ONE of the most horrifying testimonies to Colombia’s gruesome internal conflict is a video sent to prosecutors that shows a paramilitary fighter in the northern town of Aguachica wielding a machete to hack off the hands of a victim who is still alive. The town was in one of the areas hardest hit by militia violence in the late 1990s and early 2000s. On October 24th former members of the same paramilitary forces donated blood at a local hospital in a public act of contrition. The 120 donors are among 32,000 members of right-wing paramilitary groups who laid down their weapons in a demobilisation deal with the government that began in 2005, raising the hopes of war-weary Colombians that such unbridled violence would end.
The paramilitaries were set up in the 1980s by ranchers to protect them from attacks by the country’s main left-wing guerrilla group, the FARC, but they turned into a powerful federation of bandit gangs, accused (like the FARC) of thousands of indiscriminate killings as well as rape, torture and drug-trafficking. Since coming to power in 2002, President Álvaro Uribe has treated the two sides differently, waging war on the FARC with some success, but no final victory, while offering a “justice and peace” process to the paramilitaries.
Many of the paramilitaries’ victims, at first wary of the peace process, came to terms with it, hoping it would let them find out what had happened to relatives who had disappeared and recover land that had been taken from them. For rank-and-file paramilitaries, the process was a chance to return to civilian life with government subsidies and judicial amnesty. For their leaders, there was the promise of reduced jail sentences—eight years’ maximum—and of being spared extradition to the United States on drugs-trafficking charges, in exchange for confessing their worst crimes and offering reparations to their victims.
However, four years on, the vast majority of these promises remain unfulfilled. Victims and culprits feel betrayed, prosecutors and judges are overwhelmed, and new private armies are wreaking havoc in almost a third of the country, leading to new mass displacements and a worrying resurgence in violence. People standing up for victims are being killed or threatened for taking part in the justice and peace hearings or for seeking the return of seized lands. Even special prosecutors and judges have been attacked and harassed.
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