COLOMBIA DEATH SQUADS SET SIGHTS ON PEACE
Date Reported: Monday, April 03, 2000
Incident Type: SECURITY
Country: BOGOTA, COLOMBIA
Colombia's ultra-right death squads are demanding a role in peace talks between the government and Marxist rebels so they can confront their rivals on the political stage and seek amnesty after decades of murder. Analysts say the outlawed paramilitary gangs' campaign for political recognition is dictated by their paymasters, a web of regional and national power elites fearful that their interests may be at risk in year-old negotiations between the government and Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) guerrillas. The FARC, Latin America's largest surviving 1960s rebel army, has called for sweeping socialist reforms including a radical redistribution of land and wealth and an end to free-market economic policies. Feared paramilitary leader Carlos Castano pressed his claim for a seat at the negotiating table in an interview in early March with the Caracol television network. Wearing a dress shirt and tie in place of his trademark combat fatigues, he showed his face to cameras for the first time. Castano followed that with a communique to President Andres Pastrana offering to scale back attacks on leftists and suspected rebel sympathizers if he was included in talks to end the three-decade-old war, which has claimed more than 35,000 lives in just 10 years. If invited to the talks, analysts say, he is likely both to bargain for a generous amnesty for his estimated 5,000 largely working-class fighters and to defend the economic and political interests of his staunchly conservative financial backers. But Pastrana may face a firestorm of international protest if he sits down publicly with gangs that have massacred thousands of civilians in an increasingly dirty war, allegedly backed by state security forces.'TWO ROOMS, TWO TABLES'
The paramilitary groups could, however, be incorporated in behind-the-scenes talks as a counterbalance to radical leftist demands by the guerrillas, opening the way to an unofficial "two rooms, two tables" model, the analysts say. "Castano is a puppet on the strings of conflicting interests, he is not independent. Castano may have some regional independence but nationally he is not strategically independent in either military or political terms. He is dependent on his financial backers," one senior Western diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity, told Reuters. "The government cannot sit down in public and talk with Castano, but deals cut with the FARC could be passed across to the AUC (United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia) for approval. That would be a kind of two rooms, two tables scenario." The emergence of Colombia's death squads can be traced to U.S.-inspired rural intelligence networks set up by the army in the late 1960s and 1970s and outlawed in 1989 as they began to spin out of state control. Other paramilitary groups began as private militias in the pay of powerful drug mobs in the '80s. Castano, a former army guide and founding member of the Peasant Self-Defense Forces of Cordoba and Uraba (ACCU), is credited with unifying Colombia's disparate paramilitary groups under the umbrella of the AUC in early 1997. He has also been accused of being a major drug trafficker, shipping out cocaine along the same clandestine routes used for arms smuggling. Although the death squads have gained tactical autonomy to decide how and when to attack groups accused of siding with the rebels, they are still accused of having close links with the military and depend on financial backing from civilian groups.SELF-STYLED MIDDLE-CLASS CRUSADER
"Paramilitary forces find a ready support base within the military and police as well as local civilian elites," the U.S. State Department said in its 1999 report on human rights in Colombia. Castano, whose fighters include peasant farmers, unemployed rural youths, former contract killers from the drug cartels, retired soldiers and mercenaries, has sought to portray himself as a crusader for the middle classes, not the elites. "This isn't an apparatus of the ultra-right nor is it an apparatus of the economic groups. ... The self-defense groups are defending the interests of Colombia's middle classes, the rice growers, the banana growers, the cotton grower, the small farmer," he said in the Caracol interview. "The self defense forces are a reality that cannot be ignored. ... Inevitably we will all end up sitting at the same (talks) table." Analysts said he would try to negotiate a broad-based amnesty for his men and some kind of "social democratic" rural development projects, such as a limited agrarian reform and better access to education and health care. But critics say the interview with Caracol, owned by Colombia's largest industrial conglomerate, is a sign that Castano's overriding role is still to defend the economic and political interests of the upper classes. "The bosses of big business are opening their powerful TV networks to try to clean up the face of fascism," the small Communist Party, close political allies of the FARC, said in a March 2 communique.BIG BUSINESS BUILDS BRIDGES
Robin Kirk, Colombia specialist with Washington-based Human Rights Watch, believes big business may not necessarily be backing Castano directly but wants to build bridges with all sides in what has become an increasingly expensive conflict. Experts estimate the long conflict is now soaking up the equivalent of 4 percent of gross domestic product per year. "For the first time in a long time this war is affecting business, and they (business leaders) have a stake in figuring out some way to solve the problem," Kirk said, pointing to a meeting between 14 senior industrialists and FARC commanders in the southeast in mid-March. Castano's interview seemed to woo some sectors of the middle-classes fed up with a rising spiral of rebel attacks on towns ever closer to Bogota and the growing practice of mass kidnappings along the nation's highways. "The dangerous charm that some people see in the paramilitary chief is largely due to the attitude of the guerrillas," respected columnist Daniel Samper wrote in the leading newspaper El Tiempo in March. But charm seems unlikely to win over the international community, outraged by the recent wave of paramilitary massacres across northern Bolivar and Sucre provinces that claimed more than 50 lives within a month. Human rights groups and even the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights have expressed growing frustration at a series of unfulfilled government pledges to crack down on the paramilitary gangs. Congressman Antonio Navarro Wolff, a former ideologue with the now-disbanded M-19 leftist guerrilla group, feared Pastrana would pay a "high political cost internationally" if he chose to negotiate publicly with Castano. The FARC too have warned they would not accept paramilitary representatives at talks, but failure to negotiate with Castano could prove equally dangerous. "If Castano is ignored the paramilitaries could become the next major drug cartel," the Western diplomat said, "much more effective and better trained than its predecessors."
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