Colombia’s ‘new paramilitary’ organisations, or Bacrims as the government calls them, have struck alliances with Mexican drug trafficking organisations (DTOs) and are fighting each other for the control of areas along the northern border with Venezuela. This development has been revealed in a recently published study, which also claims that the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (Farc) and the Ejército de Liberación Nacional (ELN), while still a threat in those regions, have been overtaken by these alliances as the main menace.
The study, entitled ‘La frontera caliente entre Colombia y Venezuela’ (‘The hot border between Colombia and Venezuela’), was conducted by Ariel Avila, a Colombian analyst at the Corporación Nuevo Arco Iris, and was launched in book form by Random House Mondadori on 25 April. Avila spent two years researching the situation in two sets of border areas: on the Colombian side it included La Guajira, Norte de Santander and Arauca-Vichada; in Venezuela it included Zulia, Táchira and Apure.
Avila summarises developments there as fostered by three situations:
1. The intensification of activities by the illegal armed groups in border areas since the late 1990s.
2. The increase in those areas of different illegal activities: the smuggling of fuel from Venezuela into Colombia; and the routing of Colombian drugs through Venezuela towards Central America and Africa
3. The growing instability of local and regional administrations on both sides of the border.
He does admit, with caveats, that there have been improvements since Juan Manuel Santos became president of Colombia in August 2010. ‘There is no doubt’, he says, ‘that there has been greater pressure on the guerrillas and interesting cooperation with the Venezuelan authorities [thanks to the rapprochement and the dialogues between the two presidents]. However, it is necessary to broaden the debate over the real problems of the region.’
One of those problems, he says, is that smuggling is no longer a ‘decentralised’ affair: ‘It is being managed by large structures like the Urabeños and the Rastrojos [and] there is evidence of corruption in the institutions of government’. This, he says, is aggravated by the connections with foreign DTOs: ‘There are three clearly visible alliances: that of Los Rastrojos with Los Zetas, who have representatives in Maracaibo; that of Los Urabeños with Sinaloa and the Dominican cartels; and that of the heirs of ‘Jorge 40’ with the Tijuana cartel. All of these alliances are fighting for control of the border.’
(‘Jorge 40’ is the nom de guerre of Rodrigo Tovar Pupo, the former leader of the paramilitary Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (AUC)’s northern bloc, which operated in Colombia’s northern border departments. His 2,000-strong bloc formally demobilised in 2006. In 2008 he and 12 other former paramilitary leaders were extradited to the US for having breached the terms of their demobilisation.)
One of Avila’s claims may have political repercussions in Venezuela. He says that in the Venezuelan state of Zulia, ‘the police appear as yet another criminal organisation’. The current governor of Zulia is Pablo Pérez Alvarez, who was one of the contenders for the united opposition’s presidential nomination. ‘It is clear,’ says Ávila, ‘that the [Zulia police] is under the control of the opposition. It is said, for example, that it handed over Valenciano in order to take control of his cocaine business.’ (‘Valenciano’ is Maximiliano Bonilla Orozco, a former leader of the Oficina de Envigado, who was arrested in Maracay, Aragua, in November 2011.)
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