violations against non-combatants in Colombia

Percentage of voilations against non-combatants 100

90

80

and those responsible 70

60

50

40

30

20

10 State forces

Paramilitaries

Guerrillas

0

1993 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2003 2007

Figure 6.1 A re-examination of groups responsible for human rights violations against non-combatants in Colombia

Sources: Coalición Colombiana Contra la Tortura, 2008: 8; Gareau, 2004: 214; Murillo and Avirama, 2004: 89, 185–6; NUPGE, 2004: 2; HURIDOCS, 2003; Stokes, 2003a: 11; 2003b; Valenzuela, 2002: 10; Comisión Colombiana de Juristas, 2001. Data for between 2003 and 2006 has been very difficult to obtain, possibly because of the attempt to make the AUC/state negotiations (2003–06) appear effective.

of the paramilitary have been identified in the past few years alone (Haugaard et al, 2008: 11). The “guerrillas” were responsible for only 5–10 percent of all violations, while the combined state/paramilitary forces were responsible for approximately 90–95 percent.38 From these figures the insurgents’ human rights record has actually improved over the past decade. This is not to argue that the insurgents have not committed human rights abuses: they have, but the trend has generally improved since 1995. Second, the level of abuse at the hands of the state is directly related to the legitimate installation of the paramilitary via Decrees 2535 and 356 (1993), especially since the formal creation of the AUC (in 1997). As the figure demonstrates, there was an immediate and precipitous decrease in violations by state security forces, which correlates with the paramilitary’s maturity. Pearce has supported this assessment and the “miraculous” shift in the state’s proportion of responsibility of violations toward non-combatants.

The Colombian army has a long history of human rights abuse. It was deemed responsible in 1993 for 54 per cent of political killings in Colombia according to the US State Department annual report on human rights in Colombia. Over the next few years its record apparently improved and by

the mid-1990s only 4 per cent of killings were attributed to it and 60 per cent to paramilitary groups.

(Pearce, 2007: 263n.12)

Not surprisingly, upon the AUC’s so-called demobilization (in 2006) noncombatant abuses quickly reverted back to state forces (see and compare years 1993 and 2007 in Figure 6.1), who were subsequently responsible for over 71 percent of violations. Failing to examine the larger domestic issue of human rights abuses, or examining them through a class perspective, has resulted in minimal information being released about who commits the majority of atrocities in Colombia. Much of the popular media has generalized that such violations are the result of Colombia’s civil war and its “actors.” When abuse data is quantitatively analyzed, however, it is apparent that this claim is a misrepresentation. In reality, the state/paramilitary forces are the leading architects of violence, torture, rape, and murder throughout the country. This is not difficult to deduce from the simple fact that those assaulted – unionists, left-of-center political elements, community organizers, and large portions of a critical civil society – maintain a sociopolitical ideology in promotion of social welfare.39 Obviously, this does not align with the far-right conservatism of the paramilitary and the Álvaro Uribe Vélez administration. Under the paramilitary pretence, the state has co-perpetuated violence, intimidation, and acts of murder to prolong political stability and economic influence. The Colombian state and military, in collaboration with the AUC, are as a result responsible for perpetuating the preponderance of human rights violations against the civilian population. In spite of this, popular domestic and international media outlets have made conscious decisions to under-examine or more blatantly silence analyses that present the state’s role in public violence. Although it is an incredibly well-armed organization, the AUC also uses ad-hoc assault techniques. It regularly uses sharpened machetes, gas-propelled chainsaws, hammers, and even rocks as tools of war (Webb, 2004; Leech, 2002a: 23). Using such weaponry, the AUC slit throats, committed decapitations, and threw acid in the faces of suspected subversives (Coghlan, 2004; 12, 77; Taussig, 2004b: 18; Livingstone, 2003: 34). With the support of the military, its operatives have been known to travel from village to village with prepared lists of persons connected to the FARC-EP or other organizations that it has been declared need to be “cleansed” (Taussig, 2004b: 18; Shah, 2002). During one massacre Carlos Castaño and Colombian military Colonel Lino Sánchez organized an attack on Mapiripán, Meta. Here the AUC seized the listed individuals from their homes or places of work and “according to eyewitness accounts, hacked them to death with machetes or decapitated them with chainsaws” (O’Shaughnessy and Branford, 2005: 49). Another account noted how members the AUC cut off the head of 17-year-old Marino López after hacking off his legs and testicles (Pérez, 2003; see also Ramírez, 2005: 50). After the decapitation, the paramilitary, alongside members of the army, proceeded to use López’s head as a ball during a soccer game in front of

the village of Bijao del Cacarica in the Ríosucio municipality of the Chocó department (Pérez, 2003). At the end of the match, the forces took the lifeless, severed, and now fractured skull, and spitted it on a post as a threatening reminder to the remaining residents (Ramírez, 2005: 50).

Once the teams were on the field, the referee sounded his whistle. Each team took up positions on the field. Then a helper brought a large bag to the center of the field, emptying its contents at a point equidistant from the two forwards who would start the game with the initial kickoff. The audience cried out in horror. The soccer ball was the head of Marino Lopez .… For long minutes the only sound heard by the inhabitants was the cracking of the players’ feet on the man’s destroyed skull. In the oppressive sun of that unending morning, the paramilitary team passed the defense of its opponent and scored twice. After the second goal the captain announced that the soccer ball would no longer serve, and so the game would have to end. The members of the Army team had to follow. They didn’t like to lose, but the game had been clean. The forward, who had come close to scoring twice, apologized to his companions. “The ball was terrible”, he said. “Hopefully next time they will inflate it properly before the game.” (Garavito, 2004)

Taussig (2004b: 18) has written about paramilitaries hanging subversives “on meat hooks” in slaughterhouses for extended periods of time, sometimes days, before their execution. Multiple observers witnessed this during a massacre of roughly 100 peasants living on the San Miguel River, Putumayo.

Survivors who fled the massacres say the paramilitaries forced residents of the villages to stand in columns, then tied them up, interrogated them and tortured them physically and psychologically before hanging them from beams and cutting them to pieces with machetes and chainsaws. Some of those killed were Ecuadorans who were working as day laborers on coca plantations. Witnesses say the bodies remain in the villages, since no one dares to retrieve them and bury them. (Weekly News Update on the Americas, 2004c)

Transgressions against youths have also risen. Assaults range from the suffocation of a six-year-old girl by placing a plastic bag over her face (Leech, 2002a: 53); amputating a teenage girl’ s hands before cutting her abdomen open (Livingstone, 2003: 35); the enigmatic murder of a mentally challenged, deaf mute child (Coghlan, 2004; 12); decapitating infants or children having their hearts, while alive, ripped out of their bodies (Herman and Conde, 2005; Galvis, 2000: 28). It is also widely known that the AUC, supported by local merchants, “cleanse” orphaned children who have had to turn to the streets to survive (Molano, 2005: 113; Taussig, 2004a: 15).40 Over the last several years, the AUC increased practices of decapitation and the sexual mutilation of suspects while conscious. While such counterinsurgency

practices are not new in Colombia,41 they are acknowledged as being more prevalent today than during la Violencia. In one interview, Castaño actually chuckled during a discussion of how the AUC utilizes castration (Lévy, 2004: 87; see also Coghlan, 2004: 77; Pérez, 2003). The paramilitary has “raped both women and men and then dismembered them in front of the townspeople” (Ramírez, 2005: 51).42 On May 5, 2003, planes flew over the department of Arauca and approached an indigenous community in the Betoyes region, Tame. Parachutes began to open as armed combatants began to leap from the visible military aircraft (Donahue, 2003). Upon landing,

armed individuals – identified by survivors from the indigenous Guahibo reservation as National Army troops wearing armbands of the paramilitary United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC) –raped four adolescent girls and massacred four people, including a pregnant teenager who was one of the rape victims.

(Engqvist, 2003: 7)

The Guahibo girls assaulted were aged 11, 12, 15, and the pregnant 16year-old, Omaira Fernández. Following the raping of Fernández, “the attackers reportedly cut her womb open to pull out the fetus, which they hacked apart with machetes,” then “according to the Regional Indigenous Council of Arauca, witnesses from the reservation” saw the state/paramilitary forces throw “both mutilated corpses into the river” (Fitchl, 2003; Engqvist, 2003: 7; see also Obando, 2004). Reports soon appeared claiming that the UStrained 18th Brigade of the Colombian army was responsible for the atrocity (Leech, 2006d: 155; Donahue, 2003; Fitchl, 2003).43 On the heels of the attack Castaño was cited saying,

if any man, or any woman, has even the vaguest link with the guerrilla movement, then they stop being civilians and become guerrilla fighters dressed in civilian clothes, and as such deserve to be tortured, have their throats cut, to have a living hen sewed in their wombs in place of a foetus. (Lévy, 2004: 88)44

In 2003, the UN Commission on Human Rights (UNCHR), under the direction of Rodolfo Stavenhagen, began an examination into atrocities carried out by the AUC. Aside from finding the AUC responsible for the execution of indigenous peoples belonging to the Kogui tribe from the Sierra Nevada de Santa Maria in Arauca, the paramilitary were thought to engage in acts of cannibalism with the lifeless bodies. Upon the revelation of the massacre and the findings of the remains, “the fleshy parts of their legs and buttocks were missing” because “their captors had apparently fried and eaten them” (O’Shaughnessy and Branford, 2005: 109). It is in light of these horrors that Jorge Child stated, “the fundamental cause of Colombia’s political violence” is the “narco-fascist paramilitary groups.”