1 Colombia’s quiet demobilization
A security dividend?
Jorge A. Restrepo and Robert Muggah
Introduction
Paramilitaries are a routine feature of contemporary civil conflicts. Their involvement in persecuting violence as proxies of the state, however, is undergoing a qualitative transformation. Specifically, paramilitaries are increasingly distanced from state structures, operating in an intermediate area between public and private spheres. In many cases they are awake to the possibilities of accumulating private capital (see Duffield 2001, 2007). Moreover, in the wake of new human rights mechanisms such as the International Criminal Court (ICC), states are less inclined to invest in violence entrepreneurs than before.1 Thus unmoored, paramilitary techniques of violence are potentially more damaging for individuals and communities. In Colombia’s long-running civil war, paramilitaries are the main perpetrators of human rights violations.
Colombian paramilitaries are more likely than guerrillas or formal state military actors to be involved in violating human rights. They are increasingly less amenable to state control, much less influence from international entities. This marks a shift from the 1970s and 1980s during which time states resorted to repressive tactics to quell internal dissent and violently suppressed insurgencies by direct military action. Freed from military and legal checks and balances, paramilitaries in the early twenty-first century are more potent than ever. They increasingly exhibit cellular network structures that facilitate rapid, flexible and decentralized deployment, fewer vertical controls and lower overheads. Paramilitaries have honed the efficiency of repression, disconnected from legal or humanitarian restrictions and thus the potentially humanizing customs of war. At the coal-face of armed violence, paramilitaries may find it easier to resort to organized crime as a means of financing their operations.
Engaging with paramilitaries as part of a post-conflict recovery programme – including their disarmament, demobilization and reintegration (DDR) – is a challenging enterprise. The dividends of effective engagement, however, are also potentially much higher in terms of contributing to declines in real and perceived armed violence. This chapter considers the outcomes of a recent demobilization programme focused primarily on paramilitaries. It draws principally from large-scale datasets tracing the actions of Colombia’s self-defence groups (AUC) and their subsequent demobilization in different parts of the country. Colombia’s DDR experience is exceptional in that it is one of the few processes of ‘paramilitary’ demobilization (as opposed to DDR of insurgent or state forces). What is more, it was pursued in the midst of an ongoing armed conflict rather than at war’s end. It is also unusual in that it offered a reinsertion and reintegration process for former paramilitaries despite their wilful prosecution of extensive human rights violations.
Before turning to an analysis of the demobilization experience itself, it is important to note a number of factors that directly shaped the chapter’s methodology. For the purposes of this assessment, the key metric for measuring DDR ‘success’ and ‘failure’ includes reported reductions in armed violence. Many evaluations of DDR tend to focus on broad outcomes such as a reduction of conflict or micro outputs including the number of arms collected or soldiers demobilized. This chapter constitutes an important departure in this respect. The chapter also deliberately adopts an historical perspective. A key objective is to help reconstruct an ‘historical memory’ and ‘common truth’ underlying patterns of armed violence in Colombia wherein victim and survivor narratives and testimonies are given ample visibility. While the chapter draws attention to the importance of transitional justice, including access of victims to genuine restitution and reparations, the focus is nevertheless on genuine armed violence reduction (see Chapter 10, this volume).
The chapter is divided into several sections. The first section considers the Colombian conflict and the dynamics of various paramilitary groups. The second section considers the rationale for the Colombian government’s preoccupation with disarming and demobilizing the AUC and the many challenges and contradictions accompanying the process. The third section introduces the DDR programme and its conceptual and bureaucratic architecture. The fourth section briefly reviews the methods adopted to assess the effectiveness of DDR as defined above. It draws primarily from straightforward econometric methods to examine four security indicators. The final section considers the findings of the research, highlighting the heterogeneity of results, regional variations between cities and the limitations.
The dynamics of Colombia’s conflict
Newly available datasets are illuminating the spatial and temporal dynamics of Colombia’s armed conflict. Between 1998 and 2006 there were at least 40,000 conflict deaths, with an annual average of 2,221 killings (Small Arms Survey 2006). The vast majority of these conflict deaths (as opposed to criminal homicide) were perpetrated in isolated rural areas (Restrepo and Spagat 2005: 15).2 In fact, ‘only ten per cent of conflict fatalities have been in municipalities with population densities exceeding 200 people per square kilometre where two-thirds of the Colombian population resides’ (Small Arms Survey 2006: 223). As disconcerting as these longitudinal and geographic trends are, they only tell part of the narrative.
When reviewing conflict violence and designing intervention strategies it is crucial to recognize who is killed by whom, the categories of victims and the types of events contributing to fatal outcomes. It is possible to render a distinction between ‘clashes’ in which two or more groups exchange fire and ‘attacks’, defined as one-sided events with no effective resistance. The distinction between the two is important: most victims of ‘clashes’ are combatants while the majority of those victimized during ‘attacks’ are civilians. In Colombia, most civilians that are killed in the context of war are done so during unilateral paramilitary attacks. There is evidence that the large-scale increase in Colombian conflict-related violence experienced from the late 1990s to 2002 and in early 2005 was accompanied by a ‘surge’ in paramilitary-related massacres and selective assassinations.
While formidable military entities in their own right, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the National Liberation Army (ELN) guerrillas pursued an alternative strategy. Their methods concentrated on disrupting Colombian society, undertaking targeted bombing campaigns, storming and seizing municipal institutions and infrastructure and selective attacks against public and private interests. In the process, the guerrillas killed significantly fewer civilians than the paramilitaries. But unlike in the case of paramilitaries who kill many and tend to leave few injured, guerrilla attacks generate more injuries than deaths due to the indiscriminate nature of their explosive bombing campaigns. Unilateral attacks by state forces, though at one time sustained and regular, were comparatively more infrequent and account for a lower proportion of overall civilian deaths in the past decade. It is important to note that their role in perpetrating armed violence is nevertheless severe – in administering aerial bombardments, they have contributed to a sizeable number of civilian casualties.
Although considerable global attention is devoted to Colombia’s armed conflict, organized and inter-personal criminal violence exacts an even graver human toll. In contrast to conflict casualties that are primarily rural, criminal violence is a predominantly urban phenomenon taking place in inner cities and peri-urban slums. Since 1979, between 70 and 80 per cent of all firearm-related deaths from any cause occurred in urban areas. While there are disagreements concerning the overall death toll from criminal violence in Colombia, there is consensus that it is astonishingly high: the department of national statistics records some 508,000 people killed as a result of firearms3 between 1979 and 2007.4
Irrespective of the scale of conflict and criminal violence, there is widespread consensus that illegal right-wing paramilitaries are central to the issue of insecurity and armed violence in the country. When compared to either guerrillas or government forces, they are responsible for the majority of civilian conflict deaths and exhibit a high ratio of killings to injuries suggesting a significant element of intentionality.5 More emphatically, killing constitutes an explicit strategy of ‘terror’ and a deterrent to ward off civilians whom the paramilitaries suspect of aiding guerrillas. In this way it contributes to the internal displace-ment of frequently poorer and marginalized civilians and leads to illegal land appropriation. While the majority of Colombia’s paramilitaries theoretically joined the 2002 ceasefire and subsequently demobilized as part of a government-sponsored programme, there is evidence that, while substantially reduced, paramilitaries remain deeply committed to violence.
The shape and dynamics of paramilitary violence have changed over time. This has been referred to as the gradual ‘commercialization of insurgency and the search for wealth’ (Metz 2000). Fundamental transformations began emerging in the 1980s with the growing involvement of insurgent forces in narco-trafficking.6 The narco-paramilitary alliance is not solely an expression of criminal profiteering or the shoring-up of capital to prosecute war against the guerrillas. Rather, a host of interests condition paramilitary involvement in the drug trade ranging from the appropriation of arable land, localized self-defence interests, counter-insurgency strategies and far-reaching aspirations related to the accumulation of power that are already transforming Colombia’s political landscape.
Disaggregating the paramilitaries
Colombia’s civil conflict represents a long-lasting and relatively low intensity contest for political power. Launched more than three decades ago, it features several distinguishable phases. With the exception of the wrenching communal bloodletting colloquially referred to as La Violencia (1946–1966) in which the country was split along political sectarian lines (i.e. liberal and conservative parties), the contemporary conflict has pitted several leftist guerrilla groups against state forces. The paramilitaries are in fact a relatively recent player.
Colombia’s paramilitary movement emerged in the mid-1980s against a backdrop of escalating armed conflict between the state and guerrilla forces and the deepening of narco-trafficking in the Andean region.7 Paramilitary groups first emerged as part of a state-sponsored counter-insurgency strategy to combat guerrillas and their perceived civilian supporters.8 In addition to the FARC, ELN and ERP, all of which formed during the 1960s, in the 1970s new urban groups such as the Movimiento 19 de Abril (M-19) entered the fray. The origins of these various guerrilla groups can be traced to peasant self-defence organizations established in the mid-twentieth century. The negotiated settlement between liberals and conservatives in the 1940s and 1950s led to the dismantling of most partisan guerrilla groups, probably the first DDR process ever recorded in the country. Some guerrillas nevertheless survived and persisted with their activities until the emergence of the FARC in 1964 and the ELN in 1967. As noted above, smaller regional guerrilla groups appeared in the 1970s, including the Quintin Lame in Cauca, the only explicitly indigenous insurgency group in Latin America at the time.
By the 1980s the armed conflict was in full swing. Its intensity increased in the wake of a failed peace process initiated by Betancur’s government (1982–1986). Although the FARC’s political wing (the Unión Patriótica) was almost exterminated in subsequent state-led attacks, this quickly led to the radicalization of the FARC and other guerrillas. The escalation of armed violence also coincided with an increase in available funding earned through kidnapping and extortion of multinational enterprises and domestic firms, cattle farmers and landowners. More ominously, the guerrillas located a profitable new income source in taxing illegal narcotic activity in isolated areas. The narcotics producers and traffickers did not take this incursion into their business lightly.
Following their gradual association with criminal drug cartels, self-defence movements were soon converted into well-armed offensive paramilitary groups. Certain political leaders, cattle ranchers and lower-income farmers [campesinos] began simultaneously forming themselves into disparate militia or ‘self-defence’ groups. Some of these latter entities conformed to traditional vigilante militia while others bore the hallmarks of war-lordism. In certain cases, these groups were linked to the narco-leadership and nurtured linkages with local political elites and state forces. These categories – self-defence, warlord and counter-insurgency – were and remain fluid and often came together in insidious ways. In what is euphemistically described as the ‘dirty war’, paramilitaries began federating and, to...
