PARAMILITARY LEADER'S FATE UNKNOWN

Two Months After The Disappearance Of Colombian Paramilitary Leader
Carlos Castano, Authorities Are No Closer To Finding Out Whether He Is
Dead Or Alive

BOGOTA - Colombia's feared warlord Carlos Castano was either
strangled, executed in a hail of bullets on orders of his brother, or
kidnapped, buried and exhumed.

Or perhaps the founder of the United Self Defense Forces of Colombia,
a notoriously brutal paramilitary group, staged his own death and is
now hiding in Israel or the United States.

"There are a lot of rumors," said Castano's lawyer, Miami defense
attorney Joaquin Perez. "I can tell you the Castano family is fine
and well."

Was Perez saying that Castano, who disappeared April 16, is
alive?

"How many people make a family?" Perez coyly responded in a
telephone interview. "I can't go beyond that."

Since his disappearance, Castano has become as large a myth as he
was in life. Shrouded in mystery, contradictions and media buzz,
accounts of his whereabouts have yet to yield a clear answer to the
question everyone here is asking.

What happened to Carlos Castano?

TALKS AT STAKE

The stakes are big.

Colombia's government soon will launch peace talks with Castano's
group, known as AUC and controlled since his disappearance by the
country's most powerful drug traffickers. Castano had been
considered a voice of moderation within the AUC, arguing that it
should stop financing its war against leftist guerrillas by protecting
the cocaine industry.

With him gone, critics argue, the government will sit at the
bargaining table with nothing more than drug lords.

Castano, who would have turned 39 on May 15, was 14 when leftist
guerrillas from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, known as
FARC, kidnapped his father and demanded a ransom. The ransom was paid
but Jesus Castano was killed, and his sons Carlos and Fidel set out
for revenge.

The result was the AUC, an illegal paramilitary group that grew to
some 13,000 fighters by 2001. For two decades they have fought leftist
guerrillas with selective assassinations, massacres and frontal
combat, often with covert military collaboration.

Under President Alvaro Uribe, the AUC agreed to peace talks. But when
Castano spoke out against the use of drug trafficking to finance the
war, AUC hard-liners began squeezing him out, observers say.

In quick succession, Castano was indicted by a U.S. grand jury for
drug trafficking and was left out of AUC's peace negotiating team.
There were rumors that he had begun cooperating with the CIA or DEA.
His title changed from military comandante to "political chief."

2ND DISAPPEARANCE

And then he vanished -- oddly, much as his brother Fidel had a decade
earlier.

Carlos Castano's approved biography, My Confession, says he was
killed by guerrillas and buried in a family farm. Officials of the
U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency have repeatedly said they suspect he's
working as an art dealer in Europe.

"Carlos, like his brother Fidel, has just entered the land of
fiction, as both have converted their deaths into myths," said
Castano's biographer, Mauricio Aranguren Molina.

"Remember the second paragraph of my book? . . . What I wrote in that
moment was a kind of premonition, one of those reflections that turns
into an unyielding reality."

From the book: "Carlos Castano knew the mystery [of Fidel's
disappearance] turned warriors into myths that feed the incredulity of
men. That way, it prolongs life after death for unforeseeable times."

BEGINNING OF RUMORS

Castano was first reported dead April 16, when two of his bodyguards
appeared at a northern Colombia hospital with an elaborate tale of an
attempt to kill him by AUC gunmen.

Castano's young wife, Kenia, surrendered to authorities and
corroborated the story, but insisted that Castano came out alive.

In the next weeks, the versions ranged wildly.

He may have escaped because he was alerted to the attack by cellphone,
as the leading El Tiempo newspaper reported. Or he was strangled to
death, like the news agency Reuters said. Radio Caracol said he was
shot in a corral after a party drowned in whiskey.

He may have been ordered killed by his brother, as Agency France Press
reported, quoting a now-dead dissident AUC commander. AFP later cited
diplomatic sources as saying that the CIA had spirited Castano to
Israel. Israeli officials said they had no record of Castano
entering the country under that name.

'CONFUSING'

"It's confusing," fellow AUC leader Salvatore Mancuso told
journalists a few days after the disappearance. "It's really
worrisome for us. I and everyone else believe he's alive."

Later, Mancuso told a Colombian newspaper that his sources had told
him that Castano was headed to the United States to cooperate with
American justice.

The U.S. Embassy here denied it.

For its part, the Colombian government has said it doesn't have any
information on Castano aside from what has been reported in the media.

But many insiders remain convinced that Castano was killed by the
AUC.

"The very attitude of the paramilitary chiefs, who seem to have no
feelings in regard to his supposed death, is an indicator that they
killed him," said leftist Congressman Gustavo Petro. "You'd think
that they -- even the savages that they are -- would show some grief.

"I think he's dead."