Pubdate: Fri, 25 May 2001
Source: Christian Science Monitor (US)
Section: Front page
Copyright: 2001 The Christian Science Publishing Society
Contact:  http://www.csmonitor.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/83
Author: Howard LaFranchi, Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

BOGOTA'S THREAT FROM THE RIGHT

BOGOTA -- A chilling New Year's resolution echoed through Barrancabermeja, 
an industrial city in Colombia's north.

As 2001 dawned, armed paramilitary groups put out the word that they had a 
hit list of 400 people in the city, including union leaders, leftist 
guerrillas and their suspected sympathizers, and common thugs.

Five months later, they've kept their word. After a wave of violence in 
which gun-wielding bands took over several city neighborhoods and went 
house to house searching for their victims, more than 200 of the targets 
are dead, and others have fled.

The terror is evidence of the rising power of right-wing armed groups in 
Colombia's prolonged civil conflict.

"The growth of the paramilitaries is a dangerous example of another illegal 
force expanding and shifting into a kind of legality," says Fernando 
Cubides, a political analyst at Bogota's National University of Colombia.

But even as Barrancabermeja officials condemn them, the groups rule parts 
of the city unchallenged.

The same equivocal position has held at the national level: Colombia's 
leaders have insisted they were getting tough with the "paras," yet the 
illegal groups have for more than a decade often acted as handmaid of the 
country's armed forces.

But now, "there's a growing realization that the paramilitaries pose a 
threat, as the guerrillas do, to democratic stability in Colombia," says a 
US Embassy official in Bogota.

Yet to some citizens, weary of four decades of violence, partly committed 
by leftist guerrilla organizations and often involving the country's 
narcotics trade, paramilitaries can offer an illusion of order in a lawless 
land.

"Socially there is as yet no stigma" against supporting the paramilitaries 
within many social sectors, the US official says - just as it was once 
acceptable for some sectors of Colombian society to associate with drug 
traffickers.

Many people in Barrancabermeja lament the city's recent violence, but 
quickly add that the streets are safer now.

A growing number of rural areas once dominated by either the FARC or the 
ELN, Colombia's largest leftist guerrilla organizations, are now in "para" 
hands.

A hotel maid in the far-south jungle town of Puerto Asis says with a smile 
- - though her husband was killed by paramilitaries a decade ago - that her 
neighborhood is safer now because the FARC was chased out by "the boys" - 
meaning paramilitaries.

With the Colombian Defense Ministry placing total membership in 
paramilitary groups at more than 8,100 - up from less than 6,000 just last 
year and less than 2,000 as recently as 1993 - defense officials are 
suddenly sounding alarms about the "self-defense groups" becoming the 
Colombian state's biggest threat.

The Army says 873 civilians were killed in the first four months of the 
year by the country's armed groups, the majority by paramilitaries. More 
than 40 union leaders have been assassinated over the same period.

But the government's consternation over paramilitaries can be explained by 
more than statistics.

Evidence of ties between certain battalions of the armed forces and the 
paramilitaries continues to blacken Colombia's reputation in the eyes of 
foreign governments and international human rights groups.

Last week, for example, Colombia's People's Defender's Office found that an 
April massacre by paramilitaries of at least 22 farmers in the tiny rural 
community of Naya (another 20 remain missing) looked suspicious because of 
the close proximity of an Army battalion.

But some key recent arrests of paramilitary leaders, including Francisco 
Javier Correa Gonzalez, thought to be the head of paramilitary operations 
in Barrancabermeja, have started to give the Army more credibility.

Still, despite a few well-publicized cases of military officials jailed for 
working with paramilitaries, the government is not doing enough, critics say.

Some observers say the paramilitaries are more autonomous from the 
government than just a few years ago - a position the guerrillas are 
particularly loath to accept. "The guerrillas' position is that 
paramilitarism is an annex of the government, and I think they're mistaken, 
there's more autonomy than that," says Carlos Lozano Guillen, editor of the 
Colombian Communist Party daily La Voz.

Officials also worry that the paramilitaries could trigger a return to the 
urban terror that Colombia endured in the late 1980s and early 1990s at the 
hands of the drug gangs that some of today's paramilitaries were defending. 
Recent bombings in Cali and Medellin, and an unexploded bomb found hidden 
in a truck in a busy section of Bogota, heighten this concern.

The paramilitaries are also heavily involved in Colombia's drug trade, 
reflecting their origins in the 1980s, when United Self-Defense Forces of 
Colombia (AUC) leader Carlos Castano - whose father was kidnapped and 
killed by the FARC -- formed groups to defend the lands of the country's 
then-dominant cartels.

Interviews with former FARC soldiers, paramilitary soldiers, and evidence 
that hundreds of former FARC soldiers have switched camps because of better 
pay offered by the AUC, offer evidence of the paramilitaries' financing 
from the the coca trade, kidnappings, and extortion.

The government is making some efforts to stop paramilitary growth. At peace 
talks between the government and the FARC, the two sides earlier this month 
set up a commission to find ways to cut paramilitarism's appeal. But even 
commission members say the job won't be easy, because it will require an 
acknowledgment by both the government and guerrillas that they played a 
role in the rise of the paramilitaries.

Paramilitaries retain influence because they are allowed to operate with 
impunity, says Mr. Guillen. Only the government can change that, he adds.

Barrancabermeja brings the issue into painful focus. "There are 5,000 
soldiers stationed there and patrolling the streets, yet the paramilitaries 
are able to assassinate who they will and stay on to take control," Guillen 
says. "What besides impunity explains that?"
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MAP posted-by: Jo-D