The Foreign Service Journal, April 2006

dence that has been used in protract- ed but still inconclusive legal actions against cashiered officers. As the light of publicity has shone on these cases and international pressure, especially from the United States, was brought to bear, allegations of paramilitary- army complicity have sharply drop- ped, but the underlying problem of paramilitarism remains. Yet consistently drawing a bright line between official law enforce- ment and citizen self-defense is diffi- cult, because Colombians themselves so often mix the two. Colombia has a long tradition of allowing, and at times promoting, private security arrangements. The Colombian Ministry of Defense estimated in the mid- 1990s that what citizens were spending for their own pro- tection (on bodyguards, property protection, security companies and vigilante bands) amounted to 3.4 percent of the country’s gross domestic prod- uct, equivalent to what the govern- ment was then spending on the police and armed forces combined. It was often remarked that for a country supposedly in the midst of a nationwide civil conflict, Colombia had a ridiculously small defense bud- get. But if police and private securi- ty expenditures were included, that total was about average for Latin America. Back in the mid-1980s, regional military commanders freely admitted that local cattlemen were helping equip their underfunded units, boots and all. Colombians also recall that the FARC began at the end of the turbulent period of the 1950s called “La Violencia” as a self-protection force set up by middle- class campesinos in the southern department of Huila. But the current version of paramilitarism is heavily influ- F O C U S A P R I L 2 0 0 6 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 35 In 1976, Colombia told the U.S. that it no longer needed its assistance and ordered the closure of the USAID mission.