The Secret History of Colombia’s Paramilitaries and the U.S. War on Drugs
▻http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/11/world/americas/colombia-cocaine-human-rights.html
For 52 years, with abundant American support , the Colombian government has been locked in a ferocious armed conflict with leftist insurgents. Though it initially empowered paramilitary forces as military proxies, the government withdrew official sanction decades later, long after landowners and cartels had co-opted them. Before their demobilization in the mid-2000s, the militiamen came to rival the guerrillas as drug traffickers and outdo them as human rights abusers.