Republic of Colombia’s mirror image: ‘We have found the enemy, and the enemy is ourselves’

Republic of Colombia’s mirror image: ‘We have found the enemy, and the enemy is ourselves’.

The counter-Eurocentric government of Petro and Marquez established the plausibility for Colombia’s European oriented population segments that change can happen, and that change could be distinctly indigenous oriented. This served as a wakeup call for many, especially those large family businesses whose wealth is inextricable from the land that is inexorably being passed out of their control and over to that of non-Eurocentric populations with little or less regard for accumulated wealth of the Westphalian state model. What this means that the contest is not about one group becoming wealthy at the expense of another, but rather the conscious diminishment of individual and collective wealth as we in the west understand wealth. As we are not an economists, we do not pretend to know what form this will eventually take. But the idea that the new governing trajectory of Colombian, Ecuador, and Peru will accept that rich natural resources of the public and private lands will remain un-extracted, unsold, unexploited, is, in our opinion, going to be resisted at great length by those population segments who’ve historically had unlimited access to them. Already, the former remnants of the once demobilized paramilitary groups have resurfaced and are rebuilding and reorganising. Colombia's National Centre for Historical Memory, a government agency, has estimated that between 1981 and 2012 Centaur state paramilitary groups caused 38.4% of the civilian deaths, while the Guerillas were responsible for 16.8%, the Colombian Security Forces accounted for 10.1%, and other non-identified armed groups for 27.7%. The AUC has had as many as 20,000 members during their 2006 demobilisation under President Uribe. They had been heavily financed through the drug trade and through support from local landowners, cattle ranchers, mining or petroleum companies, and other companies such as Chiquita Brands International, and politicians. The organization unfortunately had links to some of the more remotely located military commanders in the Colombian Armed Forces. We experienced this tendency desire on the part of COLAR battalion commanders located in the more remote regions of Putumayo and Los Amazonas, for instance, and we had many working sessions with officers at all levels about the dangers of using civilians as soldiers. The paramilitary groups and some portions of the armed forces of Colombia shared a very close connection based on mutual survival against the operations of the FARC and ELN. The actions of civilian deaths and criminal attacks by rogue AUC units against the population that the COLAR was trying to protect, created the perception that they were an extension of the COLAR rather than approved self-defence forces. FARC propaganda referred to the AUC as the sixth-division of the Colombia's armed forces which had five official divisions until the Sexto Division was stood up in 2005 under the leadership of Major General Ardilla. Patrick James Christian was the Sexto Division’s first American Special Forces Combat Advisor and counterinsurgency team leader in the years of 2006-2008. The division’s operational area of responsibility was nearly all the FARC-EP’s Southern Bloque covering the Departments of Los Amazonas, Putumayo, and Caqueta, with the division headquartered in the

city of Florencia at the foot of the Andes Mountain Range. To understand the violence and conflict in Colombia, we found it important to understand the nature of, and the relationships within, the participants on all sides. We created figure 18 from our operational notes while serving as a senior advisor to the Uribe and Santos governments, with the purpose of ‘connecting the dots’ to understand the ‘why of what’ was happening in Colombia. The figure 19 offers a consolidated look into the Presidents, warlords and drug lords and their hidden interactions. First, notice that every president in Colombia’s history is drawn from the 26% of the white criollo population, from wealthy, influential, and accomplished families. Next, the political party affiliationsof liberal and conservative mean little outside of this small inner circle, with presidential candidates and their wealthy extended families interacting with druglords and warlords. President Pastrana is kidnapped by the Medellin Cartel, and accepts campaign funding from Salvatore Mancuso, leader of the AUC, while condemning President Samper for accepting financing from the Cali Cartel. President Gaviria and then Governor Alvaro Uribe, collaborate across party lines to establish the legality of private armed militias such as the AUC to counter the growing leftist FARC/ELN war and to maintain control over the population and resources, benefiting the Eurocentric minority. Returning to figures 18 and 19, the financial capital that has flowed into the Eurocentric administrations under Colombia’s governments for the past half century suggest that if the country remains in the control of Eurocentric population segment, its focus on European culture and wealth valuation will ensure its schizophrenic Centaur disfunction and the violence will continue. The AUC then, and the AGC now, are the only organisations that can act outside of national and international law to control the drug trade to the generalised benefit Colombia’s Eurocentric socioeconomic cultural population segments. The FARC splinter groups and the ELN on the other hand, are no longer

under the influence of the Colombia’s liberal/leftist government, and these organisations appear to be charting their own courses to perpetuate and increase their power relative to the right-wing paramilitaries. Returning to the data in figure 19: President Pastrana signs the US led Plan Colombia, accepting the initial tranche of $1.6B USD, but leaves the program to his successor, Alvaro Uribe to pursue. Uribe then drives the FARC-EP to the brink of surrender, and his successor, Juan Manuel Santos makes the peace deal that Uribe promptly opposes because Washington DC forced him to renege on his demobilisation deal with the AUC led by Salvator Mancuso. Mancuso and the AUC supported most of the presidential candidates up to Santos, who they despise because he gave (they believe) the FARC everything in their peace deal that he and the AUC had not been able to. Mancuso is from a region in northwest Colombia and initially found success as a cattle rancher.

His trajectory took a dramatic turn in the early 1990s when rebel groups demanding extortion payments threatened his family. Mancuso began by providing intelligence to the Colombian military, swiftly transitioning to a leadership role in operations against leftist rebels. His AUC was, for many parts of the battered COLAR, a needed relief while American Special Forces worked to rebuild the COLAR as a professional warfighting force. When President Uribe was forced to renege on his deal with Mancuso and the other leaders of the AUC, they were all arrested and extradited to the USA for trial and lengthy imprisonment. AUC leader Salvatore Mancuso was only recently repatriated from the United States in February 2024, and several Colombian courts have notified corrections authorities that no further detention orders were pending against him. These courts had previously held Mancuso accountable for over 1,500 acts of murder and disappearances during one of the most violent periods of Colombia’s decades-long armed conflict. Human rights organizations and the new Petro administration are hoping that Mancuso will play a peace-making role to halt the ongoing resurgence of the “Autodefensas Gaitanistas de Colombia” (AGC), a.k.a. “Gulf Clan”, which was formed after Uribe’s renege on the Now, this ‘AGC Gulf Clan’ is Colombia’s most powerful paramilitary group that allegedly controls most of the country’s drug trade. Colombia’s justice system is asking Mancuso to cooperate with the justice system by providing crucial information about numerous crimes committed by paramilitary groups in their battles against leftist rebels in rural Colombia during the 1990s and early 2000s. Independent observers believe that, between Mancuso’s ‘peace-making’ role, and his input to the justice system working to prosecute unsolved AUC crimes, that he will become the next warlord kingpin or at least kingmaker. Time will tell. All the foregoing has only been possible with the benefit of hindsight. During our years in Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru, we did not understand much of what we now do, with the benefit of continued primary and secondary research. What the foregoing does help us to understand is the context of violence today and the likely trajectories that this violence will take.