HELO: The Crisis Story Magazine - Colombia Photo: Christopher Kirk

The Triumph of Paramilitarism
Witness E. A. Ospina, Oct-Nov 2009

Anyone who comes from Colombia has been touched by the war. They will tell you of relatives murdered by paramilitaries, or kidnapped and held for ransom by guerillas. They will tell you of chainsaw massacres and social cleansing in remote villages you can only reach by boat or by helicopter. They will tell you of corrupt elites, vast criminal conspiracies overflying a ground-fog of petty crime. They will tell you of war, narcotics and social unrest.
They will tell you stories like this one: a good friend of my family was awoken by loud banging at the door to his Bogota apartment late at night. He opened the door and was shot to death, point-blank, by paramilitary gunmen. His wife managed to frantically hide their newborn baby in a closet before they found her and killed her too. Her parents were visiting; they too were shot, but her mother miraculously survived to raise the child in an uncertain future. To this day it remains unclear why they were marked for death, and the men who hired their killers remain unknown and at large.
Or perhaps you will hear of a professor of politics at the National University who was on his way to class one day and heard a sicario, an assassin, pull up in a motorcycle beside him. He raised his hand instinctively, and the gesture saved his life, deflecting the bullets that were meant for his face. The sicario left him bleeding on the sidewalk, and some passing students hailed a cab and helped him in.
As he staggered out of the cab at the hospital, he tipped the cabbie the contents of his wallet, to pay for the blood stains. There is something in this story which speaks to the terror and the courage of the Colombian experience. There is something to it that speaks profoundly to me.

I returned in 2006 to the land of my birth after finishing a Masters in International Affairs at Columbia University in New York. My area of focus, perhaps unsurprisingly, was human rights and security policy, the nexus of which has been the justification for the bloodshed that has bathed my country for decades. Almost thirty, I was looking for something that I had done without all my life. I was looking for a home, and answers that could help explain stories that defined my image of a fatherland I had never known as an adult. I found myself instead a stranger in a strange land, and all the people and truths I thought I knew had changed so much it made me wonder if they were always this way, and it was I who had changed.

The years since the turn of the millennium have certainly been eventful in the history of the only major Latin American internecine war to emerge from the twentieth century. During the Bush era, as the rest of Latin America slipped to the left, Washington found a choice ally in Bogota, lead by President Alvaro Uribe Velez and his enormously successful right wing military-political movement.