To End A War Demobilization And Reintegration Of Paramilitaries In Colombia

This book investigates demobilisation, disarmament and reintegration (DDR) in Colombia during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The six large peace processes and amnesties that took place in Colombia over this period were nation-led, providing an interesting case study for the wider DDR literature, which has historically focused on Africa and Asia. The continuous process of creating and demobilising illegal armed groups has been pivotal in building the Colombian state. Although the peace settlements and amnesties have brought renewed cycles of violence, they have also been key to the negotiation of democracy and citizenship rights for both ex-combatants and wider sectors of the population. Here the author analyses the role of DDR programmes in building state and citizenship. Comparing DDR during Alvaro Uribe’s presidency and the peace process with the FARC guerrilla under the presidency of Juan Manuel Santos, the book draws on extensive fieldwork conducted with local authorities, officers on the ground and ex-combatants themselves. It details the process of creating and implementing DDR policy and explores the difficulties, challenges and security dilemmas ex-combatants may face in integrating within a post-conflict society in social, economic and political dimensions. Bringing us right up to date with the implementation of the FARC's peace process and the challenges ahead in the reintegration of ex-combatants under a new president, this book will be of interest to scholars and researchers of politics and development in Colombia, and to those with an interest in peace-building, state-building and DDR in other countries and conflicts.

Between 2002 and 2006 the Colombian government of Álvaro Uribe counted with great international support to hand a demobilization process of right-wing paramilitary groups, along with the implementation of transitional justice policies such as penal prosecutions and the creation of a National Commission for Reparation and Reconciliation (NCRR) to address justice, truth and reparation for victims of paramilitary violence. The demobilization process began when in 2002 the United Self Defence Forces of Colombia (Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia, AUC) agreed to participate in a government-sponsored demobilization process. Paramilitary groups were responsible for the vast majority of human rights violations for a period of over 30 years. The government designed a special legal framework that envisaged great leniency for paramilitaries who committed serious crimes and reparations for victims of paramilitary violence. More than 30,000 paramilitaries have demobilized under this process between January 2003 and August 2006. Law 975, also known as the “Justice and Peace Law”, and Decree 128 have served as the legal framework for the demobilization and prosecutions of paramilitaries. It has offered the prospect of reduced sentences to demobilized paramilitaries who committed crimes against humanity in exchange for full confessions of crimes, restitution for illegally obtained assets, the release of child soldiers, the release of kidnapped victims and has also provided reparations for victims of paramilitary violence. The Colombian demobilization process presents an atypical case of transitional justice. Many observers have even questioned whether Colombia can be considered a case of transitional justice. Transitional justice measures are often taken up after the change of an authoritarian regime or at a post-conflict stage. However, the particularity of the Colombian case is that transitional justice policies were introduced while the conflict still raged. In this sense, the Colombian case expresses one of the key elements to be addressed which is the tension between offering incentives to perpetrators to disarm and demobilize to prevent future crimes and providing an adequate response to the human rights violations perpetrated throughout the course of an internal conflict. In particular, disarmament, demobilization and reintegration processes require a fine balance between the immunity guarantees offered to ex-combatants and the sought of accountability for their crimes. International law provides the legal framework defining the rights to justice, truth and reparations for victims and the corresponding obligations of the State, but the peace negotiations and conflicted political structures do not always allow for the fulfillment of those rights. Thus, the aim of this article is to analyze what kind of transition may be occurring in Colombia by focusing on the role that transitional justice mechanisms may play in political negotiations between the Colombian government and paramilitary groups. In particular, it seeks to address to what extent such processes contribute to or hinder the achievement of the balance between peacebuilding and accountability, and thus facilitate a real transitional process.

In Blood and Capital: The Paramilitarization of Colombia, Jasmin Hristov examines the complexities, dynamics, and contradictions of present-day armed conflict in Colombia. She conducts an in-depth inquiry into the restructuring of the state’s coercive apparatus and the phenomenon of paramilitarism by looking at its military, political, and legal dimensions. Hristov demonstrates how various interrelated forms of violence by state forces, paramilitary groups, and organized crime are instrumental to the process of capital accumulation by the local elite as well as the exercise of political power by foreign enterprises. She addresses, as well, issues of forced displacement, proletarianization of peasants, concentration of landownership, growth in urban and rural poverty, and human rights violations in relation to the use of legal means and extralegal armed force by local dominant groups and foreign companies. Hristov documents the penetration of major state institutions by right-wing armed groups and the persistence of human rights violations against social movements and sectors of the low-income population. Blood and Capital raises crucial questions about the promised dismantling of paramilitarism in Colombia and the validity of the so-called demobilization of paramilitary groups, both of which have been widely considered by North American and some European governments as proof of Colombian president Álvaro Uribe’s advances in the wars on terror and drugs.

VI. The U.S role

Since its independence in the nineteenth century, the South American state of Colombia has been shaped by decades of bloody political violence. In The Para-State, Aldo Civico draws on interviews with paramilitary death squads and drug lords to provide a cultural interpretation of the country’s history of violence and state control. Between 2003 and 2008, Civico gained unprecedented access to some of Colombia’s most notorious leaders of the death squads. He also conducted interviews with the victims of paramilitary, with drug kingpins, and with vocal public supporters of the paramilitary groups. Drawing on the work of Deleuze and Guattari, this riveting work demonstrates how the paramilitaries have in essence become a war machine deployed by the Colombian state to control and maintain its territory and political legitimacy.

Introduction -- Colombia and the AUC -- National government structures -- Demobilized combatants -- The greater community -- Conclusion.

Between 2003 and 2006 the Colombian government implemented a demobilization process for 37 armed groups that made up the brutal, mafia-like, paramilitary coalition known as the AUC. The government claimed success, as more than 30,000 persons went through demobilization ceremonies and entered reintegration programs. But almost immediately afterwards, new groups cropped up all over the country, taking the reins of the criminal operations that the AUC leadership previously ran. Today, these successor groups are engaging in frequent and serious abuses against civilians, including massacres, killings, forced displacement, rapes, threats, and extortion. They have repeatedly targeted human rights defenders, trade unionists, displaced persons, and community members who do not follow their orders. In some regions, like the city of Medellín, where the homicide rate has doubled in the past year, the groups' operations have resulted in a large increase in violence. Paramilitaries' Heirs, based on nearly two years of field research, documents the extent to which the emergence of the successor groups is related to the government's failure to effectively demobilize many AUC leaders and fighters. It describes the groups' brutal abuses against civilians, particularly in Medellín, the Urabá region, and the states of Meta and Nariño. And it points out continuing shortcomings in the government's response to the groups. The state has an obligation to protect the civilian population, to prevent abuses, and to hold perpetrators accountable. But it has failed to ensure that the police units charged with combating the groups, or the group of prosecutors charged with investigating them, have sufficient capacity to do so. It has done too little to investigate regular reports that state officials are at a minimum tolerating the activities of the successor groups. And it has yet to take adequate measures to protect civilians from this new threat.

This paper examines the Colombian Government's policies and strategies for dealing with right wing paramilitary organizations, including the goal of demobilization. The nature of the conflict between the government and paramilitary organizations is examined, including an analysis of the strategy used by the Colombian Government. Strategic implications of the narco-traffic and terrorism problem are discussed, as well as the Justice and Peace Law, which is intended to reestablish the equilibrium between justice and reconciliation. Finally, this paper analyzes the Colombian government's policies and strategies and the impact these policies have on national security.