PART OF BLAME FOR COLOMBIAN PARAMILITARIES LIES IN PRIVATE SECTOR

BOGOTA, Colombia -- When Colombian legislators recently criticized state
security forces for cooperating with the paramilitaries, Defense Minister
Luis Fernando Ramirez replied that there is plenty of blame to go around.

"The military and the police are always singled out. But what about the
businessmen and the civilians who are financing the paramilitaries?"
Ramirez asked at a congressional hearing last month.

Critics accused the defense minister of trying to duck the issue. Yet
Ramirez's comments received big play in the media, in part because
Colombian society rarely addresses the issue of private-sector sponsorship
of the paramilitaries.

The outlawed right-wing militias receive up to 70 percent of their income
from the drug trade but also receive huge sums from ranchers, merchants and
big businesses seeking protection from Marxist guerrillas.

"We depend on these groups for protection, because the (army and police)
are so inept," Rodrigo Garcia, a cattle rancher in the northern state of
Codoba, told the Bogota newspaper El Tiempo. In fact, the guerrillas have
driven the police from dozens of towns and villages and control huge swaths
of countryside.

The 130,000-man army is considered small for a nation the size of Colombia.
Rather than pursuing the rebels, thousands of troops guard oil pipelines
and electrical towers in an effort to prevent guerrilla attacks.

"Farmers are always coming to me, saying that the guerrillas have robbed
(them of) their cattle or kidnapped their relatives or that they are being
threatened," said Fernando Devis, president of the Colombian Farmers
Association. "They go looking for the paramilitaries."

In a recent television interview, Carlos Castano, the leader of Colombia's
main paramilitary umbrella group, said that he receives a constant stream
of desperate visitors.

"It's not just regional leaders. It's the middle class, the transport
workers, the rice and cotton farmers. The guerrillas are choking them off,"
Castano told Bogota's RCN television station.

"We tell them what a (paramilitary) front will cost and how many men will
be needed," he said.

Although the paramilitaries have been extremely effective in their war
against the rebels, experts point out that their actions have drained
public support from the police and army by making them look comparatively weak.

The paramilitaries' ties to the army and police also provide the guerrillas
with an excuse to denounce the Colombian government before human rights
groups and the international community, Devis said.

Most observers say that the only solution is for the Colombian government
to regain control of the countryside by upgrading the army, police and
other state institutions. But such reforms will likely take years.

For now, Ramirez has proposed creating a special fund with private
donations that would allow the army and police to react more quickly to
guerrilla threats to ranchers and business owners.

"If those people who currently give money to the paramilitaries would give
it to the police and army, then we will have a greater presence in the
countryside," Ramirez said.

But Devis said that the plan would create a two-tiered system with
well-financed security forces responding to the concerns of the upper class
while ignoring the concerns of the poor.

"You can't have one army for the rich and one army for the poor," he said.