C O L O M B I A R E P O R T

Published by the Information Network of the Americas (INOTA), a

Non-profit organization.

October 28, 2002

Comuna 13: Colombia's Urban Battleground

by Forrest Hylton

By now the scene is familiar. In the early morning hours of May 21,

2002, some 700 troops backed by tanks moved in while neighborhood

militias attempted to impede the advance with machine guns. Blackhawk

helicopters rained down bullets indiscriminately on targeted

neighborhoods; house-to-house searches that gave way to looting were

conducted with no warrant and announced with bullets through front

doors; young men were dragged into the streets, bound, beaten and/or

killed with children looking on. Heroic neighborhood residents tried

to rescue the injured and provide medical attention amidst a hail of

bullets fired by agents of the state. People hung white sheets,

towels, and shirts from their windows to express their desire for a

cease-fire; children armed with sticks and stones confronted soldiers

and police, demanding that they leave the neighborhood, shouting, "We

want peace! We want peace!" The siege lasted more than twelve hours,

and by the time it was finished, nine people including three children

were dead, while 37 were injured and 55 detained.

This did not happen in Nablus, Jenin, or Ramallah, but in Comuna

13*composed of 20 neighborhoods with an estimated 100,000 residents,

many of whom are displaced Afro-Colombian peasants with experience in

community organizing*in the central-western hills of Medellín,

Colombia. Yet, unlike the situation in the Middle East, there were no

international observers demanding to enter the cordoned-off area.

Rather, community leaders noted "the apathy of official NGOs and

humanitarian organizations, both foreign and domestic, which have not

responded, as they should, to the gravity of the urban conflict. They

are absent." Given the manner in which the state asserts itself in

poor neighborhoods on the city's periphery, it is easy to sympathize

with one resident of Comuna 13, who said, "I didn't lose any children

or brothers or friends, but I cried anyway. How do [the state

authorities] expect us not to hate them?"

Since the combined military/police incursion that began in the early

morning hours of May 21, Comuna 13 has come under unrelenting

paramilitary fire. And there have been many more police/military

incursions, though until last week none of them had been as murderous

as that of May 21. As of October 17, more than 450 people had died

violently in Comuna 13 this year*six times the national homicide

rate, which is already one of the highest in the world*and 500

families have been displaced in the last six months. Unlike the May

21 massacre committed by agents of the state, however, the

paramilitary assaults on Comuna 13 do not make headlines. They are

buried in the back pages of local newspapers*just as the strategists

of low-intensity warfare intend. Only recently, as the urban conflict

has escalated beyond previously imagined limits, has there been any

semblance of public debate about the future of Comuna 13. For the

most part, indifference and cynicism reign.

When the peace process between the Revolutionary Armed Forces of

Colombia (FARC) and the Pastrana administration ended on February 20

of this year, many analysts predicted that the war would soon reach

the cities where three-fourths of Colombians live. For the most part,

with the exception of Barrancabermeja, that prediction has yet to be

born out, though there are signs that the vast savannah in the

southern part of Bogotá is also becoming more heavily militarized. In

Medellín, however, the events of May 21 constitute the most visible

evidence that a new chapter in a many-sided conflict between leftist

guerrillas, the regional government, right-wing paramilitaries and

street gangs has begun. Just as before, however, the majority of the

victims in this conflict are young people, some of them combatants,

but most of them civilians.

An official intelligence report estimates that the nation's largest

paramilitary organization, United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia

(AUC), currently control 70 percent of Medellín. All that remains to

be conquered are the central-western slums (the exit to Urabá, where

the FARC and the AUC have been fighting over important access routes

to the Caribbean and the Panamanian frontier) and several

neighborhoods in the central- and north-east (which give way to an

important gold mining district controlled by the AUC). While the AUC

has generated heated criticism for its massacres of peasants in the

Antioquian countryside, a resounding silence surrounds the growth of

paramilitarism in the city of Medellín itself. Some of the people

displaced from Urabá by the state forces and paramilitaries during

Uribe's time as governor of Antioquia will be slated to disappear

during his presidency. Uribe garnered 70 percent of the votes in

Antioquia with the expectation that he will "pacify" the city of

Medellín, as well as the rest of the country.

Comuna 13 was until recently firmly under the control of a pragmatic

coalition of three insurgent guerrilla groups*the FARC, the National

Liberation Army (ELN), and the Medellín-based People's Armed

Commandos (CAP). While relations between the FARC and the ELN,

Colombia's two largest insurgent groups, are, with some regional

exceptions, chilly at best, in Comuna 13 the FARC, the ELN and the

CAP have formed an alliance. For the three rebel groups, not to

mention the residents of Comuna 13, the future looks bleak. After a

police officer and three civilians, including nineteen year-old Laura

Cecilia Betancur, died in Comuna 13 between October 13 and 14,

President Uribe ordered "Operation Orion," in which the supposed

leader of the CAP, known as 'Mazo,' was killed in a combined military

offensive that involved army, police, air force and special forces as

well as members of the intelligence services.

A total of 1,000 troops participated in the first phase of the

operation. Moving in with tanks and a Blackhawk helicopter with guns

ablaze at 4am on October 15, it took the state forces less than two

hours to reach the heart of Comuna 13. There they conducted

house-to-house searches. By the time the first phase of the

operation*which lasted for forty-one hours*had concluded on the

afternoon of October 17, another 2,000 troops had cordoned off the

area, and an army officer, two soldiers, a police officer, a

civilian, and ten guerrillas were dead. More than forty civilians

were injured and at least 176 suspected guerrilla fighters were

detained. Given the scenarios described above, however, we should

view official estimates with suspicion. We may never know how many

really died, nor how many of them were guerrilla fighters and how

many were adolescent civilians.

It is worth noting that while paramilitaries control over 70 percent

of Medellín, there has been no official effort to root them out of

their domains with military repression, and not one paramilitary

fighter has been killed in "Operation Orion." Comuna 13 was attacked

again precisely because the paramilitaries have not been able to gain

control of it on their own, so to speak, since the May 21 massacre.

As such, "Operation Orion" is far from over. Eighty percent of Comuna

13 is now under the direct control of 1,500 army troops, who have

continued to conduct house-to-house searches, rounding up suspects

while accompanied by informants dressed in ski masks and fatigues. In

response, the FARC dispatched approximately 250 fighters from its

southern stronghold of Caguán to Comuna 13 in order to prevent the

military and/or paramilitaries from gaining control of the strategic

corridor leading north toward Santa Fe de Antioquia and Urabá.

Warfare has thus become part of the fabric of daily life along the

central-western as well as central and northeastern outskirts of

Medellín, and the authorities expect it will stay that way.

Colombia's Minister of Defense, Martha Lucía Ramírez, has called

Operation Orion "permanent," implying that a significant number of

the occupying troops will stay in Comuna 13 for the indefinite future.

General Mario Montoya, head of the army's Fourth Brigade and leader

of the scorched earth campaigns in Putumayo in 2000-2001,

characterized the May 21 operation in Comuna 13 as an unqualified

success: "We have obtained excellent results against the various

bands of criminals that operate in the city. We will not stop." For

his part, General Leonardo Gallego, head of Medellín's Metropolitan

Police and another veteran of the Putumayo campaigns, denied charges

of excesses in the May 21 operation, countering that it was the

guerrillas who had committed excesses against the military and

police. Referring to Comuna 13, Jorge Enrique Vélez, former municipal

Secretary of Government in Medellín and currently the leading

candidate for mayor, declared, "We need to have it as a zone of

conflict, like Caguán or Sumapaz" (two of the FARC's principal

strongholds).

Not to be outdone, Medellín's current mayor Luis Pérez announced that

more operations*in the fashion of May 21 or Operation Orion, one

supposes*will follow: "If we want a city in which there are no areas

that are off-limits because of subversion, we will have to apply many

violent actions." Both Vélez and Pérez have called for an additional

2,000 police officers*who "can also be soldiers," according to

Pérez*as well as the creation of an Urban Mobile Brigade of the Army

and the construction of military bases in central-western and

northeastern Medellín. In short, Vélez and Pérez are looking to

institutionalize on a municipal level key aspects of Operation Orion

for the foreseeable future. In Pérez's view, the poor, peripheral

neighborhoods of Medellín that are beyond official control are "a

cancer that we have to extirpate."

Sadly, Operation Orion has proven to be another case of deaths

foretold. Municipal Secretary of Government Jorge León Sánchez,

debating the merits of a curfew for Comuna 13 with the city council,

announced on October 12 that more military operations were on the

way. "There is no turning back from a curfew and the installation of

a military battalion in Comuna 13," said Sánchez, "because the

administration in Medellín is determined to recover the legitimate

monopoly on arms." As expected, on Friday October 18, mayor Luis

Pérez announced that a curfew, the prohibition of alcohol sales and

consumption, and a ban on the use of arms in Comuna 13 would go into

effect over the weekend.

In response to the possibility of a curfew in Comuna 13, hundreds of

people from NGOs and human rights organizations, led by the Popular

Training Institute (IPC), bravely took to the streets to protest a

week before Operation Orion unfolded. According to Fernando Quijano,

director of the Colombian non-governmental organization CORPADES

(Peace and Social Development Corporation), "The curfew is the first

step in the conversion of Medellín into a 'zone of rehabilitation'

and of military operations, which will only aggravate the conflict."

Presently, in accordance with President Uribe's declaration of a

"State of Internal Commotion," nearly half of Colombia is so

governed. We should not be surprised if Medellín becomes the first of

many cities to suffer the same fate as the countryside, as Colombia

becomes a country of displaced people with nowhere to run and nowhere

to hide.

This article was excerpted from a Special Report titled, The Occupied

Territories of Medellín.

http://www.colombiareport.org/occupied_medellin.htm

Forrest Hylton is a freelance journalist based in South America. He

has previously written for Against the Current, Left Turn, Asi es

Bolivia, and the Colombian magazine Desde Abajo.