Two news stories were produced in less than four hours this Tuesday, showing the depth of the wounds of a war that has ravaged Colombia with ups and downs for decades. On the one hand, a judge from New York City (USA) sentenced Dairo Antonio Úsuga, better known as Otoniel, to 45 years in prison for drug trafficking. On the other hand, the transitional justice system created in the negotiations with the paramilitaries in 2005 expelled one of the commanders, Hernán Giraldo, for continuing to commit crimes after negotiations with the judicial system: he supported why this is seen as one of the evidence of the aggravation of the armed conflict when he committed gender-based violence against four minors while detained in Colombian prisons in 2007 and 2008.
After 18 years of massive demobilization of the illegal groups known as the paramilitaries – a criminal confederation of armies including drug dealers, land grabbers and peasant self-defense groups – the wounds they left in Colombia remain open. Both Úsuga and Giraldo are evidence of decades of violence and how rural conflicts fed each other in what experts like Francisco Gutiérrez Sanín have called different waves or cycles of violence. As journalist María Teresa Ronderos writes, these are wars that have been recycled.
Giraldo, for example, was born in one of the departments hardest hit by the fate of the undeclared civil war between Liberals and Conservatives in the mid-20th century, known as La Violencia (that is, with capital letters and no name). He studied through second grade when his family left the area due to the conflict. A landless farmer, he emigrated to the foothills of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta in the Caribbean. He came there in 1969 as a day laborer; He prospered commercially, taking advantage of the area’s marijuana production and export bonanza, and began buying farms. Then the FARC guerrillas, now extinct, arrived and Giraldo confronted them. His son and son-in-law died in a guerrilla attack in 1986, and Giraldo became a full-time paramilitary chief. With drug trafficking as his source of income and the sum total of voluntary and forced recruitment, he founded an organization that he later affiliated with the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), with whom he was demobilized in 2005 along with his brother and partner Jesús Antonio because of extradited to the US for drug trafficking.
In fact, Úsuga is the direct heir of this attempt to unite and lead the entire country into the paramilitary groups that have been dubbed the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC). He was born into a peasant family in Urabá, a violent area that was recently colonized and where there is much conflict over land. At the age of 16 he joined the Maoist guerrillas of the People’s Liberation Army (EPL) together with his brother Juan de Dios. Like many other members of the group, after the peace signing in 1991, he eventually joined the region’s paramilitary ranks organized by brothers Carlos and Vicente Castaño in the middle of the decade. Úsuga gained Vicente’s trust, grew up in paramilitary ranks and refused to secede from AUC in 2005. Along with his brother and other superiors, he inherited control of drug trafficking routes, weapons, war hardened men and carried on the war. After the death of his brother in a police operation on January 1, 2012, he was left as the sole leader of a group that called itself Los Urabeños, Las Autodefensas Gaitanistas de Colombia, or Clan del Golfo, which expanded by exploiting advantages to track down power gaps in other groups and to fight directly. He was finally captured at the border with Panama in late 2021, an operation welcomed by then-President Iván Duque. Months later, in May 2022, he was extradited to the United States by Duque.
Police escort Dairo Antonio Usuga.AP
The parallel between the two goes even further. Both were extradited to the US by right-wing governments. Giraldo in 2008, when President Álvaro Uribe suddenly sent 15 demobilized AUC leaders to US power, accusing them of continuing to engage in drug trafficking from their prisons, where they awaited favorable sentences negotiated with Uribe himself . And that determines a special justice known as “Justice and Peace.” Úsuga in 2022 when Duque decided that he should be tried in the United States for drug trafficking instead of serving the six sentences and prosecuting the 122 criminal cases he had initiated in Colombia.
Newsletter
Analysis of current affairs and the best stories from Colombia, every week in your mailbox
GET THIS
Both Giraldo and Úsuga have left thousands of victims who continue to demand justice. The first is one of the clearest dehumanizations of war. After serving an eight-year sentence in the United States, he returned deported in 2021. Two years earlier, the Justice and Peace Chamber of the Barranquilla Court had sentenced him to 40 years in prison, the longest sentence in existence in Colombia, along with other members of their group, for various crimes including forced conscription, murder, enforced disappearance and displacement, illegal financing and especially gender-based violence. “The sexual violence perpetrated by the then commander of the so-called Tayrona resistance bloc, Hernán Giraldo Serna, represented a strategy of social control in addition to satisfying his sexual desires,” it says in a sentence that totals 9,166 pages.
The injuries inflicted by Giraldo, which are estimated to have claimed around 67,000 lives, are particularly severe in dozens or hundreds of women. It is estimated that he had around 35 children, many as a result of rape. Prosecutors have ascertained that most of these mothers were abused by Giraldo when they were under 14 years old. The youngest would have become pregnant at the age of 12. And this Tuesday he was expelled because prosecutors managed to prove that Giraldo committed crimes of gender-based violence against four minors between 2007 and 2008 while he was in Colombian prisons.
“I was 15 years old, arrived in Santa Marta and met a woman there. “She asked me to stay with her and do the housework and take care of the boys and girls, and in return she would help me study, give me a house and buy me the personal things I needed,” she says one of their victims. “One day she said to me: You go, you will accompany me to prison today.” Once there, he saw El Patron face to face for the first time. “He started undressing me and had sex with me in that bed there and I remember crying and thinking he was going to die on me and I was in tears and just saying, ‘My God help me “I don’t care because this man is going to die on top of me,” says one of the testimonies prosecutors collected.
FARC guerrillas in La Guajira, north of Colombia.EFE
In Otoniel’s case, his victims include all manner of crimes—homicide, terrorism, kidnapping, sex crimes, criminal mining, etc.—that they sought to avoid extradition through sit-ins and legal action. Like Giraldo, among the bloodstains he left are hundreds of women, both victims of his international human trafficking network and minors raped by him. Among the many wounds of war, those of these women who have not yet found truth or redress are open. Wounds added to those of the victims of the other crimes committed by Giraldo, Otoniel and many other Otonieles.
Subscribe here to the EL PAÍS newsletter on Colombia and receive all the latest information about the country.
Subscribe to continue reading
Read without limits