|
CounterPunch
March 19,
2003
"We Copied
Our Tactics from Israel"
Medellín:
Life Under Paramilitary Occupation
By FORREST HYLTON
"I copied the concept of paramilitary
forces from the Israelis."
Carlos Castaño, head of the paramilitary AUC (United Self-Defense
of Colombia)
Five months ago, Colombian President Álvaro
Uribe ordered "Operation Orion," in which a combined
military-police-intelligence task force of 3,000 troops moved
into Medellín's Comuna 13, a district of 100,000 people
in the central-western hill, with tanks and a helicopter gunship
to "cleanse" the area of "subversives." As
predicted, the "target" neighborhoods that make up
Comuna 13 (especially 20 de Julio, Belencito, Corazón,
El Salado y las Independencias) are now under control of the
paramilitary AUC (United Self-Defense of Colombia).
In late 2002, President Uribe entered
into "peace negotiations" with the leaders of the AUC-talks
that will most likely lead to the legalization of paramilitarism
along the lines of the CONVIVIRs that figured so prominently
during Uribe's term as governor of Antioquia (1995-97)-but various
regional paramilitary fractions, including Medellín's
Bloque Metro and Cacique Nutibarra, have opted out of the agreements,
perhaps because of their stipulations against drug trafficking,
in which paramilitaries are deeply involved. So far, the crowbar
that acted as the lever for Operation Orion, the Colombian Army's
Fourth Brigade, has yet to take action against the paramilitaries
in Comuna 13, which is unsurprising since the two forces have
worked hand in iron glove in Comuna 13-as in the rest of the
city-for several years.
Before mid-October, most of Comuna 13
was carved up among three "revolutionary" urban militias:
the FARC, the ELN, and the CAP (People's Armed Comandos). The
first generation of these militias sprouted in the mid-1980s
after the peace process between President Belisario Betancur
and the FARC, EPL (Maoist), and M-19 (national populist) broke
down. In Comuna 13, the third generation of milicianos was composed
of young people from the neighborhoods, the occasional university
students, and a handful of second-generation veterans that survived
Medellín's wars of the 1990s. Though they purported to
favor an overthrow of the Colombian state and the institution
of a more equitable, democratic political and economic system,
militia methods were often reprehensible: kidnapping, extortion,
blackmail and murder.
Yet alongside these militias (militias
which, it must be said, kept the paramilitaries out of Comuna
13 for over a year), and with scant resources and minimal access
to employment or education, communities have struggled to build
a common life for themselves. This they have done through organization
and cooperation in the face of constant violence, threats, and
harassment from the police, military, and paramilitary forces.
In Comuna 13, people have built their roads, schools, health
clinics, senior citizens' centers and youth centers with their
own hands and funds, and they have fought for proper sewage,
drinking water and electricity.
The state and paramilitaries that appeared
after 1999 fear and loathe such independent community organizing
as much as they do the "revolutionary" militias. Paramilitaries
had displaced a considerable minority of Comuna 13's residents
from the countryside in Urabá in the 1980s and 90s, many
of them Afro-Colombians; all arrived in Comuna 13 with venerable
traditions of village organizing and protest intact. Operation
Orion and the subsequent paramilitary occupation of Comuna 13
have, however, displaced the displaced.
There is an element of tragic absurdity
in this repetition, but the logic is clear. While some of the
displaced returned to Comuna 13 in February, people directly
connected to the paramilitaries have occupied most of the houses
that Operation Orion left vacant. The community organizations
have been infiltrated with paramilitaries as well. In the eyes
of the "forces of order," anyone from Comuna 13 who
is not working with the AUC is a potential or actual guerrilla-an
enemy to be eliminated.
Homicide is down 38% over the same period
last year, from 114 to 75, though according to a community leader
from 20 de Julio, "they are not killing people in the neighborhood
anymore. Rather, they take them out and kill them in neighborhoods
nearby, which distorts the indices of violence in Comuna 13."
Gunfire no longer echoes through the night because now more
than half the killings are done with knives. The paramilitaries
want to avoid making the same mistakes the militias made, so
they do not "tax" public transportation or petty commerce,
either. Instead, they rob gasoline from the Ecopetrol pipeline
near San Cristobal, and, at $.50 to $.60 per gallon, sell $10,000
worth of it daily. Meanwhile, in Saravena, Arauca, U.S. Special
Forces are training a new Colombian Army brigade to protect Occidental
Petroleum's pipeline from guerrilla sabotage-part of a $94 million
subsidy of the petroleum industry in Colombia, courtesy of President
Bush.
Now that Comuna 13 is under control of
"dissident" paramilitaries of the Bloque Metro and
those of Cacique Nutibarra, which have moved toward unity, a
highway to Urabá, to be financed in part with North American
capital, will cut a secondary road through its heart. Urabá,
which gives way to the Caribbean port of Turbo, is home to the
core constituency of the regional paramilitary right-the multinational
banana plantations, the logging companies and the cattle barons.
Through Uribe and his Goebbels, Minister of Justice and the
Interior Fernando Londoño, this group currently exercises
power at the national level.
Urabá's "strategic corridor"
is the route through which arms and drugs move in and out of
Colombia. Whatever the legal niceties of Uribe's negotiations
with the leadership of the AUC, then, the paramilitary occupation
of Comuna 13 in Medellín dovetails neatly with the broader,
U.S.-led counterinsurgent strategy of control of strategic territory,
transport routes and resources. The extent to which it favors
the "primitive" (because of its methods) accumulation
of capital is unmistakable.
Where have the displaced of Comuna 13
gone? The countryside, where 82% of the population is poor and
where warfare is even more relentless than in Medellín,
is not an option, so many, especially milicianos, have gone to
the northeastern part of the city, which sits in a fold that
slopes gently up to an emerald ridge on the other side of which
lies the corridor from Guarne to the municipalities of the east
where the FARC and the ELN have a strong presence: Santa Ana,
San Luis and Granada. Military intelligence alleges that the
34th Front of the FARC and the Carlos Alirio Buitrago Front of
the ELN have sent reinforcements from the east to protect the
corridor out of the city at all costs.
The war between the FARC, ELN, and CAP
militias and the paramilitary Bloque Metro and Cacique Nutibarra
has made the northeastern sector into the city's most violent.
According to police, there have been 133 homicides there this
year; in Robledo alone there have been 54. It is a matter of
time before "one, two, three, many" operations like
Orion pave the way for paramilitary occupation of northeastern
Medellín. Such is life in the Cattle Ranchers' Republica
true paramilitary paradise.
Forrest Hylton
is conducting doctoral research in history in Bolivia and can
be reached at forresthylton@hotmail.com.
Sources:
For a
detailed report on Operation Orion click here.
Semana,
"Guerra silenciosa en Comuna
13"
Yesterday's
Features
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream (Interview)
Jason Leopold
Rumsfeld and Bush Sr. Opposed 1989 UN Investigation of Saddam
for Human Rights Violations
Josh Ruebner
An
Open Letter to My Former Dean, Paul Wolfowitz (and Other "Court"
Jews)
Mitchel Cohen
The
Gulf War 12 Years Later: Why Class Matters
Carlos Fuentes
The Insulting Insinuations of the Bush Regime
Fareed Marjaee
The Road to Jerusalem Goes Through Baghdad
Rick Giombetti
The Savagely Soft Underbelly
of the Anti-War Movement: Misquided Faith in the UN
Rich Procter
Rove Memo: How to Launch a War
Ritt Goldstein
Oil
War: the Smoking Guns
Website of the Day
Give
War a Chance: the Anti-Peace Anthem
Keep CounterPunch
Alive:
Make
a Tax-Deductible Donation Today Online!
home / subscribe
/ about us / books
/ archives / search
/ links /
CounterPunch Available Exclusively
to Subscribers:
- Turkish Delights: a Pre-War Diary by Tariq Ali;
- The Plot to Frame the
Zapatistas: Talkers
and Cowards;
- Drugging Kids: The Plague of Neuroleptics;
- The Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal:
a New Investigation.
Remember, the CounterPunch website is
supported exclusively by subscribers to our newsletter. Our worldwide
web audience is soaring , with about seven million hits a month
now. This is inspiring, but the work involved also compels us
to remind you more urgently than ever to subscribe and/or make
a (tax deductible) donation if you can afford it. If you find our site useful please: Subscribe
Now!
home / subscribe
/ about us
/ books
/ archives
/ search
/ links
/
|
Take a Bite Out of Phil Knight's Bottom Line: Buy No Sweat Apparel!
March 8 /
9, 2003
Edward Said
Who's
In Charge?
Bruce Jackson
Elegy
for Two Giraffes and a Zebra
Perry Anderson
The Casuistries of Peace and
War
Joanne Mariner
Patriot
Act II's Attack on Punishment
William Lind
A Warning from Clausewitz on 4th Generation Warfare
Sam Husseini
Why
So Long for Iraq to Comply? Follow the Policy
Forrest Hylton
Business as Usual in Bolivia?
David Lindorff
Race and the Death Penalty in Pennsylvania
Ben Tripp
Is There
a Eurologist in the House?
Anthony Gancarski
W's Personal Jesus
Jon Elmer
An Interview with William Blum
Douglas Valentine
The Clash of the Icons
Norman Madarasz
Radical Politics and the Writer:
Maurice Blanchot
Gordon Solberg
There's
Got to be a Better Way
Poets' Basement
Guthrie, Engel, Bernard
Weekend Website
The
White House
February 28,
2003
Alexander
Cockburn
Meet
the New Yorker's Chief Hack: Jeffrey Goldberg
Saul Landau
Now
It's Personal
Michael Neumann
A Plea for Hysteria
Karima Bennoume
The UN: Tool for Peace or War?
The Black
Commentator
The Rev. Sharpton and the Soul of the Democrats
Jennifer Loewenstein
Don't Turn Off the War
Richard Levins
Cuba's Biological Weapons: Why the World Needs More of Them
M. Shahid Alam
Is This a Clash of Civilizations?
Clay Conrad
Juries
and Judges: What's Relevant?
Ben Tripp
Speaking in Tongues: a Guide to Gibberish in the Age of Bush
Eliot Katz
To Declare Preemptive War is to Declare a Bankrupt Imagination
Kurt Nimmo
Paying Through the Nose to Kill Iraqi Kids
Matt Vidal
George W. Bonaparte
Mark Zepezauer
Why the Right Hates America
Mickey Z.
The Anti----War Talk I Never Gave
Jerry Kroth
Jung and the Space Shuttle Revisited
Shyam Oberoi
Chronicle of a War Foretold
Ron Jacobs
What If the Firebombing of Baghdad Were a Nightclub Fire?
Poets' Basement
Eliot Katz and Jim Cohn
Website of
the Weekend
Defense
Tech
Read
Whiteout and Find Out
How the CIA's Backing of the Mujahideen Created the World's Most
Robust Heroin Market and Helped to Finance the Rise of the Taliban
and Osama bin Laden
Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
|