In the past, victims’ corpses would often be dumped at sea. Now, so body parts don’t wash ashore, they are typically buried in clandestine graves.
Colombia’s peace talks may be advancing, but try telling that to the terrified residents of Buenaventura, the country’s largest Pacific port.
They live in the shadow of rapes, grotesque violence and disappearances carried out by successor groups to the hard-right paramilitary vigilantes who once battled Marxist rebels’ fire with fire.
In particular, the gangs have become known for their “chop-up” houses, where they use machetes to dismember alive anyone who gets on their wrong side, Human Rights Watch says in a new report.
It singles out a trio of rival groups — the Urabeños, Empresa and Autodefensas Gaitanistas — that have turned to organized crime since the “deeply flawed official demobilization” of the paramilitaries a decade ago.
Disbanding death squads was intended to be a key step in stopping the South American country’s internal conflict, which has cost nearly 250,000 lives over the past half-century. The conflict pits the government and the paramilitaries against leftist rebel group the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). The latter two are heavily implicated in the cocaine trade.
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