Colombia: the FARC returns to war?

His administration's ties to the United Self-Defence Forces of Colombia (AUC), a right-wing paramilitary coalition with the primary goal of fighting against the leftist insurgency groups in Colombia and a designated terrorist group by the U.S. government as of 2001. This group is responsible for the largest number of human rights abuses in the conflict, including kidnapping, extortion, murder, and rape, even when considering the abuses committed by FARC and ELN.

In the largest controversy to grip the Uribe administration and known as the 'false positives' scandal, up to 5,000 civilians were assassinated by the military and dressed up as guerrillas in order for their killers to claim bonuses from the government. Adding to this nefarious record, Silva Ortega notes that eventually Uribe's own brother and several close relatives were incarcerated on charges for supporting paramilitaries.

In 2009 though, Uribe ensured that his former defence minster Juan Manuel Santos was endorsed as a presidential candidate. While Santos as head of state (2010-2018), with the support of Cuba and Venezuela, achieved a peace deal with the FARC, he concurrently, according to one report, 'continued Uribe's policy of denying the continuation of paramilitarism in spite of increasing evidence elements within the military and the political establishment continued working with the illegal armed groups.'

In 2013, the National Centre of Historical Memory published one of the most extensive studies into the conflict in Colombia which it claimed cost the lives of 220,000 people since 1958. With over 5.7 million Colombians displaced, the report documented 1,982 massacres between 1980 and 2012 attributing 1,166 to paramilitaries, 343 to the rebels and 295 to government security forces and unknown groups.

Giving strong backing to the Colombian State, the United States has had a massive impact on the conflict, as Washington sent Bogota close to US$10 billion in aid to fight the rebels since 2000 under the Clinton administration.

Orders to kill

Fast forward to today and another one of Uribe's political protégés (Iván Duque Márquez) sits in the presidential office while Colombia, as noted by journalist Antony Loewenstein in his recent book Pills, Power, and Smoke: Inside the Bloody War on Drugs, is the world's largest supplier of cocaine following a 31 per cent increase in cocaine production since 2018.

Uribe himself has recently been ordered to stand trial in October on charges he tampered with a witness who claimed he formed a death squad in the 1990s. While only about 1,500 to 2,000 FARC rebels failed to demobilize under the 2016 Peace accord, and Colombia has not seen major fighting between the military and the rebels since, The New York Times revealed in May this year that the Colombian military has been ordered to escalate the number of its military operations. Titled 'Colombia Army's new kill orders send chills down ranks', the article notes that the military's new strategy looks rather similar to Uribe's 'false positives' scandal.

On the ground, Jonathan Levi – co-director of the García Márquez Fellowship in Cartagena – and Marta Orrantia – a Colombian lecturer at the National University of Colombia – recently visited the Catatumbo region in north-eastern Colombia where numerous ex-guerrillas and social leaders have been murdered. According to them, the Santos government claimed that the political murders taking place throughout the country were 'crimes of passion and jealousy' while Iván Duque blames the ELN left-wing guerrillas. The problem with this version of events, note Levi and Orrantia, is that the killings taking place are in 'regions overrun by paramilitary splinter groups.' The ELN has virtually zero presence.