Lawmaker Urges Colombia To Seize Paramilitary Drug Money

[Say_What]

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BOGOTA (AP)--An opposition congressman warned the government Wednesday against allowing leaders of Colombia's demobilizing paramilitary factions to keep their fortunes earned through drug trafficking.

"These funds obtained through cocaine or the use of terror are illicit," Gustavo Petro, leader of the Democratic Pole party, told The Associated Press Wednesday.

On Tuesday night, Petro denounced on the floor of Congress legislation that President Alvaro Uribe is trying to push through to help pave the way for the disbanding of the right-wing militias, saying it could become "the biggest-ever money laundering process."

Petro demanded the government explain what it intends to do with the paramilitary leaders' estimated $5 billion in cash and six million hectares of land. The outlawed paramilitary forces were created in the 1980s to battle leftist rebels, and wound up financing themselves - like the guerrillas - through the trafficking of tons of cocaine to the U.S. and beyond.

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Beware of narco-chieftains bearing gifts

It sounded like a heart-warming story from Colombia, a place that doesn't generate many of them. In a carefully stage-managed performance, more than 800 uniformed fighters gathered in a trade-show palace last week and handed over their assault rifles. The ceremony was hailed as a triumph by the government of hard-line President Alvaro Uribe Velez, who hopes it is a first step in ending nearly 40 years of internal war.

The camouflage-clad army was a right-wing paramilitary unit called the Cacique Nutibara Bloc -- one of dozens in the federation known as the United Self-Defence Forces of Colombia (AUC). Set up to combat left-wing guerrillas in the 1980s, this ruthless organization contains some of the world's most vicious killers -- people with as much blood on their hands as any Middle Eastern suicide-bombing mastermind. The AUC is responsible for gruesome massacres of peasants and villagers, land seizures and protection rackets throughout wide areas of the Colombian countryside. The Nutibara group operated in the outskirts of Medellin, the country's third-largest city and the scene of bitter turf wars between rival gangs.

Mr. Uribe's hope is that all 13,000 paramilitaries will turn themselves in by the end of 2005. That, he believes, will make it easier to conduct an all-out assault on the two guerrilla armies waging war against his government: the 18,000-strong Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the 5,000-member National Liberation Army (ELN). In theory, with the paramilitaries out of the way, there will no longer be any reason for Colombians to seek protection from the guerrillas.

A paramilitary surrender would also remove a major source of embarrassment for successive Colombian governments and the armed forces, which have had close ties to the paramilitaries in several conflict zones. In More Terrible Than Death, a perceptive, poetic book on Colombia's conflict, human-rights investigator Robin Kirk recounts a colonel's description of the nudge-nudge army-paramilitary relationship: "It's like the affair between a married man and a mistress. One has one, but doesn't bring her home to meet your family." Without the stigma of paramilitary atrocities, it would be easier for Mr. Uribe and his generals to argue the case for aid in Washington and other foreign capitals.

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[alexwcovington]

1. Ah, the simple pleasures of the drug war.

Keepin the booty. Yeah, yeah, the booty.