Here's a fairly useful Wikipedia which discusses the habits of paramilitaries:
Right-wing paramilitary groups in Colombia are the parties responsible for most of the human rights violations in the latter half of the ongoing Colombian Armed Conflict. According to several international human rights and governmental organizations, right-wing paramilitary groups have been responsible for at least 70 to 80% of political murders in Colombia per year, with the remainder committed by leftist guerrillas and government forces. Paramilitary groups control the large majority of the illegal drug trade of cocaine and other substances together with the main Colombian drug cartels, especially in terms of trafficking and processing activities.
The first paramilitary groups were organized by the Colombian military following recommendations made by U.S. military counterinsurgency advisers who were sent to Colombia during the Cold War to combat leftist political activists and armed guerrilla groups. The development of later paramilitary groups has also involved elite landowners, drug traffickers, members of the security forces, politicians and multinational corporations. Paramilitary violence today is principally targeted towards peasants, unionists, indigenous people, human rights workers, teachers and left-wing political activists or their supporters. The paramilitaries claim to be acting in opposition to revolutionary Marxist-Leninist guerrilla forces and their allies among the civilian population.
In October 1959, the United States sent a "Special Survey Team", composed of counterinsurgency experts, to investigate Colombia's internal security situation, due to the increased prevalence of armed communist self-defense communities in rural Colombia which formed during and after La Violencia.[1] Three years later, in February 1962, a Fort Bragg top-level U.S. Special Warfare team headed by Special Warfare Center commander General William P. Yarborough, visited Colombia for a second survey.[2]
In a secret supplement to his report to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Yarborough encouraged the creation and deployment of a paramilitary force to commit sabotage and terrorist acts against communists:
A concerted country team effort should be made now to select civilian and military personnel for clandestine training in resistance operations in case they are needed later. This should be done with a view toward development of a civil and military structure for exploitation in the event the Colombian internal security system deteriorates further. This structure should be used to pressure toward reforms known to be needed, perform counter-agent and counter-propaganda functions and as necessary execute paramilitary, sabotage and/or terrorist activities against known communist proponents. It should be backed by the United States.
More:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paramilitarism_in_Colombia
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About Colombia
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The Paramilitaries
Colombia’s rightwing paramilitary death squads are notorious for their brutality and have been responsible for the vast majority of the human rights abuses that have occurred in the country in the past 25 years.i They are infamous for their use of vicious violence, including massacres with chainsaws, brutal torture, sexual violence and cutting off of limbs as tactics designed to instil fear and terror among those they target. The scale of their violence is astonishing and it is estimated that the paramilitaries have killed around 150,000 Colombians and displaced hundreds of thousands more (see Forced Displacement).
Though paramilitary-style forces have been around in Colombia since the 1960s, the origins of those which exist today can be found in the late 1970s and early 1980s. These origins, however, are complicated and overlapping though essentially modern day Colombian paramilitaries derived from three sources:
◾As leftwing guerrilla movements grew in strength in the 1970s and 80s some Colombian landowners and business leaders began establishing private armies that would defend them from guerrilla extortion attempts;
◾In the early and mid-1980s as individual drugs traffickers grew more powerful and wealthy they formed cartels, most notably the Medellin and Cali Cartels. These cartels formed their own private armies to defend their business interests.
◾Again in response to the growth of the guerrillas the Colombian Army began to implement, with the assistance of US military advisers, an increasingly brutal counter-insurgency campaign that involved the use of clandestine death squads made up of off-duty soldiers and paramilitary-style personnel to carry out a secret ‘dirty war’ against those perceived to be sympathetic to the guerrillas.
The crossover and interrelationships between these three sets of groups cannot be underestimated and as time went on it became increasingly difficult to differentiate between them with, for example, the landowners and business leaders paying the private drug cartel armies to protect their interests and these armies, in turn, carrying out assassinations and other military operations for the Army and intelligence services. These relationships were no doubt solidified by the fact that all three of the above mentioned groups saw the guerrillas as their principle, common enemy.
More:
http://www.justiceforcolombia.org/about-colombia/
ETC.
Far, far more available online, and tons in books.
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