Colombia: Turning over a new leaf

(This article was submitted several months ago, but better late than never. My previous reporting from Colombia, on the situations in Medellín and in the Bajo Cauca region, can be read here and here, respectively. MD)

Colombia: Turning over a new leaf

By Michael Deibert

8 August 2010

Foreign Direct Investment

The exit of president Álvaro Uribe marks a new era for Colombia. Once given a wide berth by investors, security has improved and its capital, Bogotá, is undergoing a revival. Michael Deibert reports.

(Read the original article here)

Amid a warren of alleys where a chaotic jumble of brick and concrete houses springs up on hills that once housed a city garbage dump, Milena Gómez Valencia is quite literally harvesting the fruits of peace.

“I wanted to change and become a new person,” says Ms Valencia, whose new perch behind her computer is hard to square with her former role in the country’s notoriously brutal paramilitaries. “We wanted to leave behind all the fighting, the massacres, the kidnappings.”

Ms Valencia is a former member of the Bloco Centauros wing of the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, or AUC), which demobilised in August 2005. She is now less concerned with the crushing of either of the country’s leftist insurgencies and more concerned with the daily rounds of accounts billable and payable with which she and half a dozen former fighters try to keep their enterprise, a concern that sells fruit pulp to restaurants and other businesses around Medellín, afloat.

The business, Aso Pulpaz (short for Asociación Pulpaz, a play on the Spanish words for both ‘pulp’ and ‘peace’), was founded with the aid of a government grant, and is emblematic of the complex legacy bequeathed to the country by president Álvaro Uribe, who left office this year after eight years as the country’s premier. Juan Manuel Santos, a former defence minister in Mr Uribe’s cabinet and his preferred successor, captured nearly 70% of the record 9 million votes cast in elections in June.

“Colombia has been able to cross the threshold of being perceived as a place where you would never, ever visit, to being a place where people think about going to Cartagena or [Colombia’s capital] Bogotá or any number of places,” says Alberto Bernal, head of research with Bulltick Capital Markets, a financial services firm specialising in Latin America. “And I think that’s a very important development.”

Past terrors

When Mr Uribe took office eight years ago, Colombia was a country where all but the most hearty or cynical investors feared to tread. Army barracks were regularly overrun by guerillas closely linked to the drugs trade and large swaths of territory were beyond state control.

As he prepares to leave office, the insurgents have peen pushed out to remote areas along Colombia’s borders, Colombian security forces have benefited immensely from a slew of US-led training and financing measures known as Plan Colombia (originally proposed by Mr Uribe’s predecessor, Andrés Pastrana) and Colombia is on the radar in terms of foreign investment – for the first time in many decades.

Medellín, a city of 2.5 million people that has alternately been famous as the hometown of the world’s most notorious drug trafficker (Pablo Escobar) and Colombia’s most famous painter (Fernando Botero), is perhaps the most telling paradigm of Colombia’s complicated renaissance.

The capital of the state of the department of Antioquia, Medellín now bustles with activity under a perpetually spring-like climate, an economic hub and gateway to some of Colombia’s most scenic regions.

“The most important improvement in recent years has been security,” Luis Alfredo Ramos, Antioquia’s governor, told fDi while sitting in an office overlooking some of Medellín’s modern architecture and shadowed by life-sized portraits of the two great leaders of the nation’s rebellion against Spain, Simón Bolívar and Francisco de Paula Santander.

“For example, it is now easy to transit the road to Bogotá, whereas for many years it was closed. There were kidnappings, acts of terrorism, explosions...Now more than 70,000 people have returned to this region,” says Mr Ramos.

Some 250 kilometres away, Bogotá is also enjoying a rebirth, the benefit of a series of mayors of different political stripes who built on one another’s accomplishments in improving the country’s most important city.

Locals credit Jaime Castro (mayor between 1992 and 1994) with developing a political charter for Bogotá and reforming its tax base, Antanas Mockus (mayor from 1995 to 1996 and 2001 to 2003) with helping to create a sense of citizenship, Enrique Peñalosa (1998 to 2001) with strengthening the city’s infrastructure, public spaces and educational system, and Luis Eduardo Garzón (2004 to 2007) with extending public programmes to help Bogotá’s neediest citizens.

“The change in response by the companies we’re approaching is dramatic,” says Virgilio Barco, executive director of Invest in Bogotá, a four-year-old public-private partnership established by the city and the Bogotá Chamber of Commerce. “In 2006 we were having a lot of problems getting any traction at all, and last year we were talking to mainstream, very conservative companies which felt that security was no longer an issue.”

Economic figures from the Banco de la República, Colombia’s central bank, in May, bear out this sense of optimism. The Colombian economy was expected to have grown from 2.3% to 3.1% during the first quarter of 2010, a small increase from the same quarter in 2009, and leading to an overall projected growth rate in 2010 of between 3% and 3.5%. Also in May, Moody’s Investors Service announced that it was upgrading Colombia’s rating for its 2011 notes from Ba2 to Aaa. In Bogotá alone, FDI has grown from $87m in 2000 to $1.7bn for 2009, the largest chunk of it in the transportation sector and with the largest single investor in the city remaining the US, followed by Spain.

Drug problems

Colombia still has significant hurdles to negotiate. A series of vicious new drug gangs, many with links to the former paramilitary groups, continue to wage brutal turf wars in various locations around the country, and the country’s two rebel armies, while knocked back on their heels, remain heavily armed and well-financed by enormous sums of money derived from the drugs trade. A series of political scandals of close allies somewhat tarnished Mr Uribe’s reputation, and there is a sense that, despite the forward movement, more must be done to address the country’s extreme inequality.

“It is very difficult here, everyone is looking for work,” says Rosa Palacio, a 28-year-old mother of two in Soacha, a grindingly poor suburban municipality of about 400,000 on Bogotá’s southern edge.

Amid improvised dwellings scaling steep hills that can be reached only by dirt roads, many refugees such as Ms Palacio from Colombia’s armed conflict remain in limbo, fearful of returning home but not entirely settled in their new lives either. Nevertheless, after so many years of war, Colombians could be forgiven for looking towards the future with a sense of guarded optimism.

In Medellín, as Ms Valencia talks with the staff of Aso Pulpaz as they commence their work for the day, she recalls the story of one of the organisation’s founders, another exparamilitary member who was killed “by delinquents” she says, in Medellín a little over a year ago.

“The dead go to their graves,” she says, using a familiar Spanish expression about soldiering on through tough circumstances. “But the living must get back to the dance floor.”

Michael Deibert interviewed on KPFK Pacifica Radio

I was interviewed today about my recent trip to Colombia on Suzi Weissman's show Beneath The Surface on KPFK Pacifica Radio in Los Angeles. My segment begins at about the 40 minute mark and can be heard here. For more background on the current situation in Colombia, please read my articles from the Bajo Cauca region of Antioquia and from Medellín.

Like Colombia, Iconic City Remains a Place of Promise and Peril

Like Colombia, Iconic City Remains a Place of Promise and Peril

By Michael Deibert

Inter Press Service

(Read the original article here)

Medellín, COLOMBIA , Jun 3, 2010 (IPS) - The homes of the barrio of Comuna 13, tightly packed improvised brick and concrete structures that take on a semi- rural nature the closer one gets to the murky swift-moving Río Cauca, blanket the hills of the western edge of this city of 2.5 million.

A district of some 135,000 inhabitants, Comuna 13 represents the complicated renaissance of a city famed for producing both Colombia's most famous painter (Fernando Botero) and the world's most notorious drug trafficker (Pablo Escobar).

Abutting this grindingly poor area is the Parque Biblioteca José Luis Arroyave, a sparkling new multipurpose complex that features a library, an exhibition hall and a community- run cafeteria. Within view of its doors, a new metrocable system ferries commuters to and from their hillside dwellings at dizzying heights in a series of cable-propelled eight-passenger pods, cutting travel time for community residents in half.

"In a zone very affected by violence and poverty, we wanted to organise this project and work trying to reclaim public space and benefit the population here," says Mauricio Mejía, who works with the Proyecto Urbano Integral, an urban development project based on similar initiatives in Brasil and originally spearheaded by Medellín's former mayor, Sergio Fajardo.

Along with the city's former director of urban projects, Alejandro Echeverri, in 2009 Fajardo - in office from 2003 until 2007 and currently running for vice president on a ticket with former Bogota mayor Antanas Mockus - was awarded the Curry Stone Design Prize, an eminent architectural award that cited the duo's "bold and ambitious public works plan" for Medellín as having "helped revitalise its poorest neighbourhoods".

The award set out for particular commendation the city's 42,200-square-foot Orquideorama (a botanical garden topped by a wooden meshwork roof somewhat resembling unfurling flowers), and the nearly-prehistoric looking obsidian Parque Biblioteca España.

However, Medellín continues to exist as a paradox: On one hand a lush, green city vibrating with life and stunning modern architecture, and on the other hand a place of frightened people who speak in whispers of criminals they refuse to even name. And it has remained quite a deadly place for many of its inhabitants.

During the first three months of 2010, Medellín's murder rate increased 54.8 percent from the previous year. Only steps away from the Parque Biblioteca and in other barrios around the city, drug gangs continue to dominate, the fallout, many locals say, of an incomplete or ineffective demobilisation process of the country's ring-wing paramilitary groups undertaken by the government of outgoing President Álvaro Uribe.

"This is a war where impunity reigns," says a church worker who has been active in Medellín's poorest neighbourhoods for many years and who did not wish to be named. "There is silence, fear, and people can't talk about what's going on."

An umbrella group of paramilitary factions, the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (AUC), were formed by Carlos Castaño in 1997 and thereafter acted as a ruthless counterpoint to the Colombian state's war against Colombia's two rebel groups, the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC) and the smaller Ejército de Liberación Nacional (ELN). During the most violent years of Colombia's civil war, it was the AUC, not the Colombian army, that succeeded in driving the FARC and ELN from the comunas around Medellín.

Linked to dozens of massacres throughout the country, the AUC began a demobilisation process in 2002 whereby significantly reduced sentences were offered in exchange for paramilitary members confessing their crimes, making amends with their victims and ceasing criminal activities. Castaño himself was murdered in April 2004, allegedly in a dispute centered around the AUC's deepening involvement in the drug trade, and his body recovered two years later.

In Medellín, this demobilisation process took on a particularly chaotic and violent nature.

One of the most powerful leaders of the AUC, Diego Murillo Bejarano aka Don Berna, was (like Carlos Castaño's brother Fidel) a former close associate of the drug trafficking Medellín Cartel, having acted as one of the top enforcers for a faction run by the Galeano family, who were eventually dominated by sectors loyal to the late drug kingpin Pablo Escobar.

Having commanded the AUC's Bloque Cacique Nutibara, which had around 1,000 members, as well as the Bloque Héroes de Granada, which was thought to have numbered slightly over 2,000, amidst demobilisation Murillo Bejarano's faction of the AUC fought a brief, vicious war of attrition in Medellín's slums with the Bloque Metro of Castaño loyalist Carlos Mauricio Garcia, alias Double Zero, who was found murdered in May 2004.

Following the demobilisation process - which many in Medellín claim was largely a charade where non-paramilitary actors were recruited from around the city to go through the motions of pacification - Murillo Bejarano, despite sitting in a Colombian prison under the terms of the country's Justice and Peace Law, is said by residents and authorities to have become the dominant criminal figure in the city.

Murillo Bejarano's omnipotence over what is colloquially referred to as the Oficina de Envigado (named after the Medellín neighbourhood where many narcotraffickers live) extended to such an extent that the tit-for-tat slayings and turf wars that have marked the city over the last two decades gradually decreased as he solidified his control over many of the city's criminal gangs. There was even a term used by locals for the enforced calm Murillo Bejarano brought to the city's criminal underworld, donbernabilidad, a mordant pun on the Spanish concept of gobernabilidad, or governability.

It was, however, a consolidation that had deadly consequences for those who questioned it. A number of community leaders in Medellín, such as Haider Ramírez from Comuna 13 and Alexander Pulgarín from the La Sierra neighbourhood, have been murdered in recent years, with the latter killing being characterised in a report by Colombia's government as "a premeditated act" designed to silence a voice that would not go along with criminal system being put in place in the slums.

When Murillo Bejarano was deported to the United States in May 2008 along with a slew of other top AUC leaders to face drug trafficking charges, the Oficina de Envigado is said to have badly fractured. One of the group's chieftains, Fabio León Vélez Correa, alias Nito, was murdered in September 2009 and two remaining factions have formed with guns drawn behind one of two leaders, known by their aliases as Valenciano and Sebastian.

Colombian government estimates say that the groups operate in of Colombia's 32 departments and boast around 400 members.

It is the chaos of this power struggle, residents say, that has led to the palpable spike in violence as ever- diminishing and reorganising groups of traffickers vie for control of the city and access to the Río Cauca, a key conduit for cocaine and arms smuggling, as well as human trafficking.

Despite the palpable sense of hope in Colombian cities such as Medellín these days, the incomplete demobilisation of the paramilitaries, along with the continued threat of the not- yet-vanquished rebel groups, will continue to present a serious challenge to whoever wins this month's presidential contest to succeed the eight-year tenure of Álvaro Uribe.

"These groups basically took the generous offer of demobilisation by Uribe," says Bruce M. Bagley, the chair of the Department of International Studies at the University of Miami and a longtime Colombia observer. "But demobilise is a relative term."


Michael Deibert is a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Peace and Reconciliation Studies at Coventry University and the author of Notes from the Last Testament: The Struggle for Haiti (Seven Stories Press). His blog can be read at www.michaeldeibert.blogspot.com

Amid Elections, Armed Groups Hold Colombian Town under the Gun

Amid Elections, Armed Groups Hold Colombian Town under the Gun

By Michael Deibert

Inter Press Service

(Read the original article here)

CAUCASIA, Colombia , Jun 1, 2010 (IPS) - Rolling through this mountainous region of central Colombia, the brown waters of the Río Cauca wind through mist-shrouded hills before joining up with the larger Río Magdalena and emptying out into the Caribbean Sea.

In this area, known as Bajo Cauca and characterised by campesino farms and gurgling waterfalls, the dusky hues of the river are an apt metaphor for the violence that has had residents here existing in fear since the beginning of the year.

"We've never lived what we're living through now," says Fernanda Márquez (not her real name), whose son was kidnapped by the larger of Colombia's two main rebel groups, the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC), 13 years ago. "They kill innocent children, throw bombs, kidnap. It's terrible."

For much of the last year, groups of warring drug traffickers have battled for control of this strategically important city and surrounding towns along the river. As Colombians go to the polls this month to choose a successor to President Álvaro Uribe, the groups continue to wage a scorched-earth battle to determine dominance over the smuggling of narcotics, weapons and people along the river.

According to police, between Jan. 1 and May 26, there were 74 murders in the Bajo Cauca region, and at least 24 grenade attacks, though other sources say the number of the latter is closer to 44.

During one recent week alone here, six people were killed during the invasion of a farm, gunmen killed a mother and her nine-year-old son, a 14-year-old boy died during a grenade attack, a 21-year-old labourer disappeared and the home of Leiderman Ortiz, the crusading publisher of the La Verdad de Pueblo newspaper, was damaged by yet another grenade.

All of this occurred despite a massive police and military presence in the region and recent arrests of dozens of individuals believed to be linked to the groups.

Ground zero for this turf war has been the riverside town of Caucasia, a ramshackle place with a metropolitan population of around 120,000 and where two groups - Los Rastrojos and Los Urabeños (both aided by a subset of a gang known as Los Paisas) - are vying for control. Anonymous pamphlets in town regularly threaten death to the groups' perceived enemies.

"There are alliances between these criminal gangs and the subversive groups, particularly the FARC," says Colonel Luis Eduardo Herrera Paredes, chief of Bajo Caucau's Comando Operativo de Seguridad. "We have seen a panorama where the criminal bands organise the distribution (of cocaine) and the FARC protect the cultivation process. The majority of these murders are among these criminal groups."

The groups have their roots in Colombia's long and bloody internal armed conflict, where far-left rebels of the FARC and the smaller Ejército de Liberación Nacional (National Liberation Army or ELN) have squared off against the Colombian state and paramilitary groups allied with localised political and economic interests. Critics charge that the paramilitaries often worked as little more than a ruthless wing of Colombia's official security services.

Formed in 1997, the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (United Self-Defence Forces or AUC) represented the coalescing of these localised militias.

Largely under the aegis of Carlos Castaño, whose father had been kidnapped and killed by guerillas and whose brother, Fidel, was a major paramilitary leader and drug trafficker before he allegedly died in combat in 1994, the AUC went from a series of largely autonomous collectives to a tightly-organised combat-ready outfit that moved through the country like a murderous scythe, depriving the guerillas of safe havens and murdering, often in quite ghastly fashion, any whom they suspected of supporting them.

In addition to the drug trade, despite its designation as a terrorist organisation by the United States and the European Union, and the credible linking of the AUC to dozens of massacres, the group was also able to derive income from international firms doing business in Colombia, who continued to make payouts to the AUC to protect their business interests. Chiquita Brands International, for example, was fined 25 million dollars by the U.S. government in 2007 for doing so.

Operating as anti-subversive shock troops for the first five years of its existence, by 2002, when the AUC started negotiating potential demobilisation with the Colombian government, the group was increasingly consumed by the business of drug trafficking, leading to violent schisms between leaders.

Castaño, who was known to have objected to the AUC's deepening involvement in the drug trade despite his own past links to traffickers, disappeared in April 2004. His body was found two years later, allegedly the victim of a plot orchestrated by his brother, Vicente, who himself later disappeared and was believed to have been murdered.

The antecedent of the two of the current groups warring in Bajo Cauca, the Rastrojos and the Urabeños, to the AUC are direct and vivid.

At its height, one of the most numerically significant wings on the AUC was its Bloque Central Bolívar, which numbered around 6,000 combatants and was led by Carlos Mario Jiménez, better known by his nom de guerre, "Macaco".

After the Bloque Central Bolívar demobilised at the beginning of 2005 under Colombia's Justice and Peace Law, which required paramilitary members to confess their crimes, making amends with the victims and cease criminal activities in exchange for substantially reduced sentences, Jiménez entered a Colombian prison. However, charging that they broke the terms of their deals by continuing to be actively involved drug trafficking, Colombian authorities extradited him and several other top AUC leaders to the United States in May 2008 to stand trial for conspiring to import cocaine.

In Caucasia, local residents and authorities say, the current leader of the Rastrojos, who goes by the alias "Sebastian", was an active member of Jiménez's Bloque Bolívar. A 2009 Colombian government memorandum concluded that the Rastrojos were active in 10 of Colombia's 32 departments and had around 1,400 members.

Until his arrest in early 2009, the Urabeños were led by Daniel Rendón, known as Don Mario, a former member of the AUC's Elmer Cárdenas bloc, which never even perfunctorily went through with the demobilisation process.

"It's only about money," says Jesús Alean Quintera, the director of the Fundación Redes, a human rights organisation that works in the Bajo Cauca region and has extensively documented that activities of the groups, particularly with regards to minors, both in Caucasia and the neighbouring community of Nechí. "The recruitment of children into these groups has become a real problem."

Now, with even the thinnest veneer of ideology stripped away, groups such as Los Rastrojos, Los Urabeños, Los Paisas and Las Águilas Negras (thought by some to be a front group for Los Urabeños) are free to collaborate with Colombia's rebel factions in the service of a more tangible reward, and the people of Caucasia wonder when their situation will change.

"There are a lot of killers of 13 or 14 years old these days, both boys and girls" says Leiderman Ortiz, the local journalist who survived the grenade attack. "We're living through a war, though terrorism here, and we think that all the authorities, from the president on down, need to understand how grave this situation is."

Michael Deibert is a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Peace and Reconciliation Studies at Coventry University and the author of Notes from the Last Testament: The Struggle for Haiti (Seven Stories Press). His blog can be read at www.michaeldeibert.blogspot.com.