US put billions into Colombia. Five years after peace deal, violence has returned.

EL SALADO, Colombia – Yobelis Velazco Garrido, 41, washes a pile of clothes in a palm-topped ramada outside her house. As the 10 a.m. sun rises over the lush mountains that surround her small town of El Salado, the sweltering northern Colombian heat sets in.

She was doing the same at precisely this hour 21 years ago, when she heard gunshots resound across the town and the chilling scream of her father: “They’re going to slaughter us!”

At the time, Colombia was locked in a brutal war for territory between left-wing guerrillas, right-wing paramilitary militias and the Colombian government. El Salado sat smack in the middle of one of the most strategic areas in that conflict and a treasure trove of natural resources: Los Montes de María.

The 4,000 residents of the town were no strangers to violence, often caught in the crossfire between one side or another. 

But on February 18, 2000, hundreds of paramilitary fighters rounded up locals into the town’s soccer field, where they accused them of siding with the FARC guerrillas and began to terrorize, torture and slaughter them. The massacre put El Salado on the map as the site of one of the most grisly acts in the South American country’s more than five decades of conflict.

“I pass by [the football field] sometimes and think about it; I remember how they massacred us,” Velazco Garrido described. “One wonders what life would be like if nothing had happened, if El Salado wasn't what it was.”

Over the years conflict subsided in the region and other parts of Colombia, a product of both strong-handed military tactics and a historic peace agreement in 2016.

But two decades after the massacre, Colombia is seeing a new resurgence in violence. In places like El Salado, observers and residents fear this could mean history repeats itself.

“Since the end of 2019, there has been a new wave of violence (in El Salado),” said Damaris Martínez, a lawyer representing the town with the Colombian Legal Commission. "What worries us more than anything is that there’s this risk that it could happen again.”

It may also be weighing on the U.S. administration.

President Joe Biden has on several occasions characterized Colombia as the “keystone” of U.S. foreign policy toward Latin America and the Caribbean, according to the Atlantic Council think tank. In fact, Colombia’s peace and prosperity has a global impact when it comes to issues such as migration flows, climate change and international trade.

‘I felt like maybe the country would change’

During the massacre, paramilitaries from the United Self-Defences of Colombia (AUC) killed at least 60 people, left many more disappeared and torched much of El Salado, including Velazco Garrido’s family home. 

She and her family fled with the rest of the town, joining more than 8 million people who have been forcibly displaced by Colombia’s conflict. 

Only about a quarter of the people who fled El Salado after the massacre returned. When they arrived, the town was almost unrecognizable after years of abandon. They cleared away the overgrowth and decay, reconstructed their homes and painted a peace sign over the soccer field that was once stained with blood.

Velazco Garrido and other returnees said they hoped the violence would let up with time. 

“I felt like maybe the country would change,” she said.

Briefly, it did. 

The 2016 peace deal between the Colombian government and guerrillas from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) brought about a respite and offered the country a chance to usher in a new era of peace. 

"The months closest to the signing of the agreement and the demobilization of the FARC of course brought about a reduction in crime and violence,” said Luis Andrés Fajardo, Deputy Ombudsman of Colombia, with the government agency in charge of protecting civil and human rights.

It earned the country’s former president Juan Manuel Santos a Nobel Peace Prize.

But the country’s current right-wing leader, President Iván Duque, has failed to implement key facets of that agreement, which has created opportunities for new armed groups to seize power and again terrorize locals. 

“What we have seen is the security situation has worsened – not improved – under Duque,” said Jeremy McDermott, director of Insight Crime, a Colombia-based think tank. “They have squandered whatever ‘peace bonus’ that there might have been.” 

US invested in Colombian peace, ignoring its disintegration?

The unraveling of the 2016 peace accords and the spike in violence are likely to be weighing on the United States government. 

To protect its interests, the U.S. government funneled more than $10 billion into the South American country in a controversial drug and security policy called Plan Colombia over nearly 20 years. Since the 2016 peace pact, it has spent another $1 billion on peace implementation, far more than other nations and international partners.

Critics say U.S. policies and funding may have provided temporary relief in areas like Los Montes de María – the region where El Salado is located – but they also contributed to further escalation of conflict and obstructed peace in Colombia long-term.

U.S. militarization policies to break up drug trafficking gangs and eliminate coca crops – used to make cocaine – often backfired and resulted in human rights abuses against civilians.

But despite this recent surge in violence, the Biden administration has actually been “taking a step back in Latin America,” said Gimena Sánchez-Garzoli, Andes director of the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA).

Sánchez-Garzoli said the Biden administration has refrained from intervening in emerging crises like Colombia’s violence, the repression of protests in Cuba, or the turmoil in Haiti following the assassination of Haitian president Jovenel Moïse. 

“There is not really a criticism of the human rights situation (in Colombia by Biden),” Sánchez-Garzoli said, “They’re not really pushing them on the peace situation in the way they should given all the U.S. has invested in the peace process.”

Violence returns to El Salado

While the massacre in El Salado in 2000 was a brutal and bloody show of force, violence in the town today is insidious and often comes in the form of graphic threats. 

Before, residents often saw the guerrillas and paramilitary groups that threatened them. Now, they don’t see the groups, but feel them watching. 

“I think not knowing is more scary because at least when we knew the guerrilla was here, we could say ‘it's the guerrilla,’" Velazco Garrido said. “When the paramilitaries came in and massacred us, [we could say] ‘it's the paramilitaries.’ But now, who knows.”

Civilians from the town have received a spate of threatening text messages, phone calls and even written notes on their doors. They said the threats are sometimes signed by the paramilitary group Autodefensas Gaitanistas de Colombia, or “The Gulf Clan,” one of the largest and most violent armed groups in Colombia today.

Velazco Garrido has received threats because her sister is an activist who often speaks out against armed actors and their human rights violations in the area. 

Across Colombia, human rights defenders and community activists have growingly become the targets of killings, threats and attacks.

Since the signing of Colombia’s peace accords, more than 1,200 such leaders have been killed, according to Bogotá-based thinktank Indepaz.

Velazco Garrido used to live with her sister and mother in their small, three-room home on the periphery of the town. 

But as threats became more frequent and more violent, her sister and mother were forced to leave. Velazco Garrido decided to stay, and now lives alone in what feels like an empty shell of a home. 

Armed groups ‘no longer have any rules’

The resurgence of violence is not unique to El Salado. Killings, threats, and intimidation by armed gangs are on the rise throughout Colombia. 

In many parts of the country, FARC guerrillas left behind a power vacuum when they set down their weapons, and the government failed to protect those areas by preventing new groups from coming in.

Elizabeth Dickinson, a Colombia analyst at Crisis Group, said smaller armed groups have filled those gaps and now battle for territorial control. These newer groups are hyper-focused on lucrative profits from illegal mining and drug production, she explained.

“While the FARC had other motives, they had a social vision of controlling communities,” Dickinson said. “New groups ... are in it for the money, they're in it for the illicit markets, and they don't have this ideological bent.”

Deputy Ombudsman Luis Andrés Fajardo said the violence has increased especially over the past two years. 

In 2021 alone, forced displacements from armed clashes have doubled when compared to the previous year, a June report by the United Nations warned.

“The situation today is very complex due to the lack of a clear structure of these groups,” Fajardo said. “They no longer have any rules, or clearly recognizable and identifiable leadership.”

This is perhaps most visible in the city of Buenaventura, which is more than 600 miles from El Salado. The city sits along Colombia’s Pacific Coast on the opposite side of the country, and since December 2020 has witnessed an explosion of armed gang violence. 

Maria Miyela Riascos, a community leader in the city, said conflict in Buenaventura is “currently at an all-time high” and child and youth recruitment by competing gangs has escalated. 

“The murders have continued, the territorial disputes have continued, and so have the feuds between the two gangs present here,” she said. “There are weekly reports of young people who have been killed.”

As a result, communities across the country have opened ‘humanitarian spaces’, safe zones created to protect human rights leaders and other threatened community members who have spoken out against armed groups. 

Puente Nayero, the humanitarian space in Buenaventura, spans just a street and is guarded by the Colombian military to prevent armed gangs from entering and harming residents.

Other Colombian regions like southwestern Cauca have also endured new waves of mass killings. 

Armed groups in Clemencia Carabalí’s small town of Buenos Aires (Cauca) have carried out at least two mass killings in the past year. The perpetrators are unknown, but FARC dissidents – former guerrillas who either rejected the peace process or rearmed as the deal collapsed – are the most powerful rebels in the region.

Carabalí, a human rights defender, said people in her town no longer have autonomy over their own lives, and live under imposed curfews and rules set by the FARC dissidents and other gangs.

“You can’t do what you want to do; you can only do what the groups impose on you,” said Carabalí. 

‘The road to lasting peace is long and uncertain’

The unraveling of the 2016 peace accords and the spike in violence are among many factors that led to months of mass protest in Colombia earlier this year.

Although the Biden’s administration has not forcefully put pressure on Colombia, U.S. officials have repeatedly called on Duque to execute the accords and consolidate peace in the South American country.

In early July, a number of U.S. senators including Marco Rubio, R-Fla., Cory Booker, D-N.J., and Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., wrote a bipartisan letter to the Biden administration, urging for it to support Colombia in implementing the accords.

“The road to lasting peace is long and uncertain – an agreement on its own cannot succeed without the commitment of all parties to its full implementation,” the group wrote. 

“It is clear that genuine support for a peace process by all sides is the best path forward to ensure that Colombia does not return to conflict.”

While many focus on the implementation of the accords, Deputy Ombudsman Fajardo also added that Colombia needs more resources to guarantee security in conflict zones, especially with what he called the “new wave of violence.”

For civilians like Carabalí, a solution cannot come soon enough. Yet even as she lives under constant threat, Carabalí still holds onto hope for a future of peace in her country.

“We as a society need to work together to overcome this situation,” she said. “We can’t lose hope.”