ABSTRACT
A significant contributor to a rising death rate in Colombia in recent years has been the operations of the self-styled AUC, a confederation of right-wing paramilitary forces which was classified by the USA as a terrorist organization in 2001. It claimed at that time to have as many as 10,000 members. It first came to public notice when, following the studied insult to the President by the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC) in January 1999, right-wing death squads rampaged through villages across the country killing some 150 civilians. Operations were stepped up following the Los Pozos agreement on 9 February 2001, in the belief that the FARC was yielding to intensified military pressure. In April alone, 80 civilians died as a result of these operations, though in May one of the AUC’s senior commanders, Francisco Javier Correa González, was captured by security forces. By June a FARC attack on the AUC headquarters in the Nudo de Paramillo highlands, which drew army units into a series of ambushes, had been succeeded by a nation-wide FARC offensive in which some 200 died. On 11 July the AUC murdered 16 businessmen in Boyacá, and when, on 27 July, the two alleged AUC leaders were arraigned in Bogotá, it was only on the formal offence of the theft and destruction of identity documents. In July 2002, following elections, the leader of the AUC, Carlos Castaño, regrouped his organization to purge it of the associations which had led the USA to classify it as a terrorist organization that financed its operations through drugs-trafficking, and promised to support the new Government if it was unable to fight the guerrillas alone. In April 2004 the Government ordered AUC forces to gather in ‘concentration zones’ where they could be kept under observation by the Organization of American States.
