WE'RE DOING BATTLE RIGHT AND LEFT, COLOMBIA INSISTS

BOGOTA, Colombia, March 3 - As President Andres Pastrana shops in
Europe and America for more aid, he wants the world to know that his
government is committed to fighting his country's right-wing
paramilitary groups, not just its leftist rebels.

The message - often repeated in meetings with American members of
Congress and in speeches in Europe - is that his administration has
captured hundreds of paramilitary gunmen, is pursuing those who
finance the groups and is severing ties between military units and
paramilitary groups.

"Today, we have a frontal strategy against paramilitarism," Mr.
Pastrana said in an interview. "I am combating them through
conviction, not because the people are imposing it on us. It's
because we care about the theme of human rights."

But to some American officials and human rights groups, who have for
years accused the military of a tacit alliance with paramilitary
groups, Mr. Pastrana's efforts have not gone nearly far enough. The
paramilitary groups have nearly doubled in strength in the last two
years and are now responsible for three out of every four deaths in
the massacres of villagers the gunmen say are sympathetic to leftist
rebels.

Experts on Colombia and local officials in places where fighting has
occurred say that while the government has clearly taken a stand in
some regions, there have been no detectable efforts to rein in the
paramilitary groups in others. In some cases, outright ties between
military units and paramilitary groups continue to exist, said
American officials and other observers.

"I think that the high command, Pastrana and the Ministry of Defense
are totally committed to getting a grip on this problem," said the
American ambassador, Anne Patterson, in an interview.

"Where the problem arises, of course, is in the field, and there we
get widely mixed reports about what's happening," Ms. Patterson said.
"In some areas, clearly the local commander is taking really strong
action against paramilitaries, has arrested them and gone after them;
and in other places, there appears to be collusion."

Still, in recent months, Mr. Pastrana has begun a highly publicized
campaign to demonstrate his commitment to dismantling the
paramilitary groups (thought to number more than 8,000 members) and
to preserve a lifeline of trade agreements and foreign aid.

Glossy reports, filled with charts and graphs showing operations
against paramilitary groups, have been issued. Generals, who a few
short years ago denied that the paramilitary groups even existed, now
call their members terrorists who must be hunted down. In military
briefings and presentations, the paramilitary groups are cast as
enemies of the state, just like the rebels.

A Latin America expert at the Woodrow Wilson International Center in
Washington, Cynthia Arnson, said that in her view, "a lot of the
activity in Colombia is aimed at convincing people who would
otherwise be opposed to the aid that the government is doing the
right thing."

Yet many in Colombia and abroad are wary of the Colombian government's claims.

Gustavo Gallon, director of an internationally recognized human
rights group, the Colombian Commission of Jurists, said the military,
despite announcing 316 warrants filed against paramilitary members
last year, has not made a single arrest against a top-ranked
paramilitary gunman.

Nor has the military prevented paramilitary groups from spreading in
the last three years from their northern base of operations to 26 of
Colombia's 32 provinces.

"There are no significant or convincing actions against paramilitary
groups," Mr. Gallon said.

Most troubling, paramilitary violence - massacres and selective
assassinations - have risen dramatically, from 400 deaths in 1998 to
1,560 last year, according to the government's figures.

Last year alone, paramilitary groups killed 577 people in 83
massacres, accounting for 75 percent of the deaths, the Defense
Ministry reported. The Commission of Jurists puts the numbers higher:
160 massacres and 1,084 deaths in a one-year period ending in October
2000. Eighty-two percent of the deaths were at the hands of
paramilitary groups, the commission said.

"It's evident that there's an intense program of propaganda or
publicity to show that they have intensive actions against the
paramilitaries," said Mr. Gallon. "But the paramilitaries are causing
most of the deaths in this country, with either the tolerance or the
cooperation of state agents."

Run by Carlos Castano, the son of a cattleman who was killed by
guerrillas, the paramilitary groups, called the United Self-Defense
Forces of Colombia, sustain themselves by extorting money from coca
farmers and cocaine traffickers and drawing support from cattlemen
and business leaders. Paramilitary gunmen specialize in going after
villagers suspected of collaborating with leftist rebels.

American officials say they will soon include Mr. Castano's group on
the State Department's list of terrorist organizations.

Mr. Pastrana, who calls the paramilitary groups "a cancer that is
gnawing away at the country," said fighting them is not easy. But he
said important measures have been taken that demonstrate the
administration's commitment, especially to breaking the bonds between
military units and paramilitary groups.

He cited the government's dismissal of 388 soldiers in October, some
for what government officials said were human rights abuses. Mr.
Pastrana has also dismissed five generals believed to have committed
abuses, American officials said. Last month, the government also
announced the formation of a commission to track government progress
against paramilitary groups.

And on Feb. 12, in the first known case involving human rights
abuses, a military tribunal sentenced a general to 40 months in
prison for having stood by as members of paramilitary groups
massacred dozens of villagers in 1997.

"It's more than just public relations," said a high-ranking official
in the Pastrana administration. "Some international organizations are
putting in doubt what we're doing, and so what we're doing is putting
the data out and saying, `these are the results,' to show that the
Colombian state has the commitments to go after these groups."

Michael Shifter, an expert on Colombia at Inter-American Dialogue, a
Washington research group, said the Pastrana administration deserves
some credit for the measures it has taken. "They've been pretty
tentative and pretty half-hearted, but they should be recognized
because they're a step forward," he said.

American officials and human rights groups, however, say measuring
the government's progress is difficult. The government, for instance,
has failed to provide details about the charges filed against
dismissed soldiers and police officials.

"What they're doing is trying to give the appearance of compliance,
but in fact when you go back and look at the cases they're using they
start to evaporate," said Robin Kirk, a researcher on Colombia for
Human Rights Watch, an American group.

The State Department said there is cause for concern in its human
rights report on Colombia, released last Monday, despite some
improvements in the government's efforts.

"Members of the security forces collaborated with paramilitary groups
that committed abuses," said the report, "in some instances allowing
such groups to pass through roadblocks, sharing information, or
providing them with supplies or ammunition."

Examples of the paramilitary groups operating openly, with state
security forces in close proximity, are not hard to find.

In Puerto Asis, the largest town in the coca-growing province of
Putumayo, the municipality's legal officer and human rights
ombudsman, German Martinez, has collected testimony from residents
who reported seeing military and police officials with known
paramilitary gunmen.

In one, a Puerto Asis man said paramilitary gunmen forced him to
drive them and their terrified prisoner, a young man accused of being
a rebel, into the countryside last year. Upon reaching a military
checkpoint, the soldiers greeted the paramilitary gunmen warmly.

"They said, `This is a guerrilla, and we're going to kill him,' " the
driver recalled in an interview last month. "They said, `Brother,
congratulations.' They held him up like a trophy." The man is
believed to have been killed.