Under pressure from human rights groups and Washington, Bogota has overseen the demobilisation of over 31,000 fighters from the so-called United Self-Defence Forces of Colombia, or AUC, in recent years.
But dozens of groups have emerged as successors, engaging in activities ranging from mass murder to extortion, according to New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW).
The death squads were organised by rural landowners, ostensibly to counter leftwing guerilla groups. They soon became a powerful, lawless force in much of the country, with links to senior rightwing politicians and drugs cartels.
The US government has declared the AUC a terrorist organisation, and government pressure eventually forced the paramilitaries to disband between 2003 and 2006.
The 113-page Paramilitaries' Heirs: The New Face of Violence in Colombia report, based on nearly two years of research, documents widespread and serious abuses by the new groups.
According to the report, the groups regularly commit massacres, killings, forced displacement, rape, and extortion, and "create a threatening atmosphere in the communities they control."
Often, they target trade unionists, human rights defenders, victims of the paramilitaries who are seeking justice and community members who do not follow their orders.
HRW Americas director Jose Miguel Vivanco said: "Whatever you call these groups - whether paramilitaries, gangs, or some other name - their impact on human rights in Colombia today should not be minimised.
"Like the paramilitaries, these successor groups are committing horrific atrocities, and they need to be stopped."
The HRW report also warned that some government officials and state security forces ignore militia violence. The rights group said that massacres have increased, with nearly 170 people killed in 37 mass killings in 2008 compared to 128 victims killed a year earlier.
Mr Vivanco said that President Alvaro Uribe's US-backed administration has "failed to treat the rise of the successor groups with the seriousness the problem requires."
Colombia's Defence Minister Gabriel Silva said that HRW "has an ideological position that does not accept our objective information - it has misguided and slanted opinions."
Morning Star (UK)
Army mass grave in La Macarena
February 4, 2010
Center for International Policy's Colombia Program
Miami’s El Nuevo Herald and Spain’s Público have run stories in the past two days about a shocking find in La Macarena, about 200 miles south of Bogotá.
Residents say that after it entered the strongly guerrilla-controlled zone in the mid-2000s, Colombia’s Army began dumping unidentified bodies in a mass grave near a local cemetery. The grave may contain as many as 2,000 bodies.
Públicoreports:
Since 2005 the Army, whose elite units are deployed in the surrounding area, has been depositing behind the local cemetery hundreds of cadavers with the order that they be buried without names. …
Jurist Jairo Ramírez, the secretary of the Permanent Committee for the Defense of Human Rights in Colombia, accompanied a delegation of British legislators to the site several weeks ago, when the magnitude of the La Macarena grave began to be discovered. “What we saw was chilling,” he told Público. “An infinity of bodies, and on the surface hundreds of white wooden plaques with the inscription NN [name unknown] and dates from 2005 until today.”
Ramírez adds: “The Army commander told us that they were guerrillas killed in combat, but the people in the region told us of a multitude of social leaders, campesinos and community human rights defenders who disappeared without a trace.”
El Nuevo Heraldreports:
A spokesman of the Prosecutor-General’s Office (Fiscalía) in Bogotá revealed to El Nuevo Herald that a mission from that institution’s Technical Investigations Corps (CTI) has already gone to the cemetery and confirmed the existence of “a large number” of cadavers in the grave, though it only made a few excavations.
“We became the site for the depositing of the war dead,” declared Eliécer Vargas Moreno, mayor of the municipality. …
Residents of La Macarena interviewed over the phone by El Nuevo Herald, under the promise that their identities would not be revealed, expressed their suspicion that among the bodies are relatives who disappeared during the last four years. They denied that the bodies are those of guerrillas and asked for the chance to prove it.
Colombia’s Prosecutor-General’s Office will make its first excavations at the site in mid-March. While we are not jumping to conclusions, we will be watching this case closely.
La Macarena, the site of the grave, has been a very important site of U.S.-aided military operations since the mid-2000s. In this area, the U.S. government supported and advised the Colombian Army’s 2004-2006 “Plan Patriota” military offensive, and since 2007 has supported the “Plan for the Integral Consolidation of La Macarena” or PCIM, part of the new “Integrated Action” framework that is now guiding much U.S. assistance.
The Center for International Policy's Colombia Program
More on Colombian Death Squads
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