Pubdate: Mon, 16 Sep 2002
Source: Washington Post (DC)
Page A01
Copyright: 2002 The Washington Post Company
Contact:  http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/491
Author: Scott Wilson, Washington Post Foreign Service
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/coke.htm (Cocaine)

COCAINE TRADE CAUSES RIFTS IN COLOMBIAN WAR

Paramilitary Discord Imperils Anti-Drug Plan, Peace Efforts

IN THE ABIBE MOUNTAINS, Colombia -- Drug trafficking has fractured 
Colombia's paramilitary army into a collection of potent regional factions 
that disagree over whether the financial benefit of protecting the 
country's vast cocaine trade outweighs the political costs and internal 
corruption it has brought the group.

The split within the 15,000-member private army -- a leading player in 
Colombia's brutal civil war that derives a large portion of its financing 
from this country's drug trade -- significantly complicates President 
Alvaro Uribe's search for peace by adding at least one other armed group to 
a conflict that already features three irregular forces. It could also 
spell trouble for the U.S. anti-drug strategy here, particularly the aerial 
herbicide-spraying program that tacitly relies on paramilitary support in 
key coca-producing regions.

The group's fracturing appears similar to what occurred here in the early 
1990s when U.S. and Colombian authorities dismantled the country's two 
large cocaine cartels. Hundreds of smaller drug- smuggling operations that 
were more difficult to identify instantly emerged in their place, sending 
cocaine production soaring and giving the guerrilla and paramilitary forces 
a wider role in the trade. Now the paramilitary group, better armed than 
those cartels and with deep ties to the state itself, appears to be 
splintering in the same way.

In an extraordinary meeting Sept. 5 in this mountain range in northern 
Colombia, top commanders of the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, or 
AUC as the paramilitary umbrella organization is known, gathered to close 
gaps that have emerged recently in their ranks over kidnapping and drug 
trafficking by their members. But they were only partially successful, and 
the once-solid federation of regional paramilitary armies remains under 
intense strain.

The group's most charismatic and powerful leader, Carlos Castano, withdrew 
his own regional forces from the national organization two months ago after 
he discovered that a drug-and-kidnapping ring run by ex-police officials 
within the AUC had been responsible for the July 2000 kidnapping of a 
prominent Venezuelan businessman. A second major faction, the Central 
Bolivar Bloc, had also split from the group after ignoring Castano's orders 
to abandon drug ties.

Colombia's drug trade supplies 90 percent of the cocaine that reaches the 
United States, and much of the financial fuel for a civil conflict that 
began decades ago as a political struggle and last year claimed 3,500 lives.

The war pits the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the 
smaller National Liberation Army (ELN) -- two 38-year-old guerrilla 
movements fighting to replace the government with a Marxist state -- 
against the AUC, which regards itself as an ally of the Colombian 
government and its U.S. patrons. The AUC provides well-equipped combat 
troops in areas where the thinly stretched Colombian army cannot maintain a 
presence.

Castano, who has endorsed the U.S. anti-drug strategy here even though his 
group profits from the trade, said in an interview that reunifying the AUC 
is imperative to ensure that internal differences do not provide a military 
opening for the FARC. But while the summit managed to rejoin several of the 
group's military elements, it also formalized a split within the 
organization that will leave Colombia's two largest coca-producing regions 
in the hands of paramilitary commanders whose commitment to the Uribe 
government and U.S. anti-drug policy is unclear.

"The internal divisions are not a matter of our fast growth, but of the 
penetration of narco-trafficking that managed to corrupt and buy some of 
our regional commanders," Castano said between meetings with AUC leaders 
under a thatched pavilion here 300 miles north of the capital, Bogota. "We 
are reforming and restructuring the organization. Of course, this leads to 
crisis. But we are coping very well with it, and instead of growing in 
number, we are waiting until we have a way of maintaining our people with 
resources that do not come from narco- trafficking."

The meeting, held over five days in this lush mountain range amid rings of 
paramilitary security forces, came as the Justice Department considers 
whether to indict Castano on drug-trafficking charges and seek his 
extradition to the United States for trial. Castano offered to turn himself 
over to U.S. officials earlier this year along with 15 of the country's 
largest drug traffickers. But the offer attracted little interest from the 
United States, mostly because the AUC is classified as a foreign terrorist 
organization, making such contacts politically unfeasible.

The Justice Department has already obtained indictments against several 
FARC leaders on drug-trafficking charges, although none is a member of its 
ruling directorate. The indictments and extradition requests are largely 
symbolic, because none of the guerrilla or paramilitary leaders is under 
arrest or is likely to be captured anytime soon in a loosely governed 
country twice the size of France. FARC and AUC leaders have acknowledged 
collecting taxes from coca growers, but have denied facilitating the export 
of cocaine from Colombia.

In the interview, Castano reiterated his willingness to turn himself over 
to U.S. officials if indicted, saying that although it would be "unfair," 
he would "go and face the U.S. justice system with only one condition: that 
they allow my family to live there, because if I leave them here they will 
be killed." Later in the interview, however, he suggested that he would not 
leave Colombia until the war was over.

The paramilitary split has significant implications for the two-year- old 
U.S. anti-drug strategy known as Plan Colombia, given how the policy has 
unfolded so far. The $1.3 billion mostly military aid package was designed 
to target the drug trade as a way of depriving the armed groups of their 
chief funding source. A rule change approved recently by Congress allows 
the anti-drug aid to be used directly against the guerrillas and 
paramilitary forces, not just the drug crops and labs they protect.

The U.S. strategy seeks to discourage small farmers from producing coca by 
paying them to grow legal crops, while spraying herbicide on the land of 
those who refuse to do so. The "alternative development" portion of the 
program has proved ineffective in the security vacuum existing in much of 
the country, so the controversial herbicide spraying has become even more 
important. U.S. plans call for 300,000 acres of drug crops to be sprayed 
this year, up 30 percent from last year.

As a rule, the FARC has fired on the herbicide-spraying planes in areas it 
controls. But paramilitary forces, which in the past year have driven the 
FARC from many of the southern coca fields where Plan Colombia has been 
most intensive, have allowed the spraying as part of Castano's effort to 
ally himself with U.S. interests.

Now, though, the Central Bolivar Bloc, the paramilitary force that has 
split from the AUC, controls the coca fields in the southern Bolivar 
province and in Putumayo province, where the U.S. anti-drug strategy has 
been concentrated. Those two regions -- the top coca-producing areas in the 
country -- generate millions of dollars a month for the group. An adviser 
to Castano described some of the breakaway group's middle management as 
"very narco," suggesting that they may no longer allow planes to spray 
their crops.

"We've seen what, from the outside, looks like the political disintegration 
of the AUC over its drug-producing and other activities carried out by its 
constituent groups," said a Bush administration official. "It's still a 
foreign terrorist organization, a drug- producing organization, and whether 
it does a little or a lot, it's not going to change our view."

The summit offered a rare look at how the group is struggling to forge a 
political identity in order to begin peace talks with the new Uribe 
administration -- and, perhaps, give Castano and his fellow AUC leaders a 
chance at amnesty. In doing so, Castano has jettisoned a large part of the 
organization, reducing his own forces from 15,000 to 10,500 armed members 
and setting a course for much slower growth.

Much of the AUC's current troubles can be explained by the importance it 
has placed on drug trafficking to finance what has been its rapid expansion 
of recent years. Fed by increasing middle- and upper-class anxiety over the 
course of the war, the AUC's tripling in size over the past three years has 
weakened Castano's hold over the group, spurred human rights abuses and 
likely made his past pledge to disarm members once peace is achieved an 
unrealistic one.

Those troubles were on display at the summit. Although 15 regional 
commanders and the group's three national leaders signed an accord 
reunifying the group, the 2,500-member Central Bolivar Bloc refused to do 
so. Salvatore Mancuso, the AUC's top military commander, labeled bloc 
members "dissidents" during an interview and said they "must stop using the 
name if they continue with narco-trafficking activity."

But the agreement does not commit what remains of the AUC to ending its 
drug ties. It limits the group to "collecting a tax on coca producers in 
zones where it is the predominant economy," a caveat criticized by a 
representative of the Catholic Church who attended the summit to begin what 
Castano hopes will become a formal peace process with the government. 
Castano said severing all drug ties would put the group at a severe 
disadvantage with the FARC, which imposes taxes on areas it controls.

The AUC will continue levying taxes in rich coca-producing areas in Meta 
and Norte de Santander provinces, as well as Arauca province, along the 
eastern border with Venezuela, which has emerged as a new center of the 
drug trade. But Mancuso said the AUC will no longer allow drug traffickers 
to use the paramilitary group as protection for its cocaine shipments, a 
trend that he said had put big money into the hands of regional commanders 
and helped fracture the group.

In addition to losing 2,500 troops to the breakaway Central Bolivar Bloc, 
the remaining AUC will demobilize 2,000 of its members as part of a 
cost-cutting plan that includes teaching troops to be thriftier with 
ammunition, reducing monthly salaries and recruiting fewer new members.

Mancuso, a former cattle rancher from the northern province of Cordoba, 
said the AUC costs $4.5 million a month to run. But he said he does not 
plan to raise the monthly fees that ranchers and other business interests 
pay the AUC for protection.

"We are going to have to maintain the number of members we have at the 
moment, growing really slowly and only in the regions where it is 
necessary," he said.
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MAP posted-by: Terry Liittschwager