A Colombian paramilitary commander best known as “Macaco,” was responsible for the massacre of hundreds of people between the late 1980s and 2005. In 2008, the U.S. requested the extradition of Macaco and several dozen paramilitary leaders. The US had in fact enabled the interdependence of the Colombian state and the paramilitaries with billions of dollars in security assistance. (Macaco himself had benefited from U.S. support even more directly, as a palm oil company he owned had received funding from the U.S. Agency for International Development.) Macaco was convicted on drug trafficking charges, sentenced, released after 11 years and deported back to Colombia in 2019. While he continues to face murder and conspiracy charges in Colombia, he has not yet been found criminally responsible for any of the hundreds of murders he oversaw. But things started to change in the fall of 2021 when a Florida US federal judge ruled against Macaco in a civil case filed on behalf of the family of one of his victims. Eduardo Estrada was a popular community leader and founder of an independent radio station whom paramilitary leaders ordered executed in the town of San Pablo in 2001. The court awarded $12 million in damages to Estrada’s family. Although it is unlikely that they will collect the money, the ruling is significant nonetheless. It marked the first time a court in any country held Macaco responsible for one of the hundreds of murders carried out under his command. It was also the first judgment for murder and torture against a Colombian paramilitary leader in a case of its kind in the United States. Perhaps most significantly, the ruling recognized a “symbiotic relationship” between the paramilitaries and the Colombian state. While such a relationship is hardly a secret in Colombia, it was the first time a U.S. court recognized it. “A U.S. court has found that these violent, murderous, paramilitary regimes were basically the same as the Colombian government,” Daniel McLaughlin, another attorney who litigated the case, told The Intercept. “Which is the Colombian government that the U.S. was supporting at the time.” The case could set a precedent for more civil litigation against paramilitaries and other nonstate actors to be filed in the United States. Roxanna Altholz is a human rights attorney who fought for years to have the testimonies of the families of victims included in U.S. criminal proceedings against paramilitary leaders. “What happened in Colombia is certainly the responsibility of Colombian leaders and society,” said Altholz. “But also of the United States. Anywhere you look, you’ll see the United States.”
