COCAINE TRADE CAUSES RIFTS IN COLOMBIAN WAR

Paramilitary Discord Imperils Anti-Drug Plan, Peace Efforts

IN THE ABIBE MOUNTAINS, Colombia -- Drug trafficking has fractured
Colombia's paramilitary army into a collection of potent regional factions
that disagree over whether the financial benefit of protecting the
country's vast cocaine trade outweighs the political costs and internal
corruption it has brought the group.

The split within the 15,000-member private army -- a leading player in
Colombia's brutal civil war that derives a large portion of its financing
from this country's drug trade -- significantly complicates President
Alvaro Uribe's search for peace by adding at least one other armed group to
a conflict that already features three irregular forces. It could also
spell trouble for the U.S. anti-drug strategy here, particularly the aerial
herbicide-spraying program that tacitly relies on paramilitary support in
key coca-producing regions.

The group's fracturing appears similar to what occurred here in the early
1990s when U.S. and Colombian authorities dismantled the country's two
large cocaine cartels. Hundreds of smaller drug- smuggling operations that
were more difficult to identify instantly emerged in their place, sending
cocaine production soaring and giving the guerrilla and paramilitary forces
a wider role in the trade. Now the paramilitary group, better armed than
those cartels and with deep ties to the state itself, appears to be
splintering in the same way.

In an extraordinary meeting Sept. 5 in this mountain range in northern
Colombia, top commanders of the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, or
AUC as the paramilitary umbrella organization is known, gathered to close
gaps that have emerged recently in their ranks over kidnapping and drug
trafficking by their members. But they were only partially successful, and
the once-solid federation of regional paramilitary armies remains under
intense strain.

The group's most charismatic and powerful leader, Carlos Castano, withdrew
his own regional forces from the national organization two months ago after
he discovered that a drug-and-kidnapping ring run by ex-police officials
within the AUC had been responsible for the July 2000 kidnapping of a
prominent Venezuelan businessman. A second major faction, the Central
Bolivar Bloc, had also split from the group after ignoring Castano's orders
to abandon drug ties.

Colombia's drug trade supplies 90 percent of the cocaine that reaches the
United States, and much of the financial fuel for a civil conflict that
began decades ago as a political struggle and last year claimed 3,500 lives.

The war pits the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the
smaller National Liberation Army (ELN) -- two 38-year-old guerrilla
movements fighting to replace the government with a Marxist state --
against the AUC, which regards itself as an ally of the Colombian
government and its U.S. patrons. The AUC provides well-equipped combat
troops in areas where the thinly stretched Colombian army cannot maintain a
presence.

Castano, who has endorsed the U.S. anti-drug strategy here even though his
group profits from the trade, said in an interview that reunifying the AUC
is imperative to ensure that internal differences do not provide a military
opening for the FARC. But while the summit managed to rejoin several of the
group's military elements, it also formalized a split within the
organization that will leave Colombia's two largest coca-producing regions
in the hands of paramilitary commanders whose commitment to the Uribe
government and U.S. anti-drug policy is unclear.

"The internal divisions are not a matter of our fast growth, but of the
penetration of narco-trafficking that managed to corrupt and buy some of
our regional commanders," Castano said between meetings with AUC leaders
under a thatched pavilion here 300 miles north of the capital, Bogota. "We
are reforming and restructuring the organization. Of course, this leads to
crisis. But we are coping very well with it, and instead of growing in
number, we are waiting until we have a way of maintaining our people with
resources that do not come from narco- trafficking."

The meeting, held over five days in this lush mountain range amid rings of
paramilitary security forces, came as the Justice Department considers
whether to indict Castano on drug-trafficking charges and seek his
extradition to the United States for trial. Castano offered to turn himself
over to U.S. officials earlier this year along with 15 of the country's
largest drug traffickers. But the offer attracted little interest from the
United States, mostly because the AUC is classified as a foreign terrorist
organization, making such contacts politically unfeasible.

The Justice Department has already obtained indictments against several
FARC leaders on drug-trafficking charges, although none is a member of its
ruling directorate. The indictments and extradition requests are largely
symbolic, because none of the guerrilla or paramilitary leaders is under
arrest or is likely to be captured anytime soon in a loosely governed
country twice the size of France. FARC and AUC leaders have acknowledged
collecting taxes from coca growers, but have denied facilitating the export
of cocaine from Colombia.

In the interview, Castano reiterated his willingness to turn himself over
to U.S. officials if indicted, saying that although it would be "unfair,"
he would "go and face the U.S. justice system with only one condition: that
they allow my family to live there, because if I leave them here they will
be killed." Later in the interview, however, he suggested that he would not
leave Colombia until the war was over.

The paramilitary split has significant implications for the two-year- old
U.S. anti-drug strategy known as Plan Colombia, given how the policy has
unfolded so far. The $1.3 billion mostly military aid package was designed
to target the drug trade as a way of depriving the armed groups of their
chief funding source. A rule change approved recently by Congress allows
the anti-drug aid to be used directly against the guerrillas and
paramilitary forces, not just the drug crops and labs they protect.

The U.S. strategy seeks to discourage small farmers from producing coca by
paying them to grow legal crops, while spraying herbicide on the land of
those who refuse to do so. The "alternative development" portion of the
program has proved ineffective in the security vacuum existing in much of
the country, so the controversial herbicide spraying has become even more
important. U.S. plans call for 300,000 acres of drug crops to be sprayed
this year, up 30 percent from last year.

As a rule, the FARC has fired on the herbicide-spraying planes in areas it
controls. But paramilitary forces, which in the past year have driven the
FARC from many of the southern coca fields where Plan Colombia has been
most intensive, have allowed the spraying as part of Castano's effort to
ally himself with U.S. interests.

Now, though, the Central Bolivar Bloc, the paramilitary force that has
split from the AUC, controls the coca fields in the southern Bolivar
province and in Putumayo province, where the U.S. anti-drug strategy has
been concentrated. Those two regions -- the top coca-producing areas in the
country -- generate millions of dollars a month for the group. An adviser
to Castano described some of the breakaway group's middle management as
"very narco," suggesting that they may no longer allow planes to spray
their crops.

"We've seen what, from the outside, looks like the political disintegration
of the AUC over its drug-producing and other activities carried out by its
constituent groups," said a Bush administration official. "It's still a
foreign terrorist organization, a drug- producing organization, and whether
it does a little or a lot, it's not going to change our view."

The summit offered a rare look at how the group is struggling to forge a
political identity in order to begin peace talks with the new Uribe
administration -- and, perhaps, give Castano and his fellow AUC leaders a
chance at amnesty. In doing so, Castano has jettisoned a large part of the
organization, reducing his own forces from 15,000 to 10,500 armed members
and setting a course for much slower growth.

Much of the AUC's current troubles can be explained by the importance it
has placed on drug trafficking to finance what has been its rapid expansion
of recent years. Fed by increasing middle- and upper-class anxiety over the
course of the war, the AUC's tripling in size over the past three years has
weakened Castano's hold over the group, spurred human rights abuses and
likely made his past pledge to disarm members once peace is achieved an
unrealistic one.

Those troubles were on display at the summit. Although 15 regional
commanders and the group's three national leaders signed an accord
reunifying the group, the 2,500-member Central Bolivar Bloc refused to do
so. Salvatore Mancuso, the AUC's top military commander, labeled bloc
members "dissidents" during an interview and said they "must stop using the
name if they continue with narco-trafficking activity."

But the agreement does not commit what remains of the AUC to ending its
drug ties. It limits the group to "collecting a tax on coca producers in
zones where it is the predominant economy," a caveat criticized by a
representative of the Catholic Church who attended the summit to begin what
Castano hopes will become a formal peace process with the government.
Castano said severing all drug ties would put the group at a severe
disadvantage with the FARC, which imposes taxes on areas it controls.

The AUC will continue levying taxes in rich coca-producing areas in Meta
and Norte de Santander provinces, as well as Arauca province, along the
eastern border with Venezuela, which has emerged as a new center of the
drug trade. But Mancuso said the AUC will no longer allow drug traffickers
to use the paramilitary group as protection for its cocaine shipments, a
trend that he said had put big money into the hands of regional commanders
and helped fracture the group.

In addition to losing 2,500 troops to the breakaway Central Bolivar Bloc,
the remaining AUC will demobilize 2,000 of its members as part of a
cost-cutting plan that includes teaching troops to be thriftier with
ammunition, reducing monthly salaries and recruiting fewer new members.

Mancuso, a former cattle rancher from the northern province of Cordoba,
said the AUC costs $4.5 million a month to run. But he said he does not
plan to raise the monthly fees that ranchers and other business interests
pay the AUC for protection.

"We are going to have to maintain the number of members we have at the
moment, growing really slowly and only in the regions where it is
necessary," he said.