COLOMBIA PARAMILITARY CHIEF SAYS BUSINESSES BACK HIM

BOGOTA, Colombia, Sept. 6 (Reuters)-- The head of the outlawed right-wing
paramilitary forces, who has conceded that most of his financing comes from
the drug trade, said today that he also received support from businesses.

The leader of the group, the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, Carlos
Castano, spoke of his ties to businessmen in an open letter to Congress a
day after Defense Minister Luis Fernando Ramirez had urged lawmakers to
investigate private financing sources for the paramilitary militias that
attack leftists and suspected rebel sympathizers.

"Why shouldn't national and international companies support us when they
see their investments limited by the terrorism and barbarity of the
guerrillas?" Mr. Castano asked in his letter. "The growing support of the
business sector is an urgent necessity in our case. Either they defend
themselves from our national enemy or they will disappear."

Mocking Mr. Ramirez and his call for a crackdown on people who secretly
back the paramilitaries, Mr. Castano said, "The crime of antisubversion or
of pro-capitalism" was something that could not exist in a "civilized
universe."

"We don't believe the country will advance toward peace by pursuing
businessmen, civic leaders and defenseless citizens or by preventing them
from adopting an antisubversive stance," he said.

Local and international human rights groups said the paramilitary group,
which is responsible for many peasant massacres and other abuses, operates
with the support of state security forces.

The government has been fighting an increasingly dirty war with Marxist
rebels that has taken more than 35,000 lives since 1990.

In a rare television interview in March, Mr. Castano said that drug
trafficking and drug traffickers probably financed 70 percent of his
organization's operations.

He did not elaborate on his ties to businesses and business leaders in his
letter today.

But Mr. Castano and his private army, which is made up of an estimated
5,000 mostly working-class fighters, have long been seen as important
defenders of the economic and political interests of the conservative
financial elite.

"We have always proclaimed that we are the defenders of business freedom
and of the national and international industrial sectors," Mr. Castano
wrote. "We have said over and over again that Colombian subversives are
preventing the adequate development of productive forces."