War Averted, People Still Dying

The above picture is from a rally held two weeks ago in Bogota in protest of paramilitary violence during the week when it seemed that Colombia and Venezuela were definitely going to go to war. This was a tacit anti-war, anti-Uribe protest. Since the rally where this picture was taken, four of the rally's organizers have been murdered by paramilitaries.

In a previous post, I briefly explained the on-going Chavez/Uribe conflict. Since I wrote that post, many things have happened: the Colombian military bombed the Ecuador-Colombia border to kill a FARC leader encamped there, Chavez denounced this bombing as a violation of Ecuador's sovereignty, Colombia was on the brink of war with Venzuela and Ecuador, and then all parties retreated from their war-mongering and decided that no one has the resources or the energy to fight a war, at least for now. What was curiously absent from the coverage of the Colombia-Ecuador-Venezuela conflict was any mention of the huge role that paramilitary violence plays in the narco-trafficking/guerilla situation in Colombia, how paramilitarism perpetuates violence and guerilla terrorism. In Colombia, the paramilitary purports to combat the FARC. Paramilitaries are often ex-servicemen from the legit military that act as the government's covert anti-terrorism arm but they have more leeway for violence–they kidnap, torture, and murder the opposition (which includes non-FARC affiliated leftists, journalists, and civilians) without being held accountable because they are not officially connected to the state, only secretly sanctioned and supported by the state. The paramilitary is partially funded and armed by the government (therefore indirectly by the American government) and by various wealthy right wing Colombians.

Paramilitarism is not a uniquely Colombian problem, it's a Latin American problem: paramilitarism arises as a reactionary force against guerilla activity (which tends to be Marxist in flavor). Alberto Fujimori, ex-president of Peru has recently been extradited back to Peru from Japan on charges that he used paramilitary death squads during the 1990's to crush Marxist guerilla groups, the Shining Path and Tupac Amaru. The left in Colombia argues that paramilitary violence is just as bad as guerilla violence, that in fact paramilitaries often mask their crimes as guerilla crimes. In the great morass that constitutes the constant Colombian civil war, the paramilitary has played the role of blurring the boundaries between right wing Catholic ideology, state-sponsored terror, and narco-trafficking by partaking in all three and playing one side against the other. The left in Colombia recognizes that there can be no peace until not only the FARC and narco-trafficking is eradicated but until the paramilitaries are eradicated, yet the Colombian government and the media can barely admit that the paramilitary exists.