Pubdate: Fri, 26 Nov 2004
Source: Miami Herald (FL)
Copyright: 2004 The Miami Herald
Contact:  http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/262
Author: Steven Dudley
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/coke.htm (Cocaine)

PARAMILITARIES ALLY WITH REBELS FOR DRUG TRADE

Formerly Archenemies, Colombian Right-Wing Paramilitaries and Left-Wing 
Guerrillas Have Put Their Differences Aside, Working Together In The 
Illicit-Drug Trade

BOGOTA - In Colombia, drug trafficking and war can make for strange bedfellows.

In recent months, U.S. and Colombian authorities have noticed an alarming 
amount of direct contact between right-wing paramilitary groups and 
left-wing guerrillas from the country's largest rebel group, the 
Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC. They are not fighting, 
authorities say, but working or doing business together.

The motives for this cooperation vary. In some cases, the groups have 
teamed up to fight a mutual enemy encroaching on an important drug- 
trafficking corridor. In others, they've traded drug-processing materials 
for coca. They've also reached nonaggression pacts to facilitate the 
transport of illicit drugs.

"Every day we see that the border that existed between guerrillas and 
paramilitary groups has dissipated because of the drug-trafficking 
interests, the need to survive," said Col. Oscar Naranjo, director of 
DIJIN, the police's investigative unit.

POSSIBLE SEA CHANGE

The contact among these groups represents a shift in the dynamic of 
Colombia's war, which has left 40,000 dead in the past decade. The two 
groups have long been considered archenemies, attacking each other and 
sometimes suspected supporters of the other side.

This year, according to Colombian army statistics, the two have barely 
engaged in battle. While a global nonaggression pact between them does not 
seem possible at this point and these alliances are often short- lived, 
officials and analysts warn that Colombia may be entering a new phase in 
the war, the results of which remain difficult to project.

"They're hardly fighting each other anymore," said Sergio Jaramillo, the 
director of Ideas for Peace, a Colombian think-tank. "This idea of the 
great war between them everywhere, I don't know if its over, but they seem 
to be busy with other things at the moment."

Paramilitary groups emerged in the early 1980s as a response to the leftist 
rebels' excessive kidnapping and extortion in the countryside. In the past 
10 years, their ranks have grown to 15,000 fighters and they have competed 
for territory in nearly one-third of the countryside. The guerrillas have 
nearly 20,000 fighters.

Some of the first financiers of the right-wing groups were drug traffickers 
who also were large land owners in the regions the paramilitaries sought to 
protect. These days, both groups rely on funding from all aspects of the 
drug trade, but the leftist rebels mostly control territory where the crop 
is grown, while the paramilitaries tend to focus on refining coca paste 
into cocaine before export.

"You can say that they both do a bit of everything," said Jaramillo. "The 
FARC has a larger control of the production of the paste. The paramilitary 
are further up the chain. So it's just natural that they would get into deals."

IN PURSUIT OF PROFITS

In one particularly stark case, police intelligence noted that a 
paramilitary group in the southern province of Meta run by a man named 
Miguel Arroyave was giving the FARC chemicals used to process coca leaves 
into paste, in exchange for paste. It's not clear whether this arrangement 
continues because Arroyave was assassinated in September.

"If you can maximize your profits, you're going to go to the person that 
provides you the cheapest and best quality merchandise and a relatively 
seamless arrangement," said one U.S. counterdrug official who asked to 
remain anonymous. "So if it happens that someone . . . in the Arroyave 
organization taps a coca-base supplier who is affiliated to the FARC, he is 
doing it . . . for three reasons: He is getting a good price, good quality 
and [in] a seamless fashion."

The official said the U.S. government has received "multiple reports" of 
similar cooperation between paramilitaries and guerrillas in the last six 
months.

"It's just the basic rule of economics," the official said.

Those who watch this conflict closely say the government's recent military 
push into guerrilla- and paramilitary-controlled territories may be 
contributing to their cooperation.

President Alvaro Uribe has sent thousands of troops into rebel-held areas 
in the south and launched peace talks with several paramilitary factions, 
while targeting other factions not participating in the negotiations.

"Now that the Colombian government has launched an offensive in areas 
considered strategic strongholds of the paramilitary groups and the 
guerrillas, this has forced them to establish more tactical alliances, 
truces and mutual participation in the [drug trafficking] business," the 
DIJIN's Naranjo said.

Fights between paramilitary groups and drug traffickers also have made for 
quirky alliances.

Colombian authorities say that in the southwestern province of Valle, drug 
trafficker and former paramilitary ally Wilber Varela is fighting a rival 
trafficker, Diego Montoya, with the help of the FARC. Montoya has allied 
himself with the paramilitaries.

In another region in the southwest, a paramilitary faction reportedly 
joined forces with the FARC to fight off a rival paramilitary group.

"These are more local arrangements," said Alfredo Rangel, a former military 
consultant with the Ministry of Defense. "The FARC is trying to divide the 
paramilitaries and the narcos."

DRIVEN BY FARC

Other factors may be at work as well. Colombian researcher Ricardo Vargas, 
who has written several books on drug trafficking, says the FARC has sought 
to eliminate the middlemen in the drug trade and made direct contact with 
the paramilitary groups that process the drug.

Police intelligence, for example, has found evidence that paramilitary 
groups along the Pacific coast have signed nonaggression pacts with the 
FARC in order to allow for easy transit of the product.

Rangel downplays the significance of the cooperation and says it will not 
have long-term repercussions. He said most arrangements seem geared toward 
facilitating the drug trade.

But Jaramillo is not so sure.

"Because of their nature, the FARC is very [weak] in the cities," Jaramillo 
said. "But if they were in a possible alliance with say, narcos and bits of 
paramilitaries, well the narcos really have very good intelligence in the 
cities and obviously the paramilitaries as well. So that's a really 
worrying thing."
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