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November 13, 2004
Paramilitary talks (2): The "paracaidistas"
Pity poor Pablo Escobar. The flamboyant, brutal drug dealer always wanted a clean slate – to be seen, in journalist Mark Bowden's words, "as a benevolent, law-abiding citizen." But he came and went 15 years too early for that.
Had he been trafficking drugs and killing enemies today, perhaps Escobar could have avoided ending up dead on a Medellín rooftop, surrounded by smiling, photo-snapping policemen. Today, he could have put on camouflage fatigues, christened himself "Comandante" something-or-other, and bought himself a seat at the table in the Santa Fe de Ralito demilitarized zone, where negotiations are proceeding between the Colombian government and the AUC paramilitaries. There, Escobar would have stood a decent chance of winning amnesty, or at least a vastly reduced penalty, for his past crimes. His presence at the table would also have stymied any U.S. attempt to extradite him.
Sounds farfetched? Well, it's happening right now for an entire corps of Colombia's top drug dealers. An odd wave of brand-new comandantes has swept the AUC leadership over the past three or four years: people with precious little experience fighting guerrillas but a long record as capos in Colombian narcotrafficking organizations. Among them are no less than three of the twelve figures on the U.S. government's "wanted" list of members of the North Valle Cartel, Colombia's largest existing drug organization.
Colombians even have a term for these traffickers-turned-paramilitaries: the "paracaidistas" – the parachutists – as in people who've just "dropped in." The paracaidistas' presence at Ralito, and their growing influence over the AUC, might be the largest obstacle the Uribe government's talks face right now.
The difference between these new leaders and more "traditional" AUC comandantes may at first seem semantic, since today's paramilitaries got their start and get much of their support from drug traffickers' money, since they control 40 percent of Colombia's drug trade (according to U.S. Ambassador William Wood), and since much of the AUC leadership is subject to U.S. Justice Department extradition requests. In addition to ordering mass murder, longtime paramilitary leaders like Salvatore Mancuso, Iván Roberto Duque, "Macaco" and Ramón Isaza have helped send prodigious amounts of drugs to the United States.
As awful as they are, though, the paramilitaries' old guard at least can claim to have fought guerrillas and those they regarded as guerrilla sympathizers. The paracaidistas can hardly even claim that. They have few anti-guerrilla credentials, but long resumes in Colombia's drug underworld. It is not even clear whether they view the guerrillas as blood enemies or merely as rival drug mafias. In one celebrated example from February, when Colombian troops participating in the early stages of Plan Patriota captured "Sonia" (Nayibe Rojas Valderrama), the "financial chief" of the FARC's Southern Bloc, they found e-mails on her computer asking the local AUC to lend a helicopter "to transport arms and drugs through the jungle."
The distinction between old-line paramilitaries, however "narco," and the paracaidistas makes a world of difference for Colombia's peace talks with the AUC. First, it makes international support impossible: a negotiation with longtime, unreformed cartel leaders – regardless of the insignia on their new uniforms – is still a negotiation with cartel leaders, something that no other government is going to touch. Second, the paracaidistas are rapidly supplanting the AUC's old guard – even killing those who (like Carlos Castaño in April, or the Metro Bloc's "Rodrigo 00" in May) opposed the group's advanced narcotization and may have been seen as too likely to turn state's evidence. Under this new management, the paramilitaries are turning into a mafia, or rather a set of rival mafias united only by their common hope to negotiate an amnesty.
Here are some examples of paracaidistas currently in the Ralito zone talking with government representatives.
- Diego Fernando Murillo, nicknamed "Don Berna" or "Adolfo
Paz," is the AUC's "inspector-general" and, by some accounts,
the group's most feared and powerful leader. A July narcotrafficking indictment
issued by New York prosecutors calls him the "de facto leader of the
AUC." His long biography
includes time spent as a Medellín cartel bagman, a participant in a Cali Cartel-funded
effort to kill Pablo Escobar, and leader of La Terraza, Medellín's
feared, but now defunct, network of hitmen-for-hire and street criminals.
He did not join up with the paramilitaries until 2000 or so; thanks to a combination
of generous buyouts of paramilitary blocs and sheer ruthlessness, his rise
within the organization has been meteoric. Among several paramilitary units
that answer to him was a short-lived Medellín-based paramilitary front, the
Cacique Nutibara Bloc, that produced 860 young men for a widely questioned
November 2003 "demobilization" ceremony.
- Víctor Manuel Mejía Múnera, nicknamed "El Mellizo" ("The
Twin") but known in Ralito as "Pablo Arauca," is the head of
the AUC's "Avengers of Arauca" bloc. Mejía, along with his twin
brother, has long been on FBI most-wanted lists as a high-ranking figure in
the Northern Valle cartel. Apparently he's a member of the "General Staff"
of Iván Duque's Central Bolívar Bloc, and his group operates in Arauca, the
oil-rich department of northeastern Colombia where U.S. military personnel
have been present for nearly two years now, training the Colombian army in
pipeline-protection and offensive anti-guerrilla operations. Observers were
surprised to see him in Ralito when the current stage of talks was launched
in July; Mejía was not before known to be a paramilitary leader. The "Avengers
of Arauca" purportedly plan to demobilize by the end of the year; if
that happens, though, few believe that it will mean an end to paramilitarism
in Arauca.
- Francisco Javier Zuluaga Lindo, known as "Gordo Lindo"
in the drug underworld but in Ralito as "Comandante Gabriel Galindo,"
is the political chief of Don Berna's Pacific Bloc. He was an associate of
the Medellín cartel's Fabio and Jorge Ochoa and later, a partner of narcotrafficker
Alejandro Bernal Madrigal, or "Juvenal," who was captured and extradited
in Operation Millenium, a large-scale 1999 drug sting. A court in Fort Lauderdale
requested Zuluaga's extradition at that time, but he had evaded capture. Along
with Mejía, his presence at the Ralito negotiating table in July surprised
many who did not know him to be a paramilitary associate.
- Ramiro Vanoy Murillo, or "Cuco," heads the Antioquia-based
Mineros Bloc. Along with "Gordo Lindo," Vanoy is sought by the Fort
Lauderdale court as an associate of "Juvenal."
- Guillermo Pérez Alzate, or "Pablo Sevillano," heads the
Liberators of the South Bloc, based in the Pacific port city of Tumaco near
the coca fields of western Nariño department. He is wanted by Colombian police
in connection with a shipment of 11 tons of cocaine. He also reputedly coordinated
the North Valle Cartel's "mule" operation (recruiting women
to board planes to the United States after swallowing sealed packets of drugs).
He paid large sums to the AUC sometime after 2001 for control of southern
Pacific coast narcotrafficking routes and for permission to wear the AUC label.
According to Moritz Ackerman, a columnist for the Medellín daily El Colombiano,
Perez's group routinely does business with guerrillas: "in the department
of Nariño, in a region called 'Coca City,' the 'Liberators of the South' paramilitaries
buy the harvest and the FARC's 29th Front supervises the refining
of cocaine."
- Rodrigo Tovar Pupo, or "Jorge 40," runs the AUC's Northern
Bloc and is based in and around the port of Barranquilla, Colombia's fourth-largest
city. He allegedly controls the lion's share of narcotrafficking in Colombia's
Atlantic Coast region, though he disputes it with Santa Marta-based paramilitary
leader Hernán Giraldo. The dispute has often flared up into large-scale
internecine violence, including frequent fighting over routes through the
Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta region of northern Colombia. Giraldo and the
rest of the AUC, led by Tovar, fought an all-out war in 2002 that killed dozens
in the port city of Santa Marta. The AUC allegedly sought to rein in Giraldo
after he ordered the murder of two U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA)
agents, a crime for which the United States seeks his extradition.
A truce between Tovar and Giraldo has mostly held since then, though both have committed numerous high-profile violations of the cease-fire the AUC should be observing as a pre-condition for negotiations, among them the February murder of park ranger Marta Lucía Hernández, the abortive June kidnapping of Sen. José Gnecco, the August murder of indigenous leader Freddy Arias, and the September killing of professor Alfredo Correa.
- Last but not least, a recent report in the Colombian newsweekly Semana asserts that,
after paying a US$5 million fee, top North Valle Cartel leader Diego Montoya
Sánchez, "Don Diego," is now in the Ralito demilitarized zone,
wearing olive-green fatigues and posing as the head of a new 150-man bloc,
the "Heroes of Ríonegro." Montoya is on the FBI's worldwide list
of its ten most-wanted fugitives, alongside Osama bin Laden. If it
turns out that Don Diego has truly "parachuted in" – and his online
wanted poster notes that "Montoya is presently protected by the Colombian
paramilitary group, 'Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia' (AUC)" – it could
prove to be a near-fatal blow to the credibility of the Uribe government's
peace talks.
Note as of November 24: Semana magazine has revised this claim. In a November 21 article, it contends that the AUC refused Don Diego's request to play comandante in the Ralito zone, saying it posed to great a risk to the peace process. So Don Diego is probably not in Ralito - though his FBI wanted poster still claims that "Montoya is presently protected by the Colombian paramilitary group, 'Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia' (AUC)."
How remarkable that, in the name of peace and disarmament, some of the world's most prominent narco-criminals not only have a safe haven, but they have regular opportunities to meet with government officials to demand an amnesty deal. If they get even some of the impunity they want, the paracaidistas will have succeeded in a scheme so brazen that even Pablo Escobar couldn't have devised it.
How remarkable as well that the government of Álvaro Uribe – which takes such a hard line against the hapless peasants who grow the narco-kingpins' coca – has reacted so meekly to the growing presence of the kingpins themselves. So far, the Colombian government has sought to extradite only one paracaidista in the Ralito zone, Juan Carlos Sierra Ramírez or "El Tuso," a relatively minor figure who had bought up a small paramilitary bloc in Antioquia department. And they didn't arrest him; "El Tuso" remains at large.
The Colombian government has made no secret of its unhappiness with current low levels of international support for the paramilitary peace talks. For donor governments, though, the talks will remain radioactive – utterly untouchable – as long as the paracaidistas remain at the table. They have to go if this process is to have any credibility at all.
Coming soon: (3) Improvisation and secrecy
Posted by isacson at November 13, 2004 02:01 AM
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Comments
That would be the best outcome, for all of these "paracaidistas" to leave the negotiations...however, considering that some of these and other individuals have so closely integrated into the AUC and other paramilitary structures, especially those that have "landed" more than a couple of years ago, one has to wonder if it is even possible to arrange any sort of significant demobilization without at least the most prominent of them being involved. If, for example, "Don Berna" was kicked out of the table, the talks themselves might be in danger of collapsing. Logically, later arrivals might be easier to handle.
It's easy to condemn all that, but it's harder to handle, I suppose..from what I can gather, perhaps one way out, from the perspective of the Uribe government, would be to simply make the bulk of the judicial benefits not applicable to outright drug dealers, unless they turned themselves and their business partners/routes in, and even if that were the case, the possibility of extradition would remain open. Probably most "new arrivals" would reject that last option, but probably "Don Berna" and others might be willing to face it.
Posted by: jcg at November 13, 2004 01:09 PM
we want see fotografy these terrorist, put on please, jorge 40 and others
Posted by: israel at January 11, 2006 10:01 AM
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