A PLAYER'S BID IN DRUG WAR

Paramilitary Chief Offers To Deliver Top Colombian Dealers

BOGOTA, Colombia, April 4 -- The leader of Colombia's paramilitary army has
offered to help arrange the surrender of as many as 20 of Colombia's top
drug traffickers wanted for trial in the United States.

Carlos Castano, commander of the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia
(AUC), said his suggestion, if carried out, would fundamentally alter the
multibillion-dollar war on drugs, creating a de facto alliance between
himself and the U.S. government.

But it remains unclear whether the idea has any chance of being put into
practice; Castano's organization and Colombia's leftist guerrilla groups
derive much of their income from taxing and protecting the production and
movement of cocaine and heroin.

U.S. and Colombian officials familiar with the drug trade said Castano's
proposal has merit in theory. But they expressed deep skepticism that he
would part with the millions of dollars he receives from the drug trade at
a time when his army is growing dramatically, and suggested he may be
trying to cut off revenue for his guerrilla enemies.

"The motivation for Castano is simple," said Gonzalo de Francisco,
President Andres Pastrana's chief adviser on Plan Colombia, the president's
U.S.-backed anti-drug program. "He is saying: The money that I don't
control is money for my enemy."

The U.S. and Colombian officials said Castano's overture may also be a ploy
to burnish his image -- part of an effort to establish himself as a part of
Colombia's political scene -- at a time when U.S. officials are considering
listing his army as a terrorist organization for its ties to the drug trade.

Castano said that is not his intention. In a telephone interview this week,
he said eight to 10 of Colombia's largest drug traffickers are ready to
submit to the U.S. justice system after months of secret talks that he has
held with them at his jungle camp in northern Colombia. Colombia's drug
traffickers traditionally have fought the idea of extradition fiercely. But
Castano said he has told the men, whose enterprises benefit the leftist
guerrilla insurgencies more than his own, that they must dismantle their
operations and leave the country or face assassination as military targets.

Castano has contacted a Miami lawyer, Joaquin Perez, to sound out U.S.
officials on whether they would be willing to take custody of as many as 20
drug traffickers, perhaps in Panama, a short flight from Castano's
headquarters. There have been media reports of similar negotiations last
year between the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration and Castano, but the
DEA has denied those talks took place.

At the heart of Castano's proposal is his belief that Colombia's $6 billion
annual drug trade is driven less by the enormous U.S. market for illegal
drugs than by a more basic dynamic within Colombia. By eliminating the
largest domestic drug cartels, which buy the raw material used to make
cocaine and heroin from small farmers, Castano argues, the demand for coca
and poppy crops would shrink because those farmers have no exporting
capability of their own.

"The biggest consumers -- these narco-traffickers -- are right here in
Colombia," said Castano, who this week dispatched a letter outlining the
proposal to U.S. Ambassador Anne W. Patterson and the heads of U.S. law
enforcement and intelligence agencies here. "This problem is ours. The
Colombian conflict is fed by narco-trafficking. It cannot be stopped while
it exists, and now we have a group of major narco-traffickers ready to turn
themselves over to the United States."

The proposal comes at an important moment for Castano and the United
States, which is sending $1.3 billion here over the next two years as part
of Plan Colombia. While an intensive aerial spraying program has already
killed more than 50,000 acres of coca -- about a fifth of Colombia's total
crop of the raw material for cocaine -- the program's financial assistance
component, designed to encourage Colombian farmers to trade illegal crops
for legal ones, has been slow in starting.

A member of the AUC's directorate who goes by the name Samuel said that
eliminating the major drug rings would encourage farmers to give up their
illegal crops, and Plan Colombia then could be reconfigured to help farmers
recover.

But such a deal would be difficult to reach with Castano, whose army has
not been granted political recognition by the Colombian government. As
chief of a paramilitary army that Colombian officials say killed more than
983 civilians last year, Castano has been labeled by U.S. officials and
international groups as perhaps the single biggest obstacle to peace in
Colombia and its most prolific human rights violator. He faces more than 20
warrants for his arrest, on charges that include murdering human rights
workers.

The U.S. State Department may soon list the AUC as an international
terrorist organization because of its ties to the drug trade, which Castano
has explained are necessary because the leftist guerrilla movements he
battles rely on drug money to finance military operations. The two largest
guerrilla groups -- the 18,000-member Revolutionary Armed Forces of
Colombia (FARC) and the 5,000-member National Liberation Army (ELN) --
appear on the State Department terrorist list.

U.S. and Colombian officials say Castano is right in saying that the FARC
benefits far more from drug proceeds than do the paramilitary fighters, and
therefore any blow to the drug trade would hurt the guerrilla insurgency
more than the AUC. U.S. officials estimate that the FARC makes $500 million
a year from the drug trade.

Since Colombia's two most powerful drug cartels, based in Medellin and
Cali, were dismantled in the early 1990s, atomizing the drug trade in a way
that has made fighting it more difficult, the FARC has inserted itself
deeply into the process. The guerrilla army makes money from the internal
coca trade seven ways, from charging to protect processing labs and jungle
airstrips to taxing coca base and cocaine before it leaves the country.

Some of Colombia's bloodiest battles over the past year have been the
result of the AUC's forced entry into the drug trade. Castano contends that
most of his money comes from private contributions from cattle ranchers and
other supporters, although at least 20 percent comes directly from the drug
trade.

Castano was a leader of a brutal paramilitary army formed by his older
brother, Fidel, in the late 1980s. The group eventually served as the
protection force for Pablo Escobar, then head of the Medellin cartel. But
the Castano brothers turned against Escobar, allegedly disturbed by his war
against the Colombian state, and were instrumental in a U.S.-backed manhunt
that resulted in Escobar's 1993 death.

Since then, the big Colombian cartels have been smashed, but Colombian
police have identified roughly 220 smaller drug fiefdoms that have proven
highly difficult to root out and now account for as much as 90 percent of
the world's cocaine supply.

A U.S. official here with long experience in the anti-drug effort said
Castano has the military capability to capture or kill the leading drug
traffickers in Colombia, who maintain a much lower profile than their
predecessors and no longer have large security forces.

"These guys [AUC] were their armed protection. This is the dynamic that has
changed here over the past 10 years," the official said. "But it's the rest
I can't swallow. I think they both [FARC and AUC] need the drug money. The
profit margin is incredible."