The Cold War Roots of Colombia’s Paramilitary Death Squads

The emergence of bloodthirsty right-wing paramilitary death squads in Colombia is often attributed to the rise of powerful vertically integrated cocaine cartels during the early 1980s. That interpretation, however, overlooks the deeper forces behind their emergence in a country shaped by decades of conflict and the world's longest-running multi-party low-intensity asymmetric war. Colombia's right-wing death squads, responsible for the majority of the modern conflict’s victims, predate Pablo Escobar, the Medellin Cartel and the cocaine boom. Their roots lie in earlier struggles for political power and control of Colombia’s resources.A violent pastInformal armed groups were responsible for much of the violence that has torn Colombia asunder since the country’s 1814 independence from Spain. Constant clashes driven by politics, class and a desperate desire to control rich agricultural land and minerals fueled the bloodshed. The two main ideologically opposed political parties, the Liberals and Conservatives, were locked in conflict for most of the 19th and 20th centuries as they jockeyed for control of Colombia’s vast natural resources.According to conservative politician Jorge Holguín, as quoted by Colombia’s central bank, between 1830 and 1903 there were nine major general wars, 14 local conflicts and two international wars. The worst conflagration was the Thousand-Day War fought from October 17, 1899, to November 21, 1902. Here Colombia’s Liberal Party initially battled the authoritarian National Party-led government, and then the Conservative Party after its leader José Manuel Marroquín overthrew authoritarian President Manuel Antonio Sanclemente on July 31, 1900.The civil war, fought on land and at sea, was extremely costly for Colombia. Over 100,000 people perished, and the economy was devastated, with crucial infrastructure destroyed. The severity of the devastation caused a sharp rise in poverty across Colombia and effectively bankrupted the Andean country’s government. The conflict left Colombia politically and socially fractured between the Conservative Party, which advocated for a strong central government, and the Liberal Party, which promoted social reforms along with greater regional autonomy.The suppurating scars of the Thousand Days' War were responsible for the tinderbox that exploded into partisan conflict after the Second World War. Bloodshed began with the April 9, 1948, assassination of popular politician and Liberal Party leader Jorge Eliécer Gaitán. His murder incited a 10-hour orgy of rioting, looting, and violence in downtown Bogotá that came to be known as El Bogotazo, which left the city’s downtown districts in ruins. Gaitán's assassination detonated Colombia's long-simmering tensions over class, inequality, and political power, unleashing a decade of brutal civil conflict from 1948 to 1958, which became known as La Violencia.Extreme violence swept across Colombia, particularly through impoverished rural regions, where deep social inequality, political exclusion, and weak state control created fertile ground for conflict. The ruling Conservative Party went on to found brutal militias, which were the forerunners of bloody paramilitary groups that emerged later in the 20th century, which fought alongside Colombia’s army and police to control the countryside. These irregular armed groups functioned as a brutal shadow police force, murdering and displacing Liberal supporters as the state fought to secure Colombia's agricultural heartland.By 1953, an exhausted Conservative government had so severely lost control that General Gustavo Rojas Pinilla seized power in a bloodless coup. After consolidating power, Rojas Pinilla declared a general amnesty to end the bloodshed. The amnesty achieved only limited success, despite many Liberal militias laying down their arms and demobilizing. Bloodletting in rural Colombia was so prolific it had gained a momentum of its own, fueled by never-ending vendettas and counter-vendettas. Instead of demobilizing, some armed bands re-emerged as bandit gangs or peasant self-defence forces.An end to the violence proves elusiveAfter a period of rapidly deteriorating popularity and without the broad political base required to maintain power, Rojas Pinilla was deposed by a five-man military junta in 1957. This marked the beginning of the return to civilian rule, which was eventually restored in 1958. As a result, Colombia entered a new era with the Liberals and Conservatives hammering out a power-sharing agreement, which gave rise to the National Front or Frente Nacional. Colombia's traditional political elite believed the pact would finally end the bloodshed consuming the country.The power-sharing deal began on August 7, 1958, with the inauguration of Liberal Party candidate Alberto Lleras Camargo as the National Front’s first constitutional president. On taking office, Lleras Camargo acted swiftly to address the widespread violence in rural regions. To do this, he not only formed a commission to investigate the civil war’s multi-faceted causes but searched for a means to boost economic development in a nation ravaged by prolonged conflict. Despite Lleras Camargo declaring an end to La Violencia in late 1958, pervasive bloodletting and lawlessness remained endemic in rural areas.The brutal and corrupt conduct of authorities during La Violencia, coupled with the inability of the government to end bloodshed and lawlessness, generated considerable distrust among Colombia’s rural population. Consequently, the Colombian Communist Party, known by its Spanish initials as the PCC, gained greater support from the rural poor throughout the conflict-torn country. The PCC’s increasing popularity persisted even after being declared illegal in 1956 during the Rojas Pinilla dictatorship. After the dictatorship fell, the PCC regained its legal status.In return, the PCC supported the December 1, 1957, plebiscite that formally established the National Front and moved to a peaceful mass struggle approach despite controlling armed rural militias. Those decisions further boosted the party’s appeal, notably among the urban poor at a time when the PCC was enjoying rising popularity among Colombia’s peasants. Since the 1930s, the party had forcefully advocated for agrarian reform in Colombia, where the ownership of rich agricultural land was primarily concentrated in the hands of the ruling elite.The PCC intensified those efforts during La Violencia when it also formed peasant self-defense groups to safeguard subsistence farmers. These were important qualities at a time when a ready pool of recruits existed after many small landholders were displaced by brutal Conservative Party-backed paramilitary-style groups. These events allowed the PCC to build a small but fiercely loyal agrarian support base that continued to expand because of the government’s inability to end rural violence and disorder.Washington is alarmed by Colombia’s InstabilityColombia’s chronic instability after the 1948 breakdown of constitutional government provoked considerable concern in Washington. This, coupled with extreme disorder and rural lawlessness, and the PCC’s rising popularity during the late-1950s, a time of intense Cold War confrontation, triggered alarm bells in the Eisenhower White House. Colombia’s strategic location, with the country bridging Central and South America, made it imperative for the U.S. to influence Bogota and prevent a hostile government from seizing power.This was a period where Cold War tensions were at a flashpoint, with the Soviet Union aggressively seeking to extend its influence throughout the developing world, particularly in Southeast Asia and Latin America. After Fidel Castro's January 1959 victory in Cuba, socialist movements surged in popularity throughout Latin America. It was just six years before Castro’s victory in Cuba that US President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who was deeply troubled by the spread of communism, formulated the Domino Theory.Eisenhower argued that if a country became communist, the surrounding nations would quickly follow, tumbling like a row of dominoes. This hypothesis, despite its flaws, profoundly shaped US Cold War foreign policy, leading to a focus on the strategic containment of the USSR and Maoist China while wrestling for control of developing Africa and maintaining hegemony in Latin America. This, along with Cuba’s revolutionary government ramping up subversive activities in the region, including financing and training socialist insurrectionists, fanned the White House’s fears.The state fails to end rural disorderBy the late 1950s, Colombia’s president was determined to reinvigorate a severely war-damaged economy. Lleras Camargo introduced several policies to facilitate a broader economic recovery, including economic austerity and agrarian land reform. A key policy for rebuilding a near-bankrupt economy was the consolidation of small rural landholdings into large capital-intensive farms which could profit from economies of scale while boosting agricultural output. Lleras Camargo believed intensive industrial-scale agriculture would provide employment to the millions of Colombians displaced by La Violencia and significantly lift agricultural production as well as exports. That would not only lead to an economic recovery but stabilize rural communities while reducing the appeal of revolutionary political groups, like the PCC, calling for radical reform. Due to the prohibitive costs of large-scale intensive farming, the Lleras Camargo administration planned to engage foreign agricultural firms to manage those properties.Those policies are believed to have uprooted 40,000 families from their subsistence landholdings in a country already flooded with millions of displaced people. Many dispossessed subsistence farmers migrated to already overcrowded cities with few employment opportunities, where a lack of infrastructure and public goods created a harsh life for the urban poor. This further bolstered support for the PCC and created a ready pool of recruits for the peasant self-defense forces in rural Colombia, many of which were the Liberal militias that refused to demobilize during the 1956 amnesty.Washington was further alarmed by those events at a time when the Domino Theory and conflict with the Soviet Union were top of mind for policymakers. Not only did Cuba fall to communism in 1959, but five years earlier the French suffered a decisive defeat at the hands of the communist Viet Minh in Vietnam. After that convincing loss, the French colony was partitioned into communist North Vietnam and US-backed South Vietnam. All of this unfolded after China's 1949 conversion to communism, when the US-backed nationalist government collapsed.By the late 1950s, rural Colombia was a tinderbox of lawlessness and violence which the government proved incapable of controlling. Those traits, coupled with persistent poverty and deep socioeconomic inequality, allowed the PCC to significantly broaden its support base in rural Colombia. After the party formed peasant self-defense militias to combat endemic rural violence and banditry, its appeal grew further. Those undertakings gave the PCC greater legitimacy among peasants, leading to the formation of peasant self-/defense forces and eventual control of several autonomous rural enclaves in southern and central Colombia.The serious challenges presented by those events were aggravated by Colombia’s ineffectual barracks-bound army, which for over a decade repeatedly proved incapable of securing the countryside. A brutal, highly corrupt police force, widely despised by the population, further complicated Lleras Camargo’s attempts to pacify rural regions. The widespread distrust, contempt, and hatred of Colombia’s public forces seriously undermined the government’s legitimacy, preventing the state from establishing a strong presence while bolstering the PCC’s appeal. The US military offers a solutionIn 1959, Lleras Camargo, frustrated by the inability to end rural disorder and Colombia’s inept and unruly security forces along with the rising popularity of the PCC, turned to the United States for security advice. Alarmed by Colombia’s instability and the swift rise of leftist movements across Latin America, including the rise of communist parties in Venezuela and Colombia, Eisenhower responded to Lleras Camargo by dispatching a special survey team to the Andean nation, which was placed under State Department supervision and composed of irregular warfare experts.The CIA-led team arrived in Colombia during October 1959. They went on to travel across the Andean country for two months, interviewing key politicians, labor leaders, bandit chiefs, and captured Liberal guerrilla fighters. A preliminary report was released in late January 1960, which emphasized that the existing extreme violence and disorder was linked to criminal behavior rather than insurrection. But there was considerable potential for political agitators, particularly communists, to turn it into subversive violence and an insurrection.The document identified that resolving chronic rural lawlessness, disorder and violence was essential to stabilizing Colombia and preventing a genuine communist insurgency from emerging. The cornerstone of the team’s recommended strategy was restoring a demoralized population’s faith in Bogota’s ability to maintain law and order after more than a decade of violence. This saw a focus on a broad “Hearts and Minds” approach to rebuild public confidence and reestablish nationwide support for the government. A countrywide public works program along with land reform and expanding the provision of social goods was at the core of that approach.Among the survey team’s main observations were that the source of most of the rural violence and disorder was perpetrated by large marauding groups of bandits. These illegal armed groups operated as quasi-guerrillas and possessed rudimentary intelligence networks which aided their raiding of communities. They engaged in a range of violent activities largely with an economic motive, rather than for ideological or political reasons. As a result, the survey team believed they could be swiftly eliminated through effective counterinsurgency operations led by US advisers.While improving basic healthcare, education and sanitation, particularly in rural Colombia, was crucial, there was also a significant military component. Key was the survey team’s recommendation that Colombia form a specialist, highly mobile army counterinsurgency unit, called the Lanceros, to combat illegal armed groups, including bandits and quasi-guerillas which were emerging at this time. The provision of US military advisers to supply training in counterinsurgency operations, civic action and covert psychological warfare was also advocated.The survey team also recommended forming government-trained and armed irregular civilian detachments to gather intelligence, provide security and support anti-guerrilla operations. These militias, which were the forerunners of the paramilitary blocs that emerged in the 1980s, were to be trained and equipped by Colombia’s armed forces. These irregular civilian units were to provide local security and intelligence while supporting the Lancero’s counter-insurgency mission. Some elements were to engage, where possible, with National Police assistance, in quasi-covert counterintelligence and civic action anti-guerrilla operations.The survey team’s recommendations mirrored Washington’s flawed strategy in the Republic of Vietnam. There, US military advisers along with domestic troops were fighting an increasingly bloody war against a communist insurgency. The formation of irregular civil defense units along with the relocation of Vietnamese peasants from vulnerable remote villages into government-protected strategic hamlets were central to US counter-insurgency tactics. Similar recommendations were implemented in Colombia based on the 1959 and 1962 survey team reports.Sowing the seeds of paramilitarismWhile Colombia’s irregular state-backed civilian militias were originally formed to minimize rural violence by protecting communities from the depredations of bandits and leftist guerrillas, they eventually emerged as a brutal paramilitary force. Indeed, comparisons are now drawn with the bloodthirsty militias recruited by Colombia’s Conservative Party, several of which were formed by the police, who terrorized the rural population during La Violencia. By the early 1960s, the deployment of irregular civilian militias was a crucial tactic used in cooperation with the army to suppress banditry and violence in rural Colombia.In February 1962, a second US survey team led by Special Warfare Center commander General William P. Yarborough visited Colombia. The general’s recommendations mirrored those of the 1959 survey team, including that the government undertake a dual strategy composed of civic action programs to win hearts and minds and military operations to regain control of the countryside. Yarborough also called for the creation of state-backed civilian militias who were to be tasked with operating alongside Colombia’s military to suppress illegal armed groups. He also called for clandestine paramilitary activities by trained civilians against communist agitators.Those recommendations further drew upon the US experience and strategy in South Vietnam, where Washington’s involvement continued to escalate with the Domino Theory top of mind. It was Lleras Camargo’s successor, Conservative President Guillermo León Valencia, who, after taking office on August 7, 1962, legally recognized the existence of civilian paramilitary militias. This occurred through Decree 3398 of 1965, which formalized the state’s role in recruiting, training, and deploying, alongside the military, irregular civilian self-defense groups.That decree formed part of a broader temporary declaration of a state of siege by Valencia during May 1965 in response to students across major Colombian cities violently protesting US intervention in the Dominican Republic. Those students, like later protestors, were viewed by Colombia’s ruling Conservative Party as communist agitators, lending further urgency to the state’s need to suppress any form of insurrection. By 1968, Liberal Party President Carlos Lleras Restrepo made Decree 3398 permanent through Law 48 enacted on 11 December 1968.Colombia’s Ministry of Defense and the armed forces, including the police, used Law 48 to justify assisting paramilitary forces participating in the Andean country’s civil war. Those measures, rooted in the Cold War politics and strategy of the time, expressly sought to suppress the PCC and communist insurrectionists. They laid the groundwork for the emergence of Colombia’s bloody far-right paramilitary groups and ultimately the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, known by the Spanish initials AUC, who committed brutal acts of violence against civilians as they waged a bloody war against various groups of leftist guerrillas.A dirty war beginsAlthough official records are scarce, sources indicate military commanders encouraged the formation of state-backed civilian militias in the early 1960s. While some gathered intelligence and provided security for rural communities, others conducted covert operations against guerrillas and their civilian supporters, displacing subsistence farmers in the process. The shift marked a notable change in government strategy, moving toward a long-term “dirty war” against an emerging communist insurgency. This laid the groundwork for decades of conflict where paramilitary structures were the most prolific killers, responsible for 45% of homicides between 1985 and 2018.By Mathew Smith for Oilprice.comMore Top Reads From Oilprice.comVenezuela’s Oil Exports Fall Even as U.S. Shipments Hit Seven-Year HighUkraine’s Drone Campaign Drives Russian Oil Refining to 24-Year LowDark Tanker Transits Surge at Bab el-Mandeb as Houthi Threat Persists