Pubdate: Mon, 18 Feb 2002 Source: MSNBC (US Web) Copyright: 2002 MSNBC Contact: http://www.mapinc.org/media/938 Website: http://msnbc.com/news/ Author: Steven Ambrus 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. - --- MAP posted-by: Doc-Hawk