For weeks, locals had been quietly fleeing the northern Colombian town of El Salado. They were afraid, they told neighbours, of the arrival of the AUC, a death squad led in their region by a tall, imposing figure named Salvatore Mancuso, known as “El Mono.”
The mother thought another of her daughters, a seven-year-old, had lived. Three days later she found her body. “They put a plastic bag over her head and she died, suffocated … on the top of a hill.” In the early 1990s, Mancuso’s father’s farm became a target of the leftist FARC rebels. Mancuso — who had flirted with engineering but preferred ranching — used connections at a Córdoba military battalion to arm local farmers. He would take the fight to the guerrillas.
By September, 2001, the AUC was killing peasants faster than it could incinerate them in its ovens, and was designated by then-U.S. secretary of state Colin Powell as a foreign terror outfit. Álvaro Uribe took office as Colombian president in August the following year. To calm the Americans, who were funnelling hundreds of millions of dollars to Colombia to fight the FARC and the drug trade, Uribe started in late 2002 what came to be known as the Justice and Peace process.
Former president Uribe, now a Colombian senator, remains a hugely polarizing figure in Colombia, and is seen as a political father figure to current president Iván Duque. Praised by many Colombians for crippling the FARC during his 2002-2010 reign, Uribe has also long been accused of paramilitary ties and has faced high-profile investigations. He has vehemently denied the accusations and has never been convicted of any such offences.
Eventually, a man we will call Ernesto, picks up the phone, willing to tell his story if his real name, and other identifying details, are not revealed. He was kidnapped by the AUC and accused of being a guerrilla collaborator. He met its leaders face-to-face and somehow lived to tell the tale before escaping to Canada.
“First, he said sorry about the way he had to do things, but we had to realize that we’re in a war, and war is hard,” Ernesto recalls. “He asked us about the type of work we did at our NGO. We told him about our work on conflict resolution in small communities, and he said the AUC was trying to do things like that in the areas where they worked. At that moment, the conversation was nice, no bad words, no loudness, nothing.
UFI, useless F**KING information
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