Weekly Report - 27 January 2011 (WR-11-04)

COLOMBIA | Shift in security priorities. Emerging criminal groups, dubbed Bacrim, pose the biggest threat to citizen security in Colombia. That was the very clear message put out by both the government and the security forces in a forum in Bogotá this week. “The Bacrim are the highest priority (in the fight against crime) and the main threat to the country," the head of the national police, General Óscar Naranjo, said. He claimed that the Bacrim, composed primarily of former members of the paramilitary Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (AUC), were responsible for two-thirds of the two dozen “massacres" (defined as the murder of more than four people) in Colombia in 2010. He said he was committed to capturing the leaders of the Bacrim, which he maintained were present in half of the country's 32 departments, and eliminating their structures. But he conceded that its recruitment capacity must be formidable, as 10,400 members had been captured, he claimed, between 2006 and 2010.
    The defence minister, Rodrigo Rivera, said that close collaboration between the military, the government and the judiciary was essential as military control was not sufficient to defeat the Bacrim without “the construction of democratic values." Rivera insisted that to call the Bacrim paramilitary was a mistake as it gave them unwarranted political status to evade their responsibilities and unfairly demonised the military, which did not support these groups. He also argued that the ties between the Bacrim and other armed groups, such as the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (Farc), were getting closer and closer. The commander of the armed forces, Admiral Édgar Cely, concurred. He claimed that both the Farc and the Ejército de Liberación Nacional (ELN) were steadily becoming “bacriminised". He said that the Farc had 7,900 members, and the ELN, 2,000.

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