Patriotic Union (Colombia) - Decline and Extermination

Decline and Extermination

By 1987, the party's leadership began to be gradually but increasingly decimated by the violent attacks and assassinations carried out by drug lords, proto-paramilitary groups and some members of the government's armed forces that acted together with the above, with what many observers consider as the passive tolerance (and in, some instances, the alleged collaboration) of the traditional bipartisan political establishment.

Jaime Pardo himself was assassinated by a 14-year old on October 11, 1987, who was later killed as well. Drug lord José Gonzalo Rodríguez, also known as "the Mexican", was apparently involved in the murder as a sponsor. The Communist Party's newspaper published a report in which it allegedly linked members of the Colombian military to José Gonzalo Rodríguez.

Also during 1987, the ceasefire between the FARC and the Colombian government gradually collapsed due to regional guerrilla and Army skirmishes that created a situation where each violation of the ceasefire rendered it null in each location, until it was rendered practically nonexistent.

In 1988, the UP announced that more than 500 of its members, including Jaime Pardo and 4 congressmen, had been assassinated to date. Unidentified gunmen later attacked more than 100 of the UP's local candidates in the six months preceding the March 1988 elections. An April 1988 report by Amnesty International charged that members of the Colombian military and government would be involved in what was called a "deliberate policy of political murder" of UP militants and others. The Liberal government of Virgilio Barco strongly denied this charge.

During this period, the mid-1980s to the early-1990s, deadly violence was also directed against mainstream politicians, such as the official Liberal presidential candidate Luis Carlos Galán on August 18, 1989, M-19 presidential candidate Carlos Pizarro on April 26, 1990, Justice Minister Rodrigo Lara on April 30, 1984, and others. Liberal Ernesto Samper was wounded while he was saying hello to Jose Antequera, Union Pariotica leader who was murdered on March 3, 1989, Ernesto Samper survived the attack, Jose Antequera died. Numerous car bombs and explosives were also regularly activated in several important Colombian cities, including the capital Bogotá, leaving hundreds dead and wounded.

While some investigations were opened and some of the gunmen and military men involved were captured and convicted, most of the murders committed during these years were never resolved and most of those intellectually responsible were never punished, indicating a high degree of judicial impunity that continues to plague modern Colombia.

It has been claimed by some of the individuals responsible, such as the AUC's Carlos Castaño (who published a book in which he admitted his participation in many of these events and has apparently regretted a number of his actions), that they believed that the UP was nothing more than a FARC front, in order to attempt to rationalize the violence. According to many observers, such a situation had not been strictly true for long, and the FARC itself later began to further distance itself from the group amid the bloodshed. . Some also consider that the FARC's political wing suffered both a physical and mental blow during this period.

The exact number of the victims is not clear. It is usually an accepted figure to state that allegedly some 2,000 to 3,000 of its members were murdered (the highest unofficial and unconfirmed estimates, irregularly employed by the FARC and a small number of analysts, speak of 5,000 or more ).

Two presidential candidates were murdered, plus eight congressmen, 70 councilmen, dozens of deputies and mayors, hundreds of trade unionists, communist and peasant leaders, and an unestablished number of militants.

The official legal representatives of a partial number of UP victims presented a concrete death toll of about 1,163 to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), of which 450 (38%) were attributed directly to paramilitary groups. The breakdown of the remainder was not publicly specified.

The UP's party leader and presidential candidate for the 1990 elections, Bernardo Jaramillo Ossa, was murdered on March 22, 1990.

In the 1991 legislative elections, the UP elected 3 congressmen and only elected one senator, Manuel Cepeda in the 1994 elections. By then, the UP itself and many of its then leaders (such as presidential candidate Jaramillo, and senator Cepeda, murdered later in 1994), in spite of the wave of violence unleashed against them, rejected the violence and continued to insist for a negotiated settlement in order to end Colombia's conflict.

Bernardo Jaramillo, a lifelong member of the Communist Party, witnessed the deaths of his comrades and had openly criticized the positions of both the FARC and the Colombian government, because of what he considered as their mutual intolerance and lack of willingness to compromise for peace. He had promoted the entrance of the UP into the Socialist International, a move which was apparently unwelcome by the FARC and the Colombian Communist Party at the time. He believed that with the end of the Cold War, social democracy was the only effective way to resolve Colombia's problems, and not armed revolution.

On February 11, 2010 Alberto Romero, an ex director of the DAS (Colombian Security Service) was charged as being linked to the murder, together with Carlos Castaño.