Semana on “Hasbún’s Confessions”
Here, thanks to an excellent translation from CIP Intern Anthony Dest, is the text of an article that appeared this weekend in the Colombian newsmagazine Semana. It summarizes the “Justice and Peace” testimony of Raúl Hasbún, a shadowy businessman and paramilitary leader who was a key player in the AUC’s bloody late-1990s expansion in the northwestern region of Urabá. Hasbún was the key connection for the payments that Chiquita Brands, the U.S. fruit company, admitted making to the paramilitaries.
Perhaps most striking about this article is how thoroughly it confirms what Colombia’s human-rights defenders were alleging at the time about paramilitary ties with the military, local government and the regional business establishment. At the time, of course, those allegations were fiercely denied by all involved.
The businessman turned paramilitary boss told the attorney general’s office revealing secrets about a gruesome chapter in the history of Urabá, Colombia’s banana growing region.
The day that Raúl Hasbún arrived at the office of Pedro Juan Moreno, the government secretary of the then governor of Antioquia, Álvaro Uribe, he left with more than he expected. Hasbún, a businessman in the banana industry, relayed to Moreno the interest of various Urabá land-owning farmers in creating a government-sponsored surveillance cooperative, a “CONVIVIR,” in the region. Moreno, however, told him not to create just one, but twelve. In a few months, Urabá had twelve CONVIVIR units that consisted of 150 people, 800 radios, cars, and weapons.
Throughout the mid-1990s CONVIVIR had the support of the national government. The issue was, however, that Hasbún was not only the owner of banana plantations and extensive cattle ranches, but he had also become commander ‘Pedro Ponte’ of the Campesino Self-Defense Forces of Córdoba and Urabá (ACCU).
In his own “Justice and Peace” confession (which began in July), he did not hesitate to admit to giving the order to kill people who ’smelled like guerrillas.’ Without blinking, he confessed to the San José de Apartadó massacre of 1998. He said he ordered the massacre because the town was so secluded, and the logistics of getting there were so difficult, that it wasn’t worth it to make an incursion just to kill one or two people. Therefore, in order to make the most out of the trip, they killed the largest amount of people that could possibly be associated with the FARC.
How did the owner of more that 4,000 hectares of land become a criminal? According to him, he once tried to sell a farm, but no one wanted to buy it because there were so many guerrillas in Urabá. Disappointed because his wealth was diminishing and he was being extorted by the guerrillas, he searched for someone who could introduce him to Fidel Castaño, who already had a paramilitary group in Urabá, so that he could offer Castaño his help. He was soon invited to a farm where he met Carlos and Vicente Castaño. From that moment on he began to collaborate with the paramilitaries. Soon afterwards in 1996, the Castaño brothers put him in charge of a group of forty armed men.
Without sacrificing the image of a respectable business man, Hasbún became the head of a bloody and ambitious paramilitary group that worked under the guide of Vicente Castaño. Hasbún used information that he gathered from CONVIVIR units for the purposes of the paramilitary group. He said that the twelve CONVIVIR groups in Urabá worked as a network. The information that they gathered was sent directly to him, as a paramilitary head, at the same time that it was sent to the military and police. The paramilitary groups generally carried out the operations because they had better resources. “On one occasion, the CONVIVIR gave the military the exact location of some guerrillas. When the military decided to act, two trucks were out of gas and one had a dead battery. As soon as they were about to leave, it turned out that they didn’t have radios. Finally, they decided not to carry out the operation.” According to Hasbún, the CONVIVIR paid for the military’s gas and allowed the police and DAS [the Colombian intelligence agency] to borrow cars and even radio transmitters. When intelligence was not able to arrest and try someone, the paramilitary groups would receive the information and immediately kill the person.
This was all possible because the system that the paramilitaries had created made the CONVIVIR units incredibly rich. According to Hasbún, “[they] had a huge influx of money. Millions and millions of pesos.” Hasbún carried out every order that Vicente Castaño gave him, which guaranteed that all of the money that he took would either go to CONVIVIR or to the paramilitaries. Carlos Castaño had many meetings with companies working in the banana industry, and he was able to reach an agreement where the companies would pay CONVIVIR three percent of every box of bananas exported. This money was collected by the CONVIVIR in Papagayo, which was managed by Arnulfo Peñuela, who is now in prison for his relationship with the paramilitary groups. These payments continued until 2003 in cases such as that of Chiquita Brands, a company that has since recognized that it financed the paramilitary groups in Urabá this way. Even though Hasbún denies it, other paramilitary leaders assure that one of every three cents collected by the CONVIVIR went to the paramilitary groups.
Hasbún insists that very few people in the banana industry knew of his double life as a businessman and a paramilitary, but people who lived in the region during that time period say otherwise. Everyone knew that Raúl Hasbún, owner of more than five farms and the legal representative of many units of the CONVIVIR, was ‘Pedro Ponte,’ commander of the paramilitary groups that ordered the murders and massacres that made Urabá the most violent region in the country.
