Colombia’s paramilitary scandal grows

Salvatore Mancuso, a former top warlord of the paramilitary United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), has admitted in closed court testimony in Medellín that AUC death squads intimidated voters to cast ballots for right-wing President Álvaro Uribe in 2002.

Mancuso confessed to personally ordering a series of kidnappings, mass murders and targeted assassinations throughout his tenure as an AUC leader. The AUC was initially formed by wealthy landowners and their politico-military allies in order to suppress the people’s progressive demands for real democracy and equitable land redistribution.

This confirmation of paramilitary collaboration in Uribe’s victory has rattled the government. The Uribe administration finds itself further entangled in a scandal engulfing the country involving links between paramilitaries and political figures.

Uribe is a close ally of the Bush administration. Under his regime Colombia has been the largest recipient of U.S. aid outside of the Middle East. Much of that aid is sent through Washington’s Plan Colombia, which provides the government with military equipment to use against trade unionists and impoverished coca growers.

As Mancuso’s trial progresses, the world is beginning to learn the extent of cooperation between the AUC and Colombia’s military officers and politicians.

Mancuso admitted that he had coordinated with the former commander of the army’s Fourth Brigade, the late Gen. Alfonso Monosalva, to launch a 1997 operation in El Aro of Antioquia department that resulted in the deaths of 15 civilians.

Uribe is a former governor of Antioquia, where the AUC was able to secure its strongest grip over northern Colombia in the late 1990s. While he publicly denies charges that he cooperated with the AUC to win his 2002 election, Uribe has admitted to meeting with Mancuso on more than one occasion in the past.

The court proceedings have brought to light a signed agreement between Mancuso and 11 members of Congress, two provincial governors and five mayors from the Atlantic coast region. The agreement pledged cooperation between various levels of government and the AUC criminals. The politicians signing the document were from a number of different political parties representing different forces in Colombia’s ruling-class political spectrum.

In November the Colombian Supreme Court issued arrest warrants against two senators and a representative on charges of conspiring with AUC death squads to terrorize the civilian population into submission.

Sen. Alvaro Araujo, who is under investigation for ties with the AUC, is a brother of Foreign Minister Maria Consuelo Araujo—a high-ranking member of the Uribe administration’s cabinet.

The news that Colombia’s ruling class is willing to use force to affect the outcome of the electoral process may come as a surprise to some in the United States but it is certainly no shock to Colombia’s workers and farmers.

The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) have been waging an historic struggle for decades to protect poor and working Colombians against the violence of the capitalist state and the terror groups that do its extra-legal dirty work.

In 1985 FARC entered into a ceasefire as part of peace negotiations with former President Belisario Betancur. At that time FARC founded a political party called the Patriotic Union (UP). But UP candidates and activists, including hundreds who had been elected to office, were brutally murdered by an alliance of drug lords, paramilitary fighters and the Colombian military.  

Attacks on UP officials contributed to the breakdown of peace talks and by 2002 the party had been decimated and legally disbanded.

The most recent scandal only proves what Colombian workers and farmers have known for years—there is no limit to the crimes and atrocities the Colombian ruling class will commit in order to maintain political power. This systematic repression made it impossible for the Colombian worker and farmer leaders to safely intervene in the political arena and many chose to wage instead a revolutionary resistance struggle, which is now led by FARC.