[News] Bush Administration Fails to Acknowledge Existence of New Paramilitary Groups in Colombia

[Anti-Imperialist News]

http://www.colombiajournal.org/colombia279.htm
March 17, 2008

Bush Administration Fails to Acknowledge 
Existence of New Paramilitary Groups in Colombia

by Garry Leech

The US State Department released its annual human 
rights report last week and one of its 
implications with regard to Colombia is 
particularly startling: There are no new 
paramilitary groups in Colombia! The 
politicization of the latest edition of the 
report is most apparent in its de-politicization 
of Colombia’s new armed groups by denying that 
they are actually “paramilitary groups.” This is 
a political strategy on the part of the Bush 
administration that allows it to blame virtually 
all of Colombia’s political violence on the 
guerrillas and makes it easier to refute 
allegations of links between the Colombian 
military and paramilitaries­after all, there can 
be no such links if the paramilitaries do not exist.

The US State Department’s annual human rights 
report does not refer to Colombia’s new 
paramilitary groups as “paramilitaries,” but 
rather as “illegal” or “criminal” groups. The 
report states that the last United Self-Defense 
Forces of Colombia (AUC) bloc demobilized in 
August 2006 and suggests that the only remaining 
paramilitaries in Colombia are those individual 
members of the AUC that refused to demobilize. 
This strategy seeks to legitimize the Colombian 
government’s demobilization process by implying 
that, besides a handful of AUC holdouts, there 
are no longer any paramilitaries in Colombia.

In reality, there is a wealth of evidence showing 
that there are dozens of new paramilitary groups 
waging a dirty war in Colombia. Numerous human 
rights groups have shown that new paramilitary 
groups operating under names such as the New 
Generation or the Black Eagles do indeed exist 
and that they are responsible for a significant 
percentage of the country’s political violence. 
In 2006, the Colombian NGO Indepaz reported that 
43 new paramilitary groups totaling almost 4,000 
fighters had been formed in 23 of the country’s 
32 departments. Last year, the OAS estimated that 
there were 20 new paramilitary groups with 3,000 
fighters operating in Colombia. According to 
Alirio Uribe, a leading Colombian human rights 
lawyer with the José Alvear Restrepo Lawyers’ Collective:
There are forty-three new paramilitary groups 
but, according to the Ministry of Defense, these 
new paramilitary groups have nothing to do with 
the old ones. But the truth is, they are the 
same. Before they were the AUC, now they are 
called the New Generation AUC. They have the same 
collusion with the army and the police. It is a farce.

The Belgium-based International Crisis Group 
(ICG) claims “there is growing evidence that new 
armed groups are emerging that are more than the 
simple ‘criminal gangs’ that the government 
describes. Some of them are increasingly acting 
as the next generation of paramilitaries.” The 
ICG goes on to note, “Some of these groups, such 
as the New Generation Organization (Organización 
Nueva Generación, ONG) in Nariño have started to 
operate much like the old AUC bloc in the region, 
including counter-insurgency operations.” Even 
the title of an article published last week by 
Colombia’s leading daily, El Tiempo, called the 
new groups “paramilitaries.” The headline 
declared: “The New Generation of Paramilitaries 
Already Exists in at Least Eight Departments of the Country.”

Despite all this evidence showing that the new 
armed groups are indeed paramilitaries, the State 
Department insists­as does the Colombian 
government­on referring to them as “illegal” or 
“criminal” groups. The Uribe administration 
illustrated its attitude towards the new 
paramilitary groups last week after they killed 
six organizers of the March 6 protests against 
State and paramilitary violence. Ivan Cepeda, 
director of the human rights organization called 
Movement of Victims of State Crimes, recently 
reported that the Black Eagles paramilitary group 
had emailed a death threat to those organizations 
involved in planning the protest. However, 
Colombia’s Interior Minister Carlos Holguin 
publicly dismissed the political nature of the 
threat, claiming that the Black Eagles are a “criminal organization.”

The State Department’s annual human rights 
offerring makes clear that the Bush 
administration is using the same playbook as the 
Colombian government. In the report, the term 
“illegal groups” appears 35 times to describe the 
new organizations and the State Department never 
once refers to them as paramilitaries. The report 
claims that the new armed groups are not focused 
on fighting Colombia’s leftist guerrillas, 
stating, “The new illegal groups, which the 
government also described as new criminal groups, 

 focused primarily on narcotics trafficking and 
extortion rather than fighting the FARC or ELN. 
In these circumstances, it was often difficult to 
determine responsibility for abuses committed.”

This description of the new groups suggests in no 
uncertain terms that, from the perspective of the 
State Department, they are primarily engaged in 
criminal, rather than political, activities. 
Therefore, by implication, they could not be 
waging a dirty war against suspected guerrilla 
sympathizers nor could they be engaged in the 
country’s armed conflict. Furthermore, the last 
sentence in the quote seeks to mask the human 
rights abuses perpetrated by the new paramilitary 
groups. However, by referring to the new “illegal 
groups” 35 times in its human rights report­often 
in reference to their having committed killings, 
forced displacement and numerous other 
atrocities­the State Department makes evident 
that these groups are responsible for a 
significant portion of the country’s human rights violations.

Because the new armed groups are in fact involved 
in Colombia’s civil conflict, the report is 
inevitably riddled with contradictions. On the 
one hand it seeks to portray the new groups as 
nothing more than criminal organizations, and yet 
it states that the “country’s 43-year-long 
internal armed conflict, involving government 
forces, two terrorist groups (FARC and ELN), and 
new illegal groups, continued.” Thus, the State 
Department contradicts its overall portrayal of 
the new groups by acknowledging that they are 
indeed fighting the FARC and ELN. The report also 
admits that the new armed groups are waging a 
dirty war against the civilian population by 
noting that “new illegal groups killed 
journalists, local politicians, human rights 
activists, indigenous leaders, labor leaders, and 
others who threatened to interfere with their 
criminal activities, showed leftist sympathies, 
or were suspected of collaboration with the FARC.”

The report goes on to point out, “New illegal 
groups also prevented or limited the delivery of 
food and medicines to towns and regions 
considered sympathetic to guerrillas, straining 
local economies and increasing forced 
displacement.” Consequently, the State 
Department’s report clearly illustrates that the 
new groups are ideologically-motivated and 
engaged in the armed conflict in the same manner 
that the paramilitaries of the AUC were in the past.

The report also points out that the new groups 
collaborate with the Colombian military, whose 
primary mission is to fight the guerrillas. 
According to the report, “Some members of 
government security forces, including enlisted 
personnel, noncommissioned officers, and senior 
officials 
 collaborated with or tolerated the 
activities of new illegal groups or paramilitary 
members who refused to demobilize. Such 
collaboration often facilitated unlawful killings 
and may have involved direct participation in paramilitary atrocities.”

This quote also illustrates the manner in which 
the report repeatedly refers to “paramilitaries 
who refused to demobilize” and the “new illegal 
groups” as separate entities, thereby suggesting 
that the new groups are not paramilitaries. For 
example, by deliberately using the word “or” when 
referring to both (i.e. “tolerated the activities 
of new illegal groups or paramilitary members who 
refused to demobilize”), the State Department is 
clearly differentiating between the two armed 
actors even though they are engaged in exactly 
the same military activities. And despite the 
fact that the State Department admits that the 
new “illegal groups” are collaborating with the 
Colombian military and are waging a dirty war 
against those Colombians with “leftist 
sympathies,” it mysteriously refuses to refer to them as “paramilitaries.”

Undoubtedly, the State Department’s decision not 
to label the new groups as “paramilitaries” is 
politically-motivated. It allows the Bush 
administration to portray the Colombian 
government’s human rights performance in a more 
favorable light by dismissing the violence 
perpetrated by the new groups as common crimes 
rather than political violence conducted in 
defense of the State. It also makes it easier to 
blame the guerrillas for a majority of the 
conflict-related human rights abuses since, 
according to the State Department, there are no 
new paramilitaries to work hand-in-glove the 
Colombian military. And, finally, the mislabeling 
of the new groups implies that paramilitary 
violence is a thing of the past and helps cover 
up the fact that the Uribe government’s 
demobilization process represented more of a 
restructuring than a disbandment of the right-wing militias.




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