« Paramilitary talks (3): Improvisation and secrecy | Main | Did the FARC target President Bush? »

November 29, 2004

Paramilitary Talks (4): The post-demobilization security vacuum

In the neglected, largely rural zones where Colombia’s conflict is most fiercely fought, government representatives – including soldiers – are much scarcer than guerrillas and paramilitaries. Colombians living in these conditions (there are millions) will tell you that if they have to live without a government, they prefer to live under one illegal group’s solid control. To live in a contested area – where combat is frequent and all are under suspicion of serving the other side – is to begin each day with no guarantee of seeing its end.

In paramilitary-dominated zones, residents know that there is a more frightening alternative to the reasonably predictable tyranny of the warlords. A return of the FARC or ELN to their communities would bring a territorial struggle with the AUC, with pitched battles, massacres, and a dirty war against residents who, in the guerrillas’ eyes, formed the paramilitaries’ support system.

As the AUC prepares to demobilize 3,000 fighters by 2005 and all 20,000 of its members by 2006, it is understandable, then, that many residents of paramilitary-dominated areas are terrified by what might happen next. As Human Rights Ombudsman Volmar Pérez puts it, “people are afraid that the guerrillas will come and destroy them because they had to live among the paramilitaries.” 

Urabá and Catatumbo

One such zone is Urabá, a banana-growing region encompassing parts of Antioquia and Chocó departments near the Panamanian border. The AUC wrested Urabá from guerrilla control with a very bloody campaign of massacres and displacements during the mid-1990s (a period that included Álvaro Uribe’s term as governor of Antioquia). One of the three paramilitary groups active in Urabá, the Bananero Bloc commanded by Hernán Hernández, made headlines on Thursday with a demobilization ceremony. The bloc’s 450 members turned in a smaller number of weapons, making them the first of 3,000 paramilitaries expected to do the same by the end of the year.

Colombian journalists have detected a palpable fear that the Bananero Bloc’s disappearance will encourage the FARC, which continues to dominate the nearby Serranía de Abibe region, to return in force. “We haven’t had police here for ten years,” Fernando Callejas, a councilman from Turbo municipality, told Medellín’s El Colombiano. “First we were under the FARC’s control, and now the AUC is nearby, blocking the guerrillas’ way. We hope the security forces stay in the zone and don’t abandon us.” The director of Urabá’s largest private-security firm told El Tiempo that her business is picking up. “Cattle ranchers, merchants and even individuals are requesting our services. It all owes to the demobilizations.”

Another zone likely to see an imminent paramilitary demobilization is the Catatumbo region of Norte de Santander department, a coca-growing zone near the Venezuelan border. Catatumbo was an ELN stronghold until 1999, when the paramilitaries poured into the area, killing hundreds and displacing thousands. (The commander of the Colombian Army’s 5th Brigade at the time, Gen. Alberto Bravo, was fired for allowing the paramilitaries to advance unhindered.)

Sometime in December, the AUC’s Catatumbo Bloc, commanded by Salvatore Mancuso, is to disband its 1,400 members – the largest single bloc expected to dissolve in 2004. The guerrillas’ return to this zone is a very real possibility: according to El Tiempo, 500 FARC and ELN fighters continue to dominate the sparsely populated left bank of the Catatumbo river, while the paramilitaries reign on the right bank, where most of the population lives. We may have seen a preview of what might happen if the guerrillas cross the river for good: in June, the FARC massacred 34 coca-pickers in the paramilitary-dominated La Gabarra district of Tibú municipality.

The Colombian press has noted a slow but steady exodus from Catatumbo since word of the Catatumbo Bloc’s demobilization began to spread. Anticipating a rise in violence and a disruption to the coca economy, locals have been leaving by the busload. A campesino who has lived in the zone for twenty years told Cali’s El País that his bags are packed “because we are going to be unprotected and abandoned. What people are saying is that if the ‘paras’ leave, the guerrillas will enter, and we don’t know how they will act nor what their intentions will be, because they will consider those of us who live here to be collaborators.”

A greater military and police presence, he added, won’t make much difference. “It’s not enough, because they’re not going to put a policeman or soldier on every corner. And if they do, what will happen to the people who live in the countryside? Before, when the guerrillas ran things and the security forces were also present, the guerrillas killed at any time of day or night, anywhere they pleased, and we don’t want to see that situation repeated.”

Filling the vacuum

The Colombian government has announced its intention to fill the vacuum left by demobilizing paramilitaries, deploying new troops and police to the zones the AUC claims to be vacating. In the short term, the Defense Ministry expects to send personnel from elite mobile brigades, which may require a drawdown from other anti-guerrilla operations elsewhere in the country, particularly “Plan Patriota.” By next year, the armed forces are promising an additional 4,000 troops in the demobilization zones, a gap that they expect to fill in part by “redirecting” some peasant soldiers – participants in a program originally designed to station soldiers in their hometowns.

“The important thing is that they come to stay. Our hope is that we can finally have a state here,” a druggist in El Tarra, Catatumbo told El Tiempo. Unfortunately, it is far from clear that the Colombian military will be able to maintain a long-term presence of that size in these zones, when the conflict continues to be fought on so many other battlegrounds throughout the country.

“At its innermost circles, the government seems to fear the same thing,” writes security analyst Alfredo Rangel, who directs the Bogotá-based Security and Democracy Foundation. “It knows that it is still unable to stop the guerrillas’ return to many places where paramilitary groups will be demobilized. … Where will it find these additional troops? Clearly, by pulling them out of Plan Patriota in the south, because the government does not have enough military power to demobilize the paramilitaries and to try to defeat the guerrillas at the same time.”

Of course, truly filling the vacuum and securing these zones would require more than just military force; Human Rights Ombudsman Volmar Pérez has proposed a more integral “humanitarian cordon” in the demobilization zones, with agencies from the civilian government, governors and mayors, the international community and civil society carrying out an ambitious strategy “to rebuild the social fabric and allow the population to live in peace.” Of course this is absolutely what needs to be done. Like any workable solution in Colombia, though, it would be expensive – and the Colombian government lacks even the budget to deploy soldiers, much less carry out such an ambitious program.

A grim outlook

If the demobilizations embolden the guerrillas and the Colombian government cannot mount an effective deterrent, what will happen? The likely outcomes are grim.

The first possibility is a guerrilla takeover of key paramilitary demobilization zones. The guerrilla fronts that were pushed out of these areas (especially the FARC fronts) remain largely intact and are generally present in remote nearby zones, poised to return. If they do, the result could be quite bloody, as has been the case in the few areas where the FARC has made inroads into paramilitary dominance (such as lower Putumayo and the Atrato River region in Chocó).

A guerrilla resurgence in these zones would also deal a death blow to the Colombian government’s talks with the AUC. If their gesture is met with a guerrilla scorched-earth campaign, it is hard to imagine the paramilitaries agreeing to demobilize any more of their blocs.

In fact, the guerrilla-takeover scenario is rather unlikely. The paramilitaries are near their peak military strength and well positioned at the negotiating table; for them to cede control over strategic zones at this point defies all logic. They probably have something else in mind. It is more likely that the AUC leadership’s control will simply assume a different form.

In the short term, AUC control may be preserved through duplication of blocs. Most, if not all, of the paramilitary blocs slated to turn in their weapons between now and January 1 operate alongside other AUC groups in the same regions. In Urabá, two more AUC blocs continue to operate: the Élmer Cárdenas bloc commanded by “Alemán” (and not participating in peace talks), and the Héroes de Tolová bloc commanded by “Don Berna.” The Catatumbo bloc is part of a larger AUC structure in Norte de Santander department; Salvatore Mancuso’s paramilitaries around the nearby city of Cúcuta, for instance, are not going anywhere.

We witnessed a similar phenomenon after the much-heralded November 2003 demobilization of Don Berna’s Cacique Nutibara bloc in Medellín. It later emerged that Don Berna had begun another Medellín-based group, the “Héroes de Granada,” which continues his dominance over the city’s crime-ridden slums and in fact absorbed several former Nutibara bloc members.

If the AUC is truly to demobilize, however, these parallel blocs will have to disappear eventually. To solidify control over territories after “demobilizing,” the paramilitaries would have to pursue a less formal solution.

Taking off the camouflage fatigues and the armbands, turning in some weapons and serving some light jail sentences will certainly do away with the AUC as Colombians know it. But this alone will not undo the command structures, the criminal financial networks, the support from large landowners, drug kingpins, military officers and local officials, and large payrolls of killers-for-hire. In other words, demobilization alone will not undo AUC dominance over its territories.

While it may no longer operate within a “paramilitary” structure of uniformed fighters living with military discipline in encampments, a post-negotiation AUC may still be a lethal force with broad dominion over territory and control over much of the drug economy. In some areas, it could exert control as a network of shadowy death squads; in others, it could be a private system of vigilantes carrying out private “justice”; in still others, it may be nothing more than a mafia controlling illicit behavior. Or it could be all three at the same time.

The paramilitary peace talks could end up as a nationwide repeat of what Alfredo Rangel calls “‘the Cacique Nutibara model’: demobilization without demobilization, disarmament without disarmament, reinsertion without reinsertion, and a veiled toleration of territorial control by paramilitaries who impede the guerrillas’ return.”

If this reconfigured paramilitary control is to be the result, the current negotiations are clearly not worth the effort.

Some tough questions

The Uribe government and the AUC leadership would of course object strongly to this analysis, insisting that the main point of the negotiations is to restore government control to the zones the paramilitaries are to vacate. Filling the security vacuum, they will argue, is a challenge, but Colombia’s security forces and other institutions are ready.

Would-be donor governments should not just take the negotiators’ word for it. They must ask tough questions about the Colombian government’s plans to keep the guerrillas or re-configured paramilitaries from filling the vacuum:

Until the Colombian government can offer satisfactory answers to these questions – and clear responses have not been forthcoming – the “security vacuum” question will continue to be an urgent concern.

If the talks go ahead without good answers to these questions, the unlucky residents of paramilitary-controlled zones will not be any better off after the AUC demobilizes. If the state fails to fill the vacuum, either they will find themselves living under the same brutal leadership under a different name, or – perhaps worse – they will be caught in the crossfire, living in a territory disputed by guerrillas and ex-paramilitaries. The likelihood of either outcome poses an important obstacle to international support for the paramilitary peace talks.

Coming soon: (5) Justice, victims' rights and accountability

Posted by isacson at November 29, 2004 03:41 AM

Trackback Pings

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://ciponline.org/cgi-bin/mt-tb.cgi/20

Comments

Those are certainly some tough questions, for which the Colombian government has indeed provided few answers, at least in public.

As I see it, most of the issues can be reduced to two key aspects:

a)the true will of the paramilitaries.
b)the available money.

If either of those fails to live up to the Uribe administration's expectations, then the security vacuum will be very real and little will change (and certainly not for the better).

Posted by: jcg at December 1, 2004 01:51 PM

Post a comment

Thanks for signing in, . Now you can comment. (sign out)

(If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.)


Remember me?