Antioquia, a department in northeastern Colombia, enters the book’s account of the country’s armed conflict through the rural violence that shaped its hot country. The region is associated with the kidnapping and killing of dairy farmer Jesus Castaño and with the formation of Los Tangueros by his sons, an episode that helps explain how local retaliation fed the growth of paramilitary organizations.

Setting and Conflict

Antioquia’s rural communities were part of a wider landscape in which insurgent groups and paramilitaries competed for influence. The book describes a long-running Colombian civil war, preceded in part by La Violencia and marked by violations of civil liberties, violence against civilians, and insurgent activity in the countryside. Residents faced threats from armed groups and could be made to pay extortion in exchange for avoiding further danger.

In 1981, the FARC kidnapped Jesus Castaño, a dairy farmer living in Amalfi, a small town in the hot country of Antioquia. The ransom demanded was $7,500, described as a small fortune in rural Colombia. His family raised the money by mortgaging the farm, but his body was found afterward. The episode connected the region’s local experience of armed coercion to the broader conflict between left-wing guerrillas and their opponents.

From Local Retaliation to Organization

After their father’s killing, three of his sons—Carlos, Fidel, and Vicente—founded Los Tangueros to pursue members of the FARC and avenge the attack. The account presents the group’s origin as a response to a particular family loss, while also placing it within a larger pattern: landowners used paramilitaries for protection against guerrillas, and similar groups formed in areas where civilians were suffering from insurgent violence.

The paramilitary groups did not operate only as defenders. The book notes their involvement in drug trafficking, extortion, kidnapping, and murder, showing how organizations formed in opposition to guerrilla violence could themselves become sources of coercion. The development of Los Tangueros therefore illustrates how a local act of retaliation could become part of a wider armed structure, without making the resulting paramilitary violence equivalent to simple self-defense.

Regional Expansion and Significance

By 1997, paramilitaries led by the Castaño brothers had formed the AUC, a national organization that expanded across large parts of Colombia. Its strongest presence included the hot country in the departments of Córdoba, Sucre, Magdalena, and César; the book also places Antioquia within the regional geography of the conflict through the Castaño family’s origins and the founding of Los Tangueros.

The account’s focus on Antioquia is thus specific rather than panoramic: it does not describe the department’s full history or geography. Instead, it uses Amalfi and the Castaño family’s experience to show how a killing in a rural community could help prompt the formation of a paramilitary group, and how groups with local roots could grow into a national organization amid Colombia’s continuing civil war.