Gen. Del Rio and the Bloody Reward for Arming Paramilitaries

By Harlan Pryce · September 11, 2026

Kept secret for 26 years, a 1998 cable shows how the U.S. Embassy watched a general arm illegal death squads to crush a guerrilla insurgency while the State Department faced a military backlash.

The cost of a military victory in the Colombian countryside is usually measured in the number of peasants disappeared into the mangroves. In the Uraba region—the Caribbean coastal strip of Colombia where the state’s presence was often replaced by the whims of armed gangs—that cost was paid in the currency of systematic slaughter. When the U.S. government describes a general as having "bloodyied the FARC's nose," the blood on the ground belongs to the civilians who were caught in the crossfire of a state-sponsored purge.

The specific details of this betrayal are distilled from the archive's summary of a 1998 cable, rather than the cable's own original pages. This record, a Secret communication from the U.S. Embassy in Bogotá dated August 13, 1998, captures a moment of friction between the American diplomatic corps and the Colombian military high command. It centers on General Del Rio, an officer who commanded the 17th Brigade—the military unit tasked with security in the coastal north and the primary instrument of state violence in Uraba—and the price the U.S. was willing to ignore to ensure his "success."

The Two-Year Reward

In the professional military, rotations are designed to prevent the growth of local fiefdoms. The public record establishes that brigade commands in Colombia were generally rotated every year. Yet, General Del Rio, who would later be investigated for his coordination with illegal paramilitary death squads, was granted a rare exception. He was permitted to remain in command of the 17th Brigade for two years.

This doubling of his tenure was not a matter of administrative convenience; it was a promotion for performance. The record states that Del Rio was allowed to stay in Uraba "apparently because he had been very successful in bloodying the FARC's nose during the period of his command." The FARC, the Marxist-Leninist guerrilla army that fought a decades-long insurgency from the countryside, was the target, but the methods used to reach them were not standard military operations.

The record is explicit about the source of this efficiency. It notes that Del Rio's "systematic arming and equipping of aggressive regional paramilitaries was pivotal to his military success at the time."

The line here is clear: the Colombian military did not just tolerate the rise of illegal paramilitaries; they institutionalized them. Del Rio did not happen upon a group of local vigilantes; he armed and equipped them. The "success" the U.S. Embassy recognized was the result of outsourcing the dirty work of counter-insurgency to death squads that operated without the burden of military law or human rights oversight. The reward for this systematic violation of law was a second year of absolute power over the Uraba region.

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

The State Department Friction

While the 17th Brigade was refining the art of the paramilitary purge, a different kind of war was being fought in the hallways of the embassy. The cable records a clash between the Colombian military and the U.S. State Department. Specifically, it details the anger of General Ramirez, an officer whose hostility toward American diplomats signaled a deep rift between the Colombian military's operational goals and the U.S. government's official diplomatic posture.

General Ramirez lashed out at the State Department, a reaction that suggests the diplomats were attempting to exert pressure on the Colombian military regarding the very paramilitary links that the Embassy was simultaneously documenting as "pivotal" to military success. The record shows a government talking to itself in two different voices: one voice in the State Department demanding accountability for human rights, and another voice in the security apparatus valuing the tactical results of a general who armed killers.

This tension is the heartbeat of the document. The cable reports that General Del Rio was under investigation for his paramilitary links, but it does so in the context of a "Biographic Note" that reads more like a commendation than a rap sheet. The investigation is mentioned, but the "success" is highlighted. The pattern suggests that the investigation was never intended to lead to a courtroom. If the military high command rewarded Del Rio with a doubled command tenure for his methods, an investigation into those same methods is not a pursuit of justice—it is a diplomatic formality.

The Architecture of Deniability

If this file is shaped the way it looks, the mentions of "investigations" serve as a shield. The desk's reading is that the investigation into General Del Rio was a performative diplomatic concession. By reporting that an investigation existed, the U.S. Embassy could tell the State Department—and by extension, the American public—that the U.S. was not supporting a war criminal. Meanwhile, the actual operational reality was that the U.S. was providing the strategic umbrella under which men like Del Rio could arm paramilitaries with impunity.

Furthermore, the record uses the term "systematic arming." This is not the language used to describe a rogue officer acting alone in a remote province. Systematic action implies a process, a supply chain, and a set of orders. The desk's reading is that the arming of paramilitaries was an institutionalized Colombian military strategy sanctioned by the high command, and that the U.S. security apparatus was fully aware of the pipeline.

There is a gap in this record where the logistical support should be. The Embassy knows the arming was "systematic," yet the names of the U.S. officials or agencies who provided the intelligence or logistical framework for the 17th Brigade's operations are absent. The pattern suggests that the withheld portions of this cable—the blacked-out lines and the missing pages—contain the identities of the Americans who made Del Rio's "success" possible.

The Proxy Struggle

The conflict recorded in this cable is a proxy struggle between the U.S. State Department's human rights mandate and the operational goals of the U.S. security apparatus. The diplomats were the designated "good cop," tasked with voicing concern over paramilitary massacres to maintain the image of American legality. But the actual power resided with those who viewed the "bloodying of noses" as the only metric that mattered.

The cable itself serves as a paper trail for plausible deniability. By framing the paramilitary arming within a biographic note attached to a report of a diplomatic clash, the U.S. government created a record that acknowledged the crime while simultaneously justifying the criminal. It allows the state to say, "We knew it was happening, and we reported it," while the reality was, "We knew it was happening, and we let it continue because it worked."

This is the standard operating procedure for American intervention in the Global South: cultivate the strongman, ignore the death squads, and maintain a thin veneer of diplomatic outrage to keep the critics at bay. The people of the Uraba region paid for this strategic ambiguity with their lives. The generals received the medals and the extended commands. The diplomats wrote the cables. And the security agencies, hidden behind the redactions, continued to supply the weapons.

Gen. Del Rio and the Bloody Reward for Arming Paramilitaries

The Two-Year Reward

The State Department Friction

The Architecture of Deniability

The Proxy Struggle

Sources