As the investigations of the National Center for Historical Memory and the data collected by the Victims Unit —based on complaints and reports from the Prosecutor’s Office— had already warned, the Truth Commission confirmed that Antioquia is the area with the most victims of the armed conflict. , where 130,000 of the 450,000 homicides of 50 years of war took place.
20 percent of all cases of violence in the armed conflict occurred in the department. According to data from the Single Registry of Victims, in Antioquia there were 2,261,383 acts of violence against its inhabitants between 1958 and 2019, out of a national total for the same period of 11,275,329. And the Commission says that we occupy the first place in all forms of victimization, except in attacks on population centers.
For many it is an inexplicable phenomenon. It is believed that the war in Meta and Caquetá was more bloody, however the hegemony of the Farc —with the exception of northern Meta— lowered the possibility of confrontations, although it increased the cases of forced recruitment and court martials within that region. warfare; many of those combatants ended up in mass graves. But that is another story.
In Antioquia, the 5th and Magdalena Medio fronts of the Farc emerged in the early 1980s, without counting on the strong presence of the ELN and the EPL in Urabá and the northeast. In response, at the end of that decade the Peasant Self-Defense Forces of Magdalena Medio (ACMM) were born, exactly between San Luis and Puerto Triunfo; the group Muerte a Secuestradores (MAS) also roamed there. In that spiral war there were confrontations between the armies, massacres, kidnappings, torture, anti-personnel mines, a violence that was mixed with the terrible practices of disappearance that drug trafficking initially implemented.
When analyzing these phenomena, it can be understood that Antioquia is the department with the most victims, far from the figures for departments such as Meta, Caquetá or Valle del Cauca. The very president of the Truth Commission, Father Francisco de Roux, pointed out the case of this department as a phenomenon: “That is why if Antioquia makes peace, the country makes peace.” It is for you to think what it means: there were a little more than 450 thousand people killed during 50 years of war.
In an interview with EL COLOMBIANO, De Roux said: “What I feel is that in Antioquia there were very different conflicts and many simultaneous conflicts occurred from very different places. For example, what happened in the Middle Magdalena: Puerto Nare, Puerto Berrío, Yondó, in the basin of the Cimitarra and Yondó river valley and in front of Barrancabermeja, that had a particular violence crossed with what happened on the other side of the Cimitarra river. , which is San Pablo and Cantagallo. Then the entire area where the mining parts of Segovia are located, which were severely hit. Then Urabá, which had a very hard history and that we have tried to understand. Then all the things that happened in Ituango and in the north of the department. And finally Medellín and the East. In other words, Antioquia had a series of differentiated conflicts and the whole explanation is there”.
For its report, the Truth Commission —headed by Martha Villa and Max Yuri Gil— interviewed 2,197 people in Antioquia, including politicians, businessmen, and incumbent rulers. 1,092 were victims of different types of violence that occurred throughout the department.
Among the conclusions delivered by the report, is this to explain the violence we live: “The ambition for the expansion of large landowners and livestock, the search for control of land suitable for the development of large agro-industrial projects and crops for use illicit activity, as well as the search to gain ownership of lands that are key due to their natural wealth or because they are necessary for the development of large infrastructure projects, have often clashed with the aspirations and territorial rights of ethnic and peasant communities. ”.
One difference between this report by the Truth Commission and those made by the National Center for Historical Memory at the time is that the victims of the drug war were taken into account, a category that many academics take from the framework of the armed conflict.
The Commission says: “It cannot be understood that in this region there has been an intense and prolonged presence of all the armed actors and that there is a negative record of leadership in practically all forms of victimization, without considering the impact of drug trafficking” .
It has happened since the 1980s that the armed groups have made their combat moves around the proceeds of this crime. The Self-Defense Forces began as armies that protected ranchers and also drug traffickers who lived in Magdalena Medio, many of them in the Antioquia part of this subregion. Later, the FARC fronts that were in the Nudo de Paramillo financed themselves by monitoring the coca fields and when they found out about the whole process, they got fully into the business —with which the dissidents later stayed. Finally, the AUC became the “political” refuge of dozens of mafiosi. In the middle of it all were the civilian casualties—80 percent. It is inevitable not to see drug trafficking as part of the conflict in Antioquia.
However, the war moved the civilian population and the rulers to look for ways out of the bloodshed. The Truth Commission highlights in its report that the department has also seen courageous organizational processes, of resistance, both from civil society and from expressions of the same institutionality, “which have resorted to different forms of organization, mobilization and action resorting to on many occasions to art, culture, sports, spirituality; to build spaces of resistance to war, and have meant hope in the midst of barbarism for thousands of people in the region”.
Beyond the polarization that the Commission’s report has brought about —an excessive polarization, since not even all the texts have been disclosed—, knowing this part of history that sometimes we have not wanted to see from the narrative of those most affected will help build a society that is increasingly more peaceful, Antioquia has already shown —and is doing so— that it works in concert for a good future