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supporting elites (protection) alongside peasants (services) was possible only through the association’s centralized control of information over the Magdalena Medio. As propaganda was created and disseminated faster than reports of death threats and disappearances, the MAS, and its supportive partners, could extend their domain of resource concentration and influence. THE MAS/ACDEGAM’S FORMATION OF MORENA By the mid-1980s, the ACDEGAM, alongside the MAS, had grown considerably, and with it the need grew for financial resources.18 After 1985 this need was mostly taken up by Colombia’s prominent drug traffickers: “Pablo Escobar, Jorge Luis Ochoa and Gonzalo Rodríguez Gacha,” who had also become exceedingly large rural landowners (Pearce, 1990a: 247). However, funding is never free and certain strings were attached. Patrons demanded that any funding previously promised for social projects was to be abandoned and all surplus capital was to be specifically directed towards strengthening the MAS. The cartels then constructed “a school for training assassins,” which saw the paramilitary become an organized army rather than a band of mercenaries (Pearce, 1990a: 247; see also Kline, 1999: 73–4; Livingstone, 2003: 133). Assistance was specifically targeted “to increase the supply of weapons to the MAS paramilitaries and to improve the group’s intelligence gathering and other activities” (Simons, 2004: 57). There was no doubt that Puerto Boyacá, cradle of these groups and what one functionary called “a kind of paramilitary independent republic,” continued to be the epicenter from which the principal bases and schools were controlled and from which policies and objectives were designed. In the municipality, the paramilitary organization had a clinic, printer, a drug store, an armory, a computer and (a datum that most concerned the government officials) a center of communication that worked in coordination with the state-run telecommunications office. A second satellite center was located in Pacho, Cundinamarca. Rodríguez Gacha also had a farm in that small town. The organization had thirty pilots and a flotilla of airplanes and helicopters. It had 120 vehicles, principally jeeps, but also bulldozers and levelers, without counting the boats. It collected a monthly fee from ranchers. The one paid by narcotraffickers was much higher, and, according to some sources, the paramilitary organizations were financed almost completely by them. One high functionary said, “In addition one can think that these men [narcotrafficking leaders] have stopped bring mere common delinquents, as they were when they dedicated their activities to narcotrafficking only, and have begun to get a certain political status since they have changed themselves to the sponsors of the subversion of the right.” (Kline, 1999: 73–4) Before the 1980s would end, the MAS had become:
