Along for the ride: how Colombia's paramilitaries retain power: the U.S.-backed government appears to be doing all it can to help paramilitary commanders evade hard time

Progressive, The, May, 2005 by Chip Mitchell

Three young men with crew cuts climb into a rickety taxi headed out of Tibu, the sweltering hub of a northern Colombian region known for its coca crops and peasant massacres. The cab is taking them four hours south to Cucuta, the provincial capital, where President Alvaro Uribe's government will enroll them in a program to help former paramilitary fighters adjust to civilian life. They'll be gone a few days but are carrying no luggage, just seven six-packs of cheap beer.

An hour down the road, the men have guzzled half their cargo. Their cab passes through Campo Dos, the village where their 1,450-member unit disarmed a week ago. They say they've been partying ever since that highly publicized ceremony, whose participants included a teary-eyed Salvatore Mancuso, the nation's most powerful paramilitary commander. The government has promoted such demobilizations as major steps toward ending Colombia's decades-old civil war.

The program includes identification papers, occupational training, health insurance, and two years of employment at $150 per month, roughly Colombia's minimum wage. To fund it all, the government hopes to raise $130 million from the United States and other international donors.

"We want to take the legal road," says one of the former fighters, "but if the government doesn't keep its promises, we'll report it to Mancuso."

Such threats aren't idle. Mancuso turned in a Beretta at the ceremony and asked the nation for forgiveness, but he hasn't dismantled the intelligence network or command structure of his organization, the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC). He has helped the government disarm more than 4,800 of the group's estimated 15,000 troops, but he warns he'll "return to the mountains" if negotiations over a legal framework for the demobilizations don't go his way.

So far they are. The U.S.-backed government appears to be doing all it can to help paramilitary commanders evade hard time for their human rights atrocities, reparations for the victims, or extradition for cocaine and heroin trafficking. "There is a real risk," Human Rights Watch reported in January, "that this demobilization process will leave the underlying structures of these violent groups intact, their illegally acquired assets untouched, and their abuses unpunished."

After more than two years of negotiations and ten ostensible demobilizations, paramilitaries have cut down on their massacres but have entrenched other illegal operations, from drug running to gasoline smuggling, from prostitution to extortion. The AUC, once an ideological outfit, is transforming into a quasi-legal mafia.

In the taxi's backseat, one of the former fighters knocks back his fifth brew with alarming speed, chucks the can out the window, and cracks open a sixth. The twenty-three-year-old is illiterate, his parents having pulled him from second grade to peddle gum on the streets of Cucuta.

The paramilitary movement took shape more than three decades ago when drug traffickers, ranchers, military officers, and businessmen began forming regional private armies. The most notorious, Death to Kidnappers, was formed in 1981 by drug-trafficking brothers Fabio, Jorge Luis, and Juan David Ochoa, whose sister was being held by one of the country's leftist guerrilla groups.

But the paramilitaries have rarely engaged in combat against the guerrillas. Instead, often working closely with government forces, they've focused on unarmed social movements, assassinating thousands of trade unionists, peasant leaders, human rights advocates, and politicians. "They've destroyed the legal left," says Hector Mondragon, economic adviser to a coalition of rural, black, and indigenous groups.

Paramilitaries have also carried out most of the war's civilian massacres, a major factor convincing three million Colombians to flee their homes since 1985. Now 61 percent of the nation's arable acreage is in the hands of 0.4 percent of landholders, according to a study by the Agustin Codazzi Geographic Institute and the Colombian Agriculture Research Corporation. Paramilitary chiefs themselves acquired more than twelve million acres abandoned by peasants between 1997 and 2003, according to a December report by the Consultancy for Human Rights and Displacement. Bolstering the land grabs, Uribe and his allies have removed teeth from agrarian reform laws, including a 1936 measure allowing public reallocation of parcels left idle.

Paramilitaries have played a key role in turning the narcotics trade into Colombia's largest export sector. The United States has requested extradition of at least seven paramilitary chiefs on drug-trafficking charges. They include Mancuso and AUC founder Carlos Castano, now missing. Both were indicted in 2002 for allegedly exporting more than seventeen tons of cocaine over the previous five years.

Across the country, the paramilitary movement has infiltrated city halls, provincial governments, and federal agencies, most notably the health care program and the attorney general's office. The infiltration helps them control a range of illegal activity. "Here in Cucuta, not a single kilo of coca is sold without their authorization," says Wilfredo Canizares, executive director of the Progress Foundation, a human rights group in that city. "They'll kill you."