Since 2003 on December 1st across Medellin a large number of people in the lower strata barrios celebrate with bacchanalia and fireworks. The first is the birthday of Pablo Escobar, however this is not a celebration in honor of him, but the man that may be most responsible for his downfall and death – Don Berna.
December 1st 2003, marks the official demobilization of Don Berna’s Cacique Nutibara paramilitary bloc. To show his continued influence despite his officially putting down arms, Don Berna paid for fireworks and gunpowder to be set off show the extent of his continued control over 10 of the 16 Comunas of Medellin despite his officially “laying down arms”.
Not everyone celebrates this holiday, and depending on who you ask there are those that see the celebration of the day as shameful. For those that do, you’ll see the same sort of enthusiasm that July the 4th is celebrated in the United States.
When I was in Medellin I was lucky enough to witness the fireworks display from the penthouse rooftop of a friend and then attend a block party. My iPhone didn’t capture video nearly as nicely as the one below and I didn’t want to dar papaya at the party so documented nothing, but it will give you the idea of how large an event it is.
Don Berna is now probably most notably known in America today via the depiction of him by Mauricio Cujar in the Netflix series Narcos. I haven’t watched the series so can’t speak to his acting performance. I can, however, speak to the context in which the acts of Don Berna took place that lead to such a day of celebration and how huge an affect the man has had on Colombian politics.
First Formation of Narco Class Consciousness
During the second week of November in 1981, the 26-year-old daughter of Fabio Ochoa Restrepo was kidnapped from the University of Antioquia by M-19, a Marxist guerrilla group. Considered by some to be the man behind Pablo Escobar, $12 million was demanded from Don Fabio for her release. Responding to this following her release, on Dec. 2, 1981 a small plane dropped leaflets announcing the formation of the group “Death to Kidnapers,” which became known by its Spanish acronym MAS, over a Cali stadium during a soccer match. The leaflet said MAS had been formed by 223 leading drug traffickers that organized to resist the leftists preying on their families and that they would carry out “immediate and public execution” of Leftists. Unable to adequately defend themselves against the well-funded attacks, the leftist insurgencies in Colombia soon started to engage in narco-trafficking themselves in order to match the money and weapons that they and the State forces had at their disposal.
In one of the most deadly events in Colombian history four years later, The Palace of Justice was siege by the same Marxist group, M-19. This resulted the public deaths of many federal justices, the burning of legal documents related to Pablo Escobar and the Medellin cartel and a sea change in how the Colombian government decided to handle Pablo and how Pablo’s allies started to view him. The Castaños, one of the most powerful criminal clans in Medellin, for instance grew distant from Pablo Escobar because of Escobar’s stated affinity for left-wing guerrillas, his alleged links to M-19 and another rebel group, the National Liberation Army (Ejército de Liberación Nacional – ELN). Their patriarch had been killed by the FARC and their zeal for the bloodletting of leftists was notorious.
Whether or not M-19 had the backing of Pablo Escobar is subject to debate. Given a little bit broader context, it becomes understandable why this the beginning of the end. These were, after all, times when any sort of public support or expression of sympathy to Leftists was considered just cause for classification as a enemy of the state, placement on a list of subversives and scheduling for capture, execution and disappearance of the body.
Pablo Escobar: Populist with Leftist Leanings
Pablo Escobar was no communist. In fact, if his son is to be believed then he, like Manuel Noriega, was involved with the CIA in profiting of the funneling of cocaine into the United States in order to circumvent oversight by the legislative branch to raise money to fight the Communist, nationalist, anti-colonialist, nativist insurgent movements in Central America. His particular flavor, however, was populist.
This excerpt from Colombia Elites and Organized Crime, written for the U.S. Justice Department, details the differences between Berna and Escobar as it relates to this succinctly:
“In contrast to Escobar, Berna did not pick a fight with the government, kill police and judges, or kidnap elites. He understood that the police were an implacable enemy but could be a superlative ally. The police’s increasing control over resources and the political importance of their battle against El Patrón made them a type of bureaucratic elite. And they used this power to influence how Colombia’s government deployed its military, judicial, and political resources.
Don Berna was to place himself at the heart of this criminal-bureaucratic elite alliance that proved pivotal in the battle against Escobar.”
This interview with one of Pablo Escobar’s most used sicarios is further evidence to categorize Pablo as a narco-populist of sorts.
The Danger of Populism in the Cold War Period
Populism in Latin America is a a frequent recurrence. No surprise given the history of colonial expropriation and rule of locals resources and lands. In the context of the Cold War, however, populist political beliefs meant that Pablo was an unreliable ally and thus a major potential threat. His willingness to attack local allies and minor political functionaries was one thing, but to materially support Leftists for political work greatly upset his allies and meant he came to be classified as a potential major geo-political threat. How so?
Looking at the international scene first – Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala were all in the midst of major political upheavals where nationalists, nativists, anti-colonialists and Communists were united against the scions of the old colonial elite. Pablo Escobar had already established willingness to openly kill members of the established economic and political elite in Colombia. Were he to funnel his profits from the operations towards the guerrillas in that region – or in Colombia – rather than to the Contras and the group that would later be the model for the AUC, Los PEPES, it could significantly effect the tide of the dirty wars and political genocide then occurring in Central America under the aegis of “nation building”.
Had the Communists, their sympathizers and other varieties of nationalistic combatants advocating for anti-colonial style land and labor reforms had weapons with the financial backing that Pablo could have supplied, it’s likely they’d not have been so overwhelmingly slaughtered. But this did not happen and instead the U.S. supported forces, that would later be tried and convicted for genocide, won.
Domestically Pablo had made enemies through expropriations and high taxes on the crime families to fund his war against the state. But that was not all, The Castaños had grown distant from Pablo Escobar because of Escobar’s stated affinity for left-wing guerrillas, and his alleged links to M-19 and another rebel group, the National Liberation Army (Ejército de Liberación Nacional – ELN).
This affinity made Don Berna, who’d had his leg shot off by Communists during an assassination attempt, have even more reason to despise Pablo’s relationship of convenience than his boss being killed by Pablo when he was supposed to be his head of security.
Narco Nation-Building: Filling Pablo’s Power Vacuum
With Pablo’s influence ousted as a result of Don Berna’s alliance-building, business as usual, in a way, could more or less return to normal. Whether or not there was a meeting of political elites that voted up or down to express confidence in Don Berna’s operations is really besides the point. On a practical level Berna was given reign to enforce control networks of narcotics production and distribution, various local criminal activities and organized protection rackets.
Don Berna’s Armed Defense groups, such as the Cacique Nutibara Bloc, literally encircled Medellin. They pushed into neighborhoods to cleanse those that expressed sympathy for them or advocated for a variety of human rights. They pushed out into areas long considered the FARC’s in order to combat the group directly and to take over the fertile land they occupied so as to turn them into coca fields. The Leftist insurgents, soon found themselves turning to the cocaine business to fund them as without it they could not withstand the superior weapons and numbers made available to the Narcos given their bumper profits from the cocaine trade.
Throughout Colombia urbanization was happening at a rapid pace, and still is. People living largely outside capitalist relations – on self-sustaining farms that traded little – were legally and illegally evicted from their land and filled the urban centers. This large scale political-economic transformation was financed largely by the money and armed power granted by the cocaine trade and further financed political influence in the form of bribes, threats of and actual violence, organized voting drives and other means. Put simply, as long as the elites profits were no longer under threat, they largely turned a blind eye to the primitive accumulation of capital that plagued the countryside and low strata parts of the cities where they never visited anyway.
Bullets, Not Ballots: Limiting Leftist Political Discourse with Cocaine Powered Anti-Communism
The scope of the slaughter of Latin American Leftists is such that many historians and political scientists have used the term politicide to describe U.S. supported military actions throughout Central America and Colombia. The problem I see with such a conceptualization, however intuitively appealing that it is, is that it obfuscates that actions of the guerillas. Their activity was similarly aligned with the plata o plomo ethos and they avowedly sought the liquidation of the bourgousie.
Regardless of this, the effect of this class warfare was to drastically alter the politics of the possible, as well as the debatable. Critical words against those in power overheard and reported to the wrong person could mean that one was then placed on a limpieza‘s list of people to cleanse. The press too shirked from speak truth to power lest they join the long list of now dead community activists and hundreds of dead journalists.
Lest this be seen as solely emerging from this period, it reflects a long-standing disdain for anti-systemic political committments going back to the period of La Violenca.
The net result is a political culture amongst the lower class that largely refuses to engage with certain critiques of power and the politics that such assessments proscribe. Instead they pray for the benevolence of an economic elite (that for generations has shown willingness to murder those that threaten to expose the ill-gotten means behind their wealth) resign themselves to life’s poor conditions and exploit others for their enjoyment with little to no care to as to who it harms. The phrase for this condition: Que gonorrea!
This combined with general historical ignorance within the population means that people don’t know why the F.A.R.C. and E.L.N. fight. This problematics as without the deeper understanding of history and politics it makes the it easier to seduce the People with promises whose fulfilment is always further down the horizon.
Parties and Partys in Colombia
So what the hell does all this have to do with Alborada?
Well, with this context in mind it’s easier to see why some don’t like to celebrate it – Alborada is a celebration of the successful cleansing of leftists and lumpen that didn’t follow the political and economic dictates proscribed by La Oficina de Envigado. While the FARC and the ELN certainly continued to exist in rural areas and some smaller cities, their cleansing from Medellin was so total they they felt confident enough to lay down arms and set off fireworks for a man that had over 11,000 murders attributed to him. If this seems shocking, consider this: if the FARC had stayed and turned the government into an arm of their organization, how many more thousands of people would have been killed as they attempted to impose their poetic, narcissistic political order. This Alborada is, in a way, also a celebration of the lives that were saved by preventing such a tragedy…
Sometimes people that aren’t nice must be given some free reign, in other words, in order to prevent something worse from transpiring.
