Forced disappearance and its Practices in the Border Area

Norte de Santander has historically been one of the areas with the highest rates of forced disappearance in the country (^{Cañizares, 2010}). Its border location with Venezuela makes it a strategic territory for the activities of armed groups and the development of economies framed in informality and illegality. The violent context of the department and the disputes over territorial control have caused forced disappearance to become a strategy of terror and control over the civilian population; given the dynamics of the conflict in this territory, this strategy has been deployed through means different from those of the rest of the country. As Cañizares (2010) pointed out, forced disappearance in this area is framed under the following practices and periodicities:

As stated earlier, the first cases of cross-border disappearance were reported in 2003, however, this practice has continued to the present. Just by walking across the Simón Bolívar International Bridge -one of the legal crossings connecting Cucuta in Colombia with the state of Táchira in Venezuela-, one can see posters with images of people whose whereabouts are unknown, stating that they disappeared at the border (photos 1 and 2).

Source: Taken from ^{Patiño Idárraga and Páez Meza (2019}, p. 115).

Photos 1 and 2 Local press clipping from 2019 and poster located on the Simón Bolívar International Bridge, giving notice of a case of cross-border disappearance 

For their part, the human rights organizations that provide legal and psychosocial assistance to the victims of forced disappearance in Norte de Santander continue receiving reports about cases. In them, relatives claim to have lost track of their loved ones while they worked in informal jobs that implied them to continuously transit the illegal crossings of the Colombian-Venezuelan border.

Norte de Santander: a Liminal Space where Illegal Economies Produce Missing Persons

Border territories contain a series of characteristics that make them unique spaces where the limits of what is legal and illegal tend to blur. It is precisely these ethereal configurations that make these places propitious for the development of activities that -even when they are of an illegal nature- are assumed as legal actions by the communities, and are appropriated as part of their cultural identity, a product of the customary practice of such actions in this type of territory. Colombia and its borders¹² are no exception to this pattern: although these territories harbor differentiating elements among themselves based on the peculiarities of their contexts, when it comes to their social, cultural, and economic dynamics, there are no great distances between regions.

For the specific case of this work, the Colombian-Venezuelan border was taken as the contextual reference, delimited as it is by the 421 kilometers separating the Colombian department of Norte de Santander from the Venezuelan states of Táchira and Zulia. This has been for decades a space where the geographical delimitation is configured beyond what is merely spatial, since this border has acquired a meaning that defines it as “an area of integration and/or separation; a transition zone between territories, where different norms, pacts or agreements that identify [them] exist and interact” (^{Albornoz-Arias et al., 2019}, p. 3).

This territory has been the arena of economic exchange dynamics derived from the constant variations of the price of the peso and the bolivar, in turn becoming a space that generates migratory processes from both countries. On the Colombian side, violence has been one of the main factors of expulsion and uprooting towards countries like Venezuela; the dimensions and characteristics of this over 60-year¹³ violence have fluctuated over time, and are framed in four moments: 1) from bipartisan to subversive violence (1958-1982), 2) the expansion of paramilitary and guerrilla groups along with the spread of drug trafficking (1982-1996), 3) the polarization of the confrontation (1996- 2000), and 4) the negotiations in the midst of the conflict (2005 -2012) (^{CNMH, 2013}, as cited in ^{Villamizar, 2018}).

Colombian migration to Venezuela has also had cycles of tis own. The first came about the 1940s

-as a consequence of the events of April 9, 1948-, which generated the first wave of Colombian migration fleeing conflict, finding in Venezuela, in addition to work, good living conditions (^{Suarez, 2015}). The second cycle was around the 1970s, and came as a result of the Venezuelan oil boom that produced a high price of the bolivar and encouraged a significant transit from Colombians to Venezuela in search of employment opportunities, mainly in the agricultural sector. During this period, Venezuela functioned “as a recipient of skilled, unskilled and Colombian farmer labor, mainly in its border areas, due to (...) the permeability of the borders and communication facilities, factors that favored this migration” (^{Álvarez, 2004}, p. 192). Finally, a third cycle “gained momentum (...) from the beginning of president Nicolás Maduro’s term in 2013, due to an unprecedented economic, political, social and institutional crisis” (^{Paz Noguera et al., 2021}, p. 79), which according to figures from Colombia Migration (Migración Colombia) for October 2020, has resulted in a total of 1 717 352 Venezuelans living in Colombia (^{El Tiempo, 2020}).

The transit of Colombian migrants into Venezuela has not been the only characteristic element of this region, since the dynamics of formal, informal, legal and illegal trade also began to be part of the repertoire of practices that made this area a territory with unique elements, when compared to the rest of the country’s regions. To the asymmetries in the exchange differential that facilitated a dynamic commercial activity between Cucuta (Colombia) and municipalities of the state of Táchira (Venezuela), such as San Antonio and Ureña, was added the generation of illegal economic strategies framed in the development of activities such as the smuggling of fuel, food and medication; these products, subsidized by the Venezuelan State, were highly profitable for whoever decided to sell them illegally in Colombia. It was thus that in Norte de Santander a highly diversified “border economy began to consolidate -made up of legal and illegal markets-, which has functioned according to an invasive logic in the legal, economic and political spheres, by means of violent and criminal practices” (^{Carrión & Espín, 2011}, p. 13).

Smuggling, as part of these illegal economies, has been a historical practice in Colombia; since its origins in the 19th century, it has been related to:

(...) the changing circumstances involved in constructing a modern State (...) mainly the insufficient income and the consequent choices of fiscal and tariff policies, a social logic that privileged individual interest over the common good and tolerated practices theoretically invalidated in a modern republican State (^{Laurent, 2008}, p. 16).

This activity is carried out from small to large scale. In one form, it “includes the trafficking of food and mass consumption products, due to the differential in the exchange rate between the currency of Colombia and that of Venezuela” (^{Albornoz-Arias et al., 2019}, p. 6). This activity is carried out by single individuals and, before the border closures,¹⁴ it was carried out by people who several times a day bought small amounts of merchandise in Venezuela and crossed the border through international bridges to later resell the merchandise in Colombia. After the border closure, the illegal crossings at the banks of the Táchira River became the new circulation routes for this type of smuggling, which has managed to become a transnational practice.

The other type of smuggling is the one that develops on a large scale and has to do with the entry of merchandise into the country in large proportions, circumventing the payment of tariffs, a fact that is facilitated “by the corruption of officials, who fail to exercise due control of customs or border crossings” (^{Mazuera-Arias et al., 2019}, p. 176). This activity -at all scales- is part of the portfolio of criminal economies managed by the different illegal armed structures that operate in this border area, who not only control the illegal transit of products from one country to another, but also the market where they are sold and bought.

Yet the smuggling of gasoline and other products (for example, meat, plastics, aluminum, copper and food from the family shopping basket) is not the only illegal economic activity; extortion is also another of the practices controlled by the structures outside the law that operate in this area of the country, due to the high income it produces. Extortion is carried out in two ways: one is through extortion charges to merchants and transporters in the region, and the other through the collection of a tax from those who transit through the illegal border crossings created since the official border was closed in 2015. The trochas ¹⁵ that connect Venezuela with the municipalities of Puerto Santander and Tibú in Colombia are controlled by the National Liberation Army (ELN, acronym in Spanish for Ejército de Liberación Nacional), the Pelusos, and the Rastrojos,¹⁶ who demand the payment of a toll from both small-scale smugglers and people who need to enter Colombia to purchase either basic goods or medications, which are in short supply in Venezuela.

Historically, guerrillas have made use of extortion as a source of financing, mainly employing on national and foreign companies and landowners in rural areas, calling it a “war tax” (^{Verdad Abierta, 2016}). For their part, the neo-paramilitary groups that emerged after the paramilitary demobilization have taken advantage of the fear of the population to impose extortion quotas in various sectors of the city's economy (both formal and informal). Despite the fact that guerrillas employed this practice through collections “in a differentiated way, establishing fixed quotas in terms of the economic capacity of the extorted individual” (^{Garzón et al., 2016}, p. 19), the neo- paramilitary groups discarded this model and made of extortion a changeable collection tool. In addition to setting charges on a daily, weekly, or fortnightly basis, they put not only businessmen and landowners on their radar, but they also set extortion fees for small business owners and informal merchants who in many cases lived off the proceeds of the day’s sales (for example, street vendors, motorcycle taxi drivers, informal money changers, and smuggled gasoline retailers, known as pimpineros).

On this border, the extortions are carried out in collusion with the authorities of both countries, who, in turn, demand the payment of quotas from the illegal networks for allowing them this activity. Rastrojos and Pelusos extort money from those who travel through illegal crossings closest to the border line of Colombian territory, where both the Venezuelan Guard and members of the Colombian illegal groups have established checkpoints to collect this money.

Likewise, the high flow of Venezuelan migrants (a result of the worsening of the economic and social crisis in Venezuela) caused the ELN, the Pelusos, the Rastrojos and the Gulf Clan (Clan del Golfo)¹⁷ to begin charging extortion for the transit of migrants through of the trochas. About 1 200 people cross the border daily along this road (^{Revista Semana, 2018}), which generates high incomes for these organizations, given that the charge per person ranges between 15 000 and 35 000 Colombian pesos.

The large profits that this criminal activity generates on a daily basis are the factor that has unleashed a violent dispute between the different criminal organizations that seek to hold total control of these illegal economies. This has resulted in a serious humanitarian impact evidenced in the form of massacres, displacements and forced disappearances. In the last decades, the latter has managed to mutate until acquiring certain particularities that set it apart from the original category, by the transformation of the intentions with which disappearances are executed, as well as the profile of the victims and that of their perpetrators.

Cross-border Enforced Disappearance: Characterization of an Emerging Practice at the Border

Cross-border enforced disappearance is a practice documented so far in this area of the Colombian border. The term was coined by a human rights organization from Cucuta that has recorded a total of 43 cases of this modality during the period of 2010-2016, as shown in Graph

1. This crime consists of the disappearance of Colombian citizens within national territory and their subsequent forced displacement to Venezuela. In some reported cases, the bodies have been found in clandestine graves in Venezuela, in areas bordering Cucuta and its metropolitan area, a situation that creates strong obstacles to the prosecution, search, and reparation processes for victims in Colombia.

The analysis of the cases made it possible to identify that the first records of this type of disappearance date from 2003, intensifying then during the years 2010-2011. This fact is related to the period of intensification of the violence derived from the expansion and territorial control of the armed groups after the paramilitary demobilization in Colombia, particularly in Norte de Santander.

Since mid-2011, the main perpetrators of the acts of violence in Cucuta and its surroundings were the groups known as Urabeños and the already mentioned Rastrojos, who fought over control of the area, generating intra-urban displacements of the population that inhabited peripheral neighborhoods. Many had to leave due to being stigmatized as and accused of being guerrilla collaborators. The struggle of these groups in this region was “for the control of drug trafficking routes into Venezuela, as well as for the smuggling of hydrocarbons, weapons and goods” (^{Pérez Salazar & Montoya Cely, 2013}, p. 8).

Source: Cases documented by Fundación Progresar in Cucuta (^{Patiño Idárraga & Páez Meza, 2019}, p. 84).

Graph 1 Cases of cross-border enforced disappearance reported during the period 2010-2016 

The review of the files and the testimonies obtained from the relatives of the victims reveals how the largest number of disappearances of a cross-border nature have occurred in the municipalities located along the border between Norte de Santander in Colombia and the state of Táchira, in Venezuela. The municipalities of Villa del Rosario and Puerto Santander, which connect Cucuta (Colombia) with the state of Táchira (Venezuela), are consolidated as the areas with the highest number of reported cases of missing persons. These territories harbor the particularity of being areas where several of the main illegal crossings or trochas are located, through which the illegal activities controlled by these criminal structures take place.

The dispute over the control of the trochas is due to the large income obtained from smuggling at all scales, as well as due to the imposition of tariffs on informal merchants who transit through this territory and on migrants who cross the border through these trails. The refusal to pay such fees, as well as the confrontations between criminal structures over the monopoly on charging for transit through these places, have exacerbated the rates of violence from which disruptive practices of forced disappearance emerge, such as the cross-border modality.

The characterization of this crime is confirmed by analyzing the profiles of the victims and the testimonies of those who reported the disappearances recorded in the files; of the 43 documented cases, 28 corresponded to men between the ages of 20 and 40, whose conditions of poverty, added to the lack of formal employment options, led them to carry out informal economy jobs at the border, as street vendors, motorcycle taxi drivers and, in some cases, as small-scale smugglers, exposing themselves by working in territories controlled by criminality. A number of the case files report that the victim was forced to pay a tax to the armed structures in order to carry out his work, and in others the informant stated that his relative received threats prior to his disappearance when he tried to evade this payment.

This way, victims no longer have a political or social profile, but are rather part of a context of exclusion that forces them to be functional to the economic interests of local sovereignties that feed an entire criminal system of violence. Thus, the disappearance is constituted as a strategy to eliminate those who hinder said interests, or those who do not cooperate with the rules imposed.

Therefore, the perpetrators of cross-border disappearances fit -for the most part- in the profile of the neo-paramilitary groups that operate in this border territory, formed from the paramilitary demobilization. In the documented cases, the informants attribute the responsibility for the disappearance to particular actors in the conflict: neo-paramilitaries, the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC, acronym in Spanish for Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia), paramilitaries, Rastrojos, and other unknown parties. This last category is used by the victims as a way of referring to other armed groups and illegal groups after demobilization.

The practice of disappearance by these groups was corroborated by one of the members of the Borders Front (Frente Fronteras), Armando Mejía, a.k.a. “Hernán”, who, in a hearing before the Colombian justice system, acknowledged that the AUC¹⁸ implemented various disappearance strategies, including, incineration of bodies in ovens designed for this purpose, and the use of mass graves to hide them. Later, given the increase in complaints and as a way to evade responsibilities, “they no longer disappeared among the embers of the ovens, but on the other side of the Táchira River, in Venezuelan territory, where the police of that country unearthed left and right the bodies that the Colombian war vomited” (^{El Espectador, 2009}).

And so, through this practice the border has acquired a meaning inscribed not only in a geographical space, it has also become a place of abandonment, lack of protection and total absence of the State. Therefore, it is understood as a different area from the sites of original disappearances where a reduction and control of space prevailed (for example, detention centers) (^{Schindel, 2020}), or “where marginalized people tended to be tied and stabilized in fixed places” (Schindel, 2019, p. 15). According to the author, the case of the Colombia-Venezuela border partakes of new disappearances where the subjects move from one place to another permanently. These phenomena can be “read in relation to the new deployments of governmentality in the neoliberal context, where disappearances depend less on social repression and more actively on abandonment” (Schindel, 2019, p. 15).

The Implications of a new Cartography of Disappearance

Forced disappearance is a crime considered a plight that exceeds the limits of what is humane and has the particularity of creating a double victim: the person who suffers the disappearance and the family member who undertakes his search. In this sense, the national¹⁹ and international²⁰ regulations classifying this crime also consider as a victim any person who has suffered a direct impact as a consequence of an enforced disappearance, including the relatives of the disappeared person, who generally exercise the role of complainant in courts, and of informant through organizations or groups of victims that try to vindicate the memory of the disappeared person through sit-ins, marches or symbolic acts.

Likewise, the current international and inter-American regulatory framework for forced disappearance is based on the serious violations of human rights that took place in the context of the dictatorships in the Southern Cone during the 1970s, for which reason it is considered that the characteristics that framed disappearance at that time constitute its original meaning (^{Declaración sobre la Protección de Todas las Personas contra las Desapariciones Forzadas, 1992}; ^{Convención Interamericana sobre Desaparición Forzada de Personas, 1994}; Convención Internacional para la Protección de Todas las Personas contra las Desapariciones Forzadas, 2006). Thus, the profile of the disappeared person held a political and social connotation, since these people were for the most part members of left-wing political organizations, of social movements, of student organizations, and of unions, whose affiliation made them potential enemies of the political system.

Colombia, even without a dictatorship, belongs to the group of Latin American countries in which disappearance was also part of their repertoires of violence until becoming a systematic practice, but with the particularity that there it emerged not only from a State-centric matrix, but was also determined by a symbiosis of State and State-owned actors. The implementation of disappearances by these two perpetrators was due to certain factors related to the social and political context typical of that period: the privatization of the counterinsurgency strategy through the promotion of so-called self-defense groups, the irruption of drug traffickers and the cooptation of paramilitary groups, the opposition of regional elites to peace policies and their reaction to the expansion of the guerrillas, and the exacerbation of anti-communist ideology (^{CNMH, 2016}).

The role of these actors as perpetrators allowed, in turn, the transfiguration of some elements of this practice, particularly those associated with the mechanisms for its execution. During the 1970s, “the systematic detention and annihilation of members of the political opposition became more acute through detentions in clandestine places and torture mechanisms carried out by State security agencies, mainly by the F2”²¹ (Cajiao, 2008, as cited in ^{Bedoya et al., 2012}, p. 7). However, with the emergence of the mafia cartels and the consolidation of paramilitary groups in the 1980s, a new modality emerged that made use of rivers, mass graves and cremation ovens as disappearance devices.

In that same decade, the repertoire of the mafias began to include resources such as chainsaws to dismember bodies and throw them into the water, and incineration in piles of tires or the use of clandestine graves. Thus, it persisted over time “in a confusing plot in which the violence of drug trafficking is often used to make the violence of the armed conflict invisible, recognizing that both occur simultaneously” (^{CNMH, 2016}, p. 115).

The increase in this disappearance activity had an impact on the degradation and flare up of paramilitary violence, which reached its peak around the year 2002, when the number of disappeared persons amounted to a total of 7 963 victims (^{Mingorance & Arellana Bautista, 2019}). After the paramilitary demobilization, these disappearance devices underwent a new transformation: the rising neo-paramilitary groups that were formed after the negotiations sought to continue using forced disappearance as a control strategy, but making such practice less visible. From that moment on, the border territory became the ideal space whose geographical characteristics translate into integration spaces for criminal activity, wherein the forces that fight against it lose hold and crime and violence are privileged (^{Carrión & Espín, 2011}).

A large part of the cross-border enforced disappearances that begin to take place on the border between Norte de Santander (Colombia) and the state of Táchira (Venezuela) acquire characteristics of return and split in relation to the original category. They return to it, by keeping to the goal of producing of concealing the victim's body, its elimination as an individual, and the stripping of its sensorial manifestation by removing the individual from the phenomenal space of their appearance (^{Tassin, 2017}); and split form it due to the profile of the victim, which is far removed from a political category.

Thus, cross-border enforced disappearance manages to cast doubt on the theoretical and normative constructs on which the crime of disappearance was originally typified, and poses a new paradigm for its understanding, closer to a sociological approach. In this way, both the normative framework that typifies forced disappearance, as well as the interpretations of this phenomenon in the social sciences, constitute themselves into two perspectives from which to analyze this phenomenon. From the international legal framework, the category of disappearance seems to be inactive, set and determined. Yet from the social disciplines, an attempt is made to overcome this vision by reflecting on the changes and transitions that disappearance implies in new contexts of radical exclusion and abandonment, especially in border areas marked by illegal economic interests that characterize the intent of this practice.

^{Tassin (2017}) calls this new category of disappeared individuals the concealed, referring to immigrants who, by entering a territory irregularly, end up “deprived of all political and even social visibility (...) condemned to disappear in order to be” (p. 107). Although the victims of the cases documented for this work were not immigrants, the fact that they are related to informal economic activities and smuggling at the border makes their profiles susceptible to being analyzed under this category of the disappeared in liberal societies that the author proposes.

The profile of the cross-border disappeared is made up of Colombian citizens, young for the most part, living in poverty, belonging to fringe segments of the population, discarded by the very logic of the system, who inhabit the periphery of the city, that border limit that has no State presence. According to ^{Gatti and Martínez (2020}), before physically disappearing, these individuals were not acknowledged or taken into account, they did not matter. In this sense, the economic and social violence typical of this border territory meant a double vulnerability: by being present there, their existence was subjected to the constant risk and fragility of participating in informal and illegal markets; upon disappearing at the border -being absent- they are condemned to a state of dematerialization that makes mourning and remembrance impossible for their relatives (^{Tassin, 2017}).

The border as an “instance of vulnerability, of lack of civil protection, of dispossession and abandonment (...) opens the possibility of disappearance” (^{Schindel, 2020}, p. 6); apart from being the context where the crime actually occurs, it is the element that facilitates it. The border territory not only determines and materializes the crime of disappearance, it also makes it more complex by being a space where the authorities of each country forget their duty to guarantee protection. In this way, disappearance becomes “a wound opened at the border that does not heal, a wound never stitched” (Schindel, 2020, p. 6).

The disappearance of people on a broken border due to the non-existence of diplomatic relations between the countries that comprise it, is a serious crime that violates the victim and presents a double challenge for their relatives when undertaking the search, justice and reparation processes. The search becomes hostile when the disappearance occurs at a border turned into a mass grave whose territorial control -to a large extent- is under the power of the illegal armed structures of Colombia and Venezuela; a justice slowed down by exhausting and unsuccessful procedures before two inoperative legal systems that, although upholding a discourse that revolves around guaranteeing the protection of human rights, such guarantees are absent in practice. Reparation is unattainable given to the lack of sympathy for the suffering of the victims and the normalization of cruelty scenarios that make of this practice a persistent fact that, far from being over, continues raising the figures of violence every day at a forgotten border.