Medellin, 10 years after ‘Operation Orion,’ still

looking for answers

written by Adriaan Alsema October 16, 2012

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Medellin on Tuesday commemorated the 10th anniversary of Operation
Orion, a military offensive in the western Comuna 13 that successfully
removed left-wing rebels, but ended up installing paramilitary groups still
terrorizing the area.

Immediately after October 16 2002, when the operation began, the

military offensive was criticized because it was carried out in one of
Medellin’s most densely populated areas. While the army, police, air force
and paramilitary groups combated left-wing urban militias, the then
approximately 100,000 residents of the slums were caught in the
crossfire, leaving hundreds injured.

The operation became even more controversial later, when locals began
telling stories of how hundreds of residents had been detained but were
never tried, how dozens of neighbors were disappeared by paramilitary
forces during and after the operation and how the paramilitary Bloque
Cacique Nutibara (BCN) had been collaborating with the army and police
to secure paramilitary control over the area.

And even now, ten years down the line, inhabitants still don’t know why
they were put in the middle of a battlefield, what happened to the people
who disappeared since the four-day siege, and why paramilitary groups —
and not the state forces — used the siege to consolidate disputed territory
and imposed a terror the community had never before seen.

Comuna 13 before Orion

Throughout the 1990s, the Comuna 13, or San Javier, was actually one of
the least violent areas in Medellin with a homicide rate well below that of
the city average.

Unlike other parts of the city where the right-wing AUC had incorporated
vigilante Convivir groups and combos previously loyal to Pablo Escobar,
the western wing of the city was controlled by communist urban militias
called the Armed People’s Commandos (CAP). The FARC and ELN — at
that time at the strongest point in their history — had also reached the
periphery of Colombia’s second largest city and, together with the CAP,
had taken control over strategic entry and exit point of the city.

The situation changed drastically when in 1999 several blocks of the AUC
began an offensive to push the left-wing illegal armed groups away from
the zone that connected Medellin to Uraba, a paramilitary stronghold on
the Caribbean coast and an important port for the import of weapons and
the export of cocaine.

The paramilitaries’ counter-insurgency offensive, however, spiraled out of

control and caused unprecedented violence in the comuna.

While Medellin’s average homicide rate had been steady around 170 per
100,000 inhabitants around the turn of the century, the homicide rate in
the Comuna 13 tripled between 1997 and 2002, going from a relatively
low 123 to a staggering 357. In that same period, forced displacement
went from three cases to 1259.

HOMICIDE RATE

FORCED DISPLACEMENT

After controversial ex-Mayor Luis Perez took office in 2001, Medellin

police and the national security forces tried to violently enter the
neighborhood on ten occasions to end the war between guerrillas and
paramilitaries, but without result; the violence continued.

Operation Orion
Two months after being inaugurated, then-President Alvaro Uribe held a
security council in Medellin on October 15, 2002 and publicly ordered the
commander of the locally stationed 4th Brigade, General Mario Montoya,
and the Medellin Police Commander, General Leonardo Gallego, to begin
an offensive that would once and for all oust insurgent groups from the
Comuna 13.

More than 1,000 soldiers and policemen, supported by armed helicopters,

attacked the area 24 hours later. Heavy combat lasted until October 20
after which the police and military had successfully expelled the
communist militias from the comuna. Witnesses, local media and BCN
commander and Oficina de Envigado chief “Don Berna” have said the
police and military were aided by paramilitaries.

Speaking before Colombian prosecutors in 2009, the former paramilitary

warlord said “the self defense forces of the BCN arrived at the Comuna 13
as part of an alliance with the 4th Brigade of the Army, including General
Mario Montoya, of the army, and Leonardo Gallego, of the Police.”

“Several of my men entered with the security forces. [They were] hooded
because a lot of people from there knew them,” the paramilitary leader
testified from his U.S. prison in 2009.

The battle left hundreds of civilians injured. The amount of civilians killed
remained unclear as official counts contradicted others and some civilian
casualties were reported as guerrillas killed in combat. Additionally,
approximately 70 people disappeared.

Aftermath
Following the siege, Operation Orion was praised by authorities as one of
the most successful offensives against illegal armed groups to date. The
year after the siege, the homicide rate in the Comuna 13 dropped from 357
to 72 and the mayor claimed 72 hostages were rescued from the slums, an
assertion that was later denied by other officials.

However, residents and human rights organizations began complaining

about security forces torturing civilians, arbitrary detentions,
disappearances, and that Don Berna, and not the security forces, had
taken full control of the comuna 13, continuing violence against what the
BCN considered guerrilla sympathizers.

“What they did was replace one illegal armed group by another,” Maritza
Quiroz of the Corporacion Juridica Libertad, an NGO monitoring human
rights in the Comuna 13, told Colombia Reports Monday.

The spectacular drop in homicides that followed Operation Orion was not
the result of a successful military operation, but “because Don Berna
ordered to stop the killing,” a local community leader said.

Instead of leaving dead bodies on the streets, the BCN turned to disposing
the bodies in a dump site up the hill called “La Escombrera,” keeping the
homicide rate low.
According to the Corporacion Juridica Libertad, some 140 people
disappeared from the neighborhood between November 2002 and
February 2003. This claim has been corroborated by locals, Don Berna
and the local ombudsman’s office that has said that some 150 bodies are
expected to be buried. Some media have claimed more than 300 people
have disappeared from the Comuna 13 since Don Berna took control.

Nevertheless, official figures on the amount of people who have

disappeared since Orion are not publicly available and local authorities
have failed to fulfill its promise to investigate the dump site and locate
and identify the remains of those who disappeared.

The forced displacement that started after the paramilitary incursion in

1999 also continued after the paramilitary groups had taken control. A
2011 study showed that between 2003 and 2009, almost 3,500 people
were displaced from the comuna. City-wide, forced displacement more
than doubled since then.

The excessive homicide rate that spurred Orion returned after Don
Berna’s extradition in 2008. Warring factions of the Oficina de Envigado,
later joined by neo-paramilitary group the Urabeños, secured that by 2011
the Comuna 13’s homicide rate was higher than before the arrival of the
paramilitaries.

Inhabitants of what once was one of Medellin’s most peaceful comunas

have received the assistance of an independent international commission
that has vowed to take locals’ testimonies and clarify what has happened
during and after Operation Orion while former Generals Montoya and
Gallego are under investigation by public prosecutors over their alleged
collaboration with Don Berna.