Fighting Monsters in the Abyss: The Second Administration of Colombian President Álvaro Uribe Vélez, 2006–2010

By Harvey F. Kline

Studies the complex constraints and trade-offs the second administration of Colombian President Uribe (2006–2010) encountered as it attempted to resolve that nation’s violent Marxist insurrection and to have a more efficient judicial system

Fighting Monsters in the Abyss offers a deeply insightful analysis of the efforts by the second administration of Colombian President Álvaro Uribe Vélez (2006–2010) to resolve a decades-long Marxist insurgency in one of Latin America’s most important nations. Continuing work from his prior books about earlier Colombian presidents and yet written as a stand-alone study, Colombia expert Harvey F. Kline illuminates the surprising successes and setbacks in Uribe’s response to this existential threat.
 
In State Building and Conflict Resolution in Colombia, 1986–1994, Kline documented and explained the limited successes of Presidents Virgilio Barco and César Gaviria in putting down the revolutionaries while also confronting challenges from drug dealers and paramilitary groups. The following president Andrés Pastrana then boldly changed course and attempted resolution through negotiations, an effort whose failure Kline examines in Chronicle of a Failure Foretold. In his third book, Showing Teeth to the Dragons, Kline shows how in his first term President Álvaro Uribe Vélez more successfully quelled the insurrection through a combination of negotiated demobilization of paramilitary groups and using US backing to mount more effective military campaigns.
 
Kline opens Fighting Monsters in the Abyss with a recap of Colombia’s complex political history, the development of Marxist rebels and paramilitary groups and their respective relationships to the narcotics trade, and the attempts of successive Colombian presidents to resolve the crisis. Kline next examines the ability of the Colombian government to reimpose rule in rebel-controlled territories as well as the challenges of administering justice. He recounts the difficulties in the enforcement of the landmark Law of Justice and Peace as well as two significant government scandals, that of the “false positives” (“falsos positivos”) in which innocent civilians were killed by the military to inflate the body counts of dead insurgents and a second scandal related to illegal wiretapping.
 
In tracing Uribe’s choices, strategies, successes, and failures, Kline also uses the example of Colombia to explore a dimension quite unique in the literature about state building: what happens when some members of a government resort to breaking rules or betraying their societies’ values in well-intentioned efforts to build a stronger state?

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Alabama Press
• Release date: Dec 15, 2015
• ISBN: 9780817388843

Book preview

FIGHTING MONSTERS IN THE ABYSS

FIGHTING MONSTERS IN THE ABYSS

The Second Administration of Colombian President Álvaro Uribe Vélez, 2006–2010

Harvey F. Kline

THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA PRESS

Tuscaloosa

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0380

uapress.ua.edu

Copyright © 2015 by the University of Alabama Press

All rights reserved.

Inquiries about reproducing material from this work should be addressed to the University of Alabama Press.

Typeface: Caslon and Gill Sans

Manufactured in the United States of America

Cover photograph: Colombian President Álvaro Uribe at the Pentagon in 2004; photograph by Helene C. Stikkel, US Department of Defense

Cover design: Gary Gore

∞

The paper on which this book is printed meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

Cataloging-in-Publication data is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN: 978-0-8173-1880-2

E-ISBN: 978-0-8173-8884-3

Dedication

In Memory of

Federico Gil, 1915–2000

John D. Martz, 1934–1998

The two University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill professors

Who started my interest in Latin America,

Were models of research and scholarship,

And

Encouraged me to continue

With fond memories and thankfulness

We have dismantled the tentacles of this phenomenon, but the serpent is still alive and we must continue the struggle with greater definition and certainty, steadily toward the heads.

—President Álvaro Uribe Vélez, speech at the celebration of the 115th anniversary of the foundation of the national police, November 9, 2006

He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you.

—Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

Contents

List of Tables

Preface

List of Abbreviations

Introduction

I. HISTORICAL BACKGROUND TO THE COLOMBIAN STATE IN 2006

1. The Concepts of the State and State Building

2. State Building in Colombia before 1998

3. The Immediate Context: The Andrés Pastrana Presidency and Álvaro Uribe’s First Term

II. THE LEGITIMATE MONOPOLY OF FORCE CHALLENGE

4. Violence and Human Rights during the Second Uribe Term

5. Failure with Guerrilla Groups during the Second Uribe Term

III. THE JUSTICE CHALLENGE

6. The Conflicts of President Uribe with the Judicial Branch

7. Enforcement of the Law of Justice and Peace

8. Unsolved Problems after the Paramilitary Demobilization: Parapolítica and New Emerging Bands

IV. INTO THE ABYSS?

9. The Difficulties Coming from Allowing the Ends to Justify the Means

Conclusion

Epilogue

Notes

Selected Bibliography

Index

Tables

2.1. Average number of human rights violations in Colombia, 1982–90, according to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights

2.2. Comparison of human rights violations in Colombia in the Barco and Gaviria years, according to the Comisión Intercongregacional de Justicia y Paz

4.1. Levels of violence during the Álvaro Uribe Vélez presidency, according to the National Planning Department

4.2. Levels of violence, January–October 2002–9, according to the Fundación Seguridad y Democracia

4.3. Levels of homicide and kidnapping 2002–10, according to the Ministry of Defense

4.4. Acts of war 2002–10, according to the Ministry of Defense

4.5. Human rights violations during the Uribe years, according to the Centro de Investigación y Educación Popular

6.1. Chronology of the arguments between President Uribe and the Supreme Court

8.1. Information about the presence of emerging criminal bands in 2010

E.1. Comparison of the number of troops of the Colombian Armed Forces and the FARC, 1999 and 2012

Preface

This book is the fourth in the series I have written on the attempts of Colombian presidents to end the endemic violence in their country. State Building and Conflict Resolution in Colombia, 1986–1994 covered the presidencies of Virgilio Barco and César Gaviria. Chronicle of a Failure Foretold: The Peace Process of Colombian President Andrés Pastrana dealt with the Andrés Pastrana government. The third was Showing Teeth to the Dragons: State-Building by Colombian President Álvaro Uribe Vélez, 2002–2006.

Although I am completely responsible for the contents of this book, I have many organizations and individuals to thank for their help in the project. My first thank you goes to the Departamento de Ciencia Política at the Universidad de los Andes. On three occasions, I taught in the department; on another half dozen occasions, they gave space for me to conduct my research. Although I cannot mention all of these wonderful colleagues, four also became friends—Gary Hoskin, Francisco Leal, Armando Borrero, and Fernando Cepeda.

My second thanks goes to the Fulbright-Hays Program in Bogotá. While not for this book, the Fulbright program funded my three most important research trips, and I will always appreciate that. I am especially pleased that Ann Mason is the executive director of Fulbright Colombia, as she was also my colleague at the Universidad de los Andes.

I also thank the thirty-six people who gave me time for interviews, in many cases continuing to give information and viewpoints by e-mail. In this book for the first time I also conducted an interview via Skype. I thank all these people for their time and ideas and assure them, whether they agree with this book or not, that I did consider their views seriously.

As in all my scholarship, I thank my wife Dottie. I have explicitly thanked her in four books before this one (1983, 1995, 2007, and 2012) and have dedicated two to her (1987 and 2009). She has always been the best critic of my manuscripts, as well as my excellent in-house copyeditor and translator. On numerous occasions, she has selflessly gone with me to Bogotá. In addition she created the index for this book. Dottie makes so many things possible by being with me.

Finally, I thank Federico Gil and John Martz, my professors of Latin American politics at the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill in the 1960s. They are the ones who first interested me in Latin America and became the role models of what I wanted to be professionally. In addition, they were mentors and later friends and collaborators. In my forty-two years as a university professor, I tried to be like Federico and John.

I do not remember if I ever thanked them personally but hope they knew how much I appreciated everything. For this reason, I dedicate this book to them.

Abbreviations

AUC—Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (United Self-Defense Groups of Colombia)

BACRIM—bandas criminales emergentes (emerging criminal bands)

CGSB—Coordinadora Guerrillera Simón Bolívar (Simón Bolívar Guerrilla Coordinator)

CINEP—Centro de Investigación y Educación Popular (Center for Research and Popular Education)

CNRR—Comisión Nacional de Reparación y Reconciliación (National Commission for Reparation and Reconciliation)

COCE—Comando Central (ELN’s Central Command)

CODHES—Consultoría para los Derechos Humanos y el Desplazamiento (The Consultancy for Human Rights and Displacement)

DAS—Departamento Administrativo de Seguridad (Administrative Department of Security)

DDR—Disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration

ELN—Ejército de Liberación Nacional (Army of National Liberation)

EPL—Ejército Popular de Liberación (People’s Liberation Army)

FARC—Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia)

HRW—Human Rights Watch

IACHR—Inter-American Commission on Human Rights

INDEPAZ—Instituto de Estudios para el Desarrollo y la Paz (Institute of Studies for Development and Peace)

M-19—Movimiento 19 de Abril (Nineteenth of April Movement)

MAPP/OEA—Misión de Apoyo al Proceso de Paz de la Organización de Estados Americanos (Mission to Assist the Peace Process of the Organization of American States)

MAS—Muerte a Secuestradores (Death to Kidnappers)

NGO—nongovernmental organization

OAS—Organization of American States (OEA, Organización de Estados Americanos)

Partido de la U—Partido Social de Unidad Nacional (Social Party of National Unity)

Introduction

This book is the study of the development of the Colombian state during the second presidential administration of Álvaro Uribe Vélez (2006–10). In a previous investigation, I showed how the power of the state increased during his first term through more effective military actions against Marxist guerrilla groups and the negotiated demobilization of paramilitary groups.¹ The investigation in this book continues the previous research in looking at the continuing actions against Marxist groups. It also analyzes progress in another important aspect of the state structure, the system of justice, and asks whether the second Uribe administration led to increased state capabilities in that area.

I develop this study in the following order: In part I, chapter 1, I review various definitions of the state and state building and then give operational definitions that I use in the later chapters. In chapter 2, I begin to place the second Uribe term in the context of Colombian history by describing the patterns of political behavior before 1998. Chapter 3 analyzes the peace process of President Andrés Pastrana and then summarizes the major accomplishments of Uribe’s first term and considers how the constraints on him lessened because of the policy successes during it.

Part II turns to the ability of the state to increase its monopoly of force during the second Uribe administration. This could be done by two methods: military means or through negotiations with rebel groups. Chapter 4 deals with the extent of pacification in the country in an attempt to see if the military successes of the first Uribe administration were continued. It also considers the allegation that the larger armed forces led to more human rights violations. Chapter 5, also a continuation of the analysis of Uribe’s first term, is an examination of the failure to have successful peace negotiations with the two guerrilla groups.

Part III is about the administration of justice. Chapter 6 examines the judicial system in general, as well as the ongoing conflicts between the top-level courts (the Supreme Court and the Constitutional Court) and President Uribe. Those clashes had the effect that there was no prosecutor general during the last year of Uribe’s presidency. The subject of chapter 7 is the enforcement of the Law of Justice and Peace. That law, leading to the demobilization of over thirty thousand paramilitary troops, was one of the great successes of the first Uribe administration. The questions in the chapter deal with how well the judicial system fared in the enforcement of the law. Chapter 8 links the abilities of the judicial system and the law enforcement agencies to meet the challenges that came from the former paramilitary groups. One dimension of this problem was how well the judiciary was able to judge the politicians who had ties with paramilitary groups. Another was how capable the police were at controlling new groups. According to the government, the groups were no longer paramilitary ones but emerging criminal bands. Their major reason for existence was the drug trade.

Part IV adds a dimension not generally considered in the literature about state building: the case in which the rules of the game are broken in efforts to build a stronger state. Chapter 9 analyzes two cases of the end justifying the means in which governmental agencies broke Colombian laws. One was when the military killed impoverished men, dressed them as guerrilla troops, and then included them in body counts. The second was when the Department of Administrative Security (Departamento Administrativo de Seguridad, DAS), the principal organization responsible for enforcement of laws relating to national security, carried out wiretaps and other surveillance without proper judicial approval. The question raised in both parts of this chapter is, who was responsible for such improper behavior?

In the conclusion the key questions are to what extent the Colombian state became more powerful during Álvaro Uribe’s second term and what the reasons for his successes and failures were. In that evaluation, it is necessary to include, at least to a degree, an assessment of Álvaro Uribe as a person and the implications that his personality had on the team of individuals that advised him.

If this were a book about all aspects of the Uribe government, that evaluation no doubt would include other subjects, such as the corruption charged to his sons and the scandal of the agricultural subsidy program, intended to help poor farmers but in the end benefiting large ones. It should be remembered, however, that the focus of this book is on state building during the second Uribe administration. It is not a study of Álvaro Uribe as a person. Although not psychiatrists or psychologists, several interviewees volunteered hypotheses about Uribe’s personality. Since I also lack expertise in those fields, I have not included that pseudoanalysis.

The second administration of Álvaro Uribe Vélez, like all presidencies everywhere, had both positive and negative characteristics. In this book, I present my conclusions. I hope that I have presented all the necessary information so that others can disagree or agree with me.

The book concludes with an epilogue concerning the four years since Álvaro Uribe left the presidency. In addition to describing other changes during the first administration of Juan Manuel Santos, in it I argue that some of the state building of the Uribe years made it more likely for his successor to negotiate successfully with the guerrilla groups.

I

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND TO THE COLOMBIAN STATE IN 2006

This first part has two major sections. In chapter 1, I review various definitions of the state and state building and then give operational definitions that I use in the later chapters. In the second part, I describe the constraints under which Álvaro Uribe Vélez operated during his second presidential term. Chapter 2 outlines the history before 1998, beginning with the lack of an effective police force or bureaucracy and a weak judicial system. I show that these failed to develop during the different historical periods. In that discussion I recount how topological challenges led to vigilante rule enforcement and how partisan rivalries resulted in a tradition of violence. It all culminated in the second half of the twentieth century in a violent civil war, the appearance of Marxist guerrilla groups and government-approved paramilitary groups, and finally, the rise of the illicit drug trade. The narcotics industry increased the intensity of violence as competing groups vied for the profits and armed themselves with the most efficient weapons.

In the second part of chapter 2, I describe the set of constraints that came from the peace processes previous presidents attempted with the Marxist guerrillas. While there were successes with some minor groups, no process was effective with the two largest groups.

Chapter 3 begins with an analysis of the peace process of Uribe’s predecessor, Andrés Pastrana. It then examines the accomplishments of Uribe’s first term, including the improvement of the military and its success in driving the guerrillas out of the central Andean part of the country. It reports on the failure of negotiations with the guerrilla groups and the passage of the Law of Justice and Peace, which facilitated the demobilization of over thirty thousand paramilitary troops. The period ended with lower levels of homicides and kidnappings and the ability of citizens to travel through the rural parts of the country.

By the end of chapter 3, the reader should appreciate that Álvaro Uribe operated under many constraints at the beginning of his second administration. How he fared in building the Colombian state during his next term is the topic of later parts of the book.

1

The Concepts of the State and State Building

It is necessary to be clear on definitions in order to evaluate Álvaro Uribe’s presidency. To that end in this first chapter, I will define state and state building, and I will present the criteria on which the government will be evaluated.

Different authors have defined the state in many ways over the centuries. In social sciences of the past several centuries, one of the first and most notable definitions of the state was by Max Weber, German sociologist, philosopher, and political economist. Weber defined the state as compulsory associations claiming control over territories and the people within them.¹ For Weber, the core of the state included the administrative, legal, extractive, and coercive organizations. Alfred Stepan captured the Weberian perspective well when he stated, "The state must be considered more than the ‘government.’ It is the continuous administrative, legal, bureaucratic, and coercive systems that attempt not only to structure relationships between civil society and public authority within a polity but also to structure many crucial relationships within civil society as well."²

Scholars also disagree on what the proper functions of this state are. Adam Smith, despite calling for it to be an invisible hand, did consider that the state had three legitimate functions—to protect the society from other independent states, to protect every member of the society from the injustice or oppression of every other member of the society, and to erect and maintain certain public works and certain public institutions that it can be never be in the interests of individuals or groups to erect and maintain.³

To a certain extent, there is consensus that a state makes and enforces rules. Francis Fukuyama argued, "The essence of stateness is, in other words, enforcement: the ultimate ability to send someone with a uniform and a gun to force people to comply with the state’s laws."⁴ Robert Rotberg makes the same argument in his introduction to State Failure and State Weakness in a Time of Terror: There is a hierarchy of political goods. None is as critical as the supply of security, especially human security. . . . The state’s prime function is to provide that political good of security—to prevent cross-border invasions and infiltrations, and any loss of territory; to eliminate domestic threats to or attacks upon the national order and social structure; to prevent crime and any related dangers to domestic human security; and to enable citizens to resolve their disputes with the state and with their fellow inhabitants without recourse to arms or other forms of physical coercion.⁵

Malcolm Nathan Shaw presents the same idea in his definition of state from the standpoint of international law. He says, A sovereign state is a nonphysical juridical entity of the international legal system that is represented by one centralized government that has supreme independent authority over a geographic area.⁶

However, many scholars would insist that the state is more than enforcement. Charles Tilly states that he and his collaborators decided to compare the organization of the armed forces, taxation, policing, the control of food supply, and the formation of technical personnel. They found those activities to be difficult, costly, and often unwanted by some parts of the population. Nevertheless, All are essential to the creation of strong states. Tilly also says that the chief regret of the group was having omitted the judicial system.⁷

One of the first questions is how unity comes to exist in a given territory where previously other smaller units existed. Those units might be based on religion, economic factors, language groups, or any number of other factors. State building is a term used in state theory for the process of bringing these diverse areas into a single functioning state. State building was first used in connection to the creation of states in Western Europe and focused on the power enforcement of state in society. Tilly described the advantages of state building in Europe. State-building provided for the emergence of specialized personnel, control over consolidated territory, loyalty, and durability, permanent institutions with a centralized and autonomous state that held the monopoly of violence over a given population.⁸

Although generally called political development, there was a great deal of political science literature about state building in the 1960s and 1970s as colonialism disappeared in Africa and Asia and new countries appeared. Many times, state building was complicated by the arbitrary manner in which European powers had carved up areas into colonies, often combining different tribal or linguistic groups. In some cases, different religious groups were put together, their conflict perhaps controlled by the European colonizer but later erupting after independence.

Problems of state building existed in Europe in earlier centuries and later in Latin America. As Charles Tilly describes this and the violence in state making: At least for the European experience of the past centuries, a portrait of war makers and state makers as coercive and self-seeking entrepreneurs bears a far greater resemblance to the facts than do its chief alternatives: the idea of a social contract, the idea of an open market in which operators of armies and states offer services to willing consumers, the idea of a society whose shared norms and expectations call forth a certain kind of government.⁹

The Iberian Concept of the State

States in Latin America have similarities coming from the colonization of the countries by Spain and Portugal, countries in which the king ruled by divine right, a doctrine that defended monarchical absolutism and asserted that kings derived their authority from God and could not therefore be held accountable for their actions by any earthly authority such as a parliament. The divine-right theory can be traced to the medieval concept of God’s award of temporal power to the political ruler, paralleling the award of spiritual power to the church.

The institutions that Spain brought to the New World reflected the institutions that had developed in the mother countries of Europe during their centuries-long struggles against the Moors and their efforts to form unified nation-states out of disparate social and regional forces. These institutions included a rigid, authoritarian political system, a similarly rigid hierarchical class structure, a statist and mercantilist economy, an absolutist church, and a similarly closed and absolutist educational system. As John Martz argued,

The Mediterranean and Latin American regions became notable laboratories for the nurturing of clientelism under conditions of paternalism. The Spanish and Portuguese colonizers of the New World recognized the utility of the system in terms of an indentured and subservient labor force. On large plantations and landed properties, the costs of production were minimized. Catholicism, in preaching the helplessness of mankind and the needs for benefactors, provided otherworldly justification for the acceptance of traditional values and practices. This also seemingly excused, or at least explained the practice of repression when employed by the patron. The coercive nature of the patron-client linkage was omnipresent, with the latter entrapped in a vicious circle of obedience, subservience, and impoverishment.¹⁰

The Spanish conquerors brought this social system to the colonies; it took root, and its effects are still seen today.

To extend the political regime to the Spanish American colonies the king sent viceroys (or vice kings), first to Mexico and Peru and later to Nueva Granada (Colombia) and Argentina. In theory, the king said what policies were and the viceroys carried them out. However, given communication difficulties, many times the viceroys carried out policies as they saw fit. Nevertheless, whether the decisions were made in Europe or the Americas, a single person (no doubt with a small group of advisors) made them. There were no elective bodies in the colonies to operate as checks or balances to them.

There were at least two difficulties in the political aspect of this colonization model. One was that the rules made in the distant mother country did not work well in the colonies. This was to lead to a characteristic still common in Latin America today. What on paper was an efficient, centralized bureaucracy, in practice functioned under the policy I obey, but do not comply. This phrase, historian John Leddy Phelan argued, reflected a centralization of authority among the viceroys and governors that was more apparent than real.¹¹

The second difficulty had to do with transportation and communication problems within the colonies. Studying what today is Ecuador, Phelan found that the coastal areas were never subjugated as intensively as the mountains. In fact, many coastal areas remained unconquered until the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Nor was the administration particularly centralized. Many administrative decisions were actually made in the Americas by several competing agencies; local conditions and local interest groups played a significant role.¹² In chapter 2, I will show how similar difficulties existed in New Granada, the colony that would become Colombia.

State Building in Latin America

There are many studies of state building in Latin America, with different definitions used and different variables included. Most deal with only one country, such as Alfred Stepan’s study of Peru.¹³ In 2012, Marcus J. Kurtz published a recent comparative study of Peru, Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay. Kurtz points out that in the state-building literature the most well developed theoretical literatures are on countries that emphasize international conflict as the motor of institution building and those that stress resource wealth as the cause of institutional corrosion. However, the two have developed in near-complete isolation from each other. He also points out the great variety of states in the world, from the wealthy, massive, deeply penetrating, and comparatively honest governments of northern Europe to the impoverished states whose governmental institutions have failed altogether, as in Somalia, or have been little more than a form of loosely organized kleptocracy, as in the Haiti of the Duvaliers or the Zaire of Mobutu.¹⁴

Kurtz poses his research question as one about institutional power,—the ability of the state to induce residents, firms, and organizations to act in ways they would not in the absence of its regulatory and administrative presence,¹⁵ and, in the absence of international threat or resource corrosion, his organizing question for his book is what makes a state strong, a question that is a broad one that requires some delimitation to be theoretically and empirically tractable.¹⁶ The explanation put forward in his book is a society-centric view of political development, linking long-run outcomes to underlying social and political dynamics at two critical moments: the initial consolidation of national political institutions after independence and the first large-scale electoral incorporation of nonelite civil society in the tumultuous decades in and around the Great Depression. This book contends that these two critical periods produced trajectories of political development that, once launched, became exceedingly difficult to alter in a fundamental way. These periods are also sequenced: the results of the first critical juncture powerfully condition the range of options available at the time of the second critical juncture.¹⁷

Kurtz anticipates the empirical part of his study with the statement that Latin American state building seems paradoxical: the strongest of state institutions emerged in the impoverished, colonial backwaters of Chile and Uruguay. On the other hand, the wealthier colonial centers of Peru, Argentina, and Mexico, despite larger pools of literate, skilled individuals available to staff their bureaucratic structures and a legacy of much deeper institutional development from the era of Spanish colonialism, ultimately produced much less successful public administrations.¹⁸

This brings up the question of where Colombia might fit into state building. As a colony it was not a center of Spanish colonization as Peru, Mexico, and Argentina were. Nor was it a backwater to the extent that Chile and Uruguay were. The conclusion of my book on the first administration of Álvaro Uribe Vélez was that it was able to increase that dimension of stateness in Colombia to a level higher than it had ever been before. However, this was because of the increased presence of the military and national police in more areas of the country, as well as their better arms and communications equipment. Most of this was made possible because of military assistance from the United States in a program called Plan Colombia. The government also negotiated a cease-fire with paramilitary groups.

Those were no mean feats. One should not forget that before Uribe’s inauguration in 2002 Colombians lived with the fear of traveling outside of the major cities, that the country led the world in homicide and kidnapping rates, and that murder was the most common cause of death. Paramilitary groups controlled vast parts of the country, many times had better weapons than the armed forces, and were far from being defeated militarily. The largest guerrilla group was the de facto state