Paramilitary forces, or self-defense groups, have been associated in Colombia with drug trafficking and its conflict resolution techniques, with the counterinsurgency strategies of the armed forces and the tactics of the “dirty war” against the revolutionary guerrillas, with para-institutional forms of controlling social protest on the part of “mafia” capitalists, or with the growth of the large cattle ranches and the violent eviction of peasants from the land by large landowners (Medina 1990; Palacio and Rojas 1990; Uprimny and Vargas 1990; Reyes 1994). These were the interpretations put forward by academics, lawyers, human rights organizations, and left-wing sympathizers in the first publications on the subject during the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s. Those initial perspectives relied on, among other sources, official reports of the prosecutor general's office or the Administrative Department of Security, DAS, in which members of the armed forces were linked to “vigilante groups.”

Along with these conceptions of the paramilitary phenomenon, another related to the lack of security for rural property owners, investors, and traders gained an audience during the second half of the 1990s and already had supporters in the cabinet by 1987. This sector and its political allies preferred to call these groups self-defense groups, seeking legitimacy for what they considered to be the right of regional elites attacked by the different guerrilla groups to defend themselves.