Pubdate: Mon, 08 Apr 2002
Source: Newsweek International
Copyright: 2002 Newsweek, Inc.
Contact:  http://www.newsweek.com/nw-srv/printed/int/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/747
Author: Joseph Contreras

THE PARAMILITARY EFFECT

Salvatore Mancuso And His Right-Wing Militiamen Already Reign Supreme In 
Parts Of The Colombian Countryside. Now They Are Gaining Power In The 
Political Arena

April 8 issue - Salvatore Mancuso is a wanted man. The 37-year-old military 
chief of Colombia's outlawed right-wing militias was convicted in absentia 
last month of organizing armed "vigilante groups" and sentenced to 11 years 
in prison on charges arising from the November 1997 murder of a small-town 
mayor.

But in the humid lowlands of northwestern Colombia, where the country's 
ruthless paramilitary forces reign supreme, Mancuso is an untouchable 
warlord whom no one dares cross.

That crude fact of life seems to apply to the government of lame-duck 
President Andres Pastrana as well-despite two outstanding warrants for his 
arrest. "We have replaced the state in various areas," Mancuso told 
NEWSWEEK in an exclusive interview at a paramilitary camp two weeks ago. 
"We have had to arm and defend ourselves, we build schools and health 
clinics-all because the state has failed to fulfill its constitutional duties."

MANCUSO AND HIS estimated 8,000 comrades in arms have indeed become a state 
within a state in vast tracts of the Colombian countryside. The U.S. Drug 
Enforcement Agency says the militias fund their operations with 
cocaine-smuggling profits, an allegation Mancuso now disputes.

No one denies that the self-styled United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia 
(AUC) have acquired a military capability in recent years that puts them on 
a par with the country's more numerous and longer established communist 
guerrilla armies.

As Colombians from nearly all walks of life swing sharply to the right in 
outrage over the summary executions and kidnapping practices of the 
nominally Marxist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the six 
right-wing militias grouped under the AUC's umbrella banner have never 
wielded more power at home. "They have grown at such a rapid rate that they 
are now fast approaching the FARC," says counterinsurgency expert Thomas 
Marks of the Hawaii-based Academy of the Pacific. "The FARC has adopted the 
paramilitaries as their main enemy instead of the Colombian armed forces."

There is mounting evidence that the right-wing militias' power is no longer 
confined exclusively to the battlefield. Colombia held congressional 
elections in mid-March against the backdrop of hard- line presidential 
candidate Alvaro Uribe Velez's meteoric rise in opinion polls.

Dozens of pro-Uribe candidates won seats in both houses of the national 
legislature, and Mancuso issued an official communique hailing the results 
that, by his reckoning, delivered victory to more than one third of the 
paramilitary forces' preferred candidates.

Some of those congressmen-elect were political unknowns prior to the 
voting, and left-of-center politicians accused AUC leaders of restricting 
their freedom to campaign in areas under the militias' control. Interior 
Minister Armando Estrada expressed "grave" concern over the alleged 
infiltration of the National Congress by known paramilitary elements and 
their supporters. "If we don't confront the paramilitary forces head on, 
they will increasingly become the biggest threat facing the country," says 
Luis Alberto Moreno, Colombia's ambassador to the United States. "Three 
quarters of their money comes from drug trafficking, and they must be 
stopped at all costs."

Those warnings will likely go unheeded in the current political climate. 
The abrupt collapse of Pastrana's three-year-long peace process in February 
soured millions of ordinary Colombians on the notion of a negotiated 
settlement with the FARC. For many voters, the repeated peasant massacres 
and other human-rights atrocities carried out by the rightist archenemies 
of the FARC pale in significance alongside the guerrillas' defiant refusal 
to conclude a ceasefire agreement with the Pastrana government.

Salvatore Mancuso came to the antiguerrilla crusade relatively late in 
life. The husky, balding son of an Italian immigrant grew up in the 
sparsely populated cattle country of northwestern Colombia and took up 
ranching after studying in Bogota. He was kidnapped and held for ransom for 
three days in 1984 by a small Maoist guerrilla movement called the People's 
Liberation Army. Upon his release Mancuso remained on the sidelines of war 
for a time while guerrilla commanders rustled his cattle and demanded ever 
higher extortion payments from him and other ranchers.

By the late 1980s, Mancuso, then in his mid-20s, had reached his limit and 
joined the ranks of the then fledgling Self- Defense Forces of Cordoba and 
Uraba.

Founded by fellow paramilitary supremo Carlos Castano's older brother, 
Fidel, that ragtag rural militia drew many of its early members from the 
private antikidnapping forces of leading Colombian drug traffickers, like 
the late Medellin cartel kingpin Pablo Escobar. But as the FARC guerrillas 
grew in number and stepped up their abduction of rich and middle-class 
Colombians in the 1990s, a band of vigilantes evolved into a full-blown 
rebel movement of the right.

For now at least, the front runner in the presidential race seems content 
to keep Mancuso and his ilk at a healthy distance.

Uribe told NEWSWEEK last month that the paramilitary forces would have to 
lay down their arms as a precondition for talks with his government. In an 
interview conducted in the Paramillo Mountains near a paramilitary field 
hospital populated with land-mine victims, Mancuso echoed the candidate's 
assertion that no ties currently exist between Uribe and the AUC leadership.

It doesn't require a sophisticated student of Colombian politics to figure 
out who is the paramilitary choice in the May 26 presidential election. A 
pro-Uribe banner is prominently displayed on a wall near the entrance to 
one of Mancuso's cattle ranches in his native state of Cordoba. "Uribe is 
the political expression of the paramilitary agenda," says Gloria Cuartas, 
a former mayor of the Antioquia city of Apartado. Mancuso stops short of 
making an outright endorsement, but it's pretty clear where his sentiments 
lie. "The country is looking for a candidate who says what's on his mind 
and acts in accordance with that," Mancuso told NEWSWEEK. "Uribe has 
delivered a strong message, and people who are fed up with the same old 
story are supporting him."

It may be strictly a coincidence, but as Uribe has risen in the opinion 
surveys the right-wing militias have made a concerted effort to clean up 
their act. High-profile massacres of civilians attributed to AUC units have 
dropped sharply over the past six months.

Mancuso has also embarked on a public-relations campaign.

He has tried to turn aside Washington's allegations of paramilitary 
involvement in the drug trade, maintaining that his followers only assess 
informal "taxes" on coca farmers operating in areas under their control.

Earlier this year he publicly promised to execute no more than three 
victims at any one time. "In our national conference of last November we 
agreed to refrain from massacres," Mancuso says without a trace of irony. 
"The international community can count on the Self-Defense Forces in the 
battle against terrorism and drug trafficking."

Their friends and foes can certainly count on the right-wing militias to 
press the offensive against the 17,000-strong FARC guerrillas. While 
independent analysts place the AUC's armed fighters at roughly half the 
number of FARC foot soldiers, Mancuso told NEWSWEEK that the real figure is 
closer to 14,000-and by the year-end he hopes to have 26,000 men and women 
in his ranks.

Despite the Pastrana government's attempts to purge the armed forces of 
paramilitary sympathizers, human-rights groups say that some Colombian 
military officers continue to secretly assist militia field commanders in 
their operations against guerrilla forces.

As the country lurches toward total war, the paramilitary state within a 
state is bound to acquire ever greater clout and firepower-regardless of 
who becomes the next president of Colombia.
- ---
MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom