If you watch the show Narcos you've heard of Los Pepes a violent paramilitary organizations that was involved in drugs and assassination in murder but do you know how they were created?
Carlos Castano, right, with some of his men in northern Colombia in 2001 Photo: AP
When you taught me about the AUC you told me about all of their atrocities and the way they fought against FARC.
What you didn't tell me was how AUC came to be.
When I learned about McCarthyism growing up it was always in the context of Witch-hunt why were these Rabid Anticommunists so filled with hate" I wondered
Why were they persecuting people for just wanting to free us from oppression?
Then I discovered Noam Chomsky and he catalogued all the atrocities that the paramilitary death squads perpetrated against supporters of complete equality.
He left out some details, some important details!
Noam down played and minimised the crimes and terrorizing tactics against regular people that the left-wing death squads perpetrated.
He left out the motivation behind the actions of right-wing death squads.
Story of the AUC is a very Illustrative one.
There's three brothers the brothers Castano, they had a father who was a peasant farmer.
After the FARC kidnapped their father they then demanded a ransom that was five times the value of the entire family's holdings(and they say capitalists want to steal your labour).
After rounding up all the money he could the eldest son brought the money to the FARC...
But it wasn't enough and THE FARC beat his father to death.
When commenting on this viciuos crime the FARC admits it was a "Miscalculation" not because they thought what they did was wrong but because the brothers Castano became a terrible enemy.
There was little remarkable about the Castaños in 1980. Jesus Castaño had 12 children, eight boys and four girls, employing the usual peasant tradition of breeding enough cheap labour to work the land.
Jesus ran a tight ship and was very strict with his children, who rose before dawn to milk the cows. They had to pay for their own schooling by selling cheese and milk in the town of Amalfi in the northern province of Antioquia, where they lived.
On September 18, 1981, Jesus Castaño was kidnapped by Marxist guerrillas from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc) and a ransom of 50 million pesos was demanded.
The Farc, born in 1964 when liberal guerillas from the previous chapter of the Colombian civil war embraced Communism, at this stage used kidnap for ransom and extortion as its primary sources of income.
The net worth of the whole Castaño clan was 10 million pesos and Fidel, the eldest son, then 32, was able through charm and intimidation to scratch together six million. (The Farc later admitted that the ransom figure was a miscalculation, and one for which they were to pay dearly.)
According to Carlos Castaño, in an interview he gave to a writer, German Castro Caycedo, in 1996, Fidel told the guerrilla who came to collect the ransom, 'Believe me, I collected all the money possible and I have no way of getting any more.'
When the rebel pointed out that he was 44 million pesos short, Fidel's soon-to-become notorious temper got the better of him. 'If I could get more money,' he said, 'it would be only to fight you.'
Jesus Castaño was tied to a tree, savagely beaten and left to die. His children vowed revenge.
'What came from this was hatred,' Carlos said, 'a hatred that could not be banished. We decided to fight the guerrillas. But we did not realise the magnitude of the enemy and what we had embarked the entire family on. [Until then] I had never fired a shot.'
The tactics of the AUC were resoundingly criticized by Mr. Chomsky while these very same tactics were used by FARC.
The AUC used the same techniques that have been used in every successful counter-insurgency since the Boer war.
In the Boer War the British army rounded up all the Boer civilians and put them into concentration camps this had the effect of neutralizing the support base of the Boer Kommandos.
The AUC didn't have concentration camps so they just assassinated the supporters of the Communist death squads becoming death squads themselves.
Not very nice I know but nice doesn't get you very far when faced with an enemy that has no compunction and will brutally murder your family just to get money to further their grand ideology!
An ideology that considers Russian peasants who happen to own extra land as worthy of persecution.
Shopkeeper, teachers, Landlords, scientists all get the bullet, of course once they run out of victims they turn on themselves and like all revolutions before them they descend into terror which only ends once they sink to absolute monarchy and crown an Emporor.
Thanks for dropping by I will do another post chiding Noam