have been known for years and years to be responsible for the "lion's share" of the violence, the atrocities, the unbelievable sadistic atrocities during the civil war, and that the human rights groups have acknowledged this for years. They have also acknowledged that the faux demobilization was fiction, and that the former members merely organized new groups and changed names to ones like "Aguilas Negras" (Black Eagles), etc.
As the former AUC, they publicly dismembered villagers to instill terror, ripped them apart, sometimes filling their stomach cavities to make them sink, threw them into rivers, and have testified to having burned them up in crematories, if they didn't have time or desire to throw them into rivers, or dig mass graves.
We also know they have dressed many of the dead victims' bodies in FARC uniforms, or put weapons near their bodies, and pretended they were rebels, and used them to inflate their kill numbers. This practice was also employed by the Colombian military, which, as we know from testimonies by both former death squad members and former militaries, the military also worked in tandem with the paras during some of their massacres.
From Wikipedia:
Right-wing paramilitary groups in Colombia are armed groups that claim to be acting in opposition to revolutionary Marxist-Leninist guerrilla forces and their allies among the civilian population. Anti-guerrilla paramilitary groups control the large majority of the illegal drug trade of cocaine and other substances and are the parties responsible for most of the human rights violations in the latter half of the ongoing Colombian Armed Conflict. According to several international human rights and governmental organizations, right-wing paramilitary groups have been responsible for at least 70 to 80% of political murders in Colombia per year, with the remainder committed by leftist guerrillas and government forces.
The first paramilitary groups were organized by the Colombian military following recommendations made by U.S. military counterinsurgency advisers who were sent to Colombia during the Cold War to combat leftist political activists and armed guerrilla groups. The development of later paramilitary groups has also involved elite landowners, drug traffickers, members of the security forces, politicians and multinational corporations. Paramilitary violence today is principally targeted towards peasants, unionists, indigenous people, human rights workers, teachers and left-wing political activists or their supporters.
More:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-guerrilla_paramilitarism_in_Colombia
Anytime we hear any troll yammering on and on about the great problems caused by the people who have been struggling against the regime since the 1940's, in complete desperation, we know he, and sometimes, perhaps a she, is speaking for the elite European-descended less than 1%'ers who have controlled the government completely, and maintained ultra-close relationship with the US government and multi-nationals who have plundered Colombia's desperately poor labor pool, and the country's natural resources.
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