Pubdate: Thu, 05 Apr 2001
Source: Washington Post (DC)
Copyright: 2001 The Washington Post Company
Contact:  http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/491
Author: Scott Wilson, Washington Post Foreign Service

A PLAYER'S BID IN DRUG WAR

Paramilitary Chief Offers To Deliver Top Colombian Dealers

BOGOTA, Colombia, April 4 -- The leader of Colombia's paramilitary army has 
offered to help arrange the surrender of as many as 20 of Colombia's top 
drug traffickers wanted for trial in the United States.

Carlos Castano, commander of the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia 
(AUC), said his suggestion, if carried out, would fundamentally alter the 
multibillion-dollar war on drugs, creating a de facto alliance between 
himself and the U.S. government.

But it remains unclear whether the idea has any chance of being put into 
practice; Castano's organization and Colombia's leftist guerrilla groups 
derive much of their income from taxing and protecting the production and 
movement of cocaine and heroin.

U.S. and Colombian officials familiar with the drug trade said Castano's 
proposal has merit in theory. But they expressed deep skepticism that he 
would part with the millions of dollars he receives from the drug trade at 
a time when his army is growing dramatically, and suggested he may be 
trying to cut off revenue for his guerrilla enemies.

"The motivation for Castano is simple," said Gonzalo de Francisco, 
President Andres Pastrana's chief adviser on Plan Colombia, the president's 
U.S.-backed anti-drug program. "He is saying: The money that I don't 
control is money for my enemy."

The U.S. and Colombian officials said Castano's overture may also be a ploy 
to burnish his image -- part of an effort to establish himself as a part of 
Colombia's political scene -- at a time when U.S. officials are considering 
listing his army as a terrorist organization for its ties to the drug trade.

Castano said that is not his intention. In a telephone interview this week, 
he said eight to 10 of Colombia's largest drug traffickers are ready to 
submit to the U.S. justice system after months of secret talks that he has 
held with them at his jungle camp in northern Colombia. Colombia's drug 
traffickers traditionally have fought the idea of extradition fiercely. But 
Castano said he has told the men, whose enterprises benefit the leftist 
guerrilla insurgencies more than his own, that they must dismantle their 
operations and leave the country or face assassination as military targets.

Castano has contacted a Miami lawyer, Joaquin Perez, to sound out U.S. 
officials on whether they would be willing to take custody of as many as 20 
drug traffickers, perhaps in Panama, a short flight from Castano's 
headquarters. There have been media reports of similar negotiations last 
year between the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration and Castano, but the 
DEA has denied those talks took place.

At the heart of Castano's proposal is his belief that Colombia's $6 billion 
annual drug trade is driven less by the enormous U.S. market for illegal 
drugs than by a more basic dynamic within Colombia. By eliminating the 
largest domestic drug cartels, which buy the raw material used to make 
cocaine and heroin from small farmers, Castano argues, the demand for coca 
and poppy crops would shrink because those farmers have no exporting 
capability of their own.

"The biggest consumers -- these narco-traffickers -- are right here in 
Colombia," said Castano, who this week dispatched a letter outlining the 
proposal to U.S. Ambassador Anne W. Patterson and the heads of U.S. law 
enforcement and intelligence agencies here. "This problem is ours. The 
Colombian conflict is fed by narco-trafficking. It cannot be stopped while 
it exists, and now we have a group of major narco-traffickers ready to turn 
themselves over to the United States."

The proposal comes at an important moment for Castano and the United 
States, which is sending $1.3 billion here over the next two years as part 
of Plan Colombia. While an intensive aerial spraying program has already 
killed more than 50,000 acres of coca -- about a fifth of Colombia's total 
crop of the raw material for cocaine -- the program's financial assistance 
component, designed to encourage Colombian farmers to trade illegal crops 
for legal ones, has been slow in starting.

A member of the AUC's directorate who goes by the name Samuel said that 
eliminating the major drug rings would encourage farmers to give up their 
illegal crops, and Plan Colombia then could be reconfigured to help farmers 
recover.

But such a deal would be difficult to reach with Castano, whose army has 
not been granted political recognition by the Colombian government. As 
chief of a paramilitary army that Colombian officials say killed more than 
983 civilians last year, Castano has been labeled by U.S. officials and 
international groups as perhaps the single biggest obstacle to peace in 
Colombia and its most prolific human rights violator. He faces more than 20 
warrants for his arrest, on charges that include murdering human rights 
workers.

The U.S. State Department may soon list the AUC as an international 
terrorist organization because of its ties to the drug trade, which Castano 
has explained are necessary because the leftist guerrilla movements he 
battles rely on drug money to finance military operations. The two largest 
guerrilla groups -- the 18,000-member Revolutionary Armed Forces of 
Colombia (FARC) and the 5,000-member National Liberation Army (ELN) -- 
appear on the State Department terrorist list.

U.S. and Colombian officials say Castano is right in saying that the FARC 
benefits far more from drug proceeds than do the paramilitary fighters, and 
therefore any blow to the drug trade would hurt the guerrilla insurgency 
more than the AUC. U.S. officials estimate that the FARC makes $500 million 
a year from the drug trade.

Since Colombia's two most powerful drug cartels, based in Medellin and 
Cali, were dismantled in the early 1990s, atomizing the drug trade in a way 
that has made fighting it more difficult, the FARC has inserted itself 
deeply into the process. The guerrilla army makes money from the internal 
coca trade seven ways, from charging to protect processing labs and jungle 
airstrips to taxing coca base and cocaine before it leaves the country.

Some of Colombia's bloodiest battles over the past year have been the 
result of the AUC's forced entry into the drug trade. Castano contends that 
most of his money comes from private contributions from cattle ranchers and 
other supporters, although at least 20 percent comes directly from the drug 
trade.

Castano was a leader of a brutal paramilitary army formed by his older 
brother, Fidel, in the late 1980s. The group eventually served as the 
protection force for Pablo Escobar, then head of the Medellin cartel. But 
the Castano brothers turned against Escobar, allegedly disturbed by his war 
against the Colombian state, and were instrumental in a U.S.-backed manhunt 
that resulted in Escobar's 1993 death.

Since then, the big Colombian cartels have been smashed, but Colombian 
police have identified roughly 220 smaller drug fiefdoms that have proven 
highly difficult to root out and now account for as much as 90 percent of 
the world's cocaine supply.

A U.S. official here with long experience in the anti-drug effort said 
Castano has the military capability to capture or kill the leading drug 
traffickers in Colombia, who maintain a much lower profile than their 
predecessors and no longer have large security forces.

"These guys [AUC] were their armed protection. This is the dynamic that has 
changed here over the past 10 years," the official said. "But it's the rest 
I can't swallow. I think they both [FARC and AUC] need the drug money. The 
profit margin is incredible."
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