caused far more casualties. The military rule of the 1950s
was itself partially in response to a civil war known in
Spanish simply as La Violencia, or “The Violence.” Since
that time quite a range of insurgent groups, mostly
communist revolutionaries, have plagued the countryside,
kidnapping and murdering. To avoid either of these
unpleasant options in rural Colombia, you have to pay the
vacuna , literally “the vaccination,” meaning that you have to
vaccinate yourself against being murdered or kidnapped by
paying off some group of armed thugs each month.
Not all armed groups in Colombia are communists. In
1981 members of the main communist guerrilla group in
Colombia, the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de
Colombia (the FARC—the Revolutionary Armed Forces of
Colombia) kidnapped a dairy farmer, Jesus Castaño, who
lived in a small town called Amalfi in the hot country in the
northeastern part of the department of Antioquia. The
FARC demanded a ransom amounting to $7,500, a small
fortune in rural Colombia. The family raised it by
mortgaging the farm, but their father’s corpse was found
anyway, chained to a tree. Enough was enough for three of
Castaño’s sons, Carlos, Fidel, and Vicente. They founded
a paramilitary group, Los Tangueros, to hunt down
members of the FARC and avenge this act. The brothers
were good at organizing, and soon their group grew and
began to find a common interest with other similar
paramilitary groups that had developed from similar
causes. Colombians in many areas were suffering at the
hands of left-wing guerrillas, and right-wing paramilitaries
formed in opposition. Paramilitaries were being used by
landowners to defend themselves against the guerrillas, but
they were also involved in drug trafficking, extortion, and the
kidnapping and murder of citizens.
By 1997 the paramilitaries, under the leadership of the
Castaño brothers, had managed to form a national
organization for paramilitaries called the Autodefensas
Unidas de Colombia (the AUC—United Self-Defense
Forces of Colombia). The AUC expanded into large parts
of the country, particularly into the hot country, in the
departments of Córdoba, Sucre, Magdalena, and César.
By 2001 the AUC may have had as many as thirty thousand
armed men at its disposal and was organized into different