PARAMILITARIES ALLY WITH REBELS FOR DRUG TRADE

Formerly Archenemies, Colombian Right-Wing Paramilitaries and Left-Wing
Guerrillas Have Put Their Differences Aside, Working Together In The
Illicit-Drug Trade

BOGOTA - In Colombia, drug trafficking and war can make for strange bedfellows.

In recent months, U.S. and Colombian authorities have noticed an alarming
amount of direct contact between right-wing paramilitary groups and
left-wing guerrillas from the country's largest rebel group, the
Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC. They are not fighting,
authorities say, but working or doing business together.

The motives for this cooperation vary. In some cases, the groups have
teamed up to fight a mutual enemy encroaching on an important drug-
trafficking corridor. In others, they've traded drug-processing materials
for coca. They've also reached nonaggression pacts to facilitate the
transport of illicit drugs.

"Every day we see that the border that existed between guerrillas and
paramilitary groups has dissipated because of the drug-trafficking
interests, the need to survive," said Col. Oscar Naranjo, director of
DIJIN, the police's investigative unit.

POSSIBLE SEA CHANGE

The contact among these groups represents a shift in the dynamic of
Colombia's war, which has left 40,000 dead in the past decade. The two
groups have long been considered archenemies, attacking each other and
sometimes suspected supporters of the other side.

This year, according to Colombian army statistics, the two have barely
engaged in battle. While a global nonaggression pact between them does not
seem possible at this point and these alliances are often short- lived,
officials and analysts warn that Colombia may be entering a new phase in
the war, the results of which remain difficult to project.

"They're hardly fighting each other anymore," said Sergio Jaramillo, the
director of Ideas for Peace, a Colombian think-tank. "This idea of the
great war between them everywhere, I don't know if its over, but they seem
to be busy with other things at the moment."

Paramilitary groups emerged in the early 1980s as a response to the leftist
rebels' excessive kidnapping and extortion in the countryside. In the past
10 years, their ranks have grown to 15,000 fighters and they have competed
for territory in nearly one-third of the countryside. The guerrillas have
nearly 20,000 fighters.

Some of the first financiers of the right-wing groups were drug traffickers
who also were large land owners in the regions the paramilitaries sought to
protect. These days, both groups rely on funding from all aspects of the
drug trade, but the leftist rebels mostly control territory where the crop
is grown, while the paramilitaries tend to focus on refining coca paste
into cocaine before export.

"You can say that they both do a bit of everything," said Jaramillo. "The
FARC has a larger control of the production of the paste. The paramilitary
are further up the chain. So it's just natural that they would get into deals."

IN PURSUIT OF PROFITS

In one particularly stark case, police intelligence noted that a
paramilitary group in the southern province of Meta run by a man named
Miguel Arroyave was giving the FARC chemicals used to process coca leaves
into paste, in exchange for paste. It's not clear whether this arrangement
continues because Arroyave was assassinated in September.

"If you can maximize your profits, you're going to go to the person that
provides you the cheapest and best quality merchandise and a relatively
seamless arrangement," said one U.S. counterdrug official who asked to
remain anonymous. "So if it happens that someone . . . in the Arroyave
organization taps a coca-base supplier who is affiliated to the FARC, he is
doing it . . . for three reasons: He is getting a good price, good quality
and [in] a seamless fashion."

The official said the U.S. government has received "multiple reports" of
similar cooperation between paramilitaries and guerrillas in the last six
months.

"It's just the basic rule of economics," the official said.

Those who watch this conflict closely say the government's recent military
push into guerrilla- and paramilitary-controlled territories may be
contributing to their cooperation.

President Alvaro Uribe has sent thousands of troops into rebel-held areas
in the south and launched peace talks with several paramilitary factions,
while targeting other factions not participating in the negotiations.

"Now that the Colombian government has launched an offensive in areas
considered strategic strongholds of the paramilitary groups and the
guerrillas, this has forced them to establish more tactical alliances,
truces and mutual participation in the [drug trafficking] business," the
DIJIN's Naranjo said.

Fights between paramilitary groups and drug traffickers also have made for
quirky alliances.

Colombian authorities say that in the southwestern province of Valle, drug
trafficker and former paramilitary ally Wilber Varela is fighting a rival
trafficker, Diego Montoya, with the help of the FARC. Montoya has allied
himself with the paramilitaries.

In another region in the southwest, a paramilitary faction reportedly
joined forces with the FARC to fight off a rival paramilitary group.

"These are more local arrangements," said Alfredo Rangel, a former military
consultant with the Ministry of Defense. "The FARC is trying to divide the
paramilitaries and the narcos."

DRIVEN BY FARC

Other factors may be at work as well. Colombian researcher Ricardo Vargas,
who has written several books on drug trafficking, says the FARC has sought
to eliminate the middlemen in the drug trade and made direct contact with
the paramilitary groups that process the drug.

Police intelligence, for example, has found evidence that paramilitary
groups along the Pacific coast have signed nonaggression pacts with the
FARC in order to allow for easy transit of the product.

Rangel downplays the significance of the cooperation and says it will not
have long-term repercussions. He said most arrangements seem geared toward
facilitating the drug trade.

But Jaramillo is not so sure.

"Because of their nature, the FARC is very [weak] in the cities," Jaramillo
said. "But if they were in a possible alliance with say, narcos and bits of
paramilitaries, well the narcos really have very good intelligence in the
cities and obviously the paramilitaries as well. So that's a really
worrying thing."