Manuel Padilla still remembers the last time he pulled an all-nighter: it was late November, 2004. That night, he spent hours unloading contraband from a boat moored in the mangroves of northwest Colombia. As a low-ranking member of a drug-trafficking paramilitary militia, Manuel had done it dozens of times before. But normally the cargo was AK-47s or kilos of cocaine.

This time, it was Barbies.

His militia belonged to an alliance of right-wing paramilitary armies that, in the name of fighting Colombia’s rebel groups, had killed almost a hundred thousand peasants and displaced millions from their homes. The dolls, which Manuel’s militia gave out as Christmas presents in the communities under its control, were a bid to shed its violent reputation and win hearts and minds. Years later, in 2012, he showed me one of the dolls, which he had kept as a memento: “See, we gave them nice Barbies, not some ugly little thing — the latest models.”