The MAS/ACDEGAM’s formation of MORENA

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:

active in eight of the 32 regions of Colombia, enjoying the support of local political and military leaders. The weapons rifles used by the MAS paramilitaries included R-15, AKMs, Galils, FALs and G-3 rifles, all nominally prohibited for civilian use, but supplied through drug-funded private sales, by the military, and by Military Industry (Industria Militar, INDUNIL). (Simons, 2004: 57)

Yet, with the groups becoming a more formally organized force subscribing to a specific ideology, a growing fascist tendency started to pervade both the MAS and ACDEGAM.19 Now in partial control over blocks of territory in the country’s central-north, there was one area in which this network of elites had to solidify their legitimacy; politics. It was believed that an official far-right political organization would not only open the door to the legal conventional realms of Colombia’s municipal, regional, and national politics, but that a political party would enable the paramilitary to achieve complete authenticity as an army. Hence, in August 1989, the Movement of National Restoration (Movimiento de Restauración Nacional, MORENA) was formed – in the dogma of anti-communism, as it promoted policies of capitalist expansion and economic centralization at any cost (see Pearce, 1990a: 250).20 The fascist foreshadowing of the mid-1980s was now a reality. One of the first shadows cast by MORENA was the “assassination of the father of Martha Lucia González, judge of public order, who had indicted the leaders of ACDEGAM – Pablo Escobar, Gonzalo Rodríguez Gacha, and various officials of military intelligence – for massacres in Urabá” (Kline, 1999: 77). Amidst a growing environment susceptible to fascism, such actions did not see significant condemnation, revealing that MORENA (and its ACDEGAM and MAS counterparts) could conduct their activities with little state opposition. This is not to imply that the majority of Colombia’s traditional rural elite supported the praxis of the far right, but rather that the apathy of the dominant class demonstrated where it leaned (Pearce, 1990a: 8). It even began to look as though “the radical right in Colombia” could emerge as a participatory actor in the country’s political reality (Rochlin, 2003: 106). Colombian journalist Jorge Child went on to view sectors of the elite as a sanctioning a national fascist paradigm.21

It has been proven that the “narco-fascists” do have connections with traditional capitalists and with government, administrative, military and police personnel. This makes one think that Colombian capitalism which has been pumped full of drug money for the last twenty years is now becoming a fascist-capitalist project. A project which enthusiastically embraces the appearance of its legal, political arm: MORENA. (quoted in Pearce, 1990a: 266)

More telling were comments made by those in MORENA itself. In no way did party members hide their far-right tendencies; they rather defended them. Shortly following its official proclamation as a party, Ivan Roberto Duque