The first shot went through a basin, which fell off the table and spilled water on the floor. The second reached the youngest of Liliana Quintero’s eight children. It was eight o’clock in the evening and the family was collecting water for the next day. The eldest son immediately confronted one of the three hooded assassins and hit him with a chair until he slipped and they killed him on the ground. Those two murders, those of Ronaldo and Fabián Maldonado, brought the number of murders committed by the Clan del Golfo in Codazzi, a town in the Colombian Caribbean, to 13 this year. Residents know this is a plan of social destruction .
Liliana Quintero remembers with pain where her home was before her children were murdered in the parish of Agustín Codazzi. Diego Cuevas
Liliana’s wrinkled face has a languid expression like that of an old woman. At the age of 55, he is very sad: his four children were killed. The first was murdered eight years ago; the second in June last year and the last two, Ronaldo, 22, and Fabián, 33, in April this year. They were responsible for the financial support of Liliana, who arrived in Codazzi in the late 1990s, displaced by the paramilitaries. He built a mud hut in an invasion area and finished raising his children there.
“I couldn’t figure out why.” It’s a sleep I get every day. I want justice to be done,” he says, covering his face and crying.
El Cesar is the second largest department of Colombia, producing the most coal. Codazzi, one of his mining communities, leaves behind large royalties that are not translated into works for the common good. Starving dogs roam the potholed streets. The hospital looks like an abandoned slaughterhouse: the walls, flaking paint from excessive leaks, could well serve as a house of horrors. The most privileged residents get water every two days, the poorest, like Liliana, never. Known as “the white city” because of the vast cotton fields that surrounded it, Codazzi no longer exists. At the end of the 1990s, the paramilitaries came and scourged the people. Out of a population of 67,000, 51,204 are considered victims of the armed conflict by the state. Most of them live in the fields, mainly from coffee cultivation and animal husbandry. Most visible among all the violence in the city are a few entrance roundabouts, which the current mayor ordered to be built at a cost of 2.7 billion pesos (about $700,000). There is no permanent water and no well-equipped hospital, but there are monuments that are worth photographing.
The power that ELN and FARC guerrillas enjoyed in the region for decades pales in the face of the overgrowth of the Clan del Golfo in northern Colombia. This illegal organized crime army is a collection of criminal gangs including the Úsuga clan, the Águilas Negras and Los Urabeños. According to the latest report by NGO Indepaz, there are more than 9,000 men under arms and 3,000 more in support networks across the country; It is bigger than the ELN or the FARC dissidents.
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Photo of Ronaldo, one of Liliana’s murdered sons. Diego Cuevas
In Cesar, in the midst of the pandemic, the Clan del Golfo began to quietly expand, taking advantage of the quarantine. The Office of the Ombudsman has issued four early warnings to urge the authorities to take urgent action to prevent another bloodbath in the department. There have been no murders since the last show, which aired on Codazzi in May, but the clan has taken control of the area, recruiting young people, and men armed with pistols and rifles are roaming the city to intimidate social leaders and murder stigmatized people.
Social destruction was a common practice of the paramilitaries and is now one of their substitute practices. With it they want to “impose order” (an order of which it is not known who obeys and who serves), a sophistry to justify crimes, to educate the population and to instill fear. Most of those killed are poor and marginalized young people from the outskirts who have been accused of involvement in criminal activities without any evidence. Since last year, a wave of murders has been accumulating, the common feature of which is leaving labels on the victims so that there is no doubt about the perpetrators. Next to the bodies, the assassins left cardboard boxes with handwritten messages: “AGC available”, “For a rat”, “For a toad” (informer), “For a drug addict”. A murdered man was left with a sign accusing him of collecting extortion money on behalf of the Clan del Golfo. These are the crimes that have been dubbed “social cleansing” for decades due to Colombia’s deterioration.
Message to Ronaldo on the side of the house. Diego Cuevas
Although murders of this type have been committed since the 1980s, there are now concerns about their systematic nature. According to the Ombudsman’s Office, a strategy of the Clan del Golfo is to pursue its consolidation and expansion, as this serves to strengthen the social base, “on the one hand because some sections of the population tend to view these homicides as positive eyes and on the other hand.” others because they ingratiate themselves with latifundist sectors affected by the rustle; On the other hand, it also creates intimidation and fear in other sectors and makes them more vulnerable to their subordination,” a Cesar official told EL PAÍS.
Leaflets threatening further destruction have appeared throughout the department. In Codazzi’s, the billboard, dominated by two human skulls, reads: “The time has come to do a new cleanse for all drug dealers and smokers, street thieves, rapists, auto sled drivers…”. It used to be notices that were placed under the front door, today they are spread on social networks. In other “messages,” the Gaitanista Self-Defense Forces (a name given to members of the Clan del Golfo) threaten to kill those who leave after 9 a.m. “We’re going to kill all that son of a bitch who’s shagging in the street” (sic), they warn. “If the authorities don’t go where the thieves, thieves, pickpockets and marijuana users are, we will go after them,” they add. On other posters, they threatened various social leaders with their own names.
Cemetery of the Municipality of Agustín Codazzi.Diego Cuevas
“The approval of social destruction is very high,” explains Carlos Mario Perea, professor at the Institute for Political Studies at the National University. The urban conflict expert is concerned about the label “social cleansing” because it creates the fallacy that “dirt” is being removed and ultimately legitimizes the killers. “More complicated is the idea that social cleansing is good because it rids us of conflict and very bad people and restores justice where the state isn’t there,” he says. The professor explains that extermination pursues identities with contradictory characteristics, and that the armed actors use them because they know they evoke sympathy among residents. “The annihilation tries to regulate coexistence in a cruel way,” says Perea.
According to the Ombudsman, the ceasefire agreed between December 2022 and March this year between the state and the Clan del Golfo was “designed to strengthen themselves militarily and financially in the area, leading to repeated violations,” leading to Assassination and economic extortion carried out and patrols in urban areas. In the Codazzi area, Francisco José Morelos Peñate’s front was reinforced with weapons, logistical means and men, some of whom came from Córdoba and Urabá, the paramilitary rear guard and base of expansion at the end of the last century.
Fear and more fear
Dairo Bayona has calluses on his nerves with so many threats. Being a social leader in Colombia means living under the influence of criminals. Bayona is 37 years old and a candidate for mayor of Codazzi, a municipality he has had to leave several times due to threats. Last by phone. He was called by someone posing as “Commander Aníbal Guerrero” to keep him informed of his “compulsory security services” through “carnets” which they distribute to the population. He informed him that they had held meetings with the Presidents of the Community Action Boards in anticipation of the municipal elections in October. When Dairo told him in a recording obtained by this newspaper that he was not interested in the “offer,” Guerrero threatened him:
Dairo Bayona, social leader. Diego Cuevas
“The problems won’t be for me, they will be for you, and try to take good care of yourself.” Everyone creates their own destiny. If you are one of those people who are dissatisfied with us here in this area (…) we will also be with you. If you make the decision to lock the doors on us, do not lock them on us, but on yourself.
A motorcycle taxi driver who saw the gunmen admits he is afraid to offer his services in the city. A man recently stopped him on the road and asked him to take him to a farm seven kilometers from town. The motorcycle taxi driver accepted this on condition that the road was paved. The man got in and when they reached the rural area he announced:
“I’m the one killing here, I’ll kill everyone, but don’t worry, go ahead, we’re fine.”
The motorcycle taxi driver was horrified and continued on his way until he came to a farm full of armed men. In the outskirts nobody dares to go out after eight in the evening. He stopped working nights. “People hear about the self-defense forces and are more afraid of them than they are of the devil,” he says.
Interior of the Public Hospital of the Municipality of Agustín Codazzi.Diego Cuevas
Another resident, who asked not to give his name, says he saw them drinking alcohol, dressed all in black, with the “AGC” badge on them. In a leaflet received on his phone, they announce they will begin levying a tax on dealers “for the cause of the Self-Defense Forces.” These are logics that are modeled on those of the turn of the century.
In the late 1990s, thousands of people were displaced by the paramilitaries. Miguel Ricardo Serna was one of them. He then directed a land restitution process, but was unable to get his land back. “I used to sow seeds, but now I don’t even have soil in my fingernails,” he says. Noon burns like an ember in Codazzi. Miguel, 63, sits by the street door with several chickens and says that his life is in danger, that he has had to move several times and that, since he does not receive a peso for his social leadership, he is looking for different jobs : he is a midwife , Nursing Assistant and Rezandero. Pray for the sick animals and the dead. A few days ago I was praying for a lady with a rosary in my hand when suddenly I heard shots: a young man was killed in front of me. He finished answering and crossed the street to pray to the newly deceased. He recently received a call from Clan del Golfo, in which they insulted him, declared him “persona non grata” and asked him to vacate the apartment within 24 hours. But he has nowhere to go. “Just seeing them around town makes you feel like a victim again. We’re full of terror,” he says.
Ómar Benjumea, Mayor of Codazzi, underestimates the size and capacity of the Clan del Golfo. “My point of view is that the Clan del Golfo has no social base or distribution as they want to believe,” he said in a telephone interview with EL PAÍS. He reiterated that the Ombudsman’s early warning “did people great harm” by strengthening the criminal group. He reiterates that while there are patrols in the area, he does not believe that a cell is installed there, but that it is an incipient presence. He says he visited the yards where local residents said the armed men were, but neither he nor the police saw them.
Market in the urban area of the municipality of Agustín Codazzi.Diego Cuevas
Cesar prosecutors announced that Mayor Benjumea had in his escort a former police officer who was said to be from the Gulf clan. Former police officer Luis Miguel Mercado was arrested for conspiring to commit crimes with this criminal group. Although Benjumea denies that he was his companion, he professes their friendship and says that the man only accompanied him on his travels but held no position as such. In a local newspaper, the mayor said former police officer Luis Miguel Mercado gave him institutional advice, a claim he now denies. Social leader Dairo Bayona has asked the Ombudsman’s follow-up commission to investigate the mayor over his alleged links to this criminal group.
In a community with so much poverty and violence, life is a constant tragic struggle. The state doesn’t seem to exist. Liliana Quintero, now without her four children, displaced and without any psychosocial or financial help, needs answers to ease her pain. The same applies to another dozen victims’ families. In her mud hut, which is about to collapse, Liliana senses that justice is just a word in Colombia. It almost never comes.
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