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October 28, 2002 Comuna 13: Colombia's Urban Battleground By now the scene is familiar. In the early morning hours of May 21, 2002, some 700 troops backed by tanks moved in while neighborhood militias attempted to impede the advance with machine guns. Blackhawk helicopters rained down bullets indiscriminately on targeted neighborhoods; house-to-house searches that gave way to looting were conducted with no warrant and announced with bullets through front doors; young men were dragged into the streets, bound, beaten and/or killed with children looking on. Heroic neighborhood residents tried to rescue the injured and provide medical attention amidst a hail of bullets fired by agents of the state. People hung white sheets, towels, and shirts from their windows to express their desire for a cease-fire; children armed with sticks and stones confronted soldiers and police, demanding that they leave the neighborhood, shouting, "We want peace! We want peace!" The siege lasted more than twelve hours, and by the time it was finished, nine people including three children were dead, while 37 were injured and 55 detained.
Since the combined military/police incursion that began in the early morning hours of May 21, Comuna 13 has come under unrelenting paramilitary fire. And there have been many more police/military incursions, though until last week none of them had been as murderous as that of May 21. As of October 17, more than 450 people had died violently in Comuna 13 this year—six times the national homicide rate, which is already one of the highest in the world—and 500 families have been displaced in the last six months. Unlike the May 21 massacre committed by agents of the state, however, the paramilitary assaults on Comuna 13 do not make headlines. They are buried in the back pages of local newspapers—just as the strategists of low-intensity warfare intend. Only recently, as the urban conflict has escalated beyond previously imagined limits, has there been any semblance of public debate about the future of Comuna 13. For the most part, indifference and cynicism reign. When the peace process between the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the Pastrana administration ended on February 20 of this year, many analysts predicted that the war would soon reach the cities where three-fourths of Colombians live. For the most part, with the exception of Barrancabermeja, that prediction has yet to be born out, though there are signs that the vast savannah in the southern part of Bogotá is also becoming more heavily militarized. In Medellín, however, the events of May 21 constitute the most visible evidence that a new chapter in a many-sided conflict between leftist guerrillas, the regional government, right-wing paramilitaries and street gangs has begun. Just as before, however, the majority of the victims in this conflict are young people, some of them combatants, but most of them civilians. An official intelligence report estimates that the nation's largest paramilitary organization, United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), currently control 70 percent of Medellín. All that remains to be conquered are the central-western slums (the exit to Urabá, where the FARC and the AUC have been fighting over important access routes to the Caribbean and the Panamanian frontier) and several neighborhoods in the central- and north-east (which give way to an important gold mining district controlled by the AUC). While the AUC has generated heated criticism for its massacres of peasants in the Antioquian countryside, a resounding silence surrounds the growth of paramilitarism in the city of Medellín itself. Some of the people displaced from Urabá by the state forces and paramilitaries during Uribe's time as governor of Antioquia will be slated to disappear during his presidency. Uribe garnered 70 percent of the votes in Antioquia with the expectation that he will "pacify" the city of Medellín, as well as the rest of the country. Comuna 13 was until recently firmly under the control of a pragmatic coalition of three insurgent guerrilla groups—the FARC, the National Liberation Army (ELN), and the Medellín-based People's Armed Commandos (CAP). While relations between the FARC and the ELN, Colombia's two largest insurgent groups, are, with some regional exceptions, chilly at best, in Comuna 13 the FARC, the ELN and the CAP have formed an alliance. For the three rebel groups, not to mention the residents of Comuna 13, the future looks bleak. After a police officer and three civilians, including nineteen year-old Laura Cecilia Betancur, died in Comuna 13 between October 13 and 14, President Uribe ordered "Operation Orion," in which the supposed leader of the CAP, known as "Mazo," was killed in a combined military offensive that involved army, police, air force and special forces as well as members of the intelligence services. A total of 1,000 troops participated in the first phase of the operation. Moving in with tanks and a Blackhawk helicopter with guns ablaze at 4am on October 15, it took the state forces less than two hours to reach the heart of Comuna 13. There they conducted house-to-house searches. By the time the first phase of the operation—which lasted for forty-one hours—had concluded on the afternoon of October 17, another 2,000 troops had cordoned off the area, and an army officer, two soldiers, a police officer, a civilian, and ten guerrillas were dead. More than forty civilians were injured and at least 176 suspected guerrilla fighters were detained. Given the scenarios described above, however, we should view official estimates with suspicion. We may never know how many really died, nor how many of them were guerrilla fighters and how many were adolescent civilians.
General Mario Montoya, head of the army's Fourth Brigade and leader of the scorched earth campaigns in Putumayo in 2000-2001, characterized the May 21 operation in Comuna 13 as an unqualified success: "We have obtained excellent results against the various bands of criminals that operate in the city. We will not stop." For his part, General Leonardo Gallego, head of Medellín's Metropolitan Police and another veteran of the Putumayo campaigns, denied charges of excesses in the May 21 operation, countering that it was the guerrillas who had committed excesses against the military and police. Referring to Comuna 13, Jorge Enrique Vélez, former municipal Secretary of Government in Medellín and currently the leading candidate for mayor, declared, "We need to have it as a zone of conflict, like Caguán or Sumapaz" (two of the FARC's principal strongholds). Not to be outdone, Medellín's current mayor Luis Pérez announced that more operations—in the fashion of May 21 or Operation Orion, one supposes—will follow: "If we want a city in which there are no areas that are off-limits because of subversion, we will have to apply many violent actions." Both Vélez and Pérez have called for an additional 2,000 police officers—who "can also be soldiers," according to Pérez—as well as the creation of an Urban Mobile Brigade of the Army and the construction of military bases in central-western and northeastern Medellín. In short, Vélez and Pérez are looking to institutionalize on a municipal level key aspects of Operation Orion for the foreseeable future. In Pérez's view, the poor, peripheral neighborhoods of Medellín that are beyond official control are "a cancer that we have to extirpate." Sadly, Operation Orion has proven to be another case of deaths foretold. Municipal Secretary of Government Jorge León Sánchez, debating the merits of a curfew for Comuna 13 with the city council, announced on October 12 that more military operations were on the way. "There is no turning back from a curfew and the installation of a military battalion in Comuna 13," said Sánchez. "Because the administration in Medellín is determined to recover the legitimate monopoly on arms." As expected, on Friday October 18, Mayor Luis Pérez announced that a curfew, the prohibition of alcohol sales and consumption, and a ban on the use of arms in Comuna 13 would go into effect over the weekend. In response to the possibility of a curfew in Comuna 13, hundreds of people from NGOs and human rights organizations, led by the Popular Training Institute (IPC), bravely took to the streets to protest a week before Operation Orion unfolded. According to Fernando Quijano, director of the Colombian non-governmental organization CORPADES (Peace and Social Development Corporation), "The curfew is the first step in the conversion of Medellín into a zone of rehabilitation and of military operations, which will only aggravate the conflict." Presently, in accordance with President Uribe's declaration of a "State of Internal Commotion," nearly half of Colombia is so governed. We should not be surprised if Medellín becomes the first of many cities to suffer the same fate as the countryside, as Colombia becomes a country of displaced people with nowhere to run and nowhere to hide. This article was excerpted from Forrest Hylton's special report titled, The Occupied Territories of Medellín. Forrest Hylton is a freelance journalist based in South America. He has previously written for Against the Current, Left Turn, Asi es Bolivia, and the Colombian magazine Desde Abajo. This article originally appeared in Colombia Report, an online journal that was published by the Information Network of the Americas (INOTA).
Copyright © 2003 Colombia Journal. All rights reserved. |
This
did not happen in Nablus, Jenin, or Ramallah, but in Comuna 13—composed
of 20 neighborhoods with an estimated 100,000 residents, many of
whom are displaced Afro-Colombian peasants with experience in community
organizing—in the central-western hills of Medellín,
Colombia. Yet, unlike the situation in the Middle East, there were
no international observers demanding to enter the cordoned-off area.
Rather, community leaders noted "the apathy of official NGOs
and humanitarian organizations, both foreign and domestic, which
have not responded, as they should, to the gravity of the urban
conflict. They are absent." Given the manner in which the state
asserts itself in poor neighborhoods on the city's periphery, it
is easy to sympathize with one resident of Comuna 13, who said,
"I didn't lose any children or brothers or friends, but I cried
anyway. How do [the state authorities] expect us not to hate them?"
It
is worth noting that while paramilitaries control over 70 percent
of Medellín, there has been no official effort to root them
out of their domains with military repression, and not one paramilitary
fighter has been killed in Operation Orion. Comuna 13 was attacked
again precisely because the paramilitaries have not been able to
gain control of it on their own, so to speak, since the May 21 massacre.
As such, Operation Orion is far from over. Eighty percent of Comuna
13 is now under the direct control of 1,500 army troops, who have
continued to conduct house-to-house searches, rounding up suspects
while accompanied by informants dressed in ski masks and fatigues.
In response, the FARC dispatched approximately 250 fighters from
its southern stronghold of Caguán to Comuna 13 in order to
prevent the military and/or paramilitaries from gaining control
of the strategic corridor leading north toward Santa Fe de Antioquia
and Urabá. Warfare has thus become part of the fabric of
daily life along the central-western as well as central and northeastern
outskirts of Medellín, and the authorities expect it will
stay that way. Colombia's Minister of Defense, Martha Lucía
Ramírez, has called Operation Orion "permanent,"
implying that a significant number of the occupying troops will
stay in Comuna 13 for the indefinite future.