as Plan Colombia. President Bill Clinton promised a $1.3 billion influx of aid, overwhelmingly focused on counternarcotics assistance and military aid, over three years starting in 1999. By 2003, the US embassy in Colombia was the largest US embassy in the world, with thousands of embassy staff and US military advisers, as well as civilian contractors who were there to train and support their counterparts in Colombia (it would be surpassed in size by the US embassy in Afghanistan in 2004). Within his first few weeks in office, Uribe visited Washington to meet with President Bush; the meeting was the beginning of a friendship between the two ranch-loving presidents, and solidified the assistance package.
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