Ghost of far-right paramilitaries hovers over Colombia’s presidential runoff vote | Colombia

KWhoever wins Sunday’s presidential runoff in Colombia, the country’s next leader will have a personal history intertwined with one of the criminal forces at the heart of a decades-long armed conflict that has claimed the lives of nearly half a million people.

The lives of Iván Cepeda and Abelardo de la Espriella were shaped, in very different ways, by their relationships with Colombia’s paramilitaries—private armies formed by right-wing landowners, drug traffickers, businessmen, mining magnates, and politicians to fight left-wing guerrilla groups.

De la Espriella, 47, a far-right admirer of Donald Trump and a self-described outsider, began his legal career defending paramilitary leaders.

Cepeda’s father was assassinated by officers affiliated with a paramilitary group, and the 63-year-old left-wing senator built a public career as a human rights activist exposing the crimes of those groups.

The winner will take office on August 7 and will inherit the worst violence in the country since a peace agreement was signed in 2016 between the government and most of Colombia’s Revolutionary Armed Forces.

The two candidates advocate opposing strategies to deal with the rise in crime.

De la Espriella, who has led the polls since defeating Cepeda in the first round, supports a return to full-scale military conflict, which has done little to stop violence in the past.

Supported by the current president, Cepeda advocates a modified continuation of Gustavo Petro’s “total peace” strategy. Petro, who cannot run for re-election under the constitution, has proposed negotiations to dismantle all armed groups, including left-wing rebels, paramilitary forces and organized crime groups. But violence has increased, and security experts say the strategy has generally failed.

Gustavo Duncan, one of Colombia’s leading scholars of paramilitarism, said Sunday’s vote “reflects the reality of a country shaped by drug trafficking.”

Paramilitary groups were first formed in the 1960s in response to the emergence of leftist rebel groups and often operated with the collusion of the Colombian military. By the 1980s, as the cocaine trade became central to the conflict, paramilitaries also protected smuggling routes and drug lords such as Pablo Escobar. A large group then broke with the Medellín cartel leader, aided in his downfall, and used the resulting power vacuum to expand.

“At their peak, these groups had over 30,000 members. It was a huge army spread across the country,” Duncan said.

The book’s author, María Teresa Ronderos, said that in the 1990s, paramilitary forces “became notorious for massacres,” displays of extreme violence designed to terrorize entire communities. major studies in private militias.

Its fighters would enter towns and rural communities and kill anyone suspected of sympathizing with or providing information to the guerrillas, including villagers, indigenous people, and Afro-Colombians. They have also engaged in what they call social cleansing, targeting people deemed undesirable by paramilitary far-right culture, including LGBTQ+ individuals, sex workers, homeless people, and drug users.

Massacres often involved extreme forms of torture, such as rape followed by murder, dismembering victims while they were alive with chainsaws, and decapitation with axes.

In 1994, paramilitary forces and members of the military killed senator Manuel Cepeda as part of a campaign against the communist Patriotic Union party. Iván Cepeda, then a university professor, came across his father’s car full of bullet holes.

In the early 2000s, the younger Cepeda founded and led a movement that represented victims of death squads, investigated cases and visited prisons. collect expressions from former paramilitary forces.

At the same time, De la Espriella rose to prominence as a lawyer defending the leaders of the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC by its Spanish acronym), the country’s main paramilitary organization; Meanwhile, the group was negotiating for the organization’s demobilization.

The AUC no longer exists, but the Gulf Clan, considered Colombia’s largest and most powerful illegal armed group, was founded by its former members and inherited most of its territory and smuggling routes.

Cepeda filed a criminal complaint against De la Espriella last week, alleging that he not only represented the AUC in court in the past but also acted as a “potential recruiter” for the group through a foundation he founded.

De la Espriella He denied the accusations, calling them a “smokescreen” and responded by claiming that Cepeda maintained a “narco-political” alliance with guerrilla groups to secure votes.

Cepeda is seen as the chief architect of Peter’s “total peace” plan. He has repeatedly denied any links to rebel groups, but the fact that Petro was once a guerrilla was heavily exploited in De la Espriella’s campaign.

After De la Espriella took the lead in the first round, Trump announced on social media that he had entered the election. support The lawyer called Cepeda a “radical left Marxist”.

11 Democratic members of the US Congress Sent a letter to the Trump administration last week he argued: “instead of campaigning [De la Espriella]Our government should examine its ties to the AUC, which Washington designated a foreign terrorist organization in 2001 and “responsible for numerous massacres, assassinations, and enforced disappearances, as well as torture, forced displacement, sexual violence, collusion with state/security and political actors, and large-scale drug trafficking to the United States and other countries.”

They said De la Espriella allegedly “maintained close relationships with multiple leaders” of the AUC.

De la Espriella did not respond to requests for comment. He vehemently denied committing any crime or illegal action in relation to paramilitary forces and emphasized that his contact with them as a criminal lawyer was strictly professional.

To his supporters, his past seems less important than his promises of an iron-fist approach to crime, including building private “mega-prisons” in the Amazon. “Eliminating” culprits like “cockroaches and mice”.

Last year was the most violent year since the 2016 peace agreement, with a rise in armed group attacks, murders, kidnappings, forced displacements and massacres. Right-wing senator and presidential candidate Miguel Uribe Turbay was shot during a campaign event last year and later died.

Security experts say current indicators are well below the extraordinarily high levels of violence recorded in the years before the peace deal, but many Colombians see the country returning to its “worst moments.”

“One reason there is so much crime in Colombia is because people rob, kill, and then come back to the streets a few days later,” said Lucy Vélez, a 38-year-old graphic designer from the western city of Manizales. “That’s why I like the idea of ​​being tougher on crime.”

A former businesswoman who now works as a driver in Bogotá and asked to be identified only as Marcela, does not see De la Espriella’s alleged ties to paramilitaries as a problem. “Paramilitary forces kept the guerrillas under control,” he said. “When there were too many thieves or too much crime, paramilitaries would do what they called ‘social cleansing’… Unfortunately, in some ways they served a purpose.”

One investigation Colombian news outlet La Silla Vacía reported that minority shareholders of De la Espriella’s businesses, which include rum, wine, clothing and real estate ventures, include relatives of convicted paramilitary leader Hugues Rodríguez Fuentes, known in the AUC as. “Commander Barbie”.

“That doesn’t mean he’s personally a criminal [but] De la Espriella comes from the heart of narco-paramilitary networks,” Ronderos said.

“Colombia spent years trying to eliminate this terrible warand he talks about it ‘disemboweling’ leftists and killing criminals,” he said. “It’s very sad to go back to this after everything it’s cost us.”