General News and Announcements

November 2006

Reflection by Jim Hodgson
Caribbean, Central America and Colombia Program Coordinator

Juan Carlos, driving an ancient jeep, took a mixed Canadian and Colombian church delegation into the ranch of one of Colombia's bloodiest paramilitary leaders, Rodrigo Antonio Mercado Peludo, alias Cadena, which means"chain."

In early November 2006, I was in Colombia with Royal Orr, the host of the United Church's television program, Spirit Connection, to prepare several short documentary pieces that will be aired over the next 18 months. We were accompanied by the Rev. Juan Alberto Cardona, the president of the Methodist Church of Colombia.

From the time we climbed into the jeep at a gas station in San Onofre in the department of Sucre near the Caribbean coast, Juan Carlos regaled his passengers with stories of Cadena, his cohorts, and their crimes. The other Colombians added their versions. The stories flowed like the legends that give rise to the Latin American literary tradition known as magical realism:

Cadena kept caimans and piranhas as pets in a pond on his ranch, called "El Palmar," we were told. His wife was known as "La Motosierra"-"The Powersaw"-and the two carved up their victims before feeding the body parts to their voracious pets. Parts of at least 20 bodies were found on the ranch in April 2005. There are 500 bodies hidden on the ranch, and 3,000 people missing in the department of Sucre. Cadena hanged people from the giant rubber tree in front of his house. Cadena met with politicians in the shade of the giant rubber tree. Cadena buried his victims under the giant rubber tree. Cadena's apparent downfall came after he killed the friend of a local military commander. The commander swooped in from the sea and captured Cadena. But three days later, Cadena was released. Cadena disappeared in November 2005. He and his wife were killed in a car accident that burned victims beyond recognition. He and his wife had plastic surgery and are in hiding. He was executed on the orders of another paramilitary leader, Rodrigo Tovar Pupo, better known as "Jorge 40."

Somehow, as in magical realism, these obvious contradictions reveal something of the truth of what people experienced-and will inspire legends of horror in years to come.

The legal definition of truth is more stringent, but near the end of 2006, it is even more inspiring. On November 9, the same day that our group visited El Palmar and two nearby coastal villages in the municipality of San Onofre that had been tormented for more than five years by Cadena and his thugs, Colombia's Supreme Court indicted two senators, a congressman, and two former politicians on charges of collaboration with the paramilitary death squads in Sucre. All were accused of working with Cadena and Jorge 40 from 1999 through 2005 to silence political opponents, control the coastal drug trade and win elections for members of parties in the conservative coalition of President Alvaro Uribe. It's the biggest political scandal in Colombia since 16 members of congress were arrested in the mid-1990s for complicity in the drug trade.

The indictments substantiate two decades of denunciations by churches and human rights organizations, vehemently denied by successive governments: that the paramilitaries, the armed forces, and senior politicians are all connected to each other.

Cadena and Jorge 40 were regional leaders in the United Self-Defence Forces of Colombia (AUC), the country's major coalition of paramilitary forces. Creation of paramilitary groups began in the early 1980s as part of a counter-insurgency strategy that was supposed to quell guerrilla armies that had begun fighting for land reform and political power in the mid-1960s, and attack their alleged"bases of support" among civilian populations.

By 1993, human rights groups like the former Inter-Church Committee on Human Rights in Latin America (whose work since 2001 has been taken up by KAIROS) were attributing 70 percent of the abuses in Colombia to the paramilitaries, 20 percent to the guerrillas, and 10 percent to government forces.

After Uribe won the presidency in 2002, he launched a peace process with the paramilitaries. Because of widespread allegations that the president himself was involved in the paramilitary strategy, his detractors called this a dialogue between"myself and my other self," and said the process was designed to cleanse the paramilitaries so that they could be re-inserted back into the armed forces and police, or demobilized without consideration of their crimes. In 2003, the AUC boasted that it controlled 35 percent of the seats in Colombia's congress. Dutifully, the congress approved a Justice and Peace Law that the New York Times said should be called the Impunity for Mass Murderers, Terrorists, and Major Cocaine Traffickers Law.

With such a heritage, nobody really expected the demobilization process to bring much good to Colombians, and even though the paramilitaries demobilized in northern Sucre more than a year ago, people there say they still feel infiltrated. Killings of opposition politicians and human rights defenders continue. The National Movement of Victims of State Crimes (a KAIROS partner) said on October 31, 2006, that San Onofre politicians and security forces are managing an extermination list that contains 26 names of regional human rights defenders, nine of whom have already been killed.

In spite of the threats, the people who were terrorized by the paramilitaries for more than five years in the rural parts of San Onofre municipality are slowly rebuilding their lives.

Rincón del Mar and Brisas del Mar are two coastal communities that, having heard of the hardships of Colombia's ever-increasing numbers of internally displaced persons (more than 3.5 million) and refugees, had opted to stay when the paramilitaries arrived in 1999. Both are mixed communities of Sinu Indigenous and Afro-Colombian people.

Outside of Brisas del Mar, located on a bluff of land that overlooks the Caribbean, there had been a paramilitary checkpoint near the entrance to the town. After the official demobilization of the paramilitaries in mid-2005, the checkpoint was removed and the townspeople uncovered a mass grave just down a steep slope nearby. A local farmer who was passing by set aside the log he was dragging and then guided the church visitors down to the grave. Fifty-seven bodies were uncovered here.

In town, people were reluctant to tell their stories to the outsiders. Their Methodist pastor, Luis Arturo Beltrán, said the paramilitaries forced young men and boys to join them, and sometimes took them to other parts of Colombia. They forced young women, teenagers really, into a sort of sexual slavery, and often killed them afterward. The town now seems empty of people aged from about 15 to 25. People did say they hoped that their children would return, but everyone knows that only a few of the mass graves have yet been opened and nobody has much hope that the remains of specific individuals can ever be identified.

The 28-year-old elected Sinu chief of Rincón del Mar, Alvaro Beltrán, said that soon after the paramilitaries came in 1999, they gathered the community to witness an execution. He said he thanked God that day that his infant son was too young to be able to remember the incident.

In Bogota, meanwhile, the Supreme Court investigation came after years of allegations and stalled investigations. These indictments came after investigators got hold of a computer that belonged to Jorge 40, and found the evidence that links the politicians to Jorge 40, Cadena, and their boss, Salvatore Mancuso. Cadena is missing or dead, but Jorge 40 and Mancuso are now detained in a former country club near Medellín. The two were shown recently in newspaper photographs happily tending flowers in a greenhouse.

The accused politicians cannot benefit from similar treatment under the Justice and Peace Law because they have missed the deadlines. Opposition politicians say they can be expected to implicate others in exchange for lighter sentences.

"This is the tip of the iceberg," said Orsinia Polanco, an Indigenous congresswoman who belongs to the opposition Polo Democrático party. The scandal, she said, will eventually affect President Uribe, re-elected earlier this year to a new four-year term.