Daily exercise helps to keep the rebels fighting fit. Photo: Jason P.Howe, 2002.

The way they are developing today in the country, the self-defense organizations are a means of concealing paramilitarism and constitute a form of state terror financed by the drug trade and by cattle ranchers, latifundists and industrialists, created for the indisputable purpose of exonerating the army of its responsibility in the physical elimination of all those who oppose the establishment.

In order to cover up this purpose and create confusion in the national and international public opinion, the instigators of the war in Colombia chose to identify themselves with the notion of “self-defense”, denigrating the revolutionary content that had originally given life to the peasant organizations that acted under this name, and making them into instruments of death to use against the defenseless civil population.

Faced with this situation and the mistaken belief that the present phenomenon of self-defense forces constitutes a spontaneous organizational form of the peasant communities for the protection of their families and property from the “attacks and abuses of subversion”, it makes sense to reclaim the history of these organizations.

Mass self-defense

The notion of self-defense has its historical antecedents in the agrarian struggles developed in the twenties and thirties by pockets of peasants who organized themselves in some regions of the country (eg. Sumapaz and Tequendama) to defend what they had won against the continuous aggression of the public forces which was instigated by the big landowners.

During this period, self-defense organizations like “The Red Guard”, “The Red Mail” and “The Settlers’ Juntas” were formed, which combined three fronts of struggle: defense against aggression, using arms if need be, the solidarity front, and the search for a “legal” solution so that the national government would accept the facts and legislate recognizing a new reality that was coming into being in the country [recovery of land, processes of colonization] (Víctor J. Merchán. Witness)

In the following decade, the communist party (CPC) systematized this experience in its zones of influence to be able to confront the violence of the government, which intensified with the assassination of the liberal leader Jorge Eliécer Gaitán on April 9, 1948.

The character of this self-defense is defined in a document issued November 7, 1949 by the Executive Committee of the CPC: “Committees, commands and brigades for the defense of the life and liberties of citizens must be organized immediately everywhere: in the neighborhoods, factories, transportation systems, mines, haciendas, plantations, rural localities, so that the working masses and peasants are able to deliver an effective and firm response to the reactionary aggressors.”

In this way, the popular self-defense ceased to be a spontaneous movement and was converted into a systematized and generalized orientation by the communist detachments that recommended it as a means to respond in an organized way to the attacks of the police, army and civilian bands that were being armed by the government.

A rebel traverses an overhead ladder as part of an obstacle course. Photo: Jason P.Howe, 2002.

From the self-defense to the guerrilla movement

In the fifties and early sixties, trying to give a form to their struggles to defend and validate their rights, the self-defense organizations in different zones of the country consolidated themselves on a territorial principle and with a military foundation linked closely to mass organizations like the Peasant Leagues.

Soon after this, the harassment of these self-defense movements by irregular armed groups encouraged by the army and guided by former liberal guerrillas who had joined with the government, intensified. This occurred initially under the military government of General Rojas Pinilla and later, under the first governments of the National Front.

This situation of violence, under the effects of the official repression, led many of these self-defense movements to convert to mobile guerrilla units. The most significant case was the armed resistance that a nucleus of peasants mounted in response to “Operation Marquetalia”, which would turn into the germ of the FARC-EP.

File photo of Carlos Castano, Colombia's far-right warlord, during an interview with Reuters in the province of Cordoba on September 5, 2002. Interpol received an arrest order to capture Castano on Thursday 19 Sept., as well as his second in command, Salvatore Mancuso and another paramiltary commander, Hector Buitrago. It is the first time that the group, who fought against armed leftist militants, have been accused of homicide and kidnapping. More than 40,000 have been killed in the last decade alone during armed conflicts in Colombia. REUTERS/Jose Miguel Gomez/FILE

The criminal self-defense forces

The criminal self-defense forces of paramilitarism, which hide their roots, have a very different origin - not in the experiences of popular resistance, but in the policies of the “National Security Doctrine” and “low intensity conflict” drawn up by the Pentagon for all of Latin America, beginning in the mid-sixties, to deal with the so-called “communist threat”.

In Colombia the National Security Doctrine is embodied in Decree 3398 of 1965 and law 48 of 1968 (Organic Statute of National Defense), that provide the legal foundation for the formation of the “self-defense” forces as an auxiliary instrument of the army in its application of the counterinsurgency strategy to ensure and maintain local control of the population and the territory.

As various Human Rights NGO’s have pointed out, the Colombian army manuals explain clearly “the organization of self-defense groups at the level of small rural settlements and hamlets so that inhabitants of the area can contribute to the (counterinsurgency) struggle in an active way.”

Since then, business owners, cattle ranchers, latifundists and members of the traditional parties – many of them with close ties to drug trafficking – have participated actively in the creation and strengthening of these self-defense groups which have taken on the job of systematically exterminating the opposition and of criminalizing large sections of the population.

It becomes clear then, that these organizations of assassins cannot claim any political status whatsoever, as they have been a creation of the state and must be made to submit to ordinary justice by the same state, so as to satisfy the national and international outcry and prevent the crimes committed by these groups from going unpunished.

The FARC-EP reaffirm, once again, their frontal struggle against paramilitarism….

Members of the Calima front of the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, or AUC, participate in a military drill in the mountains of the southern state of Cauca, Tuesday, Aug. 13, 2002. The paramilitaries, which arose as a vigilante force to defend landowners against guerrilla kidnappings and extortion, have vastly increased their military strength over the past few years. They are blamed for most of the massacres committed in the country and last year the AUC was added by the U.S. State Department to its list of terrorist groups. Colombia's two main rebel groups are also on the list. (AP Photo/J. George)

Translation on English by: elbarcino@laneta.apc.org