How I Stumbled into a Paraco Human Smuggling Operation in Colombia

A trip along the Venezuelan-Colombian border led to a tense and unexpected encounter

Hola Piratas!

I’m currently travelling through Cesar as part of a story researching links between Colombian paramilitary forces and mining companies in the region. I haven’t been here for a few years. It’s hot, muggy and vallenato, the distinctly Colombian Caribbean “country music” (for lack of a better term) is omnipresent.

The sounds of the accordion, which features prominently in the style, fill every street and bar.

I’m headed to Aguachica as I write this, with some stops along the way at a few mining sites. But as I see graffiti by paramilitaries along the highway, I am reminded of the first time I ever came to Cesar, in 2019— and accidentally ran into a human trafficking operation.

Usually, the notes we write at PWS aren’t first-person, but I think this may merit an exception. My first impression of Aguachica— in the dead of night and surrounded by “paracos”— is one I will likely never forget.

This little adventure happened in 2019, at the height of the Venezuelan migration, as thousands crossed the border daily.

Here’s to hoping it goes differently this time!

How I Stumbled into a Paraco Human Smuggling Operation in Colombia

A trip along the Venezuelan-Colombian border led to a tense and unexpected encounter

Aguachica, Colombia- We departed Cucuta in a van overflowing with Venezuelans. Personal space was naught but a distant and much longed-for abstraction. The passing detail that we were the only passengers who paid the fare should have been the first clue that it wouldn’t be a typical journey.

But the bus station was a vortex of chaos, with hundreds of Venezuelans waiting for buses, selling cheap goods and petitioning “donations.” It was a cacophony of honking buses, barkers and mendicants. I was focused on not losing my cameras- they would be hard to replace in the Colombian frontier towns in which we would be spending the next few weeks.

And I was distracted by the box of live chickens someone had brought.

We left the blistering heat of Cucuta, and slowly crawled north along badly-maintained and windy roads. Our destination was Aguachica— a small city near the north of the Venezuelan-Colombian border.

I had no idea that we would be spending the evening in the city that serves as the frontier base for the Colombian Paramilitary forces, known here as “Paracos”.

It was the first stop on a three day journey towards the town of Maicao, on the border with Venezuela. I am traveling with David Parra, a Venezuelan journalist who recently fled his country. We are reporting on border conditions along the Venezuelan border in Colombia.

A supposedly six-hour journey stretched into twelve as we hit traffic jams, construction and made various stops along the winding Andean path that connects Norte de Santander to Cesar. It was claustrophobic and stifling.

At least the chickens were quiet.

An Unofficial Stop in the Road

Around hour six, the driver pulled into the parking lot of a two-story house alongside the road. Standing guard in front of the house was a young kid wearing body armor with a shotgun strapped to his back. He sported a baseball hat that read “Private Security”.

The driver dismounted, chatted briefly with the guard and entered the house. Nobody seemed very surprised or bothered by this. I kept my mouth shut. In Colombia, informal bribes are sometimes simply a part of life. I assumed that was what was occurring.

Other than noticing that the “security guard” was a lot more heavily armed than the guys you usually see in front of nice houses here, I thought little of it.

That was the second clue I missed that suggested things were not what they seemed.

Arriving on the outskirts of Aguachica

After eleven long hours we stopped at a small roadside restaurant on the outskirts of Aguachica. I desperately needed to stretch my legs and escape the stale air of the van. Everyone piled out except for David, who looked a bit concerned.

I lit a cigarette as the driver talked with ten young men who were waiting on motorcycles in front of the small kitchen.

I was only mildly surprised when all the passengers started removing their baggage from the roof of the van. There was a cheap hotel nearby. As I wondered whether we should just call it a night and stay there one of the youths on motorcycles asked me “Are you coming with us?”

I thought they were moto-taxis, a common occurrence here in Colombia. I walked back to the van and asked David if he wanted to stay in the nearby Hotel or accept a ride from the youth offering.

“No.” he told me looking concerned. “We are going to the terminal. For sure.”

I found his reaction puzzling until I started to listen to the conversations the Venezuelans were having with the youths. They were discussing large sums of money, some of them haggling. The sums were far too high to be for a moto-taxi passage.

That’s when I realized we were in the middle of an organized human trafficking operation.

I threw out my cigarette and immediately got back into the van.

David was nervously laughing. “You’re fucking loco man.” he told. “What were you thinking, Mr Danger?!” he asked me ironically.

“I wanted a cigarette.” I said.

“With the Paracos!?”

I said nothing. I didn’t know they were Paracos. But if I already felt uneasy, his comment pushed me more towards a state of controlled panic.

We were the only passengers left in the van. The driver, and the young girl he traveled with climbed back aboard. We resumed our journey towards the bus station in Aguachica. The suddenly spacious van was silent.

So was the city. Streets were deserted, houses empty, and the few stores we saw were all shuttered.

“It’s a ghost town,” said David quietly. “This shit is gothic man. It’s macabre.”

I was thinking about all the horror stories I had heard on the border in Cucuta. To understand a bit better why we were both so nervous, one needs to understand a few facts about border life in Colombia.

The Paracos

Officially, paramilitarism arrived to Cesar in June of 1996 when 25 armed men settled in in the savannas of Ariguaní on the border between Magdalena and Cesar. They were sent by the Castaño brothers and Salvatore Mancuso, who are the sort of “godfathers” or organized “paras”, originally in Antioquia, at the request of some businessmen, politicians and landowners from Vallenato, Cesar.

The irregular Paramilitary forces in Colombia, called “paracos” for short, evolved during the nearly 60 year civil war in Colombia. They were extreme-right, religious forces that were created to battle leftist guerilla group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). They also committed a very long list of atrocities and massacres during that period.

Colombia’s Special Peace Court has demonstrated that they were initially funded by business leaders, as well as narco groups, and billed as “self-defense forces”— though in reality, they functioned more as death squads.

They smuggle cocaine into Venezuela, alongside the narcos, with whom they have a long history, and engage in extortion, illegal mining, people smuggling and enforce a brutally administered “justice” in the regions they control.

People routinely go missing on the border, and violence is so commonplace that it rarely even makes the local news.

The ideological descendants of these groups still very much exist in Colombia. In fact, the Gaitanista Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AGC) - often referred to by the government as the “Clan del Golfo”- are the largest criminal group in the country.

They still have deep ties to narco-groups, as well as the private sector and the military, and in Cesar, they continue to fight the largest remaining rebel group in the country, the National Liberation Army (ELN), who control most of neighboring department Catatumbo in the southeast.

The “paracos” have a long history of working directly with, and sometimes directly for, the petroleum and coal industries in Cesar. They also finance their operations through extortion, human smuggling, illegal mining and the smuggling of cocaine to the northern coast, as well as into Venezuela.

They have also been known to murder journalists who ask too many questions.

And we had just stumbled upon a tiny piece of their organized trafficking of people out of Venezuela.

All of this information raced through my mind as we pulled into the deserted bus station.

Welcome to Aguachica

When we arrived I hurriedly removed our bags from the roof of the van as David asked the driver about hotels nearby. I hid my cameras in my backpack. Obviously, being identified as journalists writing about the border would be incredibly dangerous. Only one photo exists of our time in Aguachica, a snapshot David took on the sly using his phone.

The driver introduced us to a man waiting in the terminal. He asked us what we were doing in Aguachica.

“We’re going to Santa Marta” we told him, hoping he would assume we were just clueless tourists that accidentally ended up in a situation we didn’t understand.

“All right. Let me check and see if there is room in any of the hotels nearby.”

“If there’s room?!” I thought to myself. There were definitely no tourists in town. In fact, there was no one in town. The idea that the hotel might be full was…ridiculous.

David and I looked at each other but said nothing.

The man walked away to make a phone call while we organized our luggage.

He returned and advised us that there was a hotel nearby that might have space.

We packed our luggage into the taxi and set off. He drove us about 200 feet, to a hotel nearby. Which was deserted.

“50,000 pesos,” he told us. We could have walked the distance in 5 minutes, but I wasn’t about to argue. We were certain that it wasn’t a hotel he had called from the bus station. Much more likely he was asking someone what he should do with us.

We were clearly the only guests in the hotel. The clerk seemed surprised that anyone would be there at all. Famished from a full day on the road, we asked if there was food nearby.

She directed us to a “restaurant” two blocks away.

The restaurant, like the rest of Aguachica was deserted. The waitress told us they had chicharon, fried pork skins.

“Is there anything else?” we asked.

There was not. We ate our chicharon with toothpicks and tried to make jokes. There was also no silverware. Or anything else.

“The chicharon is probably Venezuelan,” I said

“Those poor Venezuelans,” David replied.

We laughed. But it was nervous laughter.

Grateful that no one bothered us further we went to sleep uneasily in the enormous and empty hotel, determined to rise at dawn and catch the first bus out of town.

“Macabre, man.” said David. “Gothic.”

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I am travelling all day today and tomorrow in the Colombian-Venezulean borderlands. We’ll be back with the weekly news wrap-up and the Spanish word of the week on Wednesday, when the crew puts out it’s “Ship’s Log”.

Hasta pronto piratas!