Alvaro Uribe Velez and 'Democratic Security'

An Interview with Padre Javier Giraldo

Javier Giraldo and Justin Podur

March 15, 2004

A long-time peace activist, Father Javier Giraldo helped found Justicia y Paz in 1988 and has long been a tireless worker for human rights in Colombia. He is the author of 'Colombia: the Genocidal Democracy', one of the most useful primers on Colombia's human rights situation available in the 1990s. He was interviewed in Bogota on February 22, 2004.

Uribe calls his war policies 'Democratic Security'. What do you think of this?

I have read four or five of Uribe's speeches now, in search of a definition. He gave a speech recently in Costa Rica on the topic. The rhetoric is always the same. Previously, Uribe argues, there was security for some. But 'Democratic Security' is for the whole country: it works the same whether you're a worker or an owner, whether you are in the government or in the opposition. The thesis, the rhetoric, is that it protects all Colombians.

Analyzing it in practice, it has a number of modes.

First, it is a radicalization of the paramilitary strategy. Paramilitarism is about involving ever-larger segments of the civilian population in the conflict. This is the essence of the project. And Uribe has defended this type of policy since his days as the governor of Antioquia. In such a context, there is no neutrality. All must participate on the side of 'good', against 'evil'. The keystone of this strategy is the army, and all roads of 'democratic security' lead to the army. It is about supporting the army, obeying the army.

There is a background here, from Antioquia. When the Peace Communities movement began, there were peasant and indigenous communities that declared themselves 'neutral'. They wanted nothing to do with the conflict. This movement was beginning at the time that Uribe was governor, and the peace community of San Jose de Apartado was the fruit of this. Bishop Isiaias Duarte Cancino, later killed in Cali, was working on this. The region of Apartado was a very 'hot' region, a strategic corridor for arms, guns - a contested region by the armed groups. The civilian population wanted to be neutral. There was a series of meetings there, to discuss the idea. Uribe, then governor of Antioquia, actually invited himself to the meeting. He invited himself to speak, and in his speech he called his proposal for civilians 'active neutrality', which to him meant supporting and helping the army. The bishop publicly disagreed: he said, sorry governor, but your project is not the same as ours. Uribe left, furious. Later that night the name and slogan of the movement was changed from 'active neutrality' to 'peace communities'.

As for Uribe, he kept up with his proposal as the governor of the department (Antioquia) with the highest number of CONVIVIR, which were legal paramilitary units. CONVIVIR were civilians, armed by the army, controlled by the Superintendent of Private Security - an attempt to discretely legalize the paramilitaries, trying to get around the fact that the law legalizing paramilitaries (between 1965 and 1968) had been declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1989. There was no department in the country that had more CONVIVIR than Antioquia. The paramilitaries were credentialled by this move. In Apartado, 3 of the CONVIVIR leaders were paramilitaries. They were trained by the 17th Brigade of the Army. This is his background.

If Uribe's intention is to involve more and more of the civilian population in the conflict, how has the civilian population responded?

Well, the term 'civilian population' is a bit broad. It includes the industrialists, the wealthy and powerful. But there is a process. In 1995, Serpa proposed a dialogue with the paramilitaries. The proposal, at that time, created a scandal in the media. The arguments made then were clear: the paramilitaries were not in opposition to the government. The guerrillas were in opposition, and the Constitution itself provides for legal possibilities for negotiation with armed opposition groups. The paramilitaries, by contrast, are a part of the state. How could the state dialogue with them? Because of the scandal, Serpa repudiated his proposal.

But between 1995 - 2002, there has been a process of acclimatizing the society to paramilitarism, especially in the media. One aspect of this is the visibilization of Castano, turning him into a public figure. The first major interview was by Arismendi's Caracol, but El Tiempo, Semana, Cambio, all the major media soon followed. The idea was to clean up his image, to manage it, to turn him into a public figure who would give opinions on issues.

This really got going with the 'peace process' of Pastrana and the 'dialogues' at San Vicente del Caguan. This process was analyzed and managed by the mainstream media with a real superficiality. The dialogues had as a starting point 47 points in common, that the government and the FARC agreed upon. That was at the beginning. From that point on, it was all war. The paramilitaries began to invade the zone. The army began overflights. The FARC made its own moves. The government never took the talks seriously. They did not name a single person to implement the 47-point agenda. They did not send a single official delegate to Caguan. The media blamed the failure of the talks on 'guerrilla irresponsibility'. But there was plenty of irresponsibility by the government! But because of the media campaign, public opinion was more accepting of the idea that the paramilitaries were to blame. This helped the paramilitaries, and this is how the stage was set for Uribe. The FARC's actions at the time were very questionable too - they killed parliamentarians, they staged raids and kidnappings.

Salvatore Mancuso, a paramilitary commander, endorsed Uribe's candidacy and made a statement in support of Uribe after he won the elections. Besides CONVIVIR, are there any other connections between Uribe specifically and paramilitarism?

There is a family very close to Uribe's, the Ochoa family, that are narcotraffickers. I don't mean close in the sense that they know each other - I mean they grew up together.

The US was trying to extradite one of them, the youngest, Fabio Ochoa. But Colombian law says that if you are wanted in Colombia and wanted in another jurisdiction, you cannot be extradited until you have served your sentence in Colombia. This is the argument Carlos Castano's lawyers are trying to make to prevent his extradition. Ochoa's lawyers have made the same claim, but he was still extradited. He got a good lawyer and the CIA and the DEA set terms for negotiation: they sought $30 million in exchange for non-extradition. He would get a soft sentence in the United States, after which he would receive a new passport and be able to travel again (Reference: El Tiempo, November 28, 2002, pp.1-20). Baruch Vega, a photographer, was the intermediary for this deal. There are documents on this, from the extradition proceedings. The result was a secret, illegal fund, to finance the paramilitaries. Baruch Vega was witness to a meeting in Panama where the CIA and DEA gave money to Castano with the money paid by the narcotraffickers.

Another mechanism for paramilitary financing is well documented. In the mining code, it states that where you find gold, you pay duties. A tax, to the government, on what you extract. The richest gold mines are in the department of Bolivar, while Cordoba (where the paramilitaries are based) has always had small production. But if you look up the statistics in the Banco de la Republica, you will see that the relatively unproductive mines of Cordoba are paying very high duties, whereas the mines of Bolivar are not. The missing money is ending up in the hands of the paramilitaries.

During Uribe's campaign for governor, Uribe's father was killed by the FARC in Antioquia at their ranch, Guacharacas. He was in a helicopter at the time. The helicopter had belonged to narcotraffickers, was decommissioned by DAS (Colombia's security agency), and then returned to its owners.

There is a document in the Attorney General's office, a testimony of a small businessman in the mining industry, about the Guacharacas property. He had a relatively small operation with a handful of workers, in Antioquia. He was made to see the local paramilitary chief. The paramilitaries threatened him. They said - you paid protection money to the guerrillas, and that carries a death sentence. He said, I had to pay the quota, if I hadn't paid they would have killed me. What was I supposed to do? They pardoned him, and told him that he would be paying the quota to them from that point on: 250,000 pesos per month.

Eventually, he was not extracting enough to even pay the protection money, so he went to see the paramilitaries at their base and told them that he was out of business and leaving. They said, hold on. We will find you a better place to find gold. We will come back after the meeting - wait here. As he waited, various people started to arrive: paramilitary figures, and then the governor of Antioquia himself. Uribe. At the end of the meeting, the paramilitary chief came back and said - go to Guacharacas estate and exract gold there. Pay your quota to Mr. Villega, who is the manager of the property.

This witness reported that 40 paramilitaries were installed at the Guacharacas estate and went out from that property to kill at night. He ran from there when they asked to use his car for a hit. But before that, he was witness to the murder of a peasant accused of guerrilla collaboration, on Guacharacas. He was witness to the disappearance of a boy who was accused of stealing from the estate. The paramilitaries called the 'patron' to resolve it. The 'patron' was Alvaro Uribe Velez. The boy was never seen again.

Another case comes from La Mundial hacienda near San Roque in the Maseo municipality in the 1980s, before Uribe was governor. At the time there was a campesino organization that was demanding payment for their labor on the hacienda. The owners, the Uribe family, said they couldn't pay, but they would leave the hacienda for 3 months and the campesinos could take whatever surplus they could generate in those months. The campesinos did so, happily, even paid some debts. The documentation on this is in Antioquia's Labor Office.

After 3 months, the campesinos were ready to return the property, but Uribe only wanted it back without the workers. So, the Uribe family, seemingly generously, told the campesinos that they could keep the land. Immediately after that, the army began to detain and disappear people, and there were several massacres. The survivors who testified say they have no doubt that Uribe was behind it.

I asked earlier about the response of the civilian population because some commentators believe that the October 25, 2003 referendum was a major reverse for Uribe, as were the October 26, 2003 municipal elections that brought alternative candidates to power in many municipalities and departments. Do you see these events as reverses for Uribe with public opinion, after his electoral success in 2002?

The first question is, how did Uribe win in 2002. I was re-reading Erich Fromm's 'Fear of Liberty' the other day. That is about how Hitler came to power in Germany. It is an explanation in terms of social psychology. And perhaps some of that is at work here, too. But if you look at the period March-May 2002, before the elections: I was in Meta, with the displaced, people of the Puerto Alvira, Mapiripan. I asked, how was it possible that people who had lost so much because of the paramiltiaries would vote for a president who promised more of the same? They gave testimony of a great deal of fraud. There were paramilitaries in the voting booths. These destroyed ballots. The mayor came to the voting booth with a list of social services recipients at the end of the day. They compared their list with the voters list, to see who had abstained. Then they voted for them. This was actually denounced to the Ombudsman. Nothing happened. In Barrancabermeja, the paramilitaries promised a massacre if Uribe didn't win. I know of other cases, people who didn't denounce publicly, out of fear. Those who voted, voted under tremendous pressure.

After the parliamentary elections in March 2002, Mancuso declared victory publicly. He said that paramilitaries controlled 33% of the seats in the legislature. When journalists asked the Minister of the Interior if this were really the case, he confirmed it. So we have a paramilitary legislature to go with our paramilitary president.

The referendum and following elections can be viewed as a repudiation of this, but it is fragile. This kind of dissent can be expressed in the cities. At the national level, the Liberal party played an important role in pushing for abstention. But the fragility has two parts: fear and paramilitary terror, especially in the rural areas, on the one hand, and the absence of any independent media and the constant bombardment by the media, on the other.

How do you think the insurgency has responded to 'democratic security'?

It is very tough to say. Since the end of the dialogues, the FARC has kept a policy of silence. They used to speak a lot. Now, they speak very little and they have announced that they have no intentions to speak more.

But there are different tendencies within FARC: some more militarist, others more political. What is clear is that past models for peace processes have failed. There have been three different models.

First, under the Betancur government, were the processes in 1983-84. At the time, there was at least a discourse on the causes of war. The causes were not incorporated into the mechanisms, but at least they were discussed. The practical aspects, however, had to do with demobilization, reintegration, amnesty, and so on. It was about conditions for demobilization. But what happened? The military opposed it, and many of those who demobilized were killed.

The next round refused to even consider social problems as causes, and stuck even more closely to demobilization. There was no question of agrarian reform. It was a negotiation between groups - not a social process involving the whole society. Instead, the government said: if you sign, you can have some cash, and be reinserted. Ironically, this was the most 'successful' in the narrow sense. 8 groups signed demobilization agreements. But all 8 groups have been practically destroyed, since. M-19, for example, was the largest and most powerful of the groups, and it is now a political party, but it is very small. M-19 actually had their own TV program for some time, AMPN, but it collapsed for lack of funds.

The third effort was to combine the two. This was the Caracas process between the government and the Simon Bolivar Guerrilla Coordination (CGSB). There was talk of negotiation, of instruments, and of social reform. This lasted a few months, and was cancelled after the EPL kidnapped and killed a politician. Pastrana tried to apply this model in the Caguan negotiations. There were not concrete proposals on the table but themes, starting with 100 themes, narrowed down to 47 themes over 10 chapters. In the Caguan talks social issues were back on the table, but the government, as I've said, didn't even devote a half-time staff position to working on it.

You've argued that these were flawed processes. What would a process have to have to do better?

It would have to understand the logic of this war. It has its own logic. It is not the same logic as politics. It has its own terrible laws. International Humanitarian Law and human rights law is not being followed or respected in a war like this. It was brought here in the 1960s. In 1962, a US mission, of a new school, the 'special war school' of Fort Bragg, came here to apply the lessons of the Vietnam war. General Yarborough came here, in February of 1962. The documents were published by Michael McClintock. It was called Mission Yarborough, and it openly advocated the use of terrorism in order to fight communism. If you look at these documents, the manuals on counterinsurgency, it is an openly paramilitary strategy. The timing is important, because the FARC were only founded in 1964-5. But there was no need for paramilitary methods at the time, because the political climate was such that the army could do its own dirty work, openly. In the late 1970s and 1980s, 'human rights' started to become more important. Amnesty International made its first official visit to Colombia in 1980. It was in the 1980s that the paramilitary strategy began, to continue the dirty work while allowing the state to clean up its image. Then, in 1985, the paramilitaries linked up with the narcotraffickers, and that brought its own logic to the war. The strategy has always been one of progressive infiltration of civil society. Betancur's initiatives at least acknowledged that social injustice was at the root of the conflict. And yet, there was always a desire on the part of the state - continuing to this day - to try to end the war without touching the root of the conflict. There is less and less desire to solve social problems. There is less social investment under Uribe than Pastrana. There can't be an end to the conflict without acknowledging the social roots of it.

Are you saying you don't think the state can 'win' by defeating the insurgency?

Actually I think that the state can 'win' by destroying both the insurgency and the social movements. Uribe says that he has reduced 'violence' by 20%. This is lauded in the US and elsewhere as progress, improving human rights. But I think that an example given by a psychologist, Carlos Beristain, who worked in Guatemala, helped PBI, and others, in a recent talk, is appropriate. He described a classic study in psychology. Rats are put in a cage with a gate. They get hungry and try to exit the cage. As they get close to the exit, they receive an electric shock. Each time they approach, they are shocked. Eventually, they learn, and stop trying to leave. Then, the gate is opened, the shocks turned off. The rats, however, make no attempt to leave the cage.

This is how things are under Uribe. The massacres, the disappearances and assassinations of the past years, are like the electric shocks. The government says there are fewer assassinations of unionists now - that is because they have liquidated the state companies and passed the labor reform: they don't have to assassinate any more. If they continue to extend that logic, they can 'win', by their standards.

Is the reverse true? Can the insurgency 'win'?

Militarily, no. And as a matter of fact, I believe that the majority of guerrilla fighters don't believe they can. The commanders say that they can, but it seems that they are not even trying. In this world, they cannot. What they are doing instead is looking to boycott the social model. To express their rage at it, by blowing up pipelines and extracting some price.

But there are also very strong movements and initiatives in the country…

It is true. A few years ago when the social forum process started and people were saying 'Another World is Possible', it seemed almost like a neurosis. But there is some flesh to it, though. I haven't been to them, but apparently one year they told the Colombians: stop crying, and bring us some movements to support! And there are movements. But there is more repression here. There are communities of resistance, the peace communities like San Jose de Apartado, and others. Still, people are struggling, despite very high costs, for peace and for justice.