By Esneyder Negrete and Irene Escudero |
Unguía (Colombia) (EFE).- A few kilometers from where former paramilitaries of the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC) forged a new group, the Clan del Golfo, other ex-paramilitaries got together more than a decade ago to try to form a community of peace and live away from conflict.
They called it Villa La Paz, a small town nestled in the foothills of the Darién mountain range, in northwestern Colombia, where still some twenty families of ex-paramilitaries and victims have not resigned themselves to abandoning the project that was thought of as a peace laboratory. and reconciliation and that today survives despite the unfulfilled promises of the State.
“Here we have people who are firm, thinking, believing, and growing their families with this peace mentality,” a leader from Villa La Paz, Heiler Palacios, told EFE, nostalgically recalling the principles of this project.
The genesis of Villa La Paz
This community, which is crossed by a single dusty street with its houses far apart, belongs to Unguía (Chocó), and was founded in 2006 by 100 families victims of the armed conflict and demobilized ex-paramilitaries from the Elmer Cárdenas bloc of the AUC, who joined to build a new life together.
At first, the community lived up to its name, as Palacios remembers, because they had the support of the state and international cooperation, but reality gradually turned hope into utopia.
Government aid ceased, the demobilized were left out of the reinsertion program and the FARC guerrilla that lurked in the vicinity of the area sowed fear among the first settlers.
when everything changed
The decline of Villa La Paz began a couple of years after its establishment, in 2011, when the 57th front of the now extinct FARC assassinated two demobilized AUC members who were part of the community.
According to Palacios, after that crime, the FARC threatened the community: “they have to leave, if we don’t kill them all.”
At that time, many fled to the urban area of Unguía and other nearby towns in the departments of Antioquia and Córdoba. The hamlet remained uninhabited for several years until after the demobilization of the guerrilla, some families dared to return.
However, others also stayed along the way who decided to return to arms and join the Clan del Golfo, successor to the AUC, which in this area where it was born is called the Gaitanista Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AGC) or simply “the company ”.
The present of Villa La Paz
It was at a meeting in this corner of the Gulf of Urabá where Vicente Castaño and Daniel Rendón Herrera, alias “Don Mario”, two former AUC leaders, started the narco-paramilitary group that in the last decade has become the most big in the country
The AGC, as they like to call themselves, have threatened entire peoples of the Caribbean and Pacific, their zone of control, where they collect extortion, control illicit businesses such as illegal mining and drug trafficking, and are guilty of numerous selective homicides and assassinations of leaders, according to various reports from organizations such as the Institute for Development and Peace Studies (Indepaz).
Paradoxically, while this group strengthened and expanded its domain to various areas of Colombia, Villa La Paz withered to the point that today, in this remote hamlet without a school or services, they cling to 200 hectares of rubber trees, the project productive to which they bet.
They saw it as a “lode” that has come to be called “white gold” but with a problem: when the trees began to produce, 4 years ago, 80% of the town had already fled.
Heiler and the rest of the neighbors who stayed get up every morning to “bleed”, that is, to make cuts in the bark of the tree so that the liquid latex sprouts and drips into containers where it is allowed to solidify for collection.
With the policy of total peace with which the Government of Gustavo Petro seeks to put an end to many conflicts in Colombia, and which is in danger in the case of the AGC, in Villa La Paz they keep alive the desire that their territory serve as a laboratory to continue betting on reconciliation.
But this time they trust that if an eventual disarmament process materializes in this area, Villa La Paz will serve as an example so as not to repeat past mistakes.