In sentencing the high-ranking commander of the AUC, Judge Walton rejected the government’s argument that Jorge 40 should be sentenced as a large-scale narcotics trafficker. The judge’s reasoning was that the evidence showed that Jorge 40 was a soldier imposing a “war tax” on legal and illegal businesses in his territory to fund a war that he believed in. The Judge did not believe he was a narcotics trafficker with the intent on enriching himself.
The judge addressed the defendant respectfully, as a leader of an army fighting a legitimate enemy needing funds to continue the war against communists. And you know how much Americans hate communists! Jorge 40 in the end got what he most wanted: his reputation as a soldier intact, a legacy his family can be proud of.
The other paramilitary defendants’ mistake, in my opinion, was to abandon their ideological principles and try to pass themselves off as repentant drug dealers eager to cooperate and to work off their cases. Instead of the political prisoners that they really were, they presented themselves as garden-variety criminals. Well, Jorge 40’s judge actually heard the evidence at a hearing and concluded that these “tax collectors” were not drug dealers. But once you lose your ideological gloss, the government and the judge has the upper moral hand. Americans recognize war as a valid response to aggression. It is in our national DNA. The narcotics links would have been seen as a means to fund a legitimate war.
While it was literally the difference between a thirty-year sentence that the government wanted and the 16-year sentence that the defendant ultimately received, it still was a puzzling sentence. If he was a “warrior” and not a drug dealer, why such a lengthy sentence? The judge hung his hat on the “collateral damage” caused by allowing the drugs to be manufactured in Jorge 40’s territory suggesting rather dubiously that Jorge 40 had some responsibility to the fetuses of pregnant addicts. That’s a stretch. And speaking of “collateral damage,” we Americans are hardly without sin. We commit it in our wars frequently and rarely does anyone get punished for it unless there is a public outcry.
– David Zapp