Uribe and the paramilitarization of the Colombian state
BY JASMIN HRISTOV
On May 28, 2006 Colombian president Alvaro Uribe Velez was re-elected with a victory of 62 percent. How is it possible that in a country where 11 million human beings are unable to meet their basic food requirements, where three million people have been internally displaced (often through unimaginable atrocities by the army and paramilitary groups) and where the threats, torture and assassination of members of social movements and human rights activists have taken on emergency proportions, a right-wing president wins a second mandate through a supposedly democratic election?
Most of the North American public’s knowledge of the Colombian conflict is confined to the representation offered by main stream media and literature – the efforts of a democratic government and its allies to save its people from the savage, irrational and unpredictable narco-terrorists. This kind of propaganda is part of an ongoing ideological production that inverts social reality in a way that enables the powerful to claim that war is peace, state-violence is democracy, impunity is justice, poverty is a sign of progress, human rights defenders are terrorists and the victims of crime are the perpetrators. To those who easily fall into the trap of this deception, both in and outside Colombia, Uribe’s second term in office indeed is interpreted as a promise for more security, less violence and a step towards crushing the guerrillas and establishing peace. However, there are many others for whom Uribe’s militaristic approach represents more bloodshed, terror, fear, insecurity and misery.
Apart from the fact that the May 2006 presidential election (just like the March 2006 legislative one) was anything but democratic, it is crucial to recognize that Uribe himself is not the central issue at stake here, but only the tip of the iceberg. To anyone familiar with the historical and material nature of Colombia’s internal war, the news of the second mandate of Bush’s closest ally in Latin America hardly came as surprising. The history of this country has shown that the efforts of the dominant classes to maintain their power by progressively dispossessing the working class and destroying all forces of resistance, is the heart which keeps the war alive. These efforts have found expression in various politico-economic models throughout history. Only by contextualizing Uribe’s re-election with regards to the establishment he represents, can we fully appreciate the complex interplay of forces that made possible the May 2006 political outcome and the implications of the latter. Below I briefly sketch the four main features of that model.
As in many other Latin American countries, the seeds of present day social strife can be found in the concentration of the country’s land and resources under the control of a tiny minority, matched by the progressive dispossession of the majority, originating with the European invasion in the 16th century and continuing after the emergence of the independent nation state. Today, economic liberalization has reinforced once again the shift of wealth to the dominant groups and the precarious living conditions of the low-income population. In this country rich in petroleum, gold, emeralds, minerals, vegetation, fresh water and numerous other resources, millions of women and men have been denied their human dignity. While the worries of refined individuals belonging to the upper class are filled up by matters such as plastic surgeries, 62 percent of the population lives in poverty. While the rich take their kids to see the wonders of Florida’s Disney World, over half of the country’s children go to bed hungry.
The profound class divisions have historically been maintained through a strong reliance on violence by those with economic and political power against the working majority and the poor in order to acquire control over resources, forcibly recruit labour and eliminate or suppress dissent. It is not a mere coincidence that the implementation of the neoliberal project has been accompanied by: enhancement in the capacity of the state’s security apparatus and paramilitary groups; expansion of violence and human rights; and subjection of social movements to various extermination tactics.
If we then take into consideration the historical continuity in the strong relationship between the impoverishment of the greater part of the population and the acts of violence that keep people inside exploitative social relations, we realize that in fact, the solid bond between violence and capital accumulation constitutes the first and central feature of the politico-economic model currently in place in Colombia.
It is crucial to understand here that the violence unleashed against the poor and those challenging the establishment does not consist of merely the one directly performed by state forces (even though it is always state-sanctioned). This takes us to the second characteristic of the model – the multiplicity of violence and the interdependency among its actors, a major one of which has been the paramilitary. The development of paramilitarism, which can be understood as an extension of the state’s coercive apparatus, merits a brief examination here, since it has had far-reaching consequences with respect to the onslaught on revolutionary forces, the relentless massive uprooting of millions of countryside folks and securing the grip of dominant groups on power. It began in the 1950s as a product of the joint counter-insurgency efforts of the Colombian and US administrations. Starting in the 1980s, the capitalist class of Colombia, including large-scale landowners, cattle-ranchers, the mining entrepreneurs (particularly those in the emerald business), and narco-lords, played a more direct role in the setting up of paramilitary forces. The present-day collaboration between the paramilitary and the Colombian armed forces, US military personnel in the country as well as the DEA (Drug Enforcement Agency of US), has been well-documented but always denied by the official institutions.
Gradually, the right-wing armed groups have been penetrating state institutions at all levels (in addition to those of the coercive apparatus) as well as the national (legal and illegal) economy. To understand the paramilitarization of politics we need to look no further than President Uribe himself. A declassified 1991 US national security report produced by the Pentagon places Alvaro Uribe Velez on a list of wanted Colombian narco-terrorists. Like many drug-traffickers, Uribe has thick connections to the paramilitary of a direct and personal nature. For example, one of his properties in the state of Cesar has been identified repeatedly by human rights bodies as an epicenter of unleashing paramilitary violence.
The implantation of paramilitary dominance inside major state institutions has been essential to the reproduction of the conditions in which human rights violators thrive and remain impune. Here the third characteristic of the Colombian democratatorship model (to use Eduardo Galeano’s term), where 97 percent of human rights abuses remain unpunished, comes into play. Impunity, the most visible symptom of the illegality of the state’s application of violence, inevitably speaks of the criminality of the state.
While torture, terror and murder have become an art, entailing barbarities such as cutting up persons piece by piece while alive and mutilating women’s bodies beyond recognition, Colombia has been steadily regarded as one of Latin America’s most stable democracies. Welcome to the fourth and most interesting feature of the model: its duality – the ability to cover its fascist nature through a democratic façade. Let me deconstruct here two major events which have served as conjuring acts that have allowed the machinery of terror to remain hidden under the mantle of a virtually non-existent democratic state of law.
The first occurred in February 2006 – an important moment in Colombia’s history when President Uribe proudly announced the completion of the demobilization of the largest paramilitary organization, the AUC, as a great stride towards the establishment of peace and security in this war-torn nation. Uribe’s administration has done its best so far to accommodate the demands of AUC leaders with the help of several legislative measures oriented towards pardoning their crimes, giving short prison sentences (maximum eight years for the perpetrators of crimes against humanity) and even allowing violators to escape justice by paying a fine, performing community service or emigrating.
During her trip to Colombia in March 2006, the US Undersecretary of State declared that her country is proud to be a partner of President Uribe, who is clearly winning the war on terrorism and drug- trafficking. A careful examination of the demobilization process beyond its appearance reveals the absurdity of the above statement. Firstly, while between December 2002 and February 2006 paramilitary operations had officially ceased, the number of attacks carried out by these groups continued to rise. Secondly, in many cases criminals and drug-dealers had claimed to be paramilitaries who were disarming, while in reality large numbers of the AUC fighters (no one can tell exactly how many) remained active. Thirdly, many of the demobilized have been recycled into state security bodies, while others have formed new paramilitary groups. Equally important is the increasing wealth inequality, which ensures the viability of armed groups of paramilitary nature.
In addition to all the reasons cited so far, the deceitful element of the Uribe-led peace process lies in its very essence. There was never a need for peace-talks whatsoever between the government and the right- wing armed groups, since the two were never at war. What took place in reality was a conversation among the different constituents of one system – the terror machinery of the powerful. Through this conjuring act, the more the paramilitary and the state fuse into one whole, the more it would appear that paramilitarism, as such, has ceased to exist.
The Spring 2006 elections is the second farce which I believe exemplifies and at the same time has contributed to the duality of the model. In addition to the ideological production that inundated citizens for months prior to the big day, the government and the paramilitary sought to ensure Uribe’s victory for the May 28 election through a wide variety of techniques all of which can be classified as violations of civil liberties. Not only did this false victory rely on fear, violence, and fraud, as its main tools, but even statistically it stood weak since 55 percent of Colombia’s eligible voters abstained.
Considering the six aspects of this model, it is clear Uribe’s re-election signifies: 1) The continuation of a system characterized by unequal, exploitative, alienating and exclusionary social relations; 2) The aggravation of the country’s subordinate position in the global capitalist hierarchy; 3) The consolidation of US imperial (military and economic) presence; 4) The legalization of illegality, a fusion of the legal and illegal in such a creative way, that the government can claim the paramilitary no longer exists, when in reality it has profoundly penetrated the very fabric of state institutions and the national economy; 5) The initiation of a new phase of the model: the unified Colombian para-narco state; 6) The invigoration of social struggles.
The system of dehumanization, which prioritizes profit over human life, has not been able to silence those who have chosen to become Internal Enemies rather than sell their dignity.
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Jasmin Hristov is a Ph. D. candidate in Sociology at York University. Her research areas include rural movements, neoliberalism, state-sanctioned violence and militarization in Latin America. Her work can be found in The Journal of Peasant Studies, Social Justice, Journal of Peacebuilding and Development and Latin American Perspectives. She has written a book manuscript on paramilitarization and the Colombian state-terror apparatus which is currently under review by a publisher.
