Fidel Castaño and the 2,000 Paramilitaries Who Sold the Cordoba Model

By Desmond Okafor · September 11, 2026

Kept secret for 25 years, a 1998 cable documents how U.S. multinationals and the DEA intersected with Colombian narco-vigilantes to cleanse the Córdoba region.

The cost of the "Cordoba Model" was paid in the currency of the disappeared and the slaughtered, a social price so steep it left the soil of northwestern Colombia saturated. For the families of those killed in the crossfire between the state and its proxies, the cost was the total erasure of the right to exist in their own homes.

I am working from the archive's curated description of the record, not its original pages. The record is a December 1998 cable from the U.S. Embassy in Bogotá, a confidential report detailing a trip to Montería, the capital of the Córdoba Department and a city the record describes as "perhaps the most solidly pro-paramilitary burg in all of Colombia."

A Coordinated Cleansing

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the National Army of Colombia—the state force that helped establish and equip the local paramilitary structure—decided that the most efficient way to fight the EPL, a guerrilla insurgency, was to outsource the violence. The record establishes that the Army supplied the Self-Defense Forces of Córdoba and Urabá (ACCU), a paramilitary group formed by the Castaño brothers to retaliate for the guerrilla murder of their father, with training, weapons, ammunition, and intelligence.

This was not a loose partnership of convenience; it was a synchronized operation. The record notes that after the killing of a battalion commander, the Army expanded its presence from a battalion to the 11th Brigade. While the local private sector—ranchers and businessmen—funded the salaries of the units and bought the gas and vehicles, the state provided the muscle and the mandate. The result was a pincer movement: the Army’s First Mobile Brigade and the ACCU pushed south across the department in a "very coordinated fashion," with the state moving through first and the paramilitaries staying behind to establish permanent outposts.

This is the blueprint of a proxy state. By allowing the ACCU to maintain the "outposts," the Colombian Army effectively delegated the occupation of the countryside to a narco-paramilitary force. The record admits this war came at a "very high social cost," citing "lots of deaths and human rights violations on all sides." This phrasing is the classic language of the state: it frames massacres as a symmetrical tragedy to obscure the fact that one side had the budget and the legal authority of the republic.

Document imagery from nsarchive.gwu.edu From the files: nsarchive.gwu.edu

The Vigilantes' Table

By 1998, the nature of the violence had evolved from a counter-insurgency to a narco-war. The record describes a "surreal encounter" over breakfast where a U.S. Embassy Political Officer—whose specific name is not on file—sat with the architects of this violence. Among them was the legacy of Fidel Castaño, a drug lord and military leader who had transitioned from being a business associate of Pablo Escobar, the founder of the Medellín Cartel, to his most vicious enemy.

Fidel Castaño had built a private army of 2,000 paramilitaries. When he decided he had had enough of Escobar, he became the military leader of The Pepes, a group of narco-vigilantes who called themselves "Those Persecuted by Pablo Escobar." While Fidel handled the military command, his younger brother, Carlos Castaño, who would eventually lead the ACCU, served as the chief of intelligence for The Pepes.

The irony recorded in the cable is absolute. These men, who had spent years refining the art of the extrajudicial killing, told the U.S. officer that "everyone worked with the Pepes." This list included the Police, the Army, and the DEA. Fidel Castaño had essentially mirrored Escobar’s own tactics, declaring a moratorium on any assistance to the Medellín Cartel and murdering anyone who continued to pay taxes to Escobar. With the help of the Police, Fidel "wiped out" the Escobar-related narcos in Montería.

Foreign Trainers and Blacked-Out Names

The violence in Córdoba was not a local phenomenon; it was an international project. The record details a pipeline of "material, training and ideological support" flowing from foreign sources. While the U.S. officer's report mentions that some training was provided in the late 80s, the record points to more recent and "more important" rounds of instruction. This included two separate Israeli teams and a team led by a retired French Army general.

More damning are the allegations of "material assistance from U.S. and other foreign multinationals." Here, the record goes silent. The names of these companies are withheld, leaving a gap in the history of how corporate capital funded the paramilitary cleansing of the Colombian countryside.

There is a similar void regarding the surrender of the EPL. In early 1998, 225 EPL dissidents surrendered. The record explicitly states they did not surrender to the government, but directly to a party whose name is redacted.

The Reading of the Model

When we look at the gaps in this file, the shape of the silence is telling. The desk's reading is that the identity of the "U.S. and other foreign multinationals" is withheld specifically to prevent the linkage of corporate balance sheets to the funding of illegal paramilitary structures. If these names were released, we would likely see a direct financial line from the boardrooms of North American industry to the payrolls of the ACCU.

Furthermore, the redaction regarding the surrender of the 225 EPL dissidents suggests an off-the-books handover process. The pattern suggests that the state used the paramilitaries as a "black site" for surrenders, allowing the government to avoid the bureaucratic and legal requirements of a formal peace process while ensuring the dissidents were placed under the control of the Castaños.

The mention of the DEA’s cooperation with The Pepes is reported as a third-party observation to the Political Officer, which the desk reads as a deliberate exercise in plausible deniability. By treating the DEA's coordination with narco-vigilantes as a "local fact" rather than an official U.S. policy, the Embassy could acknowledge the reality of the ground while protecting the agency from the legal fallout of partnering with mass murderers.

Finally, the "Cordoba Model"—this hybrid of state military force and narco-paramilitary brutality—was not just a local suggestion. The fact that local interlocutors were advocating for its nationwide adoption to a U.S. diplomat suggests that the Embassy was not merely observing the model, but vetting it. The pattern indicates that the U.S. was analyzing the efficiency of the Córdoba cleansing to see if it could be scaled as a national strategy for Colombia.

If a full release of these cables were to occur, we would likely find that the "Cordoba Model" was an experiment in state-sponsored terror, funded by multinational corporations and blessed by U.S. intelligence, where the target was not just the guerrilla, but any peasant who dared to own the land the narcos wanted. The people who paid for this model were the farmers of Córdoba, who found that the "Self-Defense" forces were the very ones they needed defense from.

Fidel Castaño and the 2,000 Paramilitaries Who Sold the Cordoba Model

A Coordinated Cleansing

The Vigilantes' Table

Foreign Trainers and Blacked-Out Names

The Reading of the Model

Sources