COLOMBIA'S OTHER ARMY

NUDO DE PARAMILLO, Colombia - After an hour skimming above the treetops,
the helicopter plunged toward a tiny clearing. Below was a slow-running
river and ground mist from the clouds that settle each day into the ravines
and shaded hollows of this mountainous rain forest in northwestern Colombia.

Nothing else was visible. But as the wash from the rotors reached the
ground, shaking the thick jungle brush, men emerged. Tents appeared among
towering trees. Soon more than a dozen men surrounded the landing zone,
dressed in camouflage, strapped with Chinese, Russian and Israeli rifles,
wearing red berets and armbands of the United Self-Defense Forces of
Colombia (AUC).

This was an advance camp of Carlos Castano, the reclusive commander in
chief of a private army created more than a decade ago by ranchers in
northern Colombia to take on the country's leftist guerrillas. Today this
dairy farmer's son, and his growing army of 8,000 members, loom at the
center of Colombia's search for an end to four decades of civil war-and
constitute one of the main challenges facing a U.S.-backed plan to take on
the country's drug smugglers by eradicating their crops.

Castano's AUC holds vast swaths of Colombian territory and confronts the
guerrillas in many more. Along the way, it has amassed a record of
brutality; the government calculates the AUC now kills more civilians than
the main guerrilla army it was founded to combat. Its leader, although
excluded from recently revived peace talks, asserts he has earned the
backing of the Colombian people to play a role in any arrangement to bring
peace to the country.

On an afternoon last week, Castano's headquarters of the day was a
collection of tents invisible from the air. A path of plywood planks led
from the helicopter landing zone through the trees, armed men standing
silently along each curve. A waterfall appeared. And a small generator.
Then a satellite dish and a plywood table set with a bowl of fruit, a
thermos of coffee and a laptop computer.

Castano emerged from his tent in a crisp camouflage uniform buttoned to the
top and tucked into jungle boots. He was unarmed and smiling.

After spending most of his 35 years in these backlands, having lost his
father and five siblings to leftist rebels, Castano has never held more
power or inspired more fear among his enemies and the government than
today. He says the doubling of his ranks over the past three years-a rate
five times greater than the growth of the leftist guerrilla forces he
battles-concerns him as much as it pleases him because of what it says
about the deterioration of government authority.

"Nobody has said that the AUC represent the best solution to Colombia's
problems," Castano said in an interview during a visit to this redoubt
about 200 miles northwest of Bogota. "But it is one, perhaps the only one,
and one that the Colombian people see at this moment."

Even though his army has no formal political standing, Castano plays a
central role in Colombia's peace process and in hopes for the success of
President Andres Pastrana's U.S.-backed anti-drug and economic development
program known as Plan Colombia. The United States is contributing $1.3
billion to Colombia over the next two years, mostly in the form of
transport helicopters and military trainers that will benefit Colombia's
armed forces in their battle against the drug crops that finance illegal
armed groups of both the left and right.

Castano said his army does not plant or export drugs, but earns at least $2
million a year by collecting money-taxes, he calls it-from coca producers
and dealers. That is not the view of U.S. and Colombian authorities, who
say the AUC is deeply involved in the drug industry and brings in
significantly more than $2 million. Nonetheless, Castano said he supports
Plan Colombia's goal of eliminating the drug trade, which he says has
corrupted every segment of Colombian society.

Facing more than 20 warrants for his arrest, including charges of murdering
human rights workers, Castano has eluded capture for years in fortified
camps such as this one high in the clouds of northern Antioquia province,
about an hour from enemy positions. He acknowledged that, as international
pressure has increased, the Colombian armed forces have trained more
resources on his troops.

But he said a natural political affinity between the armed forces and his
own troops-they both seek to defeat the leftist guerrillas-allows the
crackdown to go only so far. "They are like brothers," he said. "Our enemy
is the guerrillas and that has not changed."

Castano said that approximately 35 retired officers and 1,000 former
soldiers are now AUC members, a connection human rights workers and
Colombian military officials say allows the AUC to benefit from troops,
equipment and intelligence provided by former colleagues.

"You fire these people, and immediately they are contacted by the
paramilitaries," said Colombian Defense Minister Luis Fernando Ramirez in a
recent interview.

The flow of men from the armed forces to the AUC, which offers better pay
at every level than the armed forces, appears to be accelerating. Of 30
officers purged in December for having paramilitary ties, 23 now work full
time for Castano. He asserted that, in addition, his civilian supporters
include former members of the prosecutor general's office who maintain
influence in the government.

"We started out as a reaction to the guerrillas, but we have evolved and
now represent the social interests of big sectors of this country," he
said. "We now have a concept of what the state should be in terms of
economy, human rights, and justice. . . . We are now in the larger scene
because there are no leaders who think this way."

Kidnapping, Death

In many ways, Castano's own background as a high school dropout and
farmer's son might have made him a candidate to become a leftist guerrilla.
His origins, in fact, go a long way to explain Colombia's decades-old
battle with itself-a war in which allegiances are determined as much by
geography, economic interests and personal history as by political ideology.

The family of Jesus Castano, the paramilitary leader's father, lived on 440
mostly wild acres of farmland. He supported his wife and 12 children with
what he could earn selling milk, butter and cheese. To be a farming family
in rural Antioquia in the 1980s was to live under constant threat from the
Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, Colombia's main guerrilla
force and the hemisphere's oldest leftist insurgency, which now numbers
18,000 troops. The guerrilla group controlled much of Colombia's
countryside, as it continues to today, and farmers were subjected to
kidnappings and extortion to help finance the cause.

In 1981, Jesus Castano was kidnapped by the FARC and held for a ransom of
$7,500, a fortune to the family. Led by Carlos's charismatic older brother
Fidel, the family raised half the money by mortgaging the farm and selling
off what they could. But the FARC did not release their father after
receiving the partial payment: Jesus's body was found chained to a tree.

Fifteen years later, Carlos Castano kidnapped the brother of Alfonso Cano,
a member of the FARC's secretariat, and requested the same ransom "to
remind them that they kidnapped and killed my father and had not returned
his body or money." Cano's brother was returned unharmed, even though no
ransom was paid.

Their father's kidnapping radicalized the Castano brothers, who turned to
the Colombian military for help. At the time, the military was training
paramilitary forces to help protect remote villages at the mercy of the
FARC. As Castano put it, "We invoked justice, we trusted justice, but when
it did not respond, we felt we could take justice into our own hands. And
I'm not ashamed to say it was for vengeance."

The brothers trained with the Bombona Battalion of the army's 14th Brigade,
serving as guides in the northern state of Cordoba. Soon after, Fidel
formed Los Tangueros, named for a local bird, which became the most
notorious death squad in northern Colombia, blamed for more than 150
murders in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

The group was one of many in Antioquia and Cordoba that human rights groups
say profited by protecting the interests of Colombia's huge cocaine cartels
of the early 1990s, particularly the Medellin-based group run by petty
thief-turned-kingpin Pablo Escobar. But in 1994 Fidel disappeared,
allegedly killed near the Panamanian border on an arms-buying expedition.
His body has never appeared, though, and Colombia's prosecutor general
continues to file arrest warrants against him.

From these death squads grew the Peasant Self-Defense Force of Cordoba and
Uraba (ACCU), the oldest and largest of the AUC's confederation of
privately funded armies across the country. This was a result of Carlos
Castano's new leadership: He transformed a regional protection force into a
national political movement, pitching such populist, left-leaning ideas as
land reform, social development aid, and stronger courts.

Today his army reaches from Colombia's northern coast, the ACCU's
stronghold, to the principal drug-producing region of Putumayo in the
south. Along the way the AUC has picked up support not only from
beleaguered peasants seeking protection, but also from an exhausted middle
class that has watched a once-powerful economy savaged by guerrillas who
target oil pipelines, electric distribution stations and other parts of the
country's infrastructure. Despite the AUC's outlaw status, a Gallup poll
last year found that approximately 15 percent of the population approves of
it, five times more than those who expressed approval for the FARC.

Castano said that the AUC still generates 80 percent of its funding by
collecting contributions from wealthy landowners and businessmen seeking
protection from such attacks in zones that the AUC controls or operates in.
The other 20 percent comes from the "taxes" on drug producers.

At the same time, the AUC has emptied out entire regions of alleged
guerrilla supporters through massacres, including one Jan. 17 in the
northern village of Chengue where members of the ACCU Northern Bloc
allegedly killed 26 townspeople with rocks and hammers. One 74-year-old
survivor lamented afterward: "We don't have a government in this country
anymore. Carlos Castano is our president."

The government attributed 983 civilian deaths last year to the AUC, a 32
percent increase from the previous year, carried out through selective
murders and more than 500 multiple slayings.

Castano dismissed an account of the Chengue massacre published in The
Washington Post, calling the story "a terror novel." His Northern Bloc
commander, "Santander," acknowledged that AUC forces killed the
villagers-but with gunshots, not with the rocks and hammers allegedly used.
He said the FARC later staged the scene to make it look that way.

Castano said all of those killed were guerrilla sympathizers, identified by
FARC deserters who participated as AUC members that day, and that only FARC
supporters within Chengue's remaining population were allowed to speak to a
reporter after the event.

"The day something like that happens with the [AUC] in Colombia, I will
disappear," Castano said. "First you have to understand that this is an
irregular conflict. You have to understand that the guerrillas, not us,
determined the conflict's characteristics."

'Ask Me Anything'

Castano's visitors-he has given only a handful of in-person interviews in
the last five years-started a recent trip to his camp from the airport in
the northern city of Monteria. A nearby cattle ranch on the Sinu
River-complete with swimming pool, jukebox and glossy fashion
magazines-provided a waiting room, courtesy of a wealthy supporter. Men
along the route from the airport carried radios, linking farm to farm in a
region described by Castano's officers as "liberated."

A small helicopter arrived at the ranch, keeping the rotor running while
the visitors piled in. It landed once on Cordoba's vast dry plain at a
small farm where, beneath a grove of trees, a tanker truck was hidden. The
pilot, trained years ago at a U.S. military base, filled the tank and flew
on to the lair here at Nudo de Paramillo.

Castano is short and wiry with deep brown eyes, short hair and manic
energy. During an interview, he shouted his responses more than speaking
them, employing a range of gestures from finger pointing to hands waving
above his head. He began the interview by saying, "I do not get offended.
Ask me anything and I will answer it."

During a two-hour talk, attended by seven of his eight regional commanders,
Castano presented his army as a misunderstood last resort for his country.
He said Colombia was besieged by guerrillas who have infiltrated everything
from trade unions to international human rights groups, betrayed by a
hapless government and a one-sided peace process.

Castano also expressed the belief that Colombia is being threatened from
beyond its borders. Specifically, he said the election of President Hugo
Chavez in neighboring Venezuela in 1998 changed the character of Colombia's
war and may inspire a regional conflict. Chavez, a populist former army
colonel, has been accused by Colombian officials of harboring kidnappers
and by his former allies of supporting the FARC financially and with safe
passage in Venezuelan territory.

Chavez has denied all these charges. But Castano said FARC troops regularly
pass into Venezuelan territory protected from pursuing AUC forces by
Venezuelan military helicopters. He said 25,000 acres of coca have been
planted on the Venezuelan side of the border to finance the FARC.

"Chavez's expansionist pretensions gave hope to the FARC. For them it is
once again a reality, the possibility of fragmenting Colombia and annexing
it to his territory," Castano said. "The commander of the [AUC] Northern
Bloc has sent me important [Venezuelan] cattle ranchers and landowners who
are being exploited. . . . We already have some Venezuelans receiving
military instruction and the conditions to create some self-defense groups
on the border are definitely there."

In fact, most of Castano's management problems now result from the AUC's
popularity. The pace of the AUC's growth, he said, has made it difficult
for senior officers to train new commanders. Their rules of engagement, he
said, include guidelines for determining what constitutes collaboration
with the rebels, which can lead to execution. Asked if lack of training may
have resulted in recent massacres, including the one Jan. 17 in Chengue, he
said: "It is possible that in some cases there have been excesses due to
the fast growth of the AUC. We do not pretend to be the Mothers of Charity."

Daily Life

Fifteen years from now, Castano hopes to be studying sociology, perhaps in
his favorite foreign country: the United States. His wife, his 14-year-old
daughter and 9-year-old-son live in exile in Europe. He communicates with
them daily by e-mail, but he acknowledged that they do not entirely
understand a job that has earned him four bullet wounds, international
opprobrium and a tent in the jungle.

His main contact with the outside world comes from the Internet and a
satellite dish that can pull in the History Channel, which he watches
regularly. He has just finished Henry Kissinger's "Diplomacy." He lists
Richard Nixon, Francois Mitterrand and Mother Teresa as role models.

But he misses Bogota, the capital, which he has not seen in a decade. "I
made myself in the jungle," he said. "Living here, I have forgotten about
living with my family. I want to study, to be with my family, and return to
my country so I can contribute something.

"We are preparing ourselves to win this militarily and to force the
guerrillas into negotiating," Castano said.