Miguel Arroyave

José Miguel Arroyave Ruiz aka "Arcángel" or also "the Chemist" (August 10, 1954 in Amalfi, Antioquia – September 19, 2004 near Puerto Lleras) was one of the top paramilitary leaders and commander of the Centaurs bloc ("Bloque Centauros") of the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), a 5,000-strong private militia active in the sparsely populated grasslands of eastern Colombia. He was also a powerful figure within the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), an umbrella organization bringing together right-wing paramilitary groups from all over the country. He was well known for being a ruthless fighter against guerrilla groups, and for being able to evict these rebel groups and take control of their territories. The Centaurs bloc was one of the largest and most powerful groups within the AUC, and was very well organized, to the point that they even had a running web page that is no longer in service (www.bloquecentauros.org).

Arroyave was a member of the AUC's team of negotiators when talks began with the government on demobilizing the paramilitary organizations which had proliferated over the previous decades. These paramilitary organizations were created first to fight against the left-wing guerrilla armies which controlled large parts of rural Colombia since the 1960s. Arroyave was very close to the Castaño family, founders of different paramilitary organizations, and he also had control over the Capital bloc ("Bloque Capital") which controlled the paramilitary militia in Bogotá.

Early years

José Miguel Arroyave was born in Amalfi, Antioquia. He was very close to the Castaño family, small landowners from northern Colombia who founded the first paramilitary group in the early 1980s. Miguel Arroyave was from a humble rural background, and claims to have been a childhood friend of Carlos Castaño's older brother, Vicente Castaño, with whom he went to school in a small village near Amalfi, in the 1960s. He said that he completed his education at one of Bogotá's leading schools, and later became involved in a gold-mining venture, from which he made some money.

Paramilitary leader While he was from the Antioquia department, it was in the Eastern Plains regions where he made a name as a criminal. Apparently, he moved to the department of Meta around 1990 where he became a trafficker of chemical products necessary for the processing of cocaine. The Centaurs Bloc of the AUC was mostly a gang of thugs involved in crime and blackmailing, which collected money from traders and farm owners in the Eastern Plains in Colombia. It has been said that at some point he managed to rule over 6.000 men in the departments of Meta, Casanare, Boyacá, Cundinamarca, and Guaviare. He also extended his criminal emporium to Bogotá, where by way of the Capital Bloc of the AUC, which he founded and commanded, he controlled a portion of the trade occurring in the traditional “sanandresitos” (old shopping malls where smuggled items and appliances can be bought).

Arroyave also started at some point a bloody war against the Autodefensas Campesinas de Casanare (ACC), a powerful paramilitary group commanded by Héctor Germán Buitrago (aka Martín Llanos) operating on the same territory. The government's chief negotiator, High Commissioner for Peace Luis Carlos Restrepo Ramírez, explained that Arroyave had gone back to the department of Meta to organize the immediate demobilization of his forces.

There are plenty of possible candidates for the murder of Arroyave, who had a great deal of blood on his hands. Perhaps the most likely culprit is "Martin Llanos", leader of the Autodefensas Campesinas de Casanare (ACC) (Farmer Self-Defense Forces of Casanare), the paramilitary group with which Arroyave had been involved in a protracted and bloody feud for more than a year in the eastern plains region. He had been in conflict, too, with other paramilitary chiefs over control of territory, drug-trafficking routes and protection rackets, which continued even while the peace talks were going on. Another possibility, favored by army intelligence, is that Arroyave was assassinated by a hit squad from the main left-wing guerrilla organization, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).

The AUC leadership, however, laid the blame on a rival within Arroyave's very own Centauros organization: they named Pedro Oliveiro Guerrero Castillo (aka "Cuchillo") as the killer, and described him and his associates as "enemies of peace and opponents of the demobilization process in the eastern plains". It has been recently uncovered that Guerrero was working under the orders of Daniel Barrera (aka "El loco"), a notorious drug lord in Colombia who is in jail in the United States government on charges of drug smuggling into this country.

Arroyave, along with Carlos Castaño remains one of the most powerful and important assassinated members of the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia organization.