The Beginning of the Paramilitary Horror (1982–1987)

Although paramilitary groups first appeared in the late 1970s, it was in 1982 that these criminal structures first started using massacres as a method to kill leftist leaders and displace farmers. This year marked a special moment in Colombian war history, owing to various circumstances. First of all, Communist guerrillas had entered an offensive phase, after almost two decades of defending their positions in the face of military pressure. Groups such as FARC and M-19 began kidnapping wealthy landowners and taking resources, such as food and money, from small farmers in places where guerrilla groups and farmers had coexisted for years without any significant violence between them. In some areas, farmers created self-defense groups.

At the same time, drug cartels, created a few years before, had increased their economic and political power. They started taking huge landed properties to process cocaine and move the drug to the north coast of the country, from where it would be sent to the United States. When cartels started to “colonize” areas with guerrilla presence, they first had to pay off the guerrilla groups in exchange for building their laboratories to produce cocaine.

Problems quickly arose between the cartels and the guerrillas, and the former used the self-defense groups to take on their new enemies. Drug traffickers converted these groups into large armies—sometimes even trained by international mercenaries brought in from Israel and Europe—not just to combat guerrilla groups, but all the leftist leaders in these regions.

In the midst of this complex situation, members of the Colombian army, most of them educated by Cold War doctrine, gave support to the new paramilitary groups and collaborated with them to destroy what they considered the common enemy. These particular circumstances, described in detail in the book Guerras recicladas, written by Colombian journalist María Teresa Ronderos, marked the beginning of the intensive paramilitary violence that employed massacres as a weapon to terrorize huge swaths of the country.⁵

The two main paramilitary groups in 1982 were located in Amalfi (a town in the Northwest of Colombia, in the department of Antioquia, 150 kilometers from Medellín) and Puerto Boyacá (a small city in the middle of the country, 250 kilometers northwest from Bogotá). Puerto Boyacá was also a harbor on the Magdalena River, the largest in Colombia, and the center of a region called Magdalena Medio, a large humid forest with huge farms and very bad transportation infrastructure.

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Fig. 1. Screenshot of Rutas del Conflicto’s section maps showing the places where two massacres were committed in 1982. The point more to the north marks the first massacre perpetrated by the group in Amalfi and the other one by the group in Puerto Boyacá.

The group in Amalfi, led by Fidel Castaño, a drug trafficker in the Medellín Cartel, was the first to massacre dozens of farmers and leftist leaders in 1982⁶ and 1983.⁷ Castaño said “the war started against communism” because members of the guerrilla group FARC had killed his father after kidnapping him in 1981. The circumstances of the death of Castaño´s father are still a mystery, and yet this story was used as the foundational myth of the Colombian paramilitary group. In her book Guerras recicladas, María Teresa Ronderos explores some of the many contradicting accounts of that death.⁸

During these two years, Castaño killed more than 40 people in at least four massacres, in which several members of the Communist Party and the Movimiento Independiente Revolucionario died, the two main leftist movements in the zone.

The other group, in Puerto Boyacá was led by Henry and Gonzalo Pérez, a couple of farmers who had founded a self-defense gang that became an army under the command of the Medellín Cartel. The Pérez men, father and son, also committed their first massacre in 1982 against a family of farmers, accusing them of helping the Ejército de Liberación Nacional (ELN), the second largest Communist guerrilla group in Colombia.

The maps of Rutas del Conflicto provide evidence of how little information is available related to the crimes committed by the two main paramilitary forces between 1984 and 1987. There are no entries for massacres committed by these two groups that can be geographically pinpointed. In the Magdalena Medio region, the men led by the Pérez family had expelled all the leftist movements following several individual murders. So, Pablo Escobar and his main lieutenant, Gonzalo Rodríguez Gacha, took control this region. They controlled both the economy and political power, owing to an alliance with the old local ruling class. Members of the Colombian army worked openly with these groups and prevented any kind of guerrilla foothold from returning to the region.

While there is a fair amount of information about the groups operating in Puerto Boyacá, the evolution of Fidel Castaño’s group has huge gaps. Castaño increased his power as a drug trafficker and created a more independent criminal career than the other paramilitary group, but there are not so many entries related to his crimes. The journalist María Teresa Ronderos has documented how the paramilitary leader left his town and went to the department of Córdoba on the Caribbean Coast, where he stole huge farms but stopped committing massacres.

The main massacres registered in this period were committed by the FARC, which entered into conflict with indigenous communities in Cauca, a department in the southwest of the country, on the Pacific coast. Members of the FARC killed several people of the Nasa ethnic group.

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Fig. 2. Screenshot of Rutas del Conflicto’s section maps showing massacres committed between 1984 and 1987. There are no entries for massacres perpetrated by the groups of Fidel Castaño and the Pérez family in these years. In the cases documented in this period, victimizers were FARC guerrilla groups and a new paramilitary group, independent from those previously mentioned in the southwest of the country in towns such as Trujillo.

North of this region, in 1986 a small paramilitary group, created by members of Colombian army and drug traffickers, began killing social leftist leaders in the town of Trujillo in the department of Valle del Cauca. They murdered 245 people over the course of eight years, and although academic researchers apply the term massacre, as a multiple homicide occurring within a specific short period of time, in general, Colombian society considers this to be a massacre as well.

The paramilitary group that committed these crimes was the first to use an array of methods to torture and kill, such as employing chainsaws to cut up bodies while the victims were still alive. In Trujillo, for example, the priest of the town, a recognized leftist leader, was castrated and decapitated, and his body was hurled into a river.

These practices were used by paramilitary groups again, all over the country and for a decade afterwards, to terrorize communities and force them to leave their land. Details of these methods were documented in depth in the book La masacre de Trujillo: Una tragedia que no cesa.⁹

The Upsurge of Violence against Leftist Groups (1988–1993)

In 1985, the government of President Berlisario Betancourt entered into a peace process with the FARC guerrilla group. Although talks later broke down, the two sides signed a partial agreement to create a leftist political party called Unión Patriótica (UP), which was seen by them as the only political alternative to all the traditional parties. In many towns in the country, UP candidates won the local elections held in 1986, but at the same time they became the main target of paramilitary groups allied with old political structure of local power.

In 1988, Fidel Castaño’s group, which had remained on his huge farms in the department of Córdoba, on the Caribbean coast in the northwest of the country, started a long series of massacres against leftist leaders. Exploring the map produced by Rutas del Conflicto that shows the entries of massacres year by year, it is clear to see how Castaño’s men terrorized the Urabá area, on the border with Panamá.¹⁰

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Fig. 3. Screenshot of Rutas del Conflicto’s section maps showing massacres committed in 1988. Fidel Castaño’s group committed at least eight massacres in the Urabá region, close to the border with Panamá.

The stark dimension of cruelty in these massacres is easy to see in the case of La Mejor Esquina, a multiple crime committed in April of 1988. Castaño’s paramilitary group killed 27 people, including a 10-year-old child in a small town in the department of Córdoba, accusing its victims of aiding the guerrilla group FARC. Castaño’s group called itself “Los Magníficos,” the name given in South America to the American television series The A-team, whose storyline revolved around a group of former US army soldiers defending people from criminal elements.

Another case was the massacre of Segovia, a small town in the southwestern part of the department of Antioquia, about 300 kilometers from Urabá.¹¹ This area was the origin of the Communist Party in Antioquia, and in the elections of 1986 it elected a government from the new leftist new UP party. Castaño’s men allied with Cesar Pérez, a traditional politician in the Liberal Party, and with the other biggest paramilitary group in Colombia (from Puerto Boyacá), to commit the massacre. Forty-six people were murdered on the night of November 11, 1988, including four children. Although there were dozens of police officers and soldiers of the Colombian army in the area, nobody stopped the massacre. Pérez was found guilty of these crimes in 2013 by the Supreme Court of Justice of Colombia.

The other main paramilitary group in the country, which also participated in this massacre, the men of Pérez’s family, were at this time the private army of the Cartel of Medellín. Pablo Escobar’s biggest partner was Gonzalo Rodríguez Gacha, alias “El Mexicano,” who became the real power behind of the group that was created at the beginning of the 1980s in the town of Puerto Boyacá. Rodríguez Gacha hated leftist groups and had started a systematic series of murders of leaders of the UP party in 1987.

The paramilitary model created in Puerto Boyacá, which defeated guerrilla groups there and controlled the political power in these regions, was exported to the eastern plains of the country and to the middle of the Amazon jungle, sparsely populated areas where drug trafficking leaders stole huge farms. There, they built their cocaine laboratories and runways for sending drugs directly to the United States.

Drug traffickers also occupied these areas of Puerto Boyacá in order to develop their new landholdings. Dozens of new paramilitary groups known as “Masetos” were born in these zones, which started to kill members of the leftist movements. They committed several massacres in the eastern departments of Meta and Vichada on the border with Venezuela, and in the Amazonian departments of Guaviare and Putumayo, which became the main zones of cocaine production.

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Fig. 4. Screenshot of Rutas del Conflicto’s section maps showing massacres committed in 1991. Paramilitary groups known as “Masetos” committed several massacres in the eastern area of the country, in a large region called Llanos Orientales, a key place for controlling the drug trafficking.

Although the “Masetos” and other small paramilitary groups committed several additional massacres, the number of these crimes committed by Castaño and the Pérez family group decreased across the entire country in 1993, as can be seen in the chronological Rutas del Conflicto map. During these years the two main paramilitary groups in the country entered into war with the head of the Medellín Cartel, Pablo Escobar Gaviria.

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Fig. 5. Screenshot of Rutas del Conflicto’s section maps showing massacres committed in 1993. During this year, the number of massacres decreased at the same time that illegal groups and some members of Colombian government forces made a deal to hunt down Pablo Escobar Gaviria.

At the end of 1989, the Colombian Army killed Escobar’s lieutenant, Gonzalo Rodríguez Gacha, the bridge between the cartel and the paramilitary groups. Under pursuit by both the Colombian Police and the Drug Enforcement Administration of the United States (DEA), and after the murders of national leaders of leftist parties committed by Castaño´s men and the Pérez family, Escobar declared war against his old allies. Paramilitary gangs then focused their attention on killing Escobar, working with some members of the Colombian police in a secret plan, the details of which have been partially revealed over the last two decades.

Escobar died in December of 1993, a moment that marked a breaking point in the history of the Colombian conflict. After three years of war, the Pérez family and its supporters were exterminated, while Castaño and his men survived, owing to the impressive power and relevance afforded him by his role in hunting down Escobar. However, Fidel Castaño was killed just a month after Escobar, and it was his brothers Carlos and Vicente who took advantage of the position they had gained and, in the following years, they unleashed the worst violence ever experienced in the conflict.

Expansion and Consolidation (1994–2005)

After the death of Fidel Castaño in January of 1994, paramilitary groups reorganized and began a process of expansion to take control of cocaine production across the entire country. This process can be seen in the evolution of the massacres in the territories where these groups arrived and began to dispute drug trafficking with guerrilla groups.

Early in 1994, most of the massacres were concentrated again in the zone of Urabá, close to the border with Panama, but this time the perpetrators were not the paramilitary groups. In this zone, starting in the final years of the 1970s, the guerrilla groups of FARC and the Ejército Popular de Liberación, EPL, created a strong military presence and established relations with the union organizers among the foreign banana producers.

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Fig. 6. Screenshot of Rutas del Conflicto’s section maps showing massacres committed in 1994–1995. Close to the border with Panama, paramilitary groups incorporated former members of the guerrilla group EPL and unleashed a war against the FARC guerrilla that caused several massacres, killing more than a hundred members of different banana plantation workers’ unions.

In 1991, the EPL signed an agreement with the government and disarmed. In Urabá, the former members of this guerrilla group created a new political party called Esperanza, Paz y Libertad (Hope, Peace, and Freedom, abbreviated as EPL), but their former allies of the FARC accused them of being traitors and began targeting them systematically. In 1994, the FARC committed several massacres against the demobilized EPL members. The biggest of these crimes was the massacre of La Chinita on January 23, 1994, when a FARC faction killed 35 people.¹² Several former EPL members went on to join paramilitary groups in this region.

Meanwhile, Vicente Castaño, the brother of the killed former leader of the main paramilitary group in Colombia, started a process of expansion all over the country. As can be seen on the chronological map of Rutas del Conflicto, by 1996, the documented massacres point to the arrival of the Autodefensas Campesinas de Córdoba y Urabá, ACCU, as the Castaño group was known, to the rest of the Caribbean coast and almost all the department of Antioquia.

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Fig. 7. Screenshot of Rutas del Conflicto’s section maps showing massacres committed in 1996. The map evidence the process of expansion of the paramilitary group of the Castaño family, taking over old paramilitary structures in the whole department of Antioquia and the north coast of Colombia.

María Teresa Ronderos explains in her book that, although Vicente, a drug trafficker with several years of experience, was one of the biggest powers behind the organization, the more prominent face of the paramilitary group was Carlos Castaño, his younger brother, who started to appear frequently in the Colombia media, as they were looking for ways to show a political anti-guerrilla side of the organization.¹³ In a persistent pattern, men of the Castaño family would arrive in a region and absorb the small paramilitary groups, usually with the support of the rich farmers, thus creating a “franchise” of the criminal model that would also control the drug traffic.

In 1997, the Castaños sent their men to the border between the eastern plains of the country and the Amazonian jungle, where FARC controlled huge expansions of land planted with coca. Judicial court proceedings have proved that about 120 members of the paramilitary group, with help from members of the Colombian army, travelled in a plane more than 700 kilometres from Urabá to the south of the country and committed the massacre of Mapiripan.¹⁴ Castaño’s men arrived in the area and killed more than 40 people, accusing them of helping the FARC. Several were decapitated, and some of the bodies were thrown into the Guaviare River. The horror of the massacre produced a massive displacement of the inhabitants, who abandoned their landholdings and belongings to go to the closest cities in pursuit of safety.

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Fig. 8. Screenshot of Rutas del Conflicto’s section maps showing massacres committed in 1997. In that year, paramilitary groups of the Castaño family had its biggest period of expansion, frequently using massacres, especially in key places for coca plant harvesting and processing.

Paramilitary groups repeated this story hundreds of times all over the country. In 1999, the Castaños sent their men to the region of Catatumbo, in the department of Norte de Santander on the border with Venezuela, another zone with a large coca plantation. For months, dozens of massacres, involving cruel torture and assassination techniques, spread an extreme terror among the population.

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Fig. 9. Screenshot of Rutas del Conflicto’s section maps showing massacres committed in 1998–1999. On the map it is easy to see the location of massacres that coincide with the expansion of paramilitary group of the Castaño family to key areas for cocaine production like Catatumbo on the border with Venezuela and Putumayo on the border with Ecuador.

In the same year, this story was repeated in Putumayo, in the jungle close to the border with Ecuador, with crimes such as the massacre of El Placer, where sexual violence against young women was the preferred method to terrorize those communities, as documented by the Centro de Memoria Histórica in their book El Placer.¹⁵

In the region with a strong presence by the FARC guerrilla group, the population suffered more from the use of systematic massacres as weapons of terror. In the small town of San Carlos, on the eastern side of the department of Antioquia, paramilitary groups and FARC guerrillas committed more than 30 massacres between 1996 and 2004.¹⁶

The number of massacres increased in 2000, 2001, and 2002 on the Caribbean coast, especially in the departments of Magdalena, Bolívar, and Cesar. Paramilitary groups made an alliance with a large portion of the traditional political class to help them to win the 2001 and 2002 elections, committing dozens of massacres against their opponents. The Supreme Court of Justice of Colombia found more than 60 congressmen of such these alliances, and in some cases, they found that some senators were the masterminds the massacres. For example, congressman Alvaro García was sentenced to 40 years in prison for ordering the homicide of 15 people in the massacre of Macayepo in October of 2000.

In several places, massacres were also related to the process of land dispossession targeting poor farmers. Paramilitary groups were seizing farms to force the displacement of thousands of people, and then the illegal groups somehow legalized their rights to the properties. Most of this land has been transferred to the hands of large companies, as figureheads and intermediary businesses took advantage of the situation. This fact has been documented in detail in books such as Guerreros y campesinos¹⁷ and La tierra en disputa.¹⁸

The frequency of massacres documented by Rutas del Conflicto are shown to have decreased starting in 2002, the year when paramilitary groups started a process of consolidation and began to talk with the government of then president Alvaro Uribe Vélez. Talks ended in 2006 with a demobilization of a large percentage of the paramilitary groups, but to this date, those who remain have continued to commit massive homicides, especially on the Pacific coast and along the border with Venezuela.

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Fig. 10. Screenshot of Rutas del Conflicto’s section maps showing massacres committed in 2006. This year marked the end of the demobilization process of the paramilitary groups, but some formers members of these groups continued to commit massacres, especially in the southwest of the country. Since this time, these criminal bands have been known as BACRIM.

It is worth clarifying that the details on how the war evolved vary depending on the region and the interests of the illegal groups. Rutas del Conflicto’s maps and search tools show the level of violence experienced in some places during the period of expansion of the paramilitary phenomenon. Putting all the information together in the database made it easy to see that in towns such as San Carlos in Antioquia, paramilitary and guerrilla groups committed at least 29 massacres in a period of less than ten years, between 1995 and 2005.

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Fig. 11. Screenshot of Rutas del Conflicto’ section maps showing massacres San Carlos, in Antioquia. Paramilitary and guerrilla groups perpetrated more than 29 massacres in this town located 120 km east of the city of Medellín.

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Fig. 12. Screenshot of Rutas del Conflicto’s search tool showing 12 of 29 entries for massacres committed in San Carlos Antioquia.

Another case of a local process of violence shown by Rutas del Conflicto during these years is the town of Armero-Guayabal in the departament of Tolima in the center of the country. There is not much information in the media and academics reports about how the war developed in this area, where illegal groups have perpetrated at least five massacres, and more than 10 in the surrounding area in less than four years, between 1999 and 2003.

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Fig. 13. Screenshot of Rutas del Conflicto’ searching tool showing five entries for massacres perpetrated by paramilitary and guerrilla groups in Armero, a town located to 170 km west of the city of Bogotá.

The Reorganization of Crime after the Paramilitary Groups (2006–2015)

Although the number of massacres has dramatically decreased since 2006, these tragedies have not disappeared from the ongoing conflict in Colombia. Small paramilitary groups remain in operation as criminal organizations, which the government refers to with the generic term BACRIM. They continue controlling drug trafficking and killing the civil population, especially in the immense jungle that surrounds the Colombian Pacific Coast and in the region of Urabá on the border with Panamá and Venezuela.

In these areas, FARC guerrillas also had a strong presence and controlled drug trafficking, and some of them still do so. In some cases, the interests of the community have clashed with the interests of these groups, and so the guerrilla members have once again used massacres to terrorize populations and control these areas. In 2009, for example, BACRIM and FARC groups committed several massacres against towns of the indigenous Awa people in the extreme southwest of the country.

Since 2009, unidentified groups have committed massacres in which victims were relatives of former paramilitary leaders or people related with the local mafia. In December of 2014, a group of armed men killed seven people in the town of Amalfi, the place where the first paramilitary massacre took place in 1982. One of the victims was a relative of a former paramilitary leader Diego Rendón Herrera, known as “Don Mario.” Colombian authorities have investigated to see whether these crimes are related to lingering feuds between long-time criminals or if they signal a reorganization of the illegal groups.