BOGOTA'S THREAT FROM THE RIGHT

BOGOTA -- A chilling New Year's resolution echoed through Barrancabermeja,
an industrial city in Colombia's north.

As 2001 dawned, armed paramilitary groups put out the word that they had a
hit list of 400 people in the city, including union leaders, leftist
guerrillas and their suspected sympathizers, and common thugs.

Five months later, they've kept their word. After a wave of violence in
which gun-wielding bands took over several city neighborhoods and went
house to house searching for their victims, more than 200 of the targets
are dead, and others have fled.

The terror is evidence of the rising power of right-wing armed groups in
Colombia's prolonged civil conflict.

"The growth of the paramilitaries is a dangerous example of another illegal
force expanding and shifting into a kind of legality," says Fernando
Cubides, a political analyst at Bogota's National University of Colombia.

But even as Barrancabermeja officials condemn them, the groups rule parts
of the city unchallenged.

The same equivocal position has held at the national level: Colombia's
leaders have insisted they were getting tough with the "paras," yet the
illegal groups have for more than a decade often acted as handmaid of the
country's armed forces.

But now, "there's a growing realization that the paramilitaries pose a
threat, as the guerrillas do, to democratic stability in Colombia," says a
US Embassy official in Bogota.

Yet to some citizens, weary of four decades of violence, partly committed
by leftist guerrilla organizations and often involving the country's
narcotics trade, paramilitaries can offer an illusion of order in a lawless
land.

"Socially there is as yet no stigma" against supporting the paramilitaries
within many social sectors, the US official says - just as it was once
acceptable for some sectors of Colombian society to associate with drug
traffickers.

Many people in Barrancabermeja lament the city's recent violence, but
quickly add that the streets are safer now.

A growing number of rural areas once dominated by either the FARC or the
ELN, Colombia's largest leftist guerrilla organizations, are now in "para"
hands.

A hotel maid in the far-south jungle town of Puerto Asis says with a smile
- - though her husband was killed by paramilitaries a decade ago - that her
neighborhood is safer now because the FARC was chased out by "the boys" -
meaning paramilitaries.

With the Colombian Defense Ministry placing total membership in
paramilitary groups at more than 8,100 - up from less than 6,000 just last
year and less than 2,000 as recently as 1993 - defense officials are
suddenly sounding alarms about the "self-defense groups" becoming the
Colombian state's biggest threat.

The Army says 873 civilians were killed in the first four months of the
year by the country's armed groups, the majority by paramilitaries. More
than 40 union leaders have been assassinated over the same period.

But the government's consternation over paramilitaries can be explained by
more than statistics.

Evidence of ties between certain battalions of the armed forces and the
paramilitaries continues to blacken Colombia's reputation in the eyes of
foreign governments and international human rights groups.

Last week, for example, Colombia's People's Defender's Office found that an
April massacre by paramilitaries of at least 22 farmers in the tiny rural
community of Naya (another 20 remain missing) looked suspicious because of
the close proximity of an Army battalion.

But some key recent arrests of paramilitary leaders, including Francisco
Javier Correa Gonzalez, thought to be the head of paramilitary operations
in Barrancabermeja, have started to give the Army more credibility.

Still, despite a few well-publicized cases of military officials jailed for
working with paramilitaries, the government is not doing enough, critics say.

Some observers say the paramilitaries are more autonomous from the
government than just a few years ago - a position the guerrillas are
particularly loath to accept. "The guerrillas' position is that
paramilitarism is an annex of the government, and I think they're mistaken,
there's more autonomy than that," says Carlos Lozano Guillen, editor of the
Colombian Communist Party daily La Voz.

Officials also worry that the paramilitaries could trigger a return to the
urban terror that Colombia endured in the late 1980s and early 1990s at the
hands of the drug gangs that some of today's paramilitaries were defending.
Recent bombings in Cali and Medellin, and an unexploded bomb found hidden
in a truck in a busy section of Bogota, heighten this concern.

The paramilitaries are also heavily involved in Colombia's drug trade,
reflecting their origins in the 1980s, when United Self-Defense Forces of
Colombia (AUC) leader Carlos Castano - whose father was kidnapped and
killed by the FARC -- formed groups to defend the lands of the country's
then-dominant cartels.

Interviews with former FARC soldiers, paramilitary soldiers, and evidence
that hundreds of former FARC soldiers have switched camps because of better
pay offered by the AUC, offer evidence of the paramilitaries' financing
from the the coca trade, kidnappings, and extortion.

The government is making some efforts to stop paramilitary growth. At peace
talks between the government and the FARC, the two sides earlier this month
set up a commission to find ways to cut paramilitarism's appeal. But even
commission members say the job won't be easy, because it will require an
acknowledgment by both the government and guerrillas that they played a
role in the rise of the paramilitaries.

Paramilitaries retain influence because they are allowed to operate with
impunity, says Mr. Guillen. Only the government can change that, he adds.

Barrancabermeja brings the issue into painful focus. "There are 5,000
soldiers stationed there and patrolling the streets, yet the paramilitaries
are able to assassinate who they will and stay on to take control," Guillen
says. "What besides impunity explains that?"