THE PARAMILITARY EFFECT

Salvatore Mancuso And His Right-Wing Militiamen Already Reign Supreme In
Parts Of The Colombian Countryside. Now They Are Gaining Power In The
Political Arena

April 8 issue - Salvatore Mancuso is a wanted man. The 37-year-old military
chief of Colombia's outlawed right-wing militias was convicted in absentia
last month of organizing armed "vigilante groups" and sentenced to 11 years
in prison on charges arising from the November 1997 murder of a small-town
mayor.

But in the humid lowlands of northwestern Colombia, where the country's
ruthless paramilitary forces reign supreme, Mancuso is an untouchable
warlord whom no one dares cross.

That crude fact of life seems to apply to the government of lame-duck
President Andres Pastrana as well-despite two outstanding warrants for his
arrest. "We have replaced the state in various areas," Mancuso told
NEWSWEEK in an exclusive interview at a paramilitary camp two weeks ago.
"We have had to arm and defend ourselves, we build schools and health
clinics-all because the state has failed to fulfill its constitutional duties."

MANCUSO AND HIS estimated 8,000 comrades in arms have indeed become a state
within a state in vast tracts of the Colombian countryside. The U.S. Drug
Enforcement Agency says the militias fund their operations with
cocaine-smuggling profits, an allegation Mancuso now disputes.

No one denies that the self-styled United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia
(AUC) have acquired a military capability in recent years that puts them on
a par with the country's more numerous and longer established communist
guerrilla armies.

As Colombians from nearly all walks of life swing sharply to the right in
outrage over the summary executions and kidnapping practices of the
nominally Marxist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the six
right-wing militias grouped under the AUC's umbrella banner have never
wielded more power at home. "They have grown at such a rapid rate that they
are now fast approaching the FARC," says counterinsurgency expert Thomas
Marks of the Hawaii-based Academy of the Pacific. "The FARC has adopted the
paramilitaries as their main enemy instead of the Colombian armed forces."

There is mounting evidence that the right-wing militias' power is no longer
confined exclusively to the battlefield. Colombia held congressional
elections in mid-March against the backdrop of hard- line presidential
candidate Alvaro Uribe Velez's meteoric rise in opinion polls.

Dozens of pro-Uribe candidates won seats in both houses of the national
legislature, and Mancuso issued an official communique hailing the results
that, by his reckoning, delivered victory to more than one third of the
paramilitary forces' preferred candidates.

Some of those congressmen-elect were political unknowns prior to the
voting, and left-of-center politicians accused AUC leaders of restricting
their freedom to campaign in areas under the militias' control. Interior
Minister Armando Estrada expressed "grave" concern over the alleged
infiltration of the National Congress by known paramilitary elements and
their supporters. "If we don't confront the paramilitary forces head on,
they will increasingly become the biggest threat facing the country," says
Luis Alberto Moreno, Colombia's ambassador to the United States. "Three
quarters of their money comes from drug trafficking, and they must be
stopped at all costs."

Those warnings will likely go unheeded in the current political climate.
The abrupt collapse of Pastrana's three-year-long peace process in February
soured millions of ordinary Colombians on the notion of a negotiated
settlement with the FARC. For many voters, the repeated peasant massacres
and other human-rights atrocities carried out by the rightist archenemies
of the FARC pale in significance alongside the guerrillas' defiant refusal
to conclude a ceasefire agreement with the Pastrana government.

Salvatore Mancuso came to the antiguerrilla crusade relatively late in
life. The husky, balding son of an Italian immigrant grew up in the
sparsely populated cattle country of northwestern Colombia and took up
ranching after studying in Bogota. He was kidnapped and held for ransom for
three days in 1984 by a small Maoist guerrilla movement called the People's
Liberation Army. Upon his release Mancuso remained on the sidelines of war
for a time while guerrilla commanders rustled his cattle and demanded ever
higher extortion payments from him and other ranchers.

By the late 1980s, Mancuso, then in his mid-20s, had reached his limit and
joined the ranks of the then fledgling Self- Defense Forces of Cordoba and
Uraba.

Founded by fellow paramilitary supremo Carlos Castano's older brother,
Fidel, that ragtag rural militia drew many of its early members from the
private antikidnapping forces of leading Colombian drug traffickers, like
the late Medellin cartel kingpin Pablo Escobar. But as the FARC guerrillas
grew in number and stepped up their abduction of rich and middle-class
Colombians in the 1990s, a band of vigilantes evolved into a full-blown
rebel movement of the right.

For now at least, the front runner in the presidential race seems content
to keep Mancuso and his ilk at a healthy distance.

Uribe told NEWSWEEK last month that the paramilitary forces would have to
lay down their arms as a precondition for talks with his government. In an
interview conducted in the Paramillo Mountains near a paramilitary field
hospital populated with land-mine victims, Mancuso echoed the candidate's
assertion that no ties currently exist between Uribe and the AUC leadership.

It doesn't require a sophisticated student of Colombian politics to figure
out who is the paramilitary choice in the May 26 presidential election. A
pro-Uribe banner is prominently displayed on a wall near the entrance to
one of Mancuso's cattle ranches in his native state of Cordoba. "Uribe is
the political expression of the paramilitary agenda," says Gloria Cuartas,
a former mayor of the Antioquia city of Apartado. Mancuso stops short of
making an outright endorsement, but it's pretty clear where his sentiments
lie. "The country is looking for a candidate who says what's on his mind
and acts in accordance with that," Mancuso told NEWSWEEK. "Uribe has
delivered a strong message, and people who are fed up with the same old
story are supporting him."

It may be strictly a coincidence, but as Uribe has risen in the opinion
surveys the right-wing militias have made a concerted effort to clean up
their act. High-profile massacres of civilians attributed to AUC units have
dropped sharply over the past six months.

Mancuso has also embarked on a public-relations campaign.

He has tried to turn aside Washington's allegations of paramilitary
involvement in the drug trade, maintaining that his followers only assess
informal "taxes" on coca farmers operating in areas under their control.

Earlier this year he publicly promised to execute no more than three
victims at any one time. "In our national conference of last November we
agreed to refrain from massacres," Mancuso says without a trace of irony.
"The international community can count on the Self-Defense Forces in the
battle against terrorism and drug trafficking."

Their friends and foes can certainly count on the right-wing militias to
press the offensive against the 17,000-strong FARC guerrillas. While
independent analysts place the AUC's armed fighters at roughly half the
number of FARC foot soldiers, Mancuso told NEWSWEEK that the real figure is
closer to 14,000-and by the year-end he hopes to have 26,000 men and women
in his ranks.

Despite the Pastrana government's attempts to purge the armed forces of
paramilitary sympathizers, human-rights groups say that some Colombian
military officers continue to secretly assist militia field commanders in
their operations against guerrilla forces.

As the country lurches toward total war, the paramilitary state within a
state is bound to acquire ever greater clout and firepower-regardless of
who becomes the next president of Colombia.