by Austin Galt
Salvatore Mancuso became one of Colombia’s largest drug traffickers, controlling the flow of drugs from both the Catatumbo region and much of Córdoba. One of his principal exit points was a large farm in Puerto Escondido in Córdoba which had 7 kilometres of coastline. It was previously owned by Juan Ramón Matta-Ballesteros, a large-scale Medellín Cartel-linked Honduran trafficker, who was one of the pioneers of the ‘Mexican Trampoline’ which refers to Colombian cocaine being transported to Mexico before being ‘bounced up’ to the United States.
One of Mancuso’s key lieutenants in the drug-trafficking business was a man called Carlos Mario ‘Kiko’ Vega. His real name was actually Fabio Ochoa Vasco and he shouldn’t be confused with the extradited Medellín Cartel leader Fabio Ochoa Vásquez. After both capos met each other during the 1980s, Ochoa Vasco decided to change his name in deference to the cartel leader. He worked with Fernando Galeano and became close friends with Don Berna and one of his right-hand men upon the death of Pablo Escobar. He was then introduced to Mancuso in 2000 thus beginning his involvement with the paramilitaries. Fabio Ochoa Vasco became one of the most wanted men for extradition by US authorities and he turned himself over to them in 2009. As for Salvatore Mancuso, he would eventually be extradited to the United States in 2008 and sentenced to 16 years in prison.
Despite the outcry after the Mapiripán massacre, Carlos Castaño promised there would be many more ‘Mapiripáns’ and indeed there were.
On 25 October 1997, about 200 paramilitaries arrived in the village of El Aro located in the municipality of Ituango, high in the mountains to the north of Medellín. They spent the next four days raping and murdering their way through the village. They killed 15 villagers, burnt over 40 houses to the ground and stole all the cattle.
Salvatore Mancuso, the paramilitary commander who led the raid, subsequently testified that the victims were guerrillas and not civilians. He stated the area was used to hide kidnapping victims. Survivors stated that there was a helicopter which hovered over the zone as the assault took place, and at first they thought it was there to help them before realising it was there to support the paramilitaries. Villagers claimed that they saw AUC boss Carlos Castaño riding in the helicopter as it flew in close.
Mancuso said that there were actually three helicopters in the air during this time. One belonged to the military while another belonged to the FARC who were extracting Iván Márquez, the leader of the guerrilla factions in that region. The third allegedly belonged to the office of the governor of Antioquia, Álvaro Uribe, at that time. Uribe has denied having anything to do with the massacre.
Many of the village’s inhabitants left never to return. Of the few who did remain, some scratch out a living by picking the leaves off the many coca plants that still exist in the area. Unfortunately, the construction of a new dam in Ituango for hydroelectric power has meant the locals can’t fish in the river or mine for gold as they were able to do previously. To make matters worse, the area is a very dangerous place due to the significant number of landmines there. Ituango has one of the worst records for landmine accidents in Colombia with over 230 cases reported since 1990.
The paramilitary assaults continued into the next year. On 4 May 1998, about 200 paramilitaries stormed the town of Puerto Alvira located a bit further upriver from Mapiripán. With a list in hand, about two dozen people suspected of being guerrilla sympathisers were taken from their houses and murdered. Some had their throats slit. Others were run over by a car and, still alive but in agony, had gasoline poured over them before being set alight. A six-year-old indigenous girl, attempting to escape by boat across the Guaviare River with her father, was cut down by gunfire. The paramilitaries then burnt down half of the town.
The attack was led by Manuel de Jesús Piraban, nicknamed ‘Pirata’ or ‘Pirate’ after he contracted a disease in one eye requiring him to wear an eyepatch. He was one of the recruits given paramilitary training in Puerto Boyacá during the 1980s before he moved to the Eastern Plains.
As the level of violence increased, the first attempt at peace was made with the signing of the Nudo de Paramillo Agreement on 26 July 1998, outlining several points that would help in advancing the peace process. This was considered one of the reasons for the FARC launching The Goodbye Offensive a week later as they rejected the idea of the paramilitaries being granted political status. The agreement was, effectively, not worth the paper it was written on. It certainly didn’t stop the violence.
The AUC’s gruesome campaign showed no sign of relenting by the turn of the century. It was the remote town of El Salado, in the municipality of El Carmen de Bolívar located near the Caribbean coast, which was one of the hardest hit.
Before the FARC arrived in the area in the mid-1990s, El Salado was considered an agrarian oasis surrounded by fresh water streams and green hills. Nestled in the fertile Montes de Maria, an isolated group of small mountains considered the very end of the Cordillera Occidental, the town is surrounded by much drier and desert-like landscapes.
Unlike the poverty that existed in the neighbouring areas, El Salado had a medical centre with its own ambulance, a school and a police station. It was the envy of nearby towns. Everyone had their own slice of land which they tilled. The main crop produced by the townspeople was tobacco. The men would plant, collect and dry the tobacco, while the women were employed by a couple of companies to select, press and pack it.
El Salado was probably as close as you can get to a left-wing communal paradise. Then the FARC entered the picture. The police station was eventually shut down as it became too dangerous for the officers, while the town’s wealthiest peasants started being extorted by the guerrillas. When one refused to pay, he was marked for death and when the army came to rescue him, he and over two dozen members of the army were ambushed and murdered. The town’s idyllic life was permanently shattered.
Towards the end of 1999, the FARC were seen herding about 500 cattle into the area. The cattle had been branded as the property of Enilce López, the powerful and feared lottery queen known as ‘La Gata’ or ‘The Cat’. She presided over her empire from her fiefdom of Magangué, a municipality of Bolívar located further south-east by the Magdalena River.
The police and army undertook a fruitless search for the cattle. They learnt the cattle had come through El Salado but then the trail went cold. It was thought that the FARC had divided up the herd with El Salado’s population and shared in the spoils. In December 1999, a helicopter flew over the town dropping leaflets which read, ‘Eat the chickens and eat the sheep and enjoy all that you can this year because you will not enjoy more’. A couple of months later, the bloodbath began.
On 16 February 2000, over 300 paramilitaries advanced on the town from three separate directions in the early hours of the morning. Not wanting to use their guns which would warn others of their presence, they hanged or cut the throats of anyone who came before them. Some locals were able to escape, but without food or water some of them, especially those with children, returned to the town of their own free will.
The paramilitaries had several FARC deserters with them who pointed out those guerrilla sympathisers among the local population. The first victim was the town’s respected teacher, Luis Pablo Redondo. His torture began with his ears being cut off. He was then stabbed multiple times between the ribs and in the belly but not enough to kill him. He moaned and writhed in terrible pain as the townsfolk looked on, stunned in disbelief at what was unfolding before their eyes. A black plastic bag was then put over his head so that he struggled to breathe. Finally, he was put out of his misery with a bullet to the head. A haunting silence ensued.
A local guerrilla leader’s rumoured girlfriend, a pretty 16-year-old girl named Nayibis Contreras, was found hiding in her home and was dragged to the town square, which had been converted into a slaughterhouse. With the town’s population gathered around, she was tied to a tree and disembowelled with a bayonet. Next on the chopping block was a pregnant teenage girl who had a
sharp stick inserted into her vagina and pushed up so hard that it protruded out of her stomach. She and her unborn baby were literally torn apart.
Over the next few days, many victims were chosen by chance and tortured by the paramilitaries who demanded they admit to being a guerrilla member. The bodies began to stack up in the square and become bloated under the hot sun. Before long, pigs began feeding on the dead. The surviving relatives looked on in horror.
The paramilitaries began selecting the most beautiful of the young women who they would then gang rape. Accusing them of being the girlfriends of guerrillas and traitors perhaps made them feel justified about the vile acts they were committing.
After four days of terror and just one hour after the paramilitaries had left the town, the army turned up. Their complicity was too obvious. The death toll stood at 66 men, women and children. As for La Gata’s cattle, they were subsequently found a year later wandering peacefully in the hills of the Montes de Maria.
The AUC weren’t finished with the Montes de Maria and were intent on dominating the region which held strategic significance as it provided good access to the Atlantic coast. The Heroes of Montes de Maria Bloc dominated the region and was headed by Edward Cobo Téllez, known as ‘Diego Vecino’, who once survived being shot in the head by M-19 guerrillas after his family didn’t pay their extortion. This AUC bloc carried out several other massacres including that in Macayepo.
On 16 October 2000, about 80 paramilitaries entered the village of Macayepo in the municipality of El Carmen de Bolívar and clubbed at least a dozen peasants to death. Controversy subsequently surrounded a senator, Álvaro García known as ‘El Gordo’ or ‘The Fat Man’, who was recorded 10 days earlier during a telephone conversation with a well-known rancher in the region talking about things that eventually occurred during the massacre. The senator was recorded saying, ‘I consider that this decision is not an easy decision to take today but it is easy to take in 10 days’. Álvaro García denied everything, putting it down to pure coincidence.
The Castaño brothers were blazing a brutal trail across the country and they now turned their attention to the south. Vicente envisaged a paramilitary bloc that would span the whole Pacific coastline from the state of Nariño all the way up to northern Chocó. The allure of controlling this prime drug-trafficking region set in motion events that would lead to another bloody massacre.
On 12 April 2001, several hundred paramilitaries made their way to the jungle town of El Naya which contained a small indigenous and African community in Valle del Cauca. It was reputed to be an area with vast coca plantations as well as where the guerrillas took their kidnapping victims. Arriving at the village, the paramilitaries captured a guerrilla and offered to spare his life in return for fingering other guerrillas.
Having blocked access to the village, the paramilitaries proceeded to ravage their way through the area killing inhabitants and burning houses and, in the process, causing a huge displacement of the population. They not only used guns and machetes to kill their victims but a chainsaw obtained from a local farmer was brought into the mix for macabre results. It was used to cut the limbs off a teenage girl, saw an indigenous leader in half as well as slicing open a woman’s abdomen, leaving her guts to spill onto the ground. It was a real-life chainsaw massacre.
The guerrillas and some locals fought back with several AUC casualties. Some intense fighting was witnessed but they were overwhelmed by the paramilitaries through sheer weight of numbers. After three ghastly and ghoulish days, the army was able to reach the zone and start bringing out the victims, which it did by piling the bodies into big cargo nets to be carried out by helicopter. The bodies of about 40 Kitek Kiwe natives and Afro-Colombians were retrieved, although El Naya locals said the exact death toll was more likely double that with many thrown into the river, whole or in pieces.
This time the AUC really did appear to have overstepped the mark (as somehow previous massacres hadn’t appeared to) and dozens of paramilitaries were arrested several weeks later after attempting to occupy the zone. Vicente Castaño’s grand ambitions had been thwarted.
*
Lily grew up in a town not too far from Carlos Castaño’s home town of Amalfi in north-eastern Antioquia. It is a typical paisa town set around a central plaza where the townsfolk gather to chat and gossip – they love to gossip. The elders may sip on a tinto or espresso coffee while kids have an ice cream. Ranchers who live outside the town may pop into the cantina or bar for a beer and catch up on things with friends. On Sunday they all come together in the local church which looms large over the plaza.
While its population was fortunate not to be pegged as FARC sympathisers by the AUC, its economic story following the arrival of the guerrillas mirrored that of many other towns affected by the violence. Lily and her family were no exception. Their family business, a local store, was prosperous with many wealthy landowners in the surrounding area spending money in the town and providing employment for the population. But when the FARC entered the region, they began extorting the businessmen and landowners.
Lily’s father was one of their victims. He was kidnapped by the guerrillas in the 1980s and taken up into the mountains. He was only released once his family paid a ransom which meant selling their home. He was not alone and, unsurprisingly, many of the wealthier residents left, causing the town to go into economic decline.
Being the oldest of her siblings, Lily was required to take on a more senior role in the household during her teenage years as her parents worked hard, often seven days a week, in order to recoup what they had lost to the FARC. They would also have to contribute to the paramilitaries once they arrived in the area. Lily developed an independent streak and learnt that if you wanted something in life you had to work hard and fight for it.
So many hard-working Colombians have been affected directly or indirectly by both the FARC and AUC. The conflict has caused the displacement of millions of people. Even after the AUC came to help towns banish the guerrillas, it was often too late. The wealthy had already left and, in many cases, would never return.
16
RIGHT-WING PARAMILITARIES PART 2
After seeing each other for several months, I moved in with Lily in the second half of 2003. She had an apartment in north Bogotá, less than 10 blocks from the zona rosa. This became the area where I would spend most of my time, rarely venturing back down south.
While work filled the week, on the weekends I generally frequented a couple of pubs in the zona rosa – the Irish Pub and the Bogotá Beer Company. Both are favourites with the Western crowd. Chris was friends with the owner of the Irish Pub and had a deal to teach English to the employees of both establishments. I would teach the bartenders in one of the pubs in the morning before opening time.
I had also made a couple of friends through Chris: a comprehensible Scot named Ally, and an Englishman named Andy who grew up in Manchester, sneaking into clubs underage to watch the band Happy Mondays and formulate his dance moves. Ally had escaped the inclement weather of his homeland only to settle in another city racked by inclement weather, while Andy had sailed to the country with his father and decided to stay. They had both arrived a couple years earlier and now taught in an all-English school where every class was taught in English.
We tore up the city together on the weekends. The northern part of Bogotá was our playground. There was always something happening, whether it was in the zona rosa or Parque 93. We usually began with drinks at a friend’s house or one of the local bars, or even a dinner at a nice restaurant, before hitting the best clubs. Lily, who has never taken drugs in her life and essentially provided some balance for me, could only ever handle two or three alcoholic drinks. She certainly couldn’t keep up with me and I would often drop her home around 11 pm before hooking back up with the guys and heading to an after-party held at a friend’s place.
We never had problems getting in anywhere as, without many foreigners in the country, our presence was mostly seen
in a good light. Foreigners, or better said Westerners, were generally viewed as being at the forefront of what was in and what wasn’t in the music and dance scene, and if we liked a place then it must be alright.
We were never short of things to do and each party seemed to be the party to end all parties. The civil war raged on around us but it was like we didn’t have a care in the world. They were great times. The best of times.
*
The extreme violence perpetrated by the AUC brought back memories of a time long since passed – La Violencia or The Violence.
Jorge Eliécer Gaitán Ayala was a very popular and charismatic politician who was running for president in the 1949 elections as the Liberal Party candidate. His ideology was based on inclusion for the country’s minorities and fighting against the ruling oligarchy. Polls suggested he was destined for victory until he was assassinated by a lone gunman on 9 April 1948. News of his death led to immediate rioting which left much of downtown Bogotá destroyed. The killer, having been detained by a policeman, was lynched by a mob, although in the confusion it is thought they killed the wrong man.
The riots, known as El Bogotazo, lasted into the night and led to the deaths of thousands of people. The urban conflict spread to the countryside and over the next 10 years a civil war raged between the Liberal and Conservative parties who both organised as paramilitary groups to fight their battles. Upwards of 200,000 people lost their lives during this time.
Both political parties were accustomed to doing battle. Between 1899 and 1902, they fought each other in the Guerra de los Mil Días or Thousand Days’ War. The Liberal Party had accused the Conservative Party of rigging the 1898 election to remain in power. The conservatives eventually won out, while the conflict left around 100,000 dead.
Now that there was no Liberal Party candidate to contest the 1949 election, the Conservative Party’s Laureano Gómez, the father of Álvaro Gómez, became the 18th president of Colombia. With the rule of law collapsing, he was ousted in a military coup led by General Gustavo Rojas Pinilla who became the country’s next president in 1953.
