Colombian Security Forces and the 'Allies' Who Killed 38 Percent of Civilians

By Desmond Okafor · September 17, 2026

A heavily censored report kept secret for decades confirms that Colombian state forces sheltered the very paramilitaries responsible for the highest toll of civilian blood.

Thousands of Colombian peasants were slaughtered in their own fields, their homes burned and their villages erased, while the men paid to protect them stood by and watched. These civilians were not collateral damage in a war; they were the primary targets of a state-sanctioned cleansing operation designed to liquidate anyone suspected of leaning left.

This was the reality on the ground in 1999, a reality that the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency—the military intelligence arm of the Pentagon—captured in a brief, four-page report. What survives of this record is a translated archival description of the document rather than its original pages, but the summary provides a stark admission of state complicity. According to the record, Colombian security forces—the army and police units tasked with maintaining order—"have not actively persecuted paramilitary group members because they see them as allies in the fight against the guerrillas, their common enemy."

The Logic of the Common Enemy

To understand why the state would shield mass murderers, one must look at the "common enemy" cited by the DIA. In this context, the enemy was the FARC, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia. The public record establishes the FARC as a far-left Marxist–Leninist guerrilla group founded in 1966 from peasant self-defense groups. Born out of the brutal agrarian conflicts of La Violencia, the FARC promoted a political line of agrarianism and anti-imperialism, fighting a war of attrition against the Bogota government using everything from guerrilla ambushes to terrorism.

Against the FARC, the Colombian security forces deployed a proxy: the paramilitary groups. These were not haphazard gangs, but armed, militarized units operating without professional or legitimate status. The public record identifies paramilitaries as forces synonymous with political repression, ethnic cleansing, and genocide. By the standards of international law, they were death squads. By the standards of the Colombian state, they were an indispensable asset.

The connection between the two is a symbiotic loop of violence. The security forces provided the paramilitaries with protection, intelligence, and a permissive environment in which to operate. In exchange, the paramilitaries performed the "dirty work" that the official military could not legally execute without triggering international condemnation or human rights sanctions. The record is explicit: the state did not pursue these killers because it viewed them as "allies."

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

The 38 Percent

There is a cold irony in the DIA's choice of the word "allies." When one examines the cost of this alliance, the term ceases to be a strategic descriptor and becomes a confession of complicity. Between 1981 and 2012, the public record shows that paramilitary groups were responsible for 38.4% of civilian deaths in Colombia. This figure dwarfs the killings attributed to the FARC, which accounted for 16.8%, and the Colombian security forces themselves, who were responsible for 10.1%.

This means the most lethal actor in the Colombian conflict was the one the state actively decided not to persecute. The security forces were not merely failing to catch criminals; they were managing a partnership with the most efficient killing machine in the country. The "allies" mentioned in the DIA report were the authors of the Mapiripán massacre and countless other atrocities where civilians were slaughtered to ensure the FARC had no social base to return to.

By framing the relationship as a shared struggle against a "common enemy," the DIA report sanitizes a slaughter. It presents a strategic alignment of interests while ignoring the blood on the floor. The security forces did not see the paramilitaries as a necessary evil; they saw them as a force multiplier. The paramilitaries provided the state with plausible deniability: the army could claim it was fighting a guerrilla insurgency while its proxies were busy erasing entire villages.

Failure to Persecute

The phrasing in the DIA report is a masterclass in bureaucratic erasure. To say that security forces "have not actively persecuted" the paramilitaries is to describe a deliberate policy of impunity as if it were a mere administrative lapse. This is not a gap in enforcement; it is a feature of the design.

If the state does not persecute a group that is openly conducting genocide, the state is the facilitator of that genocide. The public record makes it clear that right-wing paramilitary groups in Colombia also controlled a vast majority of the illegal cocaine trade. This adds a layer of financial greed to the ideological war. The "alliance" was not just about fighting Marxism; it was about protecting the drug profits that funded the death squads and, by extension, greased the palms of the security forces.

Furthermore, the record notes that this DIA analysis was "heavily censored." This censorship is the most telling part of the document. A report that simply states the army likes the paramilitaries does not need heavy redaction. Censorship is used to hide names, dates, specific units, and the mechanisms of coordination. The redactions are the shape of the truth.

The Proxy War

The pattern suggests that the DIA was not merely observing this relationship but was documenting it for a U.S. government that was simultaneously pouring military aid into the Colombian security forces. The desk's reading is that the redacted sections of this report likely contain the names of specific military officers and units who were coordinating these "allies" in real-time. The report masks a direct command-and-control relationship, framing active coordination as a mere "failure to persecute."

If this file is shaped the way it looks, it represents a bridge between U.S. intelligence and Colombian state terror. The DIA knew that the state's primary allies were responsible for nearly 40% of the civilian dead, yet the report focuses on the strategic utility of those allies against the FARC. The desk's reading is that the U.S. intelligence community viewed the slaughter of Colombian peasants as an acceptable cost for the suppression of a Marxist insurgency.

The document omits the specific financial and logistical conduits—the trucks, the radios, the payrolls—used by Colombian security forces to sustain these paramilitary groups. It ignores the contradiction between the requirements of U.S. military aid, which officially prohibits funding units engaged in gross human rights violations, and the DIA's own admission that these units were allied with genocide-committing proxies.

The pattern reveals a strategic intent to use paramilitaries for "cleansing" operations that the state could not legally perform. The security forces didn't just look the other way; they outsourced the massacre. The heavily censored pages of this report are protecting the paper trail of that outsourcing, shielding the officers who signed the orders and the U.S. officials who looked at the body counts and decided the alliance was still worth the price. The civilians paid for that strategic calculation with their lives.

Colombian Security Forces and the 'Allies' Who Killed 38 Percent of Civilians

The Logic of the Common Enemy

The 38 Percent

Failure to Persecute

The Proxy War

Sources