The Twilight of the Colombian Paramilitary

This chapter considers the multiple efforts at engaging three armed groups in Colombia: the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia [FARC]), the National Liberation Army (Ejercito Liberacion Nacional [ELN]), and the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia [AUC]). I address the various demands for territorial and political control put forth by each of the two key rebel armed groups — the FARC and the ELN — as well as the efforts to either address those demands or simply recognize the security situation on the ground, and to reach cease-fires and engage in demobilization. This engagement appears to have failed, for various reasons, including the possibility that the incentives offered are not of significant interest to groups also engaged in the lucrative narcotics industry, or fearful of the heavy presence of the United States through Plan Colombia. Based on my fieldwork, carried out in summer 2006, I address the key concerns and objections of each armed group. Finally, although the umbrella group of right-wing paramilitaries, the AUC, has distinct historical origins and relations with the government, I address the demobilization of the AUC undertaken with the government’s guarantee of amnesty and a ‘concentration’ zone.

Nationalism, racism, violence, and militarism are incarnate in football itself, as indicated through an engagement with the history and theory of the sport. This chapter considers this context to question the identity of the state and who holds a monopoly on legitimate violence, through a case study of Colombia. It focuses on the 1980s and 1990s, an era dominated by putatively progressive guerrilla movements (the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia, or FARC), putatively unofficial right-wing paramilitares (the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia, or AUC), and putatively populist narcotraficantes/Mafiosi. One aspect was not entirely shared in their tripartite struggle against each other and the state over who could terrorize the population most—the narcos' involvement in football. For while state militarism occupies an important role in the mental map of Colombians, especially since US intervention from Bill Clinton to Barack Obama via "Plan Colombia", it has been largely absent from football, though institutional violence and its symbolism have not.

Las víctimas han adquirido una legitimidad social y política inédita en el mundo contemporáneo. A la luz de dicho fenómeno y los debates que ha generado en las ciencias sociales y humanas, en este artículo analizamos cómo se construye la identidad de víctima en Bojayá, un municipio del litoral pacífico colombiano donde fueron masacradas más de ochenta personas en 2002 durante un combate entre las FARC-EP (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia-Ejército del Pueblo) y las AUC (Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia). Apoyados en entrevistas y datos de campo, argumentamos que el trauma social de la masacre y el sufrimiento son el motor de la agencia política de las víctimas y el medio que les permite devenir sujetos políticos. A partir de conceptos del psicoanálisis lacaniano, concluimos que la nominación de víctima en Bojayá posibilita que sus habitantes —antes invisibilizados— existan para el Otro de la nación y del escenario internacional.

This work investigates how personalised Music Emotion Recognition (MER) systems may lead to sensitive profiling when applied to musically induced emotions in politically charged contexts. We focus on traditional Colombian music with explicit political content, including (1) vallenatos and social songs aligned with the left-wing guerrilla Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC), and (2) corridos linked to sympathisers of the right-wing paramilitary group Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (AUC). Using data from 49 participants with diverse political leanings, we train personalised machine learning models to predict induced emotional responses – particularly negative emotions. Our findings reveal that political identity plays a significant role in shaping emotional experiences of music with explicit political content, and that emotion recognition models can capture this variation to a certain extent. These results raise critical concerns about the potential misuse of emotion recognition technologies. What is often framed as a tool for wellbeing and emotional regulation could, in politically sensitive contexts, be repurposed for user profiling. This work highlights the ethical risks of deploying AI-driven emotion analysis without safeguards, particularly among populations that are politically or socially vulnerable. We argue that subjective emotional responses may constitute sensitive personal data, and that failing to account for their sociopolitical context could amplify harm and exclusion.Supplementary InformationThe online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1140/epjds/s13688-025-00595-1.

El primer intento de justicia transicional en Colombia se materializó con la Ley de Justicia y Paz (Ley 975 de 2005), en virtud del Acuerdo de Ralito entre las Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia y el gobierno colombiano. Posteriormente, con la expedición de la Ley 1592 de 2012, se generó la posibilidad de que los miembros que no cumplieran las condiciones establecidas en la Ley de Justicia y Paz o que no cumplieran con los compromisos adquiridos al someterse a dicha legislación, pudieran ser excluidos de ella y continuar siendo investigados y juzgados en la jurisdicción ordinaria. Como resultado del Acuerdo de Paz entre las Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia y el gobierno colombiano, nació la Jurisdicción Especial para la Paz, mediante la cual se juzgarán los delitos cometidos durante el conflicto armado. El presente artículo pretende evaluar la posibilidad que tienen los excombatientes de grupos paramilitares que, habiéndose postulado a la Ley de Justicia y Paz y que hayan sido excluidos por no cumplir con algunos de los requisitos o por no haber cumplido con sus compromisos, puedan someterse a la Jurisdicción Especial para la Paz. Lo anterior se realiza a partir de la construcción de escenarios sobre casos icónicos de ex paramilitares excluidos de la Ley de Justicia y Paz.

The FARC (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia or Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) transformed from a traditional guerrilla group into a full-fledged insurgency because of its ability to effectively convert the proceeds derived from illegal narcotic trafficking into operational funds. Those financial capabilities allowed the FARC to challenge government authority in large swathes of the Colombian state. The FARC moved into the drug trade, initially controlling production territory and subsequently engaging in trafficking, which allowed the organization to increase its war-fighting capabilities. This paper only scratches the surface of the mechanism by which the FARC utilized its coca revenue in order to fund its community reinvestment programs, engage in large scale military buildup, and buy political support throughout the region. The exploration of the financial side of the FARC adds to our understanding of how insurgencies become successful. Based on open source information, Threat Finance and financial investigative techniques are underutilized in foreign policy, law enforcement, and intelligence. The critical role played by financing in the rise of the FARC suggests that Threat Finance efforts can be most effective when used to track terrorist and criminal networks. American law enforcement and intelligence agencies should be given bigger budgets and tasked earlier to shut down or disrupt financial networks of foreign insurgencies, such as the FARC.

Despite efforts employed by the Colombian state to demobilize paramilitary groups and to tackle organized crime structures since 2003, Colombia today remains characterized by a repressive apparatus of social control by paramilitary successor groups in certain sectors of the population. Drawing on information from Colombia’s second-largest city – Medellín – and various rural areas of the Department of Antioquia, this work offers a characterization of the legacies of the paramilitary phenomenon, and its continuities and transformations in relation to one particular paramilitary confederation, the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (AUC). In many regions, the AUC gained territorial, economic, and social control by managing the illegal drug economy and perpetrating political violence against leftist parties and social organizations. Paramilitaries have thus exerted what we refer to as status quo-oriented violence. As we illustrate for the case of Medellín, mechanisms of territorial, economic, and social control, as well as the particular manifestations of violence related to these mechanisms, have been transferred to paramilitary successor groups. The findings are mainly based on the outcomes of qualitative field research carried out in Medellín in mid-2015. Keywords: Medellín, Department of Antioquia, social, economic, and territorial control, paramilitary successor groups, organized crime, Colombia. Resumen: Paramilitarismo en un contexto post-desmovilización? Perspectivas desde el Departamento de Antioquia en ColombiaA pesar de los esfuerzos desplegados desde el año 2003 por el Estado colombiano para desmovilizar a los grupos paramilitares y hacer frente a las estructuras de crimen organizado, la Colombia de hoy sigue estando caracterizada por la existencia de un aparato represivo de control social ejercido por los grupos sucesores del paramilitarismo sobre ciertos sectores de la población. Partiendo de fuentes informativas procedentes de la segunda ciudad más grande de Colombia – Medellín – y de algunas zonas rurales del Departamento de Antioquia, este trabajo ofrece una caracterización de los legados del fenómeno paramilitar, sus continuidades y transformaciones en relación a una confederación paramilitar en particular, las Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (AUC). En muchas regiones del país, las AUC lograron establecer un control territorial, económico y social por medio de la gestión de la economía ilegal del narcotráfico y la perpetración de una violencia política contra partidos de izquierda y organizaciones sociales. Así, los paramilitares ejercieron lo que nosotros denominamos una violencia orientada al mantenimiento del status quo. Tal como ilustramos para el caso de la ciudad de Medellín, tales mecanismos de control territorial, económico y social, así como sus manifestaciones particulares de violencia inherentes a dichos dispositivos, han sido transferidos a los grupos sucesores del paramilitarismo. Los hallazgos de este estudio se basan principalmente en los resultados de una investigación de campo de carácter cualitativo llevada a cabo en Medellín a mediados del año 2015. Palabras clave: Medellín, Departamento de Antioquia, control territorial, económico y social, grupos sucesores del paramilitarismo, crimen organizado, Colombia.

With the Peace Agreement between Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC), Colombia promised healthcare to 13,000 ‘reincorporating’ FARC ex-combatants. Shortages of healthcare workers in reincorporation camps means this promise is in danger of going unfulfilled. More information is needed to determine incentives, disincentives, and recruitment of healthcare providers to address this shortage. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with healthcare providers across FARC reincorporation camps, and a multidisciplinary team conducted analysis in NVivo12 using a team-based coding method. Twenty-four healthcare professionals from 15 camps participated, of which 75% were female. Incentives to work with FARC included improved clinical skills, professional advancement, increased comfort with FARC, and contributing to the peace process. Disincentives included poor living conditions, lack of support, biases, familial commitments, and sacrificing career opportunities. Three-fourths of the sample recommended working with FARC, and 92% reported a shortage of healthcare workers. Recruitment strategies included improved resources and specialised career development for healthcare workers, facilitating interactions between FARC and healthcare professionals outside clinical scenarios, and integrating medicine for vulnerable populations into health education. This study shows the impact that working with FARC ex-combatants can have on healthcare providers and tangible suggestions for increasing provider participation to address the healthcare worker shortage.

The kidnapping of the presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt in February 2002 by the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC) and the numerous attempts to free her, by force or through negotiations, have made the headlines. Three US citizens, who are US Defense Department contractors, were also caught by FARC after their plane came down during a surveillance mission in February 2003. Hope was on the rise again as to their freedom when the re-elected President of Colombia, Alvaro Uribe, announced in 2006 he would resume talks for prisoners/hostages exchanges. However, the negotiations took an abrupt end after a bombing in Bogota in October 2006.2 In 2007 a hostage escaped after spending nine years held by the movement. More recently, President Chavez tried to act as an intermediary to have all FARC’s prisoners released. However, it seems today that the Uribe government seems less inclined to engage in peace talks and seems ready to interfere violently to free the other hostages, despise the hostages’ families’ fears of a bloodbath.3 The question remains as to how a peaceful solution can be found to the hostage crisis, knowing that it is diffi cult for a government to negotiate with a group that mixes violence and politics in order to rise to power. FARC has demonstrated in the past it cannot be trusted when it is given the opportunity to act as a political actor during negotiations and peace talks, as it has abused the situation. The successive Colombian governments have chosen a politics of repression of the movement that has also crushed all hopes of transformation of FARC into a political machine. What, therefore, are the prospects for peace in Colombia and how are they linked to FARC’s insertion in political life?

This book recounts the history of the last half century in Colombia, focusing on the violent contention between the Colombian state, Marxist-inspired guerrillas, and right-wing paramilitary forces. Author Marco Palacios, a Colombian historian now based at the Colegio de México, is at pains to place his account against the background of US Cold War and terrorist concerns as well as the dynamics of the illegal drug trade, both of which color every aspect of the events he chronicles.Most of the information in the book is not new, drawn as it is from Colombia's major newspapers and news magazines as well as reading in an increasingly rich and sophisticated secondary literature on the period. Palacios is content, as he puts it, to “revise, correct, amplify, and restate” information and interpretations previously advanced in his own work and that of others (p. 20). In fact, his interpretations of the salient issues of the period — from the meanings of La Violencia (the civil commotion of the mid-twentieth century that pitted Liberals against Conservatives and resulted in 1958 in the power-sharing arrangement, the Frente Nacional, which marks the beginning of Palacios's study) to the ebb and flow of the different guerrilla groups' military strength over the decades and to the fate of efforts at negotiated peace between the armed contenders — follow mainstream understandings widely shared by specialists in the field of Colombian studies.Why then write and publish a book like this? Palacios himself seems somewhat at a loss to answer that question (pp. 20–21), but he concludes that his bird's-eye historical synthesis is meaningful. He is quick to point out that his interpretation is one of many possible ones and that it does not offer prescriptions for a future political settlement.Be that as it may, not all the information and analysis in the book is commonplace. There is an attempt to statistically analyze police records, for example, and although many of these labor-intensive exercises yield banal conclusions, such as the fact that most of the violence is “rural” (table 4.4, p. 175) or that it is largely perpetrated by the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (figure 4.1, p. 179), there is important statistical information in the book, most notably a comparison of the degree of land concentration in 1964 and 2009 (appendix 2, p. 196). That data reveals a radical transformation of land tenure in the last half century, an agrarian counterreform of unprecedented proportions. Tens of thousands of small and medium-sized farmers, displaced by the violent contention between government forces, guerrilla groups, and paramilitary forces in rural areas, have been dispossessed by large landowners, many of them bankrolled by drug money.Palacios rightly emphasizes the growing influence of large landowners (latifundistas) in Colombian politics and society, but he curiously ignores the ideological and political legacies of the remarkable diffusion of property ownership, especially in the all-important coffee zones, during the middle decades of the twentieth century. That largely market-induced agrarian reform, I have argued elsewhere, sets Colombian history off from that of its Andean neighbors and of Latin American nations generally, and it helps to explain many of the exceptional features of Colombian history during the last half century. These include the remarkable staying power of Colombia's traditional, clientelistic two-party political system and the poor showing of third parties of both the Left and the Right; the weakness of labor and the Left, and the paradox of the longevity of an armed Left unable to win widespread political and ideological support and consequently relying on kidnapping, extortion, and drug trafficking to support itself; and the degree of Colombian acquiescence to neoliberal economic reform and the appeal of right-wing, US-allied governments like that of Álvaro Uribe's eight-year presidency, which ends the period covered by Palacios's book.A useful feature of Palacios's book is its bibliography of secondary works. But even here there are glaring omissions. These include the classic collection on La Violencia edited by Gonzalo Sánchez and Ricardo Peñaranda and the compelling critique by ex-Communist Alvaro Delgado of the Colombian Communist Party's strategy of pursuing, simultaneously, electoral and armed strategies of achieving power, a policy that proved disastrous for the peaceful Colombian Left and for labor leaders in particular.On page 79 (footnote 12), the author announces that he is at work on a study dealing with the first decade of Colombia's second most important guerrilla group, the Ejército de Liberación Nacional. Hopefully, that monograph will do more than the present survey to advance our understanding of violence in Colombia.

Charles W. Bergquist (1942–2020)

Armed Conflict and Human Rights in Colombia

Several insurgent groups have financed their arms procurement through drug trafficking, explaining in part the long duration of conflicts in drug producing countries. Incomes generated from this trade do not however automatically translate into improved military capabilities, since access to military-grade weapons typically requires tacit or active state support. Hence, two groups with similar types of funding can still have access to very different types of armaments, impacting their operational capability. This paper compares the arms procurement of the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC) and the United Wa State Army (UWSA) in Myanmar. Both insurgent groups have procured arms through networks and with finances from the drug trade. The UWSA's 20,000-strong force and significant armaments, including Man-portable air defense systems (MANPADS) believed to be provided by China, is largely supported by these illicit activities and the networks they provide. FARC has ample access to small arms, the acquisition of which has been financed by taxation of the drug trade. In spite of significant incomes, FARC however until very recently lacked access to MANPADS, a fact which has significantly hampered its ability to withstand the Colombian counterinsurgency campaign, specifically targeted aerial assaults. The exploratory comparisons drawn in this paper offer insights into how insurgent groups can pass a crucial threshold of arms procurement, funded by illicit activities, that renders their dissolution far more difficult, while also highlighting the continued importance of state support in explaining rebel group resilience.

The participation of children in war doesn’t begin from modern times, and it could be traced back from the civilization of ancient Egypt, ancient Greece and the Bible. Any country, which is facing a long-timed war, its troops is going to be exhausted, and during that time it will often recruit children to get into the battlefield. According to interpretation of child soldiers of UNICEF and the Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers, children who are under the age of 18, participate in any regular or irregular armed groups, including combatants, bombers of mines, baits, logistics, porters, sentries, spies, messengers, cooks, laborers and some of them are forced into the marriage with the commander or to be bodyguards and shields for the commander. Colombia is currently the only country of Latin American which has civil war. Since Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia was founded in 1964, the problem of guerrilla already existed for nearly 50 years, it’s estimated that about 20 million people died in the armed conflict between Colombia government, the guerrillas and paramilitary. It’s originated from ideological differences and the Colombian internal conflict, and things could be different as time goes by that it finally became the struggle territorial control. Nearly 40 percent of territory in Colombia has controlled by the guerrillas. In Colombia, children who are under 18 years old have to face many challenges in their daily lives. As a result of armed conflict, children forced migration, displacement, kidnapping and get involved with street retaliatory war and military crackdown. The biggest threat is forced to become child soldiers on the battlefield. In Latin America, Colombia is estimated that about 11,000 to 14,000 children get involved with the war between in left-wing guerrillas, right-wing paramilitary and government army. Making child soldiers to reintegrate into society is a complicated and long-term issue. The United Nations and NGOs over the world spare no efforts to alleviate poverty, improve education and employment opportunities, and establish pipeline for children to participate in the development of regions and countries. These efforts are trying to achieve a future of peace and security which are indispensable.

Three issues dominate the debate about the leading guerrilla group in Colombia, the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC). The issues are the survival and strengthening of the movement after the end of the cold war, its incapacity to defeat the state and the chronic nature of the conflict. The article addresses these issues through the concept of the partial breakdown of the state, first used in reference to the political violence of the 1950s. The account finds little room for hope about the success of the peace talks currently taking place between the government and the FARC. The outlook is for chronic conflict that will continue to sap Colombia's democracy.