Plan For Colombia: Day 4

A NEW BREED: PARAMILITARY GROUPS MUSCLING THEIR WAY TO THE FOREFRONT

BOGOTA, Colombia - The year 2000 in Colombia may fairly be termed to have
been "The Year of the Paramilitaries," in part because it marked the public
debut of the nation's approximately 7,000 right-wing militiamen.

In two long interviews on Colombian television, Carlos Castano, the
plainspoken and charismatic 35-year-old leader of the biggest paramilitary
group, even talked about his wife and two children, who are safely living
in London.

But the militia leader, who heads the United Self-Defense Forces of
Colombia, or AUC, mainly used his public coming-out - the source of almost
all that is known of him - to challenge centrist officials and left-wing
guerrillas for a place on the nation's political stage.

"My war is public, my peace is public, my arguments are public," the
formerly secretive leader declared.

The year also was fortuitous for the Paras, as most Colombians call them,
because of military conquests.

During 2000, the AUC showed it can confront guerrillas on guerrilla-held
turf and turn them back. The Colombian army, by contrast, only rarely has
shown such daring - or had such success.

But the year did not bring about any change in Para tactics, for which
Castano's AUC is notorious.

"The paramilitary forces are worse than those that they pretend to
destroy," writes Horacio Serpa, leader and 1998 presidential candidate of
the opposition Liberal Party.

In December, the Colombian Defense Ministry reported 671 civilians had been
murdered between January and October, 507 of them by paramilitaries, 164 by
left-wing guerrillas. Paramilitaries also were implicated in the deaths of
39 fishermen last month.

Castano made no apologies for the violence.

"For us, the guerrillas are military objects whether they be civilian or
uniformed," he told an interviewer.

"It is inevitable that in a guerrilla war, human rights are violated," he
added, just for good measure.

In October, as a move to influence government in negotiations with the
guerrillas of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC,
Castano's AUC also kidnapped seven members of the Colombian Congress,
holding them for some 10 days.

The militia leader's statements won him a following perhaps because of his
frankness - a quality as rare in Colombian as in American politics -
despite his chilling admissions.

He even confessed to Para participation in the Colombian drug trade.

"From the drug traffic and the drug traffickers we ought to get 70 percent
of our financing, just as the guerrilla gets 90 percent from kidnapping and
the drug traffic," he said.

Today's Colombian paramilitaries do not owe their rise, like Colombia's
guerrillas, to the period of 1950s warfare that Colombians call "La
Violencia." Instead, their origins are in private militias organized by
drug lords during the 1980s, and more respectably, to the pressures brought
to bear on prosperous cattlemen and farmers by guerrillas during the late
1980s.

Castano's past is a case in point. One of 12 children of a prosperous
central Colombian farm family, he was 15 and still a student when the FARC
kidnapped his father in 1981.

In Colombia, kidnappers usually make an exorbitant initial ransom demand,
and families or employers negotiate for months until captors accept a more
modest figure. But after Castano's father was taken, bargaining broke down,
and he was murdered. Carlos and his older brother, Fidel - since killed in
paramilitary action - decided to get even.

With a dozen workers from their father's farm, the Castano brothers formed
a militia.

Human rights organizations repeatedly have charged the Colombian army with
encouraging, even arming, right-wing militias: "The military-paramilitary
partnership is a fact of life throughout Colombia," Human Rights Watch
declared in a statement issued in February.

And indeed, the Castano clan found an ally in the army, whose local troops
took them on as guides.

"It was the army that really formed us, trained us to combat the
guerrillas," Castano said on television.

But he has said that his militia found itself unable to abide by the Geneva
Convention, which prohibits assaults upon civilians.

"If we couldn't wage combat where they (the guerrillas) are quartered, we
were able to neutralize the people who took them food, drugs, information,
aguardiente (rum), prostitutes, and all of those kinds of things that the
peasants took to their encampments," Castano said.

The parents of guerrilla fighters became favorite targets of the AUC.

Nor did the paramilitaries confine their killings to the apologists for
violence.

It was the Paras, everyone in Colombia is sure, who assassinated hundreds
of left-wing activists and candidates during the political campaign of
1980-90. Guerrilla sympathizers, even left-wing professors, now are largely
silent in Colombia because they fear paramilitary death squads.

Last spring, three students and one professor at the University of Cordoba
were murdered, presumably by paramilitaries, and according to the Colombian
newsweekly Semana, Paras forced the university's rector to resign.

During the past three years, as the country's army has purged human rights
violators from its ranks, the Paras have become Colombia's primary
practitioners of "dirty war," with, most observers believe, the continuing
encouragement of the military.

"The complaint of the communities is always the same: paramilitary action
is protected by the military," Colombian analyst Alfredo Molano notes in
"Pare," Colombia's latest book on its civil war. "The result is clear:
While during the 1980s the armed forces were accused of 70 percent of the
abuses against the civilian population, today this statistic rests on the
heads of the paramilitaries."

Molano, like several other academics who have spoken out about the Paras,
recently has moved to Spain to escape the threat of death squads.

The most strident critics of the Paras picture them as a murder force more
than as a fighting force.

"The war of the paramilitaries against the guerrillas has given rise to
only a small number of direct confrontations," National University
sociologist Fernando Cubides charged in a 1999 review of the war. "The
majority of paramilitary actions have been directed against the civilian
population that supports the guerrillas."

The Paras have been associated with other, nonmilitary activities as well,
including the promotion of what some scholars call "agrarian counter-reform."

Cubides says the Paras have taken possession of at least a third of the
lands abandoned by farmers displaced by the country's civil war. The
accusation usually made is that they collect a commission on the resale of
these properties to narco-traffickers, whose passion for owning ranches is
notorious in Colombia.

Because no one who operates outside of the law in Colombia can for long
ignore the nation's drug traffickers, AUC militiamen, by Castano's
admission, have been involved in settling scores between rival drug lords,
especially in the Cali region. The militia leader also claims they helped
American authorities in their efforts to bring about the 1993 death of drug
kingpin Pablo Escobar.

In Colombian cities today, paramilitaries provide bodyguard services to the
rich, just as they stand guard over the properties of cattlemen and coca
growers in the countryside. And the talk on the streets is that if someone
owes a significant debt, it is far easier to pay AUC members a 20 percent
commission to collect it, than to sue in Colombia's slow-moving courts.

Even these activities, it seems, win a degree of toleration from the
authorities. Government prosecution, Castano has admitted, "is more
systematic against the guerrillas. Maybe it is not as systematic against
the Self-Defense Forces."

Over the past three years, the AUC, formerly an organization based in
northern Colombia, has begun challenging guerrilla strongholds in the south.

It claims to have pared the ranks of the National Liberation Army, or ELN,
by two-thirds, from a strength of about 3,000 guerrillas to less than 1,000
today. Last year, the AUC challenged the FARC and ELN in the northwestern
province of Cordoba, and if Castano's claims are credible, established
itself as the ruling armed force there.

But the most impressive offensive of the AUC has come in Putumayo province,
which will be ground zero in the military phase of Plan Colombia - the
place where American-made helicopters will land American-trained troops to
do battle with forces protecting the coca fields.

Some three years ago, the AUC began infiltrating its men into the region's
commercial hub, Puerto Asis, a town of some 40,000 near Colombia's border
with Ecuador.

Though government soldiers and national police officers patrolled its
streets, Puerto Asis was considered as guerrilla territory because troops
of the FARC held sway in the surrounding countryside. Puerto Asis was their
supply town.

The paramilitaries came to Puerto Asis in civilian garb and began to
insinuate themselves with local business and farming interests.

"What happened here," says Gen. Mario Montoya Uribe, army commander in the
region, "is that in 1996 and 1997, the FARC took over the drug business.
The narcos naturally didn't like that, so in 1997 and 1998, they called in
the Paras."

"They give the Paras enough money," the general told the San Antonio
Express-News, "to pay their men $500,000 pesos a month (about $250), plus a
bonus of $3 million pesos for a kill and $3 million for capturing a firearm."

Locals say in the days since the paramilitary move on Puerto Asis, some 200
corpses have been found on the city's sidewalks and in the nearby Rio
Putumayo - the bodies of suspected FARC sympathizers and of criminals and
derelicts who were killed as part of a Para policy of "social cleansing."

Statistics kept by the Colombian president's office show that in 1998 and
1999, the murder rate in Puerto Asis quadrupled, to 278 per 100,000
residents; the comparable rate is 6.3 in the United States.

Once the Paras had "taken" Puerto Asis, they began seeking out FARC units
in parts of the countryside, especially at Orito, a village about 25 miles
northeast, deep in coca country. Last spring, they declared Orito's
environs their turf, and despite subsequent shootouts with the FARC and
skirmishes with the army, they've made their claim stick.

Not surprisingly, the town's mayor was murdered last year.

Despite horror tales such as those told in Putumayo, Carlos Castano remains
among the most popular figures in Colombia, especially among the urban
middle classes, because he has challenged the government to put an end to
kidnappings and to halt the creep of guerrilla power across the countryside.

In late November, the AUC won an important public relations victory when
the Colombian National Federation of Cattlemen demanded that the government
sponsor civilian militias like the one the Castano brothers formed. "It
cannot be that Colombia, world's champion at kidnappings, doesn't have the
right of self-defense," the cattlemen complained.

President Andres Pastrana, pledged to peace talks and a policy of gun
control, rejected the proposal out of hand.

Though Castano is officially regarded as a criminal by American
authorities, he is among Colombia's most prominent supporters of the
military actions that are foreseen as part of Plan Colombia.

"Doing away with the illicit economy of the drug traffic," Castano has
said, "the political conflict will be done away with."

But experts on the drug trade, like Ricardo Vargas, a spokesman for a
European-based nongovernmental organization called Accion Andina, point out
that Para support for Plan Colombia may have more to do with geography -
and drug investments - than with patriotism. Under the plan, coca
fumigation will begin in, and focus upon, the provinces of Putumayo and
Caqueta, which, despite the AUC foray into Orito, are still largely in the
hands of the FARC.

"The Paras will applaud when the helicopters land," Vargas says, "because
they can grow coca in the north. They only came to the south to weaken the
guerrillas there. In the short run, anyway, the Paras will be the
beneficiaries of Plan Colombia."

Continued: http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v01/n149/a05.html