Since the fifties, paramilitaries have existed in Colombia, like many countries in Latin America, but the current version of para-militarism stems from drug trafficking. In fact the Medellín cartel created the arrangement of armed Muerte a Secuestradores (MAS) [Death to kidnappers] in 1982, in order to pursue guerrillas and members of their family.

Starting from this, during the eighties, paramilitaries operated clandestinely by doing the dirty work of war - as if it could be clean! -. During the nineties, their actions were carried out in broad daylight. They became a true parastate army, not by effecting operations properly speaking of counter insurrection against guerrillas but well, list in hand, by committing massacres within the civilian population, but clearly announcing that its aim was not to confront the Government, but to supplement it and help it.

At the time of the latest parliamentary elections (March 2002), the peasant masses and the unemployed voted under pressure from propaganda, media and landowners and drug dealers - read paramilitaries -, who according to their spokesperson, Salvatore Mancuso, elected [control] 35 percent of the members of Congress. Did these same landowners and drug dealers, who spoke for such a high percentage of Congress members, help elect Alvaro Uribe as president of Colombia? None dares answer this question, but the president of the Democratic Centre- main opposition party and deputy Gustavo Petro, in statements in the newspaper El Espectador, (September 2004) said: "President Uribe is setting up in Colombia a rural world of big landowners, linked with drug trafficking and para militarism (...). All the paramilitary chiefs gathered in Ralito are pro-Uribe (...). The President shares the development bases of paramilitarism".

Moreover, at the request of legislators controlled by paramilitaries, and with president Uribe's approval, three of their leaders, Mancuso, Duque, and Isaza, were received in Congress on Wednesday 28 July 2004. There, they declared that they were heroes of democracy, and that they had saved half of the republic from the claws of Communism, that Colombian society had a debt towards them, and that the patriotic sacrifice cannot be given back to them by prison.

The paramilitaries visit to Congress, and their speeches in this context, caused horror inside and outside Colombia. But more disconcerting, one week later, the intervention of the High commissioner for Peace, the psychiatrist Luis Carlos Restrepo, who seems to have suffered from the Stockholm syndrome, yelled in anger and pain in the Senate against the political and corporate leadership of the country, and against the international community and all members of Colombian society because according to the commissioner we "all feel disgust" faced with the government's process of negotiation with the paramilitaries.

The excess of the government's generosity and the snafu of paramilitarism have exhausted the patience of the four most influential media of the country, the daily newspaper El Tiempo, the weekly El Espectador and the reviews Semana and Cambio, have blown things sky high, in a deep and widespread way with editorials and special reports last September on Sunday 26th. It is not known whether these media agreed or whether this was a simple coincidence. What we are sure of is that they interpreted what society felt, because it had had it up to the teeth.

Is it true that the country has become para militarised? The Ministry of Defence, with an expression of amazement, says that "no such phenomenon exists". And it adds: "NO most emphatically. That no one should think that this started on 7 August 2002 [date when Uribe came into office]. What has been happening is the start of the emergence of what has been happening for years". Minister Uribe - who is also an Uribe - is right, namely: this is not a new phenomenon. Since the time that para- militaries started carrying out massacres and selective murders, the defender of human rights and leaders of the patriotic Union [leftist party of which thousands of its activists were wiped out] started to denounce them publicly. In 1987, the minister of the government in office, César Gaviria, during a debate in Congress, said then that over one hundred paramilitary gangs existed. In October of the following year, the same government officer announced that the authorities had broken up 17 groups but that more than eighty of them still remained.

Despite denunciations and acceptance of the government of the time, the State has never carried out an offensive against the Auc group [Autodefense unies de Colombia- United self defence of Colombia, who are paramilitaries]. Military forces have never organised an operaiton against a paramilitary camp, like they did for over forty years against guerrillas. The actual losses of paramilitaries, they have put forward these themselves. 1.500, only for clashes between the Martín Llanos front and the leader Arroyabe; the latter was recently assassinated by his own partisans.

Thus the government is denying it, the country is not paramilitarised. Through complicity, tolerance acceptance, and support networks within the economic and political sectors, paramilitaries have penetrated society or vice versa. landowners, politicians, farmers, bankers and industrialists have penetrated drug circles seeking military and economic support. It is no secret: for two years, on the Atlantic coast, there is talk of para-democracy that as it is said in El Tiempo, has become a para-Government. Now paramilitaries cling to the branches and to the bodies of public power. Congress, public Ministry, government of states, town halls, universities (etc). It is already too late, but if society and the Government so wish, they can end paramilitarism a small Patriota plan - the Patriota Plan is Uribe's programme, mobilising the entire troop against guerrillas - of 10,000 soldiers and a few policemen would be enough.

Rafael Ballén is a member of the editorial Board of the newspaper the Monde Diplomatique, edición Colombia.

Translation from French Miriam Lee
e-traduction@eircom.net