TAKING AIM AT THE CITY

Now Colombia's Right-Wing Death Squads Are Recruiting Urban Gangs, Opening A
Fresh Front In The War And Threatening The Very Fabric Of Democracy. With
The New Guerrillas

At 15, John Abandoned his schoolbooks for the guns, motorcycles and designer
clothes of a hit man. Working for the Medellin cartel in the 1990s, he
whacked drug traffickers who owed money to cocaine kingpin Pablo Escobar,
supplied getaway cars for bombings and kidnapped civilians. Like many ghetto
kids of his generation, he also revered the cartels for declaring war on the
government after it agreed to hand drug traffickers over to the United
States.

"WHEN YOU'RE AMONG lions, you've got to fight like a lion," says John,
fondly recalling the years the cartels ruled Medellin. Now 32, he has new
heroes - and new employers: the right-wing death squads, or paramilitaries,
battling Colombia's leftist insurgency. "The paramilitaries are power
hungry, arbitrary and ruthless when fighting for control of a neighborhood,"
John says. "But once they're in command, it's paradise."

A gangster's paradise. Across Colombia, hundreds, perhaps thousands, of
young toughs, once the shock troops of the drug cartels, are being recruited
by paramilitary forces as Colombia's civil war comes to the cities. From
Bogota to Cali, and dozens of other urban centers, gangsters now fight
alongside the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC). Trained to use
high-powered rifles and mortars, the gangsters operate in the "misery belts"
- - the vast warrens of tumbledown shacks that ring Colombia's cities.
Observers say the paras' urban invasion represents a chilling shift in the
38-year conflict and perhaps the gravest danger to Colombian society yet.
"The paramilitary penetration of the cities could pose a major threat to
Colombian democracy and stability, as much as if not more than the
[rebels]," says Michael Shifter, vice president of the Inter-American
Dialogue, a Washington-based think tank on hemispheric affairs. "This is a
group that's completely outside any control or authority, and I don't see
how they're going to be reined in."

The paras say they're moving on the cities to head off - and, in some cases,
reverse - incursions by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC)
and the smaller National Liberation Army (ELN). For years, the FARC has
carried out sporadic but bloody attacks in Colombia's cities. In the last
month alone, the rebels have bombed a Bogota TV station, attacked the city's
main reservoir and toppled more than 50 electrical towers around the
country. A booby-trapped bicycle allegedly detonated by the rebels outside a
Bogota restaurant late last month killed four policemen and a 5-year-old
girl. Other attacks left 40 soldiers, policemen and civilians dead.

Paramilitary commanders warn that the carnage could get worse if the
three-year-old peace talks fail or the war tilts in the government's
direction. Intelligence officials say the FARC and the ELN have received
training in the use of explosives, antipersonnel mines and weaponry from the
Irish Republican Army, Libya and Vietnam. They fret that growing U.S. aid to
the regular Army, in the form of training and helicopters, could put more
pressure on the rebels in the countryside. With tons of weapons and dynamite
stored in urban safe houses, the insurgents might try to paralyze parts of
major cities. "The war is coming to the cities," said Luis Fernando Quijano,
a former leader of the Revolutionary Armed Commandos, a small, now disbanded
rebel group. "The guerrillas know that like the IRA or Basque separatist
group ETA, they can wreak far more destruction using 50 men in urban
settings than 500 men in the countryside."

Their paramilitary rivals know it, too. And in an effort to keep it from
happening, they're turning to their new gangster recruits. One secret
training camp lies hidden in a valley several hours to the north of Medellin
at the end of a road that zigzags through hills of sugar cane, terraced
coffee plantations and miles and miles of deserted pasture. A commander of
the Bloque Metro - with 1,000 men under arms and responsibility for
operations in Medellin and its environs - stands in a clearing, his golden
retriever and American M-16 by his side. Half-a-dozen camouflaged buildings
serve as classrooms, kitchens, infirmary and barracks - home to a rotating
crew of 150 paramilitary and gangsters training in strategic warfare and
urban assault.

In an open field, 15 gang members, sporting short haircuts and crisp black
uniforms, shoot at targets with German- and Israeli-made assault rifles and
AK-47s. They will eventually return to Medellin to patrol the high mountain
passes where the ELN has blown numerous energy towers in recent months,
blacking out the city's industrial zone. "The culmination of every Marxist
revolution is in the cities, and so we, too, have to be in the cities,
neutralizing the guerrillas, convincing them with bullets that they are not
going to seize power," says the commander.

But who's going to neutralize the paras? In the last two years, the AUC has
taken over huge areas of cities - from the state of La Guajira near the
northeastern border with Venezuela to the state of Narino in the southwest
near Ecuador. And their rule has been anything but benign. In fact, the
paramilitaries have supplanted the civilian leadership in areas they
control, and made a direct assault on democratic institutions. Not only
leftist guerrillas, but labor unionists, politicians and other civilian
leaders have been assassinated. AUC members prohibit university professors
from teaching controversial material. They tell people how to vote - by
summoning neighborhood leaders and threatening to kill them if their sector
doesn't deliver votes to the paras' preferred candidate. And now they are
even supporting a presidential candidate. "It is armed campaigning of the
worst sort, a form of proselytism as insidious and destructive as anything
the guerrillas have ever done," says one intelligence official.

In Barrancabermeja, the nation's oil-refining center, the right-wing death
squads - partnering with hundreds of gang members - completed their defeat
of the ELN late last year. The ELN had dominated large parts of the city
since the 1970s, earning millions from its control of oil contracts and the
state oil workers' union. They used it to stock up on military supplies,
treat their wounded and regulate part of the nearby Magdalena River, the
nation's largest and most important fluvial artery.

The paramilitaries, for the same reasons, viewed the city as a choice prize.
Two years ago they offered gang members a salary and mobile phones,
prompting hundreds to join their ranks. The new alliance sowed terror. The
paramilitaries and their gangsters went door to door carrying out a census
on inhabitants of poor neighborhoods. They imposed a nighttime curfew. And
last year they gunned down dozens of civic leaders, including members of the
neighborhoods' governing councils and leaders of youth groups, human-rights
groups, women's groups and the oil workers' union. More than 100 members of
the ELN militia were killed. Today nearly all of the city council are under
death threat from the paramilitaries and have been assigned bodyguards.

According to the Colombian Commission of Jurists, the nation's leading
human-rights group, the paramilitaries committed 82 percent of the more than
3,100 killings carried out in "noncombat" attacks last year. And this could
be only the beginning. The paras have sent 300 elite troops to the poor
neighborhoods of Bogota over the last year as part of their new "Capital
Front." Repeating their pattern of urban infiltration, they have set up
training centers for gang members and threatened human-rights workers, labor
unionists, journalists and political leaders.

Their excesses have finally landed the AUC on the U.S. State Department's
list of terrorist organizations, alongside the FARC and the ELN. Suspected
paramilitaries and their supporters have had their visas to the United
States denied. And a new $538 million aid package for Colombia in 2003 will,
for the first time, include training troops in areas where not only the
guerrillas, but also the paramilitaries, control drug cultivation.

Still the Bush administration has had a hard time seeing the paramilitary
threat in the same light as the one posed by the rebels. "In the State
Department and other sectors, there's a lot of concern about this force
that's proliferating, expanding and is completely out of control," says the
Inter-American Dialogue's Shifter. "But defense specialists still believe
that whatever abuse the paramilitaries commit is an acceptable cost to try
to bring the conflict to an end."

Many Colombians share that philosophy-especially after decades of guerrilla
abuses, including routine extortion of businesses and most of Colombia's
more than 3,000 kidnappings last year. In Medellin, Colombia's second
largest city and its most important manufacturing center, pro-paramilitary
gang members have long chafed under the guerrillas' almost Stalinist order.
"The guerrillas came into the neighborhoods in the mid-'90s and immediately
began to demand payoffs from everyone," says John, the gang leader. "They
bossed us around, told us what to wear and killed anyone considered a petty
criminal or drug dealer. They'd even abuse you for smoking a joint." The AUC
was more easygoing - as long as the gangs collaborated in the anti-guerrilla
struggle. "The paramilitaries went from neighborhood to neighborhood. They
gave us only one option: join us or die," says John. "Then they let us get
on with our lives."

The strategy has been so successful that today the paras control almost all
of Medellin's slums and the vast majority of the city's 400 gangs. The price
of their conquest has been high. Gang drug dealing and crime continue. And
life for communities accused of guerrilla sympathies has become unbearable.
Galeras, a small neighborhood of 9,000 people crammed with dusty eateries,
crumbling shanties and chipped murals of Che Guevara, could be Bosnia in the
early 1990s. Suspected guerrilla sympathizers are killed in broad daylight.
Buses are raided; passengers are forced to the ground. The clatter of pistol
fire precedes the wailing of family members and, hours later, the arrival of
police sirens. Twelve people have been killed in the past week alone.

Local authorities finger the 38th Street gang, a group of pro-paramilitary
teenage toughs, for myriad rapes, tortures, decapitations and summary
executions. They also blame the group for an eight-month siege that has cut
the area off from the rest of the city and cost most of the residents their
jobs. "We are imprisoned within a three-block radius; we are hungry," said a
single mother in her mid-30s. "We can't even get on the bus to go to work
because we know they will be waiting on the roads for us, watching for
someone to pick out and kill." (The paramilitaries deny any involvement.)

As the paras have spread their influence, the government has been unable, or
unwilling, to stop them. But finally the threat to its very existence has
roused civilian society. In Ciudad Bolivar, for instance - an endless Bogota
slum where both paramilitaries and guerrillas operate - nongovernmental
organizations work to prevent poor youth from joining the warring armies.
Social workers and therapists hope to erect bulwarks against the temptation
of wearing a uniform and wielding a gun through work programs and
psychological support groups. But with little other work available in the
nation's crumbling slums, the life of a hit man has its allure.