Noticiero 90 Minutos

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Homicide in Medellín has fallen 77% over the last three years, according to figures from city authorities. In 2002 there were 3,450 murders. This year there have been 741 (to December 4th).

In 1991, when Pablo Escobar was still at large, there were 6,349 killings (in a city of roughly 2 million people) making Medellín the most violent city on earth.

It is hard to find anyone who doesn’t say that life in the city has improved dramatically. Taxi drivers, demobilized paramilitaries, fruit-sellers and business men all tell the same story. People are not as afraid to go out at night, and the social life of the city has revived. Everyone agrees that the fear of crime has abated.

“The city has overcome many of the problems left over from the drug cartels, such as the culture of contract killings,” Jairo Herran Vargas, who heads the Personería de Medellín, the City’s human rights watch dog, told the Daily Journal. “The forces of the state have regained territory which was previously controlled by armed groups.”

In 2002 there were two huge military assaults on guerrilla strongholds in the city - Operation Orion and Operation Mariscal- in which the “urban militias” of the FARC and the ELN were driven out of the area known as Comuna 13. This removed one source of extortion, kidnapping and murder, Herran Vargas said. And the demobilization of Medellín’s paramilitary blocs, in November 2003, removed another source of violence, he added.

But many people believe that the level of violence in the city has fallen simply because one group –the paramilitaries of “Don Berna”- won the war, and now control most of the city. Because of this, most of the gang violence has petered out, at least for the time being. Don Berna has been in jail since May, and faces a US extradition order for drug trafficking, but he continues to control much of Medellín despite, in theory, having demobilized.

According to Herran Vargas, “The groups commanded by Don Berna [AUC Blocs Cacique Nutibara and Heroes of Granada] succeeded in taking over spaces that had been occupied by other groups and “redirectioning” them, after they had been weakened by the attack on Comuna 13.”

Fabio Orlando Aceuedo was the “political commander” of Don Berna’s organization, and now works with the Democracy Corporation, which is formed of former paramilitaries from Cacique Nutibara and Heroes of Granada. He told the Daily Journal, “Cacique Nutibara gave order to the crime gangs. It created a positive impact in the gangs, they were no longer independent. It regulated them. This is an important aspect of the fall in violence.”

“We were the first bloc to demobilize, because of an initiative by our maximum commander Adolfo Paz [another alias of Don Berna]. He gave the order to lower the intensity of the conflict. We have to be more social, more political than military.”

The idea is that these two Blocs have retained much of their hierarchy, but are now involved in social work of various kinds via the Democracy Corporation. “We went ahead with the peace process, but without breaking the structures. Other blocs disintegrated, but we kept our organization intact. We retained our presence. We are social coordinators… before our commanders were political and military, now they are social.”

Amnesty International described the government’s demobilization strategy as a “dangerous sham”.

“In Medellín, paramilitaries continue to operate as a military force… However, rather than operating in large, heavily-armed and uniformed groups as they did in the past, they are now increasingly cloaking their activities by posing as members of private security firms or by acting as informants for the security forces.”

The Personería de Medellín’s annual human rights report came out last week: “One can observe a worrying situation of illegal control in areas that were formerly under the control of paramilitary groups. But now control is exerted in a different way, without massacres or a high number of homicides, even though they maintain authoritarian and violent means of social control…”

A local journalist, who asked not to be named, said that free speech is under threat in the city. “Two years ago you could go into slum neighbourhoods in the middle of a gun fight and people would still talk to you, even in the middle of a tragedy. Today it is different. The demobilized groups have control. They are always watching whom you talk to, and if people are critical they will disappear… They have the power to paralyse the city [when President Uribe ordered the arrest of Don Berna all the buses stopped, apparently due to paramilitary threats] and order people to go on fake demonstrations.”

Gustavo Villegas is director of the Peace and Reconciliation programme in the city, which aims to “re-insert” 2,885 former paramilitaries back into civilian life. They are provided education courses, and psychological help if they need it. Only 80 are being investigated for crimes committed since demobilization, and 33 or 34 have been murdered. Villegas denied that paramilitary control has consolidated. “False- people are denouncing abuses more that they used to. They denounce the police, the demobilized paramilitaries, the government…. I don’t say that there isn’t intimidation, only that every day there is less… since the demobilization new armed groups haven’t entered these areas- only the state has.”

He said that the armed strike lasted two hours, and ended when demobilized AUC commanders made it clear that they didn’t support it. “Strikes went on for 8 days in the time of Pablo Escobar.”

Amnesty lists the three phases of paramilitary control as incursion, consolidation and legitimization. In the legitimization phase: “The paramilitaries create foundations and cooperatives to promote productive projects, engage in community work especially in poor neighbourhoods, and seek to control local regional and national electoral and political processes. Human rights violations decline as opposition to the paramilitary strategy has been neutralized… the paramilitaries no longer need to maintain a large-scale overt military presence in areas over which they and the security forces have control. Instead, paramilitaries remain “in the shadows” in case of any future attack by guerrilla forces, although threats against and killings and disappearances of civilian opponents continue.”

Demobilized paramilitaries in Medellín with certificates in Peace Studies. Catalina Quintero (second from left) is their psychologist.

(For The Daily Journal)