The Expansion of Paramilitarism in the Llanos Orientales

(Translated by Stephanie DiBello, a CSN Volunteer Translator. Edited by Teresa Welsh, a CSN

Volunteer Editor.)

Private militias have long roots in the history of Meta, Casanare and Guaviare, but the most

recent period of paramilitarism has been the bloodiest.

Paramilitarism in the Llanos Orientales began over 50 years ago with the demobilization of the

liberal guerrillas. The demobilization took place in 1953, five years after the guerrillas took arms

in the wake of the assassination of their beloved leader, liberal Jorge Eliécer Gaitán. Afterwards,

the government organized ex-guerrilla fighters and other citizens to carry out a plan to put an end

to the banditry still occurring in the vast plains in the east and incorporate that region into the

national economy.

With this plan the Army Battalion 21 Vargas, ideologically influenced by Colonel Gustavo

Sierra Ochoa's training manual, provided military training to rural inhabitants and proposed the

creation of an anti-guerrilla force that would attack groups of bandits concentrated within the

budding populations of San Martín, Granada, El Dorado, El Castillo, and Cubaral.

According to Colombia Nunca Más (Never Again), an initiative of 17 non-governmental human

rights and social justice organizations that seek to restore the memory of victims of political

violence, Colonel Sierra's manual read, "The commander of the Military Garrison will be the

leader of the camp who organizes the activities and the defense strategies. Abandoned land and

livestock in the region will need to be distributed. The region's inhabitants will be obligated to

comply with the military commander's operations to eliminate the bandits…"

As told to Verdadabierta.com, at that time the government integrated some ex-guerrilla fighters

from Monterrey (Casanare) into the army and the rural units of the DAS (Colombian intelligence

agency). "After we demobilized, the government gave us a spoon, cleaning supplies and safety

training, but when we arrived home they began to detain us. This made us return to the mountain.

When things started to clear up, we came back down and afterwards some of us joined the rural

DAS," said an ex-fighter who belonged to the liberal armed ranks of Manuel and Pablo Bautista

Tulio, brothers whose fighters mostly demobilized on September 15, 1953 in Monterrey.

Demobilization in the region did not stick, and just thirty years later a new counterinsurgency

plan appeared again in the vast plains.

The 'paras' of the 80s

At the start of the 80s two forces in the region came together to form the origins of modern

paramilitarism. On one side, businessmen came down to Llanos from eastern Boyacá in search

of profits from the emerald trade, traveling through a natural corridor that passes through the

municipalities of Paratebueno (Cudinamarca), Sabanalarga, Monterrey and Aguazul (Casanare).

These men imported their own private armies with men they were accustomed to. Every person

was used to preserve their profits in the lucrative emerald business.

On the other side were the drug traffickers, who had fought to the death for a piece of the

emerald business, became rich and inverted their immense profits in the Llanos. They bought

enormous ranches there and, just like the emerald businessmen, hired their own private armies to

protect their property.

This is how the legendary emerald magnate Víctor Carranza came to buy various swaths of land

in El Dorado and Cubural in the department of Meta. The drug trafficker Gonzalo Rodríguez

Gacha, aka 'The Mexican', member of the Medellín Cartel, bought up land in Vistahermosa in

the same department.

Héctor 'El Viejo' Buitrago, a native of the municipality Páez at the foothills of the plains, left

Boyacá for Casanare 30 years ago to raise livestock. Buitrago himself stated in an article in El

Tiempo that after he killed two guerrilla fighters that tried to extort money from him he left his

ranch 'La Sombra' "with seven men, revolvers and 12 gauge shotguns." Paramilitaries travelling

from the Magdalena Medio then trained them and organized them into an auto-defense group.

Brothers Víctor, José and Omar Feliciano and Jaime Matiz Benítez, other allies in the drug-

emerald amalgam, later arrived to join this irregular army.

The sale of huge ranches created friction with the adjudication of the land that the Colombian

Institute for Agrarian Reform (Incora) began handing over to members of the National

Association of Campesinos (Anuc) ten years earlier. Those agencies encouraged the creation of

a rapidly growing agrarian union, and in 1979 obtained legal status as the Independent Farmer's

Union of Meta (Spanish acronym SINTRAGRIM). Soon after, the union had more than 2,500

members from San Juan de Arama to Puerto López and from Vistahermosa to Casanare.

That farmworker organization was tied to the work of the Communist Party in the region, which

had been present there since the 50s when the liberal guerrillas splintered, with the most radical

wing forming the beginnings of the FARC in 1964. By the 80s these guerrillas already had 13

fronts, with the majority in that region, and its center of operations was in the Green House in La

Uribe, Meta, which was a camp buried in the jungle of the Duda river valley.

In addition, the National Liberation Army (Spanish acronym ELN) spread from the department

of Arauca where it had created its Domingo Laín Front in 1980 and entered into the northern part

of Meta.

Rodríguez Gacha is known as one of the first paramilitaries in the Plains. He was member of the

Ochoa Vásquez brothers' Medellín Cartel. After the M-19 guerrillas kidnapped Martha Nieves

Ochoa, the sister of Fabio, Jorge Luis and Juan David, in 1981, the Medellín Cartel created the

violent group Death to the Kidnappers, known as MAS for its acronym in Spanish. Soon after,

a chapter of this group called 'Los Masetos' began operating in the Eastern Plains. According

to testimonies and documents collected by Verdadabierta.com, the first violent actions of 'Los

Masetos' date back to 1982 and span from the Río Ariari to the north of Meta.

Military Ties

Much like the failed attempt to create an alliance between the military and civilians to combat

the bandits of the 1950s, 'Los Masetos' also had a connection with the Army in the 1980s.

In February 1983, in a public report about MAS, the then Attorney General Carlos Jiménez

Gómez placed Army major Carlos Vicente Meléndez Boada, second commander of the Guides

of Casanare group of Yopal's Seventh Brigade, as a member of the aforementioned paramilitary

group. Jiménez's accusation led to the criminal and disciplinary investigations of several

soldiers.

The Center for Investigation and Popular Education, CINEP, a group of Jesuits that specializes

in human rights violations, has compiled documents collected by the 17th Criminal Court of

Villavicencio. In the open preliminary investigation in November 1982 there were indications

that the Seventh Brigade, "especially its cavalry Guides of Casanare from Yopal, together with

its military base in Arauca, created its own paramilitary structure under the acronym MAS in

1982."

The commander of the group Guides of Casanare was the then colonel Luis Alfonso Plazas

Vega, the same man who was recently condemned for the forced disappearance of the survivors

of the military rescue at the Palace of Justice in Bogotá in 1985. According to testimonies retired

soldiers Isaías Barrera, Arnubio Agudelo and José Elías Ramírez made to the Office of the

Attorney General, the Guides of Casanare illegally sold weapons to paramilitaries in Saravena

and Villavicencio.

In 1984, the FARC signed a cessation of hostilities accord with the government of Belisario

Betancur. The political movement Patriotic Union (Spanish acronym UP) was born as a result

of this agreement, and in 1986 its candidates entered into the running for public office. They

were particularly successful in Meta where, alone or allied with other political entities, they won

several seats as mayors and city councilors.

The traditional political class in the region felt that the success of the UP threatened their power

and began to pressure the national government to militarize the zone, arguing that guerrillas and

drug traffickers were taking over. Among the traditional politicians that were protesting were

Leovigildo Gutiérrez, Jorge Ariel Infante, Alfonso Latorre Gómez y Hernando Durán Dussán.

The government gave into the petitions, militarized the area, and it became one of the regions in

the country that maintained a legal state of emergency that restricted liberties.

Soon after came the assassination attempts against leaders of the UP. According to the

Independent Agriculture Workers of Meta, Sintragrim, as found in the Cinep database Noche

y Niebla, the first to fall at the hands of paramilitary hitmen was Hernández Yate Bonilla,

UP councilor for Granada, murdered in 1985. Those murdered in 1986 were: Rafael Reyes

Malangón, UP councilor for Granada; Octavio Vargas Cuellar, House representative; and Pedro

Nel Jiménez, UP senator. In 1987 Alfonso Perdomo, UP councilor for Vista Hermosa; Arnulfo

Vargas Dimate, UP councilor for El Castillo and Gabriel Alfredo Briceño, UP councilor for

Villaviencio were shot to death.

In Meta, María del Carmen Trujillo's situation was emblematic of the systematic persecution

of the UP. In 1986 they killed her son in Granada. Four months later her other son Nelson was

murdered and the Army placed him in boots and planted a pistol and a grenade on his person. In

1988 unknown men pulled her husband Julio Cañon, then UP mayor of Vistahermosa, off of a

bus and killed him. On January 11, 1989 her son Vladimir disappeared in Meta.

She now lives in exile with the two children she has left. "They tortured me alive," she said in

the documentary El Baile Rojo (The Red Dance), which informs about the persecution of the UP

in Colombia.

And who unleashed such terror? Many of the accounts given by different witnesses before the

judiciary and the press allege that 'Los Masetos' were responsible. Rodríguez Gacha's men had

been persecuting everyone with suspected ties to the FARC. According to the accounts of several

researchers, these guerrillas had taken more than 300 kilos of coca paste from the powerful

gangster Rodríguez Gacha, stolen from a processing lab that he shared with Leonidas Vargas. In

retaliation 'The Mexican' declared war against the FARC, and his men were killing people left

and right in San Juan de Arama, Granada, Vistahermosa, and other towns in Meta.

Manuel de Jesús Pirabán, aka 'Jorge Pirata', described the perception that the auto-defense

groups had of the leftists in a 2009 interview with VerdadAbierta.com: "The UP were guerrillas

that became a political party, but they did not stop being guerrillas. The order was to exterminate

all those from the UP that had ties with guerrilla groups". 'Pirata' had arrived in the Plains in

1989, in the midst of the dirty war against the UP.

In December 1987 general Harold Bedoya Pizarro arrived in Villaviciencio as the commander

of the Army's Seventh Brigade. Bedoya Pizarro was trained at the School of the Americas and

had extensive experience in counterinsurgency combat. According to news reports from that

time, from the start Bedoya Pizarro waged verbal war with the communist leaders and the UP,

accusing them of being the political wing of the guerrilla.

And meanwhile, the assassinations of political and agrarian leaders of Meta were not abated

under his command. To the contrary, the situation worsened. In 1989 alone 31 members of the

UP were assassinated, including Luis Eduardo Yaya Cristancho, the 52 year-old president of

the Union Workers' Federation of Meta (Spanish acronym: FESTRAM) and ex deputy of the

Assembly of Meta for the UP.

During this time extremist groups from the right also appeared, and although they used different

names many attributed them to local variations of 'Los Masetos'. According to the local

periodical, Oriente, in August 1986 the assassination of Reyes Malagón, the UP councilor for

Granada, was perpetrated by the group 'Los Verdaderos Patriotas' (The True Patriots) who were

responsible for other crimes committed against the UP. No one knew about this armed group

until the news outlet circulated a report revealing its origin: "We are herdsmen and farmers

from Ariari and Arauca, displaced by the FARC…We are not paramilitaries. Our businesses in

Guaviare have been ruined by the guerrilla and we promised to exterminate the FARC and the

Communist Party to put an end to their expansion which affects all of the plainsmen".

While the presence of 'The True Patriots' was felt throughout Granada, the group 'Los

Aguijones' (The Stingers) circulated a black list throughout Ariari threatening assassination to

those who did not leave the region.

The UP militants found themselves in a difficult situation but their denunciations were

unsuccessful. Jorge González Acosta, then UP parliamentarian, angrily stated, "they are

assassins paid by the military commanders and local politicians of the Plains to kill all of the

popular leaders in the rural areas. The UP and leftist leaders aren't the only ones, they are

targeting politicians from all parties".

After a debate in Congress over the paramilitary presence in Meta, politician and analyst Hugo

Velásquez Jaramillo wrote the following in the periodical Oriente in July 1987:

"The explanation up to now has been that those groups are a replica of the guerrilla. In a way

we could affirm that some of the procedural mistakes the guerrillas made were a catalyst for

the multiplication of these auto-defense cooperatives. And some of these political leaders show

sympathy for that cause, especially the liberals…in Meta, for example, the obliging attitude of

representative Germán Hernández Aguilera, close ally to governor Ariel Infante, was reckless

and those who employed this type of armed solution instead of politically addressing the problem

believe that the problem lies in the other, which is what fuels confrontation."

In light of the political analyst's affirmations, Durán Dussán explained the situation in the

following terms: "Eastern Colombia finds itself in the hands of the FARC, its political wing

Patriotic Union, and other forces that are capable of receiving international recognition of

belligerent status and making the region sovereign".

But while the temperature rose and fell within the political debate, the extermination of the

UP continued without stopping. In the following decade of the 90s the most recent wave of

paramilitarism came while the ashes of UP members were still red hot.

The FARC were accused of abandoning the UP and taking advantage of the extermination to

justify new offensives. In the Llanos, where they already had 13 fronts, they initiated a guerrilla

offensive where they took over towns, blew up 'toll roads', robbed businesses and banks and

extorted money from herdsmen and farmers.

The guerrillas also looked for ways to become more business-minded in order to combat the rich

and powerful alliance between the paramilitaries and drug traffickers that almost drove them out

of the Llanos. In a departure from their method in the 80s of simply taxing the production of the

coca leaf, in the 90s the guerrilla began to manage cook houses where the paste was processed,

charge to protect transportation routes, and they even began to tax the export of their own cargo.

It was clear that, as a farmer at the time reported to a documentary filmmaker, "Whoever

controls the coca wins the war"..

The New 'Paras'

As mentioned, Héctor Buitrago came from Boyacá to Casanare and had founded his own small

auto-defense group and later allied himself with 'The Mexican.' In the 90s he became a powerful

landowner and the head of the Campesina Auto-Defense Group of Casanare (Spanish acronym

ACC). This group was the local chapter of the Castaño brothers' auto-defense group, which

began in 1994, and included in its ranks José Baldomero Linares, aka 'Guillermo Torres', from

the auto-defense group of Vichada, Manuel de Jesús Pirabán, aka 'Pirata', and Pedro Oliverio

Guerrero, aka 'Cuchillo'.

According to a report from the Vice President's Human Rights Observatory, the ACC was

working with Los Carranceros, the men that protected Víctor Carranza's properties. As they

went buying large stretches of land they extended their reach from Meta to Paz de Ariporo and

Hato Corozal in Casanare. The Observatory reports that according to witnesses from the zone

they acquired these lands at giveaway prices and took them forcefully.

The paramilitary groups of Víctor Feliciano and Jaime Matiz were present in Monterrery, in the

south of Casanare. Despite the fact that these organizations respected their borders, in the end

they found themselves in open confrontation.

Castaño's Assault

On July 12, 1997, two planes, a Douglas DC-3 and an Antonov 32, landed at airport Jorge

Enrique González in San José del Guaviare, after a trouble-free flight departing from Urabá in

Antioquia.

Its passengers, 87 paramilitaries trained on the Castaño brothers' land, picked up their

equipment, guns, supplies and uniforms, like any other traveller. Although the ex-paramilitary

boss Elkin Casarrubia, aka 'El Cura', stated that, "the police and army were present, one could

see them from the airplane", they passed by the anti-narcotics agents and the soldiers without

problems.

The group split up in San José – some got into a truck while the rest got on speed boats. The final

destination: Mapiripán, a small town lost in the borders between Meta and Guaviare. Between

July 15 and 20, the paramilitaries murdered, disappeared, tortured and plundered the area.

Although the exact number of those murdered remains unknown, it is believed around 60 people

were killed.

While the auto-defense groups were killing, the habitants desperately called the Army. Auxiliary

forces arrived late. When the first troops arrived on the scene, 'El Cura' said that an army captain

called him and said they were less than 10 kilometers away so it would be best if they left. "We

had established radio communication and everything was coordinated with the Army", said the

ex-paramilitary soldier.

The Mapiripán massacre was a sign of change in the war. It was the first step towards national

expansion by the Castaño brothers and their United Auto-Defences of Colombia (AUC), which

had been created just four months earlier.

The AUC offensive in the Llanos sought to consolidate its profits off of livestock, extort money

from petroleum production and control the cocaine laboratories that dotted the region up to

Guaviare. It would not have been possible without the assistance of local 'paras', the Convivir

and the complicity of some businessman, soldiers and local politicians.

In Mapiripán, the men of the Buitrago family and the Convivir guided them. A few days

afterwards, after a combat, the injured men from Urabá were picked up by a white airplane

that 'El Cura' identified as 'La Rebeca.' According to 'El Cura' in his testimony as part of the

Justice and Peace process, the airplane belonged to Víctor Carranza. An alliance with 'Jorge

Pirata' was forged on May 4, 1998 with the massacre of Caño Jabón, where more than 20 rural

inhabitants were murdered. And in July of that same year, according to the confession of 'El

Cura', paramilitaries murdered 5 rural inhabitants in the town of La Picota and then fled to a

hideaway on a ranch named Brasil in Puerto Gaitán, Meta, which was also owned by Carranza.

A Setback and the Arrival of Arroyave

One event broke up the ACC: the massacre of 11 members of a judicial commission on

November 3, 1997 in San Carlos de Guaroa, Meta, carried out on the order of Héctor Buitrago

and Jaime Matiz. Buitrago was swiftly captured and the Castaño's ACCU disowned him and

ordered the execution of Matíz.

Buitrago's son Héctor, better known by his alias 'Martín Llanos', and Nelson Orlando

Buitrago, aka 'Caballo', then became the leaders of the ACC. The Castaño brothers found

themselves a new ally: Miguel Arroyave, aka 'Arcángel.' He was their townsman from Amalfi

and a drug trafficker with expertise in obtaining the chemical compounds needed to process

cocaine. According to various sources, they would sell the chemicals as if they owned a chain

supermarket or restaurant, making their product a brand name sold by Bloque Centauros in the

Llanos region controlled by the United Auto-defenses of Colombia. It is said that Arroyave had

to pay seven million dollars for the permission to sell in their territory.

Daniel Rendón, aka 'Don Mario', arrived at the same time as Arroyave and was also a drug

trafficker from Amalfi. They wanted to control drug trafficking in the Llanos, extort money from

millionaires, and snatch control of coca cultivation and processing laboratories in Guaviare from

the FARC.

Arroyave's attack on the economy en Llanos was systematic: for every case of beer they

received 5,000 pesos; between 30 and 50 pesos per gallon of gasoline; 20,000 pesos for each

hectare of rice or palm; 20,000 pesos for each cow; and created 'toll roads' in Granada, San Juan,

Mesetas, Lejanía, Puerto Rico, Puerto Lleras, Mapiripán and Puerto Concordia.

And there were few political positions that they had not touched: governors, mayors, and

councilmen had accepted pacts, money or were intimidated. The list of those convicted,

investigated or implicated is long. Almost all of the governors or candidates for the governorship

were questioned for their proximity to this paramilitary block, including Edilberto Castro, Eusser

Rondón, Nebio Echeverry, José Alberto Pérez, Miguel Ángel Pérez, Óscar de Jesús López

Cadavid and William Perez Esquivel.

The growth of the Bloque Centauros became apparent in 2001 when they entered northern

Casanare and were able to run the guerrilla out of Paz de Ariporo, Aguazul, Nunchía and

Támara. But not only did they attack the guerrilla, they extorted money from landowners and

killed political and community leaders. The Centauros also fought with the ACC of 'Martín

Llanos' in a battle that left an astronomical amount of deaths, the toll of which the judicial

department puts at 1,000 youngsters.

Arroyave won that battle and took power over almost all of Meta. But his reign did not last long.

Because he resisted demobilizing with the other members of the auto-defense groups during

the negotiations with Uribe to lay down their arms, Arroyave was murdered by his own men

on September 19, 2004 in Casibare, Puerto Lleras, Meta, almost certainly at the orders of the

Castaño brothers.

The Bloque Centauros then split into three factions: one at the command of 'Pirata,' the second

at the command of 'Cuchillo' and the third with the largest amount of soldiers was led by

alias 'Mauricio,'

In September 2005, 1,135 men from Centauros demobilized in the town of Tilodirán, a half hour

from Yopal. 'Martín Llanos' went to Santa Fe de Ralito as the representative of the auto-defense

groups of the Llano, but he never demobilized. 'Pirata' is in prison as a result of the Justice and

Peace process. 'Cuchillo' continued living the criminal life until 2010 when he was brought

down by a police operation near Mapiripán, Meta.

Today 95 ex-combatants, 18 middle ranking leaders and two ex-commanders are waiting to be

included in the Justice and Peace Law so that they can contribute to the clarification of around

3,000 homicides.

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