COLOMBIAN MILITIA SCOFFS AT PEACE

End To Civil War Faces Rocky Road

In The Mountains Of Northwest Colombia -- As Colombian President Alvaro
Uribe tries to make peace with right-wing paramilitary groups, there is at
least one man who is determined to continue the war.

Sitting in a bush camp with two dozen heavily armed troops, Comandante
Rodrigo heads one of Colombia's most powerful paramilitary factions. He is
also one of the most defiant leaders, saying he has no intention of joining
peace talks with the government until the leftist guerrillas who he is
battling do the same.

"It's not a road to peace but a road to unconditional surrender," said
Rodrigo, who heads a faction known as the Metro Bloc.

"To abandon the fight without achieving our goals is to renounce the
future. What we've done up to now is just warm-ups," he added.

What Rodrigo has done the past 15 years is go from the comfort of a
middle-class home to the heart of Colombia's brutal civil conflict. As one
of a handful of paramilitary leaders, he has assembled a 1,500-man force
that has swept across this strategic region in a ruthless campaign to push
out leftist guerrillas.

Now Rodrigo stands as a major impediment to Uribe's controversial effort to
demobilize the paramilitaries, a coalition of about 15,000 armed fighters
that has been loosely aligned as the United Self-Defense Forces of
Colombia, or AUC.

Government officials say the exploratory talks are crucial to easing a
conflict that has lasted decades, left tens of thousands dead and forced 2
million others to flee their homes. But the dialogue begun several months
ago has been rocky, and experts doubt it will end in an agreement.

"The government has to do something in the area of peace, but I'm not
optimistic," said Rafael Nieto, a Colombian security expert.

One problem is that Carlos Castano, the paramilitary's once undisputed
leader, no longer commands the loyalty of powerful commanders such as
Rodrigo, who denounces Castano for alleged involvement in drug trafficking.

Almost one-quarter of Colombia's paramilitary forces have refused to join
the talks. Another faction recently threatened to pull out over army
attacks against its members.

Another sticking point is Uribe's demand that the AUC commit to a
verifiable cease-fire before entering formal negotiations.

This presents a major problem for the paramilitaries because the Colombian
military is not strong enough to shield them from attacks by the country's
two powerful rebel forces.

"We don't know if we can give protection," acknowledged one top government
official. "Our army is so overstretched."

The Issue Of War Crimes

There also remains the difficult issue of how to handle war crimes.
Human-rights officials say Castano and other paramilitary leaders are
responsible for killing two presidential candidates and thousands of other
Colombians, some by stoning and hacking.

The U.S. State Department lists the AUC, along with Colombia's two rebel
groups, as terrorist organizations. Castano and two top deputies also are
under federal indictment in the United States for smuggling more than 17
tons of cocaine since 1997.

U.S. officials, while supporting the peace talks, have said they would not
drop extradition requests for Castano and the two other men. Critics have
questioned how the Colombian government can make peace with such men
without also demanding justice.

"Amnesty for war crimes, that's a tough cookie that the government hasn't
decided what to do" about, said Colombian Vice President Francisco Santos
in a recent interview with the Tribune. "We certainly don't want to forget
what has happened."

Carlos Gaviria, a respected opposition politician, said that he supports
the paramilitary peace talks but that impunity cannot be part of any deal.

"Dialogue is the only route to peace," Gaviria said. "But if there are
persons who committed crimes against humanity, they need to go before the
courts in Colombia or the international courts."

The talks with the paramilitaries are the only negotiations under way to
find a peaceful solution to Colombia's four-decade-old civil war.

In recent years, officials have held discussions with the country's two
leftist groups, the 5,000-member National Liberation Army and the
18,000-strong Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC.

The collapse of those talks catapulted Uribe to the presidency last year
with a mandate to defeat the guerrillas on the battlefield. Uribe has
sharply increased the size of his U.S.-backed military, which has taken the
offensive in many parts of this vast South American country.

Experts say the FARC has responded with hit-and-run attacks against the
military while striking major cities with devastating car bombings. The
goal, experts say, is to avoid heavy losses while depleting Uribe's
political support.

But Uribe--whose father was killed by rebels--is also under pressure to
show that he is a man of peace. The Colombian president found a willing
partner in Castano, a ruthless paramilitary commander who is feeling the
pressure of the U.S. indictment and desperately wants a place in civil
society, experts say.

Under Castano's leadership, the paramilitaries, bankrolled by wealthy
cattle ranchers, drug trafficking and other illegal activities, expanded
rapidly out of their northern stronghold and now control large swaths of
territory. They often fight alongside the Colombian military.

"What Castano wants is to legalize himself, and to do this he needs to
neutralize the pressure from the United States," explained Jaime Zuluaga, a
political scientist at Colombia's National University.

"For years he has fought for the political recognition of the
paramilitaries," Zuluaga added.

Castano Out Of Favor

But Comandante Rodrigo said Castano has "lost control" over the
paramilitaries and lacks the authority to order them to lay down their weapons.

Once Castano's top deputy, Rodrigo said he broke with his former boss over
financing the war through the cocaine trade.

"The AUC stopped being a self-defense force and became a drug-trafficking
organization," said the 38-year-old paramilitary leader. "I was against this."

Rodrigo expresses equal contempt for Uribe, whom he describes as a member
of Colombia's "corrupt elite" who continues to ignore the deep social
problems that have fed the conflict.

The son of successful Medellin attorneys, Rodrigo said he always liked
weapons and joined the armed forces against his parents' wishes. But his
military career ended abruptly in 1989 when human-rights officials
denounced Rodrigo for forcing peasants to work as scouts for his platoon.

Undeterred, Rodrigo joined a small paramilitary group then headed by
Castano's brother Fidel, for whom he worked as a bodyguard, personal
secretary and military commander.

Admits To Massacres

Rodrigo said that early on the paramilitaries massacred hundreds of
civilians because of the mistaken policy of paying soldiers a bonus for
each death.

Others were killed simply because the paramilitaries ran across them and
didn't know who they were--though Rodrigo denies participating in such actions.

"Someone who is dead can't talk," he explained. "There were a lot of errors
committed and a lot of atrocities."

Rodrigo left briefly to work as the security chief on a banana plantation
but rejoined the paramilitaries to take part in Fidel Castano's urban war
against his old ally, Medellin-based drug kingpin Pablo Escobar. This time
Rodrigo was on the frontlines working with local police.

"It was the dirtiest war," he recalled. "We'd capture someone and we'd ask
them, 'Tell us who are the members of Escobar's group.' If they didn't
talk, they died."

Rodrigo justified the "irregular methods" by arguing that it was the only
way to take down a ruthless man like Escobar, who was killed in a 1993
U.S.-supported police raid.

After Escobar's death, Rodrigo returned to fighting rebels in the northern
region of Uraba, where again he conceded that his men massacred civilians
sympathetic to his enemies.

It was in 1999 that Rodrigo broke with Carlos Castano, who had taken over
after his brother died, and set out with 70 men to this once
rebel-controlled region east of Medellin to begin his own battle.

His troops, now numbering about 1,500, dominate much of an area that is
strategically situated between Colombia's two largest cities and is the
primary source of the nation's hydroelectric power.

Armed with assault rifles, machine guns and grenade launchers, the
paramilitaries trudge along rugged mountain paths and settle in camps like
this one, where palm fronds and black plastic cover wooden huts and
makeshift buildings.

'I Like War'

Many of Rodrigo's troops are former soldiers or guerrillas who appear to
lack a political vision. They fight because it is the only thing they know
and the only way to support their families.

"I like war," said Humberto, a 39-year-old former police officer who
supports his wife and two children on his $200-a-month salary. "It's where
I feel most comfortable."

To pay for the war, Rodrigo collects "taxes" from local businesses as well
as siphons gasoline from a nearby pipeline to sell. He spends $515,000 a month.

About 150 of his troops have died in the fighting. Rodrigo said he now
tries to keep civilian casualties--"errors," as he calls them--to a minimum
and works closely with local peasants. He insists that his fight to
eliminate the guerrillas and bring social, economic and political justice
to Colombia is righteous.

"We will continue the conflict until there is a lasting peace," Rodrigo said.