A former commander in Columbia's notorious right wing death squad AUC (Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia) has testified that Colombian elites and the Colombian military direct and supported their murderous operations.
This has to be the worst kept secret in the history of Latin America.
One would hope that current Colombian President progressive Gustavo Petro institutes a thorough and fair investigation of this. The people who did this need to be punished for their reign of terror:
A notorious former commander of Colombia’s largest paramilitary group has revealed new details of how rightwing death squads worked side by side with the country’s business, military and political elite to sow terror in the countryside and wipe out leftwing insurgencies.
Salvatore Mancuso told Colombia’s peace tribunal this week that state institutions were not only complicit in the expansion of the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC) but actively coordinated with them, giving orders to wipe out anyone suspected of aligning with communist rebels.
“This phenomenon of paramilitarism came from the state,” Mancuso told the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP) on a video link from the US where he was extradited on drugs charges in 2008.
Mancuso was released from prison in 2020 and is seeking a reduced sentence from Colombia’s transitional justice system in exchange for divulging the human rights atrocities committed by the AUC – a key player in a brutal, six-decade-long conflict which has left 450,000 dead and millions displaced.
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Mancuso, who was the AUC’s second in command, has admitted to orchestrating thousands of crimes and some of the darkest chapters in Colombian conflict – including massacres of unarmed civilians, torture and sexual violence.
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Mancuso said officials gave the AUC lists of individuals and communities with suspected ties to the communist rebels so they could intimidate, torture and assassinate them without consideration for the rules of war.
“Mancuso’s narrative was that the military was not strong enough to combat the guerrillas themselves and needed an extrajudicial force in order to carry out the scorched-earth tactics that they themselves could not,” says Elizabeth Dickinson, senior analyst for Colombia at International Crisis Group.
There was “enormous pressure” from the state to wipe targets out, Mancuso said. Those targets include Gustavo Petro, then a leftwing congressman and now the country’s president.
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One of Mancuso’s most shocking new allegations was that the then president, Álvaro Uribe, removed the security unit for Eudaldo Díaz , a local mayor in the town of El Roble, so the AUC could torture and kill him in 2003.
Mancuso also alleged that Francisco Santos, then vice-president, requested that he form a new unit around Bogotá to prevent leftwing rebels from advancing on the capital.
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Mancuso alleged that hundreds of businesses – including banana companies and multinationals such as Coca-Cola and Drummond – helped fund the AUC in the 1990s as it grew from a community of vigilantes into a national terror machine, while military generals trained and supplied the AUC commanders with helicopters and uniforms. Coca-Cola and Drummond have previously denied the allegations.
“Mancuso’s testimony confirms that paramilitarism was not only an anti-subversive strategy but an economic one to make business leaders rich, to elect corrupt politicians in the highest ranks of the state and to spy on and intimidate politicians, lawyers and journalists,” says Julián Martínez, author of Chuzadas, a book documenting how the Colombian state spied on judges, journalists and the political opposition.
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When the number of civilian casualties began to rack up Mancuso says the attorney general’s office alerted the AUC ahead of investigations so they could burn the bodies.
Without a reckoning on the troubles in Columbia, peace and stability will be elusive, and not just because people denied justice are unlikely to support their government.
It is also that the prior malefactors are current malefactors, as is shown by the numerous right wing paramilitaries that are still operating out there, such as the "Gulf Clan", albeit primarily in service of the illicit drug trade.
There are elements of Colombian society still supporting these forces because they find them useful, or believe that they will find them useful in the future, in suppressing worker and farmer movements.
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