Santa Fe de Ralito was the setting for a pact between Colombia’s powerful paramilitary organization, the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (AUC), and national politicians. The meeting made visible how armed control could be converted into political influence: the AUC was already governing extensive territory, and its leaders and political allies could shape the 2002 elections through threats and forced voting.

Setting and political context

The meeting took place as the AUC expanded across Colombia. Formed in 1997 under the leadership of the Castaño brothers, the organization had spread particularly through the hot-country departments of Córdoba, Sucre, Magdalena, and César. By 2001, it may have commanded as many as 30,000 armed men, organized into separate blocks. In Córdoba, the Bloque Catatumbo was led by Salvatore Mancuso.

The AUC’s presence reflected a conflict in which civilians faced both left-wing guerrillas and right-wing paramilitaries. Landowners had used paramilitaries for protection against guerrillas, but the armed groups also engaged in drug trafficking, extortion, kidnapping, and murder. The AUC’s growth therefore involved more than military confrontation: it established the means to exert authority over communities and began seeking a role in formal politics.

The pact

A group of AUC leaders met with prominent politicians in Santa Fe de Ralito, in Córdoba. The meeting produced a joint document calling for the “refounding of the country.” Among the signatories from the AUC were Jorge 40, the nickname of Rodrigo Tovar Pupo; Adolfo Paz, a nom de guerre of Diego Fernando “Don Berna” Murillo; and Diego Vecino, whose real name was Edwar Cobo Téllez. National senators William Montes and Miguel de la Espriella signed alongside them.

The pact joined armed leaders and elected officials in a shared political initiative. Its importance lay not only in what the document called for, but in the circumstances of its creation: by this point the AUC controlled large areas, while politicians had reason to negotiate with the organization that exercised power on the ground. The town’s name consequently became associated with the public convergence of paramilitary territorial authority and national political representation.

Electoral coercion and consequences

The AUC’s political reach was demonstrated in the 2002 congressional and senatorial elections. In San Onofre, a municipality in Sucre, the paramilitary leader Cadena organized the local vote. Trucks sent by him collected residents from neighborhoods, rural areas, and corregimientos; hundreds of peasants were taken to Plan Parejo to see the candidates they were expected to support. Cadena threatened to kill two municipal council members, and others chosen at random, if Muriel Benito Rebollo did not win Congress. The threat appears to have worked: Rebollo and Jairo Merlano, the Senate candidate, each received 40,000 votes across Sucre.

The mayor of San Onofre signed the Santa Fe de Ralito pact. The account estimates that probably one-third of the congressmen and senators elected in 2002 owed their victories to paramilitary support. Mancuso described the breadth of that control by saying that 35 percent of Congress came from areas where the self-defense groups operated, and that the groups collected taxes, administered justice, and maintained military and territorial control. Politicians seeking office in those regions had to deal with their representatives.

This political reach carried grave consequences beyond election results. The AUC fought the FARC, murdered civilians, and terrorized and displaced hundreds of thousands of people. By early 2010, around 4.5 million people—nearly 10 percent of Colombia’s population—were internally displaced. In territories where the paramilitaries performed governmental functions, the taxes they collected were, in the account’s characterization, expropriation for their own pockets. Santa Fe de Ralito thus stands in the narrative as the place where a pact between politicians and armed actors gave formal shape to a wider capture of political authority and public life.