In 1997, when the Castaño brothers brought the peasant self-defence groups of Córdoba, the Magdalena Medio and the Llanos Orientales together under a single banner, they did not found one more irregular army among the many already scattered across the Colombian map. They founded a parallel administration, financed by cattle ranchers, agro-industrialists and drug traffickers, which for nearly a decade governed entire territories with an efficiency the legal state never achieved and never sought to achieve. The Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia were not a wartime accident nor a spontaneous reaction of peasants worn down by guerrilla extortion, as a certain official memory still insists. They were a technique of government, deliberate and profitable, which replaced the absent state wherever agrarian reform never arrived, and which left, upon demobilising between 2003 and 2006, an architecture of power the country still cannot dismantle.
I. Convivir, the Legal Varnish of a Private Army
In 1994 the government of Ernesto Samper authorised, by decree, the creation of the Convivir, private surveillance and security cooperatives conceived as a bridge between armed civilians and public forces in zones of heavy guerrilla presence. The official justification spoke of civic collaboration. The practice was something else entirely. In Urabá and Córdoba, the same regions where the country’s most lethal paramilitary blocs would later operate, the Convivir served as a legal front for structures that already existed de facto, financed by cattle ranchers and agro-industrialists who viewed the guerrilla vacuna as an unbearable tax and who preferred to pay for private protection rather than negotiate an agrarian reform with the state that never arrived.
The Castaño brothers did not start from nothing. Fidel Castaño had been buying land in Urabá and Córdoba since the mid-eighties, often through direct violence against peasants who refused to sell, building a strategic corridor designed for drug trafficking before counterinsurgency. After his death in 1994, Carlos and Vicente inherited command and consolidated the Autodefensas Campesinas de Córdoba y Urabá, the ACCU, absorbing demobilised EPL guerrillas who in 1994 controlled Turbo, Apartadó, Carepa and Chigorodó and who chose to ally themselves with those they had previously fought in order to survive against the FARC. The recycling of ex-combatants into new armed structures, a theme running through this entire series since the episode devoted to the ELN and the M-19, found here one of its most cynical variants, not towards civilian life but towards another war.
By 1996 the ACCU had launched an offensive towards the Nudo de Paramillo aimed at controlling a corridor through which weapons, drugs and men moved between two oceans. The Colombian Army would later acknowledge, before the Comisión de la Verdad, that the Convivir had become a double-edged weapon, a mechanism the state itself had authorised and which ended up strengthening precisely the actors it claimed to want to contain.
In Antioquia, the push behind the Convivir had a name and a title. Álvaro Uribe Vélez, governor of the department between 1995 and 1997, actively promoted these cooperatives alongside his Government secretary, Pedro Juan Moreno Villa, reaching eighty-seven authorised associations in the department alone. Magistrates of the Tribunal Superior de Medellín would later note that the period of greatest paramilitary expansion in the region coincided exactly with that governorship, though the justice system has not to date established direct criminal responsibility against Uribe on that specific point.
His brother Santiago Uribe Vélez, by contrast, was convicted, in a separate case predating the events of this episode. The Corte Suprema de Justicia confirmed in June 2026, with no further appeal possible, the twenty-eight-year and three-month prison sentence handed down against him for forming and leading Los Doce Apóstoles, a paramilitary group active in Yarumal, northern Antioquia, between the late eighties and 1994, which the Court itself described as an extermination policy amounting to crimes against humanity, carried out with the support, through action or omission, of state agents, chiefly the Police. The family, geographic and chronological coincidence between the two cases proves nothing about the first. But it establishes, through a final judgment, what remains documented but unadjudicated in the second, namely that Antioquian paramilitarism of the nineties was not some anonymous force arriving from nowhere. It had known family names, some already tried, others not yet.
II. The Federation of Terror, 1997
On 18 April 1997, Carlos and Vicente Castaño convened in Córdoba the self-defence groups of Boyacá, those led by Ramón Isaza in the Magdalena Medio, and those of the Llanos Orientales. The purpose was not merely military. It was political. Thus was born the federation of the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia, with a unified command, an aspiration to be recognised as a negotiating actor before the state and, above all, a national expansion plan that within a few years would grow from nine founding structures to nearly forty regional blocs and fronts.
The money came from three sources that reinforced one another. Cattle ranchers and agro-industrialists in the expansion zones paid protection fees in exchange for the AUC driving out the guerrilla and guaranteeing the order the state did not impose. Oil and coal companies, domestic and foreign, financed directly or indirectly the security of their operations in regions where the self-defence groups became de facto subcontractors of extraction. And drug trafficking, which according to Carlos Castaño himself accounted for up to seventy per cent of the organisation’s income, ended up defining the territorial logic of expansion, following routes and crops before any other variable. Washington designated the AUC a foreign terrorist organisation in 2001, a label that coexisted without apparent contradiction alongside the connivance that sectors of the Colombian security apparatus itself maintained with the organisation on the ground.
By the year 2000 the AUC already operated in Urabá, Córdoba, Magdalena Medio, Casanare and much of the Llanos Orientales. This was no right-wing guerrilla in the classical sense. It was a federation of armed businesses with a vocation for regional government, capable of setting taxes, administering summary justice and deciding who lived and who did not in the territories under its control.
The federation’s own statutes, drafted in its early years, spoke of a national political plan and an aspiration to negotiate with the state as a belligerent actor, not as mere organised crime. That aspiration explains why, unlike a conventional drug cartel, the AUC built parallel town halls, financed local and regional election campaigns, and went so far as to fix a per-hectare tax in the cattle-ranching zones under its control, a fixed levy that effectively replaced any state taxation. Governing, for the AUC, was not a metaphor.
III. Territory Under Control, Bodies to Prove It
Territorial control by the AUC did not rest on persuasion. It rested on terror applied with method, tested first and repeated afterwards until it became administrative routine.
Mapiripán set the pattern. Between 15 and 20 July 1997, around a hundred ACCU men flew from Urabá in two planes, were received by official vehicles at the San José del Guaviare airport, and spent five days executing the population branded as guerrilla collaborators, throwing many of the bodies into the Guaviare river so they would never be counted. The Inter-American Court of Human Rights recognised at least forty-nine victims in 2005, a figure the prosecutor’s office itself later disputed after documenting fraudulent compensation claims by people who had never died there. What admits no dispute is the sentence. General Jaime Humberto Uscátegui, commander of the brigade with jurisdiction over the area, was sentenced to thirty-seven years in prison not for participating in the massacre but for omission, for knowing well in advance what was going to happen and failing to prevent it.
El Salado repeated the formula on a larger scale. Between 16 and 21 February 2000, around four hundred and fifty men from the Bloque Norte and the Bloque Héroes de los Montes de María occupied the hamlet for six days, gathered much of the population on the village football pitch, and executed, according to the count kept by the Centro Nacional de Memoria Histórica, at least sixty people, a figure later investigations by the prosecutor’s office raised to over a hundred. A military helicopter flew over the area before the massacre began. The Marine Infantry, responsible for protecting the region, arrived three days after it was all over.
Trujillo, in the Valle del Cauca, between 1988 and 1994, had already shown that the same script had been rehearsed long before the AUC acronym ever existed.
According to the ¡Basta ya! report by the Centro Nacional de Memoria Histórica, paramilitary groups were responsible for 58.9% of the 1,982 massacres documented in Colombia between 1980 and 2012, equivalent to 1,167 incidents.
Mapiripán and El Salado were not the bloodiest cases. They were the best documented. The aggregate Basta ya figure confirms that both belong to a pattern, not to an isolated excess. In a conflict with four principal armed actors, a single one accounted for nearly six out of every ten registered massacres. The purpose was not simply to eliminate enemies, it was to set a precedent that made repeating the punishment unnecessary, to expel entire populations from areas of strategic or economic value, and to occupy the land left empty by displacement. The Contraloría estimated that between 1995 and 2004, during the years of greatest paramilitary expansion, more than eight million hectares were abandoned or forcibly seized across the country. The agrarian grievance this series has traced since the 1928 banana strike was not resolved by the AUC. It deepened, adding a further layer of dispossession that turned land concentration into the direct, not incidental, result of a terror campaign sustained for nearly a decade.
IV. Institutional Connivance and Parapolítica
No armed actor of that scale operates for a decade without the support, tolerance or direct participation of sectors of the state. The Comisión de la Verdad and the Centro Nacional de Memoria Histórica documented patterns of connivance between Army units, the Police and paramilitary structures across entire regions, from the supply of intelligence to the coordination of joint operations. This was not an isolated regional exception. In many territories, it was the ordinary way the state exercised its military presence.
The political dimension of that connivance has a proper name, parapolítica. The scandal broke in the mid-two-thousands, when the Corte Suprema began convicting members of Congress for direct links to paramilitary chiefs. By the close of the judicial proceedings, around sixty members of Congress had been convicted and more than a hundred and fifty had been investigated, nearly a third of the Congress elected in 2002. Many had signed the so-called Pacto de Ralito, a July 2001 agreement in which regional politicians committed themselves to refounding the country on the AUC’s terms, a document its own signatories would later acknowledge before the courts. The continuity with earlier episodes in this series is unavoidable. The extermination of the Unión Patriótica between 1984 and the early nineties, thousands of militants murdered by paramilitary networks and state agents in documented connivance, was not an isolated precedent to nineties paramilitarism. It was its dress rehearsal, the proof that the physical elimination of a political alternative could be carried out with almost total impunity.
That same institutional logic, tolerating or directly producing illegal violence in exchange for security results, reappeared in another form between 2002 and 2008, during the years of greatest intensity of the Seguridad Democrática policy, when civilians with no link whatsoever to the guerrilla began turning up dead and dressed in uniform so they could be counted as combat kills.
The Jurisdicción Especial para la Paz documented that between 2002 and 2008 at least 6,402 Colombian civilians were killed and illegitimately presented as combat kills, a figure the same tribunal raised in 2026 to 7,837 cases after extending the investigation period between 1990 and 2016.
Paramilitarism and the falsos positivos were not parallel phenomena that happened to coincide in time. They shared the same root, a security apparatus willing to produce corpses as a metric of efficiency, and a political system willing to look the other way as long as the results favoured the official narrative.
V. The Disarmament That Disarmed Nothing
In July 2003 the government of Álvaro Uribe signed the Acuerdo de Santa Fe de Ralito with the AUC, aiming to demobilise around twenty thousand combatants before 2005. The deadline stretched to August 2006. Between the Bloque Cacique Nutibara, demobilised in Medellín in November 2003, and the last of the thirty-eight collective weapons-handover ceremonies, the government reported 31,671 ex-combatants demobilised and 18,051 weapons surrendered. Later research by the Centro Nacional de Memoria Histórica suggests the AUC’s actual strength at the time of the negotiation stood between fourteen thousand and sixteen thousand combatants, and that the final figure was inflated, with the tacit consent of both sides, to give the process greater political weight.
Of those demobilised, only 4,588 were put forward for the Ley de Justicia y Paz, Law 975 of 2005, which required a full confession in exchange for reduced sentences of between five and eight years. The vast majority of rank-and-file fighters fell outside that framework, covered years later by a looser mechanism, Law 1424 of 2010, with no real judicial requirement. On 13 May 2008, in the midst of a confession process that was beginning to trouble political and economic sectors, the government unexpectedly extradited fourteen top paramilitary commanders to the United States to face drug trafficking charges, a decision victims’ organisations denounced as a forced closure of judicial truth in Colombia precisely when it was beginning to name those responsible.
Vicente Castaño never showed up at the concentration point set for August 2006. His disappearance, never confirmed with certainty, coincided with the emergence of new structures the Uribe government itself christened with an administrative euphemism, criminal bands, Bacrim. Los Urabeños, later the Autodefensas Gaitanistas de Colombia and known today as the Clan del Golfo, alongside Los Rastrojos, the Águilas Negras and other smaller acronyms, inherited routes, territories, local complicity networks and, in no few cases, the same mid-level commanders who had signed their own demobilisation years before. Disarmament was real on paper. On the ground, the paramilitary technique of government simply changed its name.
Conclusion
None of this fits the narrative of a war between two clearly defined sides. The AUC were born of a state vacuum, grew on financing from legal regional elites, sustained themselves on drug money, benefited from documented complicity within sectors of the state, and demobilised without dismantling either the economic structure or the political structure that had made them possible. Of the land Colombia’s transitional justice system has managed to restore so far, barely half a million hectares in nearly three decades of conflict, half was specifically seized by paramilitary structures, the clearest proof that dispossession was never a side effect but the very objective of the operation. Where the state was meant to arrive with land registries, judges and property titles, it arrived first with checkpoints, and where it failed to arrive even with that, the Castaños arrived instead. Twenty-nine years after that meeting in April 1997, much of the stolen land remains unrestored, much of the political and institutional responsibility remains unnamed in full, and the acronyms that inherited the AUC still decide, across entire stretches of the country, who comes in and who goes out. Paramilitarism did not end in 2006. It became structural, it became invisible to anyone who does not live in its zones of control, and from then on it never stopped governing…
G.S.
Sources
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