Death Squads or Self-Defense Forces?
Death Squads or Self-Defense Forces?

Author: Julie Mazzei

Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press

Published: 2009-09-01

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 0807898619

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In an era when the global community is confronted with challenges posed by violent nonstate organizations--from FARC in Colombia to the Taliban in Afghanistan--our understanding of the nature and emergence of these groups takes on heightened importance. Julie Mazzei's timely study offers a comprehensive analysis of the dynamics that facilitate the organization and mobilization of one of the most virulent types of these organizations, paramilitary groups (PMGs). Mazzei reconstructs in rich historical context the organization of PMGs in Colombia, El Salvador, and Mexico, identifying the variables that together create a triad of factors enabling paramilitary emergence: ambivalent state officials, powerful military personnel, and privileged members of the economic elite. Nations embroiled in domestic conflicts often find themselves stuck between a rock and a hard place when global demands for human rights contradict internal expectations and demands for political stability. Mazzei elucidates the importance of such circumstances in the emergence of PMGs, exploring the roles played by interests and policies at both the domestic and international levels. By offering an explanatory model of paramilitary emergence, Mazzei provides a framework to facilitate more effective policy making aimed at mitigating and undermining the political potency of these dangerous forces.

Death Squad Or Paladins? A Colombian Defends Role
Death Squad Or Paladins? A Colombian Defends Role

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The New York Times Co. presents the full text of the March 12, 2000 article by Larry Rother entitled "Death Squad or Paladins? A Colombian Defends Role." Rother highlights a March 2000 television interview with Carlos Castano, who was then the leader of the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC). The AUC is a right-wing paramilitary group that has played a key role in the decades-long Colombian Civil War and has been accused of committing numerous massacres.

Self-Defense in Mexico
Self-Defense in Mexico

Author: Luis Hernández Navarro

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2020-03-02

Total Pages: 279

ISBN-13: 1469654547

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In Mexico and across other parts of Latin America local Indigenous peoples have built community policing groups as a means of protection where the state has limited control over, and even complicity in, crime and violence. Luis Hernandez Navarro, a leading Mexican journalist, offers a riveting investigation of these armed self-defense groups that sprang up around the time of the 1994 Zapatista uprising in Chiapas. Available in English for the first time, the book spotlights the intense precarity of everyday life in parts of Mexico. Hernandez Navarro shows how the self-defense response, which now includes wealthier rancher and farmer groups, is being transformed by Mexico's expanding role in the multibillion dollar global drug trade, by foreign corporations' extraction of raw minerals in traditionally Indigenous lands, and by the resulting social changes in local communities. But as Hernandez Navarro acknowledges, self-defense is highly controversial. Community policing may provide citizens with increased agency, but for government officials it can be a dangerous threat to the status quo. Leftists and liberals are wary of how the groups may be linked to paramilitary forces and vulnerable to manipulation by drug traffickers and the government alike. This book answers the urgent call to understand the dangerous complexities of government failures and popular solutions.

The Para-State
The Para-State

Author: Aldo Civico

Publisher: University of California Press

Published: 2015-11-24

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 0520288521

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Since its independence in the nineteenth century, the South American state of Colombia has been shaped by decades of bloody political violence. In The Para-State, Aldo Civico draws on interviews with paramilitary death squads and drug lords to provide a cultural interpretation of the country’s history of violence and state control. Between 2003 and 2008, Civico gained unprecedented access to some of Colombia’s most notorious leaders of the death squads. He also conducted interviews with the victims of paramilitary, with drug kingpins, and with vocal public supporters of the paramilitary groups. Drawing on the work of Deleuze and Guattari, this riveting work demonstrates how the paramilitaries have in essence become a war machine deployed by the Colombian state to control and maintain its territory and political legitimacy.

Death Squad Kills at Least 36 Colombians
Death Squad Kills at Least 36 Colombians

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"Death Squad Kills at Least 36 Colombians" is an Reuters article that was originally posted on December 1, 2000. Members of the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), a right-wing paramilitary group, allegedly massacred 36 villagers from Nueva Venecia. The villagers were accused of being leftist collaborators. Colombia has been embroiled in a civil war for decades. The government and right-wing paramilitary groups are fighting against left-wing guerilla groups. Antonio Rafael de la Cova presents the full text of the article online.

A History of Political Murder in Latin America
A History of Political Murder in Latin America

Author: W. John Green

Publisher: SUNY Press

Published: 2015-04-27

Total Pages: 384

ISBN-13: 1438456638

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A sweeping study of political murder in Latin America. This sweeping history depicts Latin America’s pan-regional culture of political murder. Unlike typical studies of the region, which often focus on the issues or trends of individual countries, this work focuses thematically on the nature of political murder itself, comparing and contrasting its uses and practices throughout the region. W. John Green examines the entire system of political murder: the methods and justifications the perpetrators employ, the victims, and the consequences for Latin American societies. Green demonstrates that elite and state actors have been responsible for most political murders, assassinating the leaders of popular movements and other messengers of change. Latin American elites have also often targeted the potential audience for these messages through the region’s various “dirty wars.” In spite of regional differences, elites across the region have displayed considerable uniformity in justifying their use of murder, imagining themselves in a class war with democratic forces. While the United States has often been complicit in such violence, Green notes that this has not been universally true, with US support waxing and waning. A detailed appendix, exploring political murder country by country, provides an additional resource for readers.

U.N. Urges Colombia to Fight Death Squads
U.N. Urges Colombia to Fight Death Squads

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"U.N. Urges Colombia to Fight Death Squads" is a Reuters article that was originally posted on December 4, 2000. The United Nations (UN) High Commissioner for Human Rights has accused the Colombian government of doing little to prevent massacres by right-wing paramilitary groups, in particular the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC). Colombia has been embroiled in a bitter civil war for decades. Antonio Rafael de la Cova presents the full text of the article online.

The Colombian Civil War
The Colombian Civil War

Author: Bert Ruiz

Publisher: McFarland

Published: 2012-12-01

Total Pages: 280

ISBN-13: 078645072X

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In 2000, the National Police of Colombia reported that 25,660 people met violent deaths in that country. According to the office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights in Colombia, 170 civilians were killed in the first 18 days of 2001 in massacres and selective homicides related to that country's terrible civil war. By drawing on diverse sources of information, this work brings together the thoughts of historians, journalists, human rights activists, social scientists, military veterans, law enforcement officials, Congressional investigators, financial analysts, lawyers, Roman Catholic priests, peace organization spokespersons and others about the volatile present-day situation in Colombia. It explains the complexities of the drug-financed civil war and details Washington's concern that the Colombian conflict will destabilize the Andean region. Photographs and maps enhance the text.

Death Squad
Death Squad

Author: Jeffrey A. Sluka

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2010-08-03

Total Pages: 271

ISBN-13: 0812200489

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"There is real personal danger for anthropologists who dare to speak and write against terror; by doing so, they potentially and sometimes actually bring the terror down on themselves."—Jeffrey A. Sluka, from the Introduction Death Squad is the first work to focus specifically on the anthropology of state terror. It brings together an international group of anthropologists who have done extensive research in areas marked by extreme forms of state violence and who have studied state terror from the perspective of victims and survivors. The book presents eight case studies from seven countries—Spain, India (Punjab and Kashmir), Argentina, Guatemala, Northern Ireland, Indonesia, and the Philippines—to demonstrate the cultural complexities and ambiguities of terror when viewed at the local level and from the participants' point of view. Contributors deal with such topics as the role of Loyalist death squads in the culture of terror in Northern Ireland, the three-tier mechanism of state terror in Indonesia, the complex role of religion in violence by both the state and insurgents in Punjab and Kashmir, and the ways in which "disappearances" are used to destabilize and demoralize opponents of the state in Argentina, Guatemala, and India.