When you hear that a foreign leader was "a favorite of George W. Bush," do you need to know more?

To the surprise of most, Juan Manuel Santos (left), seen here with outgoing President Álvaro Uribe the day before Santos's inauguration as president of Colombia in February 2010, has moved away from the previous regime's "macabre alliance" with drug-trafficking right-wing paramilitary forces -- championed enthusiastically by (surprise, surprise!) U.S. congressional Republicans.

"You can't imagine what pleasure it gives us to remember that around this date seven years ago we killed your father . . . but we see the work is still not complete. . . . We have not forgotten you, on the contrary we think your [death] should be slow and painful and even worse than Tito’s. Greetings to your wife and your son and your sisters and your mother."

-- note received last year, after the birth of his own son,
by Juan David Díaz, son of a murdered Colombian mayor

by Ken

Appalling as this story is, it might not seem of enormous moment for us North Americans. Except that the U.S. has already played a large role -- sometimes for worse, but surprisingly sometimes also for better -- in Colombia's struggle of recent decades against the drug trade and its attendant corruption of government. The embattled figures within the country trying to root out government complicity with the right-wing drug traffickers have been aided more than one might imagine by one piece of leverage the U.S. has: a long-simmering proposal for a U.S. free-trade agreement (FTA) with Colombia, which has been strongly championed by Republicans. Hey, have Republicans ever yet met a right-wing drug-trafficking paramilitary cabal they didn't love?

During the Bush regime, Daniel Wilkinson reports in a June 23 piece in the New York Review of Books, "Death and Drugs in Colombia," even as courageous investigators in Colombia were uncovering evidence linking the right-wing paramilitaries to high-ranking officials in the Colombian government, including a 2001 agreement, the Ralito Pact, pledging collaboration to "refound the nation,"

a political battle erupted in Washington over the US–Colombia Free Trade Agreement (FTA). Congressional Democrats were refusing to ratify the treaty until Colombia improved its human rights record by, among other things, reducing violence against trade unionists, who were being assassinated at a higher rate in Colombia than anywhere else in the world.

Republican (and some Democratic) policymakers and pundits bitterly criticized the Democratic leadership for this opposition. Their bitterness reflected concerns about geopolitics more than trade. [President Álvaro] Uribe had been the Bush administration’s most steadfast ally in Latin America, openly endorsing the US "war on terror," while his Venezuelan neighbor, Hugo Chávez, was gleefully promoting anti-Washington sentiment in the region. Moreover, they argued, unlike the authoritarian Chávez, Uribe was a champion of democracy.

But we're getting ahead of ourselves. The note received by Juan David Dìaz which I've quoted above is used by Daniel Wilkinson as a concluding note for his NYRB piece. The note was signed, he tells us, by one of the country's "new armed groups," basically re-formed from the former right-wing paramilitary drug-trafficking AUC (United Self-Defense Forces), which as he has explained had been enmeshed in a "macabre alliance" with the government of the then-president of Colombia.

Do I really have to tell you that the president in question was the above-mentioned "favorite of George W. Bush," Álvaro Uribe (president from 2002 to 2010)? Bush in fact awarded Uribe the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

More worryingly, as Wilkinson tells us, Uribe --

received high praise from Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Administration officials have held up his policies as models for Afghanistan and Mexico, both struggling with a similar confluence of drug trafficking, corruption, and terror. Uribe's presidency has provided Washington what it needs to counter the pessimism those other situations inspire: a success story.

That phrase "macabre alliance" -- between the drug-trafficking right-wing paramilitaries and the Uribe government -- was used by Juan David Díaz's father one day in February 2003 when, as mayor of a small town on Colombia's Caribbean coast, "he stood up at a nationally televised meeting" attended by the president "and announced his own murder." Wilkinson starts his piece with this story.

"Señor Presidente, I am the mayor of El Roble," Tito Díaz said as he walked toward the stage where Uribe sat with several cabinet ministers and officials from the state of Sucre, where the meeting was held. Pacing back and forth before the President, Díaz delivered what was probably the first public denunciation of a web of violence and corruption involving politicians and paramilitary groups -- what he called a "macabre alliance" -- that would eventually become an explosive national scandal. Singling out several local officials, including the governor, Salvador Arana, seated at the President's side, Díaz declared: "And now they're going to kill me."

After several minutes, President Uribe cut Mayor Díaz off, assuring him that he appreciated "the gravity of the matter" and promising to order an investigation, "with utmost pleasure, for transparency cannot have exceptions, and security is for all Colombians."

And how did that investigation go? Mayor Díaz never found out, or perhaps he did -- it went just the way he expected.

Within weeks, the national police stripped Díaz of his bodyguards. On April 5, 2003, he disappeared. On April 10 his corpse appeared on the edge of Sucre's main highway. He had been tortured, shot, and left in a crucifix position -- feet crossed, arms extended, palms upturned -- with his mayoral certification card perched on his forehead. A note, found later at his house, told his family he was setting out for a "dangerous meeting" with Arana. "If anything happens to me," it said, they should flee.

Wilkinson walks us through the backstory to Uribe's "success story," and some of it even turns out to be true, though not much that has to do with Uribe. We're reminded of the ravages of drug-related armed insurrections in Colombia, which got if anything worse after we found it necessary to deal with the appalling crime boss Pablo Escobar, who in the '80s had "embarked on a campaign of mass murder that eventually won him a constitutional ban on extradition and permission to serve time for his crimes in a luxurious 'prison' he had built for himself on hillside overlooking Medellín, but became so egregious that he had to go, and was finally hunted down, in December 1993.

You're no doubt thinking that with the death of Escobar all was well in Colombia. Um, not exactly. In fact, things got all kinds of worse, so that Colombia was seen as being "on the verge of becoming a failed state" by the time Álvaro Uribe took office as president in 2002. He faced "two illegal armed groups financed through drug trafficking" that "were terrorizing civilians":

* the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia), the larger and more publicized group, "a leftist guerrilla army founded in the 1960s that had grown in the late 1990s to 20,000 combatants and by 2002 was encroaching upon Bogotá, the capital. It dominated vast regions of the countryside."

* and the right-wing AUC, founded several years after the death of Escobar by paramilitary bosses "who were mostly former associates" of his. This "network of right-wing paramilitary groups" --

had wrested control of large stretches of the country from the guerrillas using a simple but effective strategy: causing communities to fear them more than they already feared the FARC. They massacred civilians by the dozen in town squares. They quartered people with chainsaws, cut off tongues and testicles. They often made sport of the slaughter -- sometimes literally, as when they played soccer with the decapitated heads of their victims.

Wilkinson tells us about the "success story" which became so popular in Washington among those desperate for hope in the face of the unraveling drug-fueled disasters in Mexico and Afghanistan. President Uribe spent large sums of money, including "billions in US aid," on counterinsurgency operations against the FARC, and did get some results: "driving the guerrillas from the cities, highways, and towns," in time depriv[ing] the FARC of its strategic initiative, while causing it to lose half its combatants, most to desertion."

Meanwhile, still according to "the success story," Uribe dealt even more masterfully with the right-wing AUC, persuading its commanders to demobilize and even, incredibly, to submit to "prosecution for their many crimes in exchange for reduced prison sentences." Unlike the case of other Latin American governments fighting armed insurrections, so the story goes, there would be no question of sacrificing justice for peace, as was reflected in the name Uribe gave his program: "Justice and Peace."

The problem, Wilkinson says, is that this lovely "success story" is "largely untrue."

Uribe's success in diminishing the power of the FARC was real, albeit marred by egregious human rights violations, and contributed to a dramatic drop in the national homicide rate. But the account of his deal with the AUC was fundamentally false, especially the notion that it was a new, improved version of the settlements other governments had made with armed political groups.

In fact, Wilkinson says, the AUC commanders' deal recalled the one that Colombian authorities had agreed to in the mid-'80s under siege from Pablo Escobar's heightened campaign of mass murder: the constitutional ban on extradition and permission for the drug lord to "serve time" in the luxurious hilltop prison he built for himself.

The AUC, in fact, had been founded in part because in 1997 "the Colombian Congress was on the verge of lifting the ban on extraditions." And the new group launched a major P.R. campaign "to rebrand the paramilitaries as primarily a political group," committed to fighting anti-Colombia "subversive" activities. However, despite their claimed withdrawal from drug trafficking, by the time Uribe became president, "the AUC had become the most powerful network of drug traffickers in the country's history." And within weeks of his inauguration, "the first US extradition request arrived, for two of its top commanders, on drug charges."

Uribe could have used the threat of extradition to press the paramilitary bosses to come clean. Instead, he established the Justice and Peace program, in which the "justice" component was largely a sham. The AUC commanders would be "incarcerated" for as few as three years on farms instead of in prisons, without turning over all their illicit wealth or naming their accomplices. They would emerge with their criminal networks intact, immune from further prosecution -- and extradition -- for the crimes to which they had "confessed."

Wilkinson vividly describes the spectacle of Salvatore Mancuso, who "had helped plan many of the AUC’s most horrific massacres, and had become one of Colombia’s most powerful drug bosses, a new Escobar" (he was one of the AUC commanders whose extradition the U.S. had requested), arriving "in a Valentino suit, with a large security detail supplied by the government" to address the Colombian Congress in July 2004, and after speaking for 45 minutes receiving "a spirited ovation." And he describes the response of a journalist named Claudia López, who watched in her home in Bogotá "in horror," wondering how it could be "that members of Congress were publicly applauding a mass-murdering drug trafficker."

She wasn't alone. All over the country voices began to be raised, among them that of Juan David Díaz, who was 23 at the time of the murder of his father, the mayor of El Roble, in 2003. In May 2005, following an investigation inspired by a visit from Juan David, a congressman "from a left-of-center political party," Gustavo Petro, gave a televised speech of his own.

Petro began his televised presentation with footage of Tito Díaz denouncing the "macabre alliance" to President Uribe two years earlier. He then laid out evidence he had gathered supporting the murdered mayor's allegations. And he warned that the collusion between politicians and paramilitaries -- what he would later call "parapolitics" -- was not limited to Sucre, but instead was the main threat to the rule of law facing the entire country.

Oh yes, one thing I didn't mention. Several months after "mass-murdering drug trafficker" Salvatore Mancuso got that "spirited ovation" from the Colombian Congress, President Uribe suspended his extradition order. While his American supporters were hailing him as a scourge of drug trafficker and a champion of openness and democracy, of "Justice and Peace," his government was using its considerable powers to protect the right-wing paramilitaries from extradition and from interference with its criminal activities at home.

Claudia López, the horrified journalist, began investigating, and published her first findings online in September 2005. Initial response was limited, but gradually other Colombians began to join her in looking at what had been going on in their country.

All these years later, López has edited a book called Y refundaron la patria…: De cómo mafiosos y políticos reconfiguraron el Estado colombiano (And They Refounded the Nation…: How Mafiosi and Politicians Reconfigured the Colombian State). Congressman Petro continued his inquiries. Other lonely voice joined in, and crucially both of Colombia's top courts, the Supreme Court and the Constitutional Court, took an interest. The Constitutional Court --

issued a ruling that overhauled Uribe's Justice and Peace program. Paramilitaries would be required to give "full" and "truthful" confessions and serve their sentences in real prisons. These changes made the paramilitary commanders nervous, and they began disclosing bits of information regarding their dealings with Uribe's political allies. The aim, it seemed, was to warn the politicians: if we go down, we'll take you down with us.

And "as the Supreme Court expanded its investigation, evidence began to mount that the ties between the paramilitaries and members of Uribe's coalition had been extensive." Nobody attacked the investigations more relentlessly and categorically than . . . the president!

He denounced the Supreme Court's investigations, likening them to a FARC abduction, and accused the justices of abetting terrorism. In Colombia, such incendiary accusations can be life-threatening. Several justices began receiving death threats. They were insulted by strangers in the street and shunned by friends. Some stopped going out in public.

Eventually it was learned just how far the government had gone to try to intimidate the Supreme Court and other critics, with illegal surveillance (including bugging the Supreme Court!), stealing files, and launching intensive smear campaigns and death threats -- much of it done by the national intelligence agency, the DAS, "which answers directly to the president."

But the court didn't back down, and by April 2008 "dozens of elected officials [had been put] behind bars -- including Senator Mario Uribe, the President's second cousin and one of his closest political allies." (Also convicted and imprisoned: onetime Sucre Gov. Salvador Arana, who had been sitting at President Uribe's side the day El Roble Mayor Tito Díaz pronounced his own death sentence by accusing them of being part of that "macabre alliance" with the paramilitaries..) Even more ominously, under pressure of the investigations, the paramilitary suspects began talking, and what they were saying was increasingly tying the "parapolitics" network to people close to the president, including his younger brother. And suddenly the government did a 180 on its strategy toward extradition of paramilitary commanders, which for years it had fought so hard to prevent. Within weeks of the arrest of the president's cousin the senator, "President Uribe surprised the court by rounding up fourteen top paramilitary leaders (including Mancuso) and flying them to the United States to face drug charges." The president's U.S. apologists considered this proof of his dedication to cleaning up the country.

Those less charmed by his increasingly evident massive corruption and criminality saw the sudden reversal on extradition of the paramilitary commanders as a coup for cover-up.

The people who would know the full extent of whatever collaboration took place on Uribe's watch are the ones he extradited to the US. Since the extradition, however, they have essentially stopped cooperating with Colombian investigators. Several -- including Mancuso -- have explained that if they revealed all they know, they would be unable to protect their families from reprisals in Colombia.

Uribe's continuation in office, in violation of the country's established single-term limit on the presidency, served the interests of both him and his "coalition" partners, and in 2006 Congress paved the way for him to run again. By the time he tried the same strategy to enable him to run for a third term in 2010, the lid had come off his cover-up to the extent that even his allies seemed to recognize that he was too damaged to serve their interests, and he wasn't enabled to run again.

Huge damage had already been done, though.

López's book shows that the Ralito Pact's reference to "refounding the nation" -- from which the book takes its title -- was not merely pompous rhetoric. Rather, it reflected a broader objective shared by the AUC commanders and local politicians and landholders: to legalize the enormous wealth and power they had amassed during years of paramilitary expansion.

The paramilitaries had driven more than one million poor farmers off their lands, preparing the way for what the authors refer to as a "counter-agrarian reform." Large landholders and investors -- including paramilitaries and other traffickers -- acquired the land, and corrupt officials helped them obtain title. As one former paramilitary put it: "We went in killing, others followed buying, and the third group legalized."

The extradition of AUC commanders did not end this project. On the contrary, López writes, "the land, wealth and political capital amassed through violence by narco paramilitarism remained in the hands of an emergent and hybrid elite" made up of large landholders, local politicians, drug traffickers, and former AUC members who had avoided extradition.

The new president, Juan Manuel Santos, had been Uribe's defense minister, and the general assumption was that the cover-up of collusion between the government and the paramilitary supporters would remain strong. But Santos began taking steps that indicated otherwise, and by late 2010,

some of Uribe's most outspoken critics -- including López and Petro -- had become cautiously hopeful. Santos, they believed, understood that rolling back the parapolitical project was key to repairing the country's image abroad and restoring the dominance of the political establishment in Bogotá.

The government is still a long way from getting control of the situation, though. But it doesn't seem to matter to most American pols.

In April, in response to mounting pressure from FTA supporters, President Obama announced that he would send the treaty to Congress for ratification once Colombia begins implementing a mutually agreed "action plan" to improve workers' rights. Thanks to Republicans' gains in the midterm elections, ratification is almost certain. Still, House Democrats disappointed with Obama’s action plan -- which falls far short of the human rights requirements they had sought -- are expected to make one final effort to use the FTA debate to press for progress on the crucial issues omitted from the plan.

The plan's most glaring omission is any mention of the powerful armed groups, led largely by former AUC members, that continue to kill trade unionists and, increasingly, leaders of displaced communities seeking to reclaim their lands. These groups no longer present themselves as a national counterinsurgency movement, but they do continue to traffic illegal drugs and terrorize civilians the way the AUC once did. They are the legacy of Uribe's approach to "justice and peace."

And, as Wilkinson concludes his piece, Juan David Díaz "is back in hiding, far from his family."

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