Death, Rebirth and Genocide

The Mass Murder of the Patriotic Union in Colombia

Photos by Jesse Gwilliam

Blinded by the flare of his rocket launcher, the mercenary lost his footing and missed. It was that mistake, Senator Aída Avella told me, and rites of protection performed by Indigenous Colombians that saved her life that day in May of 1996.

Avella went into hiding and then fled the country to Switzerland. Her party insisted she wasn’t going into political exile and would return in three months. Avella didn’t come home for 17 years, six months and four days.

The attempt on Avella’s life was a part of the state-led extermination of her party, the left-wing Patriotic Union (UP). In February 2023, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACHR) declared that the Colombian state was responsible for the elimination of the UP. Colombia’s Justice and Peace court ruled the extermination of the party a political genocide.  “It’s unbearable to watch your political family die, to have to bury them all, and we buried thousands,” Avella told me.

The UP represented a chance at lasting peace in Colombia—now the second most unequal country in Latin America, still in the throes of a violent internal armed conflict despite intermittent peace agreements. At a minimum, the U.S. government tacitly supported the state-led elimination of at least 5,733 members, leaders, and suspected sympathizers of the UP.  Said U.S. involvement escalated Colombia’s internal armed conflict, thwarted a lasting peace, and decimated a popular and democratic socialist movement in a country marred by civil war.

“The King’s Bidding”

Dubbed “a maverick Conservative” by the late historian Eric Hobsbawm, Colombian President Belisario Betancur (1982-1986) deeply unsettled the doctrinaires of Movement Conservatism within the Reagan administration. Reagan’s first ambassador to Colombia, Lewis Tambs, saw in the country a chance to “synthesize the New Right’s domestic crack hysteria and anti-communist foreign policy evangelism.” The reality in Betancur’s Colombia, however, was far removed from Tambs’ apocalyptic New Right fiction of the “narco-guerrilla.” It was a burgeoning cocaine export elite dressed up as the far-right, not guerrillas, running coke. By then, Colombian cocaine formed a central part of the CIA’s black budget for the Contras.

President Betancur, the Contadora group co-founder who had committed the diplomatic faux pas of, among other things, shifting Colombia into nonalignment, refused to play along with Washington. “President Betancur was swimming against the current,” Daniel García-Peña, Colombia’s newly appointed ambassador to the United States, told me in an interview.

On March 28, 1984, in the Meta Department (similar to a state), the Colombian government and the FARC agreed to a historic indefinite ceasefire. Betancur’s “political opening,” despite Washington’s efforts, was apparently working. Out of the opening, on the peace deals’ first anniversary in 1985, emerged the Patriotic Union. Yaneth Corredor, a founding member of the UP who hid Avella before her exile, told me, “My entire generation became committed to working toward the peace agreement, and the UP emerged as a beacon of hope for many.”

Yaneth Corredor

The party united a diverse coalition of trade unions, Afro-Colombians, members of the Colombian Communist Party, demobilized guerrillas, disaffected liberals, Indigenous people, and peasants. Its electoral platform championed agrarian reform, the cancellation of foreign debt and International Monetary Fund structural adjustment programs, and the nationalization of Colombia’s oil, coal, gas, and mineral resources.

Reassigned as the U.S. ambassador to Costa Rica in 1985, Tambs went to “open a southern front for the Contras”—the real narco-guerrillas— on behalf of the CIA and White House aide Oliver North. There, he transformed an unsophisticated jungle runway into a clandestine air base that, historian Greg Grandin argues, doubled “as a weapons drop for the anti-Sandinista army and a transshipment point” for U.S.-bound Colombian cocaine.

Testifying before the Senate subcommittee on the Iran–Contra affair in 1987, Tambs skirted the illegality of his foreign affairs with the adage of an unwavering Cold warrior: “They have a saying in the Foreign Service: When you take the king’s shilling you do the king’s bidding.”

The Red Dance

“Even before the UP fully formed,” its onetime executive secretary, Víctor Manuel Matiz, explained to me, “people were being assassinated.” And yet, in Colombia’s March 1986 general elections, the UP’s first electoral contest, it did remarkably well. With just four months of campaigning, the party won 15 congressional representatives to the Senate and Chamber, 18 deputies, 335 councilors, and appointed 23 municipal mayors. Two months later, Jaime Pardo Leal, the UP’s first presidential candidate, won 328,752 votes, then a record number for Colombia’s left. “In their commitment to finding a democratic path to revolution,” historian Forrest Hylton writes of the UP, “they were similar to the Chilean UP of the 1960s and 1970s — and, if anything, more doomed.”

Víctor Manuel Matiz

The CIA found President-elect Virgilio Barco Vargas to be “more positively inclined toward Washington than his predecessor,” chiefly on counterinsurgency. In the first 14 months of Barco’s tenure, more than four hundred UP militants were killed by the Colombian military and its “Sixth Division,” the private armies of the country’s elite—the paramilitaries. The executioners christened the mass murder program “The Red Dance.” As the systematic violence against the UP heightened, “Washington increased its military aid to Colombia … [and] simply ‘sidestepped the military’s involvement and focused narrowly’ on the threat of ‘narco guerrillas,’” Grandin writes.

In February 1987, the FARC announced its withdrawal from the fifth plenary session of the UP’s National Board, citing the state’s persecution of amnestied ex-combatants active in the UP.  The party, in turn, definitively distanced itself from the guerrillas.

On March 2, Ambassador Charles A. Gillespie cabled Washington an encouraging projection: “If enough UP leaders are murdered (how many would be enough, can only be speculative), the UP will be driven to depart from Congress and the FARC from what remains of the peace process.”

In an official statement to El Espectador on April 7 that year, Pardo, on behalf of the UP, rejected President Barco’s characterization of the group as “the party of the guerrillas” and denounced the dirty war.  Pardo said, “We consider the president’s declarations unacceptable … as this implicitly justifies the actions of the Army and paramilitary groups in their systematic assassination of UP militants and leaders,” who, he insisted, no longer had “ties to the armed movement.”

With no end to the state-sanctioned carnage in sight and armed escalation underway in the country’s frontier regions, the FARC broke the cease-fire in June 1987. The FARC returned “not just to war, but a new phase of war,” writes Grandin, “with the guerrilla army increasingly dependent on cocaine profits to fund its activities.”  Five months later, Jaime Pardo was assassinated. “We won’t have another like him,” Senator Avella told me, recalling her old friends’ lightheartedness, humor, and, above all, “his unwavering commitment to the Left that cost him his life.”

“We cannot disgrace them”

Faced with Colombia’s first local elections since 1886 (governors previously appointed municipal offices), the CIA sounded the alarm on the UP’s electoral viability. A now declassified memo, Colombia: Losing Electoral Gamble, cabled just three days before the March 1988 elections, reads:

We believe Colombia’s 13 March mayoral elections will … promote the insurgents’ political aims and accelerate the erosion of President Barco’s authority. Moderate political parties stand to lose ground to the Patriotic Union, the party representing the insurgents … Direct control of municipal budgets and police assets will enable leftist mayors to channel government funds to FARC’s activities, including arms purchases, recruitment, and guerrilla-training … This buildup of pressures will make it more difficult for Colombia to respond to US concerns on a range of security issues … [and] Leftist officials will almost certainly use their newly acquired legal powers to block new antinarcotics initiatives.

Despite the UP’s 1987 split from the FARC, it was, by Langley’s standards, still the guerrillas’ “political front.” According to the cable’s anonymous author, the party’s electoral strength put Washington’s interests in the Andes at risk, including its nascent “anti-narcotic” fumigation programs. The United States was, as journalist Steven Cohen writes, “bathing millions of acres of jungle, in deadly … glyphosate,” and while it had “no demonstrable effect on overall [coca] cultivation levels,” the program proved profitable for U.S.-based agrochemical corporations. In reality, the UP was focused on creating a national healthcare system, expropriating unused land, and winning a general wage increase for its constituents, not tilling coca fields or funneling municipal budgets to the FARC for arms.

Traditional parties lost ground to the UP in the elections, with 256 of the party’s municipal councilmen and 16 mayoral candidates winning seats across the country. Fidel and Carlos Castaño, landed siblings turned paramilitary warlords, penned a series of ‘manifestos’ after their defeat. One read:

We will not accept communist mayors in the region, neither will we accept municipal councils made up of idiotic peasants or vulgar workers like those of the Patriotic Union since they do not have the intelligence to … manage these municipalities which have always belonged to us and which we will now recuperate, whatever it takes!

The other:

We recognize and value the effort that our allies in the United States are making under the guidance of their President Ronald Reagan to fight international communism. We cannot disgrace them given that they’ve put millions of dollars into our country.

The Castaño’s devastated UP electoral strongholds through massacres, displacement, and torture. Carlos Castaño, who sanctioned the botched assassination of Avella in 1996, later wrote, “I copied the concept of paramilitary forces from the Israelis” after training in Tel Aviv in 1983. That is, insights gleaned in the blood-shedding of Lebanon and Gaza were now being exacted in the mass murder of the UP. By 2002, the party had lost its legal status, unable to field candidates for the national elections.

Cracks in the glass of a window at the Patriotic Union headquarters

Death and Rebirth

In June 2024, I spoke to Boris Guevara, a former FARC guerrilla, in a cafe at the edge of Cali, where the city turned to jungle. There, listening to Guevara, under the Caleño strip malls’ neons, I caught glimpses of the world of the insurgent, what he called “the other Colombia.” He told me about surviving “Odysseus,” the government bombing campaign that killed his commander, ruthless paramilitary dispossession in the countryside that now has more cattle than people, and said, “When I joined [the FARC], I met many people who had been part of the Patriotic Union who saw no other way to save their lives.” Guevara, a photographer and filmmaker who joined the FARC in 2000, was also a protagonist in The Fog of Peace, a novel documentary on Colombia’s 2016 peace accord. In it, a fellow guerrilla recounts the story of his death and rebirth:

The army detained me because I had a pamphlet from the Patriotic Union, a registered and legal political party. Four soldiers lacerated me with machetes. They cut through the tendons in my neck, and then they buried me alive. At first, the earth cooled my body. I felt tranquil in the ground, just waiting for death to come. Then, the earth began to heat up, and I realized I was going to suffocate. So I started to dig my way out. [When I got out] I saw a new world. It was like being reborn. After that, I decided to join the guerrilla.

His rationale for armed struggle is one I had heard before. When I interviewed Doris Suárez, an ex-combatant from the FARC and cofounder of La Casa de la Paz, she told me, “Many guerrillas, myself included, are children of the Patriotic Union… we got tired of marching in the streets and shouting for our dead. … As the Silvio Rodríguez song goes, “Rifle against rifle”—that was our response.”

Boris Guevara

The Great Scar

Just 45 minutes by car from Bogotá, Colombia’s capital, is the northernmost edge of the Sumapaz Páramo, one of the world’s largest moorland ecosystems. The páramo was once a strategic corridor for the FARC, a military stronghold that, throughout Colombia’s short twentieth century, served as a safe haven for the conflict’s Red refugees dating back to the War of Villarrica in 1955.

In June, rambling through Sumapaz along trails once controlled by the FARC, I came across an overgrown, discernible gap in the earth along the mist-covered mountainside. These were the guerrilla’s trenches, our guide, Luis insisted. My collaborator, Jesse, reached his arm into a great scar in the earth and pulled out a tin can—possibly war rations.

View through the clouds over the Sumapaz páramo

Colombia’s scar from the destruction of the UP and, with it, a chance at lasting peace is just below the surface of today’s political landscape.

As I hiked through the former war zone, I recalled my interview with Ambassador García Peña, “The fact that there have been so many signatories of the 2016 peace agreement who have been assassinated is a sign that we have still not been able to overcome what happened with the systematic assassination of the Patriotic Union party in the 1980s, ’90s, and early 2000s.”

El Salón de las mariposas

Hundreds of paper butterflies hang from the ceiling of La Casa de la Paz in Bogotá, each with a name suspended between its wings. The kaleidoscope is a tribute to more than 400 ex-combatants from the FARC assassinated since the 2016 peace deal. “The stigmatization and burden placed on the backs of everyone in the Patriotic Union, which forced people to take up arms, isn’t just from that era. It continues today,” Suárez told me, standing in El Salón de las mariposas.

Looking at the butterflies, I’m reminded of an argument made by Hylton, “to blame the bulk of the country’s problems on the insurgency—fashionable [in] academia and the media—is to put the cart before the horse.” Paramilitaries working alongside the State were responsible for the largest number of civilian killings in Colombia’s internal armed conflict.

This January, in Catatumbo, along Colombia’s border with Venezuela, firefights between the National Liberation Army (ELN) and dissidents of the FARC killed at least 80 people and displaced an estimated 18,000. The near collapse of the 2016 peace deal and of Colombian President Gustavo Petro’s paz total indicates the threat of reiterant political violence. Today, Colombia is confronted with the unresolved contradictions of its past.

Butterfly memorials hang from la Casa de la Paz to memorialize the demobilized FARC members who have been assassinated.

Click on the photos below to scroll through the gallery.

Luca DeCola is an independent researcher and aspiring historian whose work has appeared in Jacobin magazine. Luca’s research focuses primarily on the Cold War in Latin America and U.S. counterinsurgency in the region. 

Jesse Gwilliam is a photographer and student. His photographic work is interested in the ways social forces shape contemporary subjectivities. Jesse currently lives in upstate New York.