RIGHTS-COLOMBIA: Paramilitary Chief Willing to Talk with Rebels

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Yadira Ferrer

BOGOTA, Aug 28 1999 (IPS) - The chief of Colombia’s right-wing paramilitary umbrella group, Carlos Castaño, announced Tuesday that he was willing to engage in direct dialogue with the guerrillas in search of a peace agreement.

Castaño, the head of the United Self-Defence units of Colombia (AUC), said that if necessary he would talk with Manuel Marulanda, the leader of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) – the largest rebel group – to discuss “a model of a country with room for all of us.”

Castaño, the leader of around 5,000 members of paramilitary groups, said the armed conflict had been “degraded,” and suggested a multilateral ceasefire.

In statements to the local radio station Radionet, he denied responsibility for the Aug 13 assassination of one of Colombia’s leading humourists, Jaime Garzón.

He blamed Garzón’s death on forces keen on torpedoing any peace initiative, who he said had infiltrated the army, the rebel groups and his own organisation.

But Castaño accepted responsibility for the massacres in which around 50 peasant farmers – who he described as “guerrillas dressed as civilians” – were killed over the weekend in four villages of the municipality of Tibú in the northeastern department of Norte de Santander.

Castaño said massacres were “not the best route toward peace,” and proposed preventing further mass killings and kidnappings of civilians through “an accord on humanitarian law.”

Since May, the department of Norte de Santander, located in the jungle region of Catatumbo on the border with Venezuela, has become one of the main pockets of clashes between rebels and paramilitaries fighting for control over the territory.

Security agents say the irregular armed groups are disputing control over 50,000 hectares of coca crops and mineral resources, as well as the border with the Venezuelan states of Táchira and Zulia, into which the groups stage incursions to kidnap landowners and smuggle arms.

Castaño added that he would have no problem meeting with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez to discuss the civil war, as long as the Colombian government approved the meeting.

Chávez announced Monday that he was willing to meet with Colombia’s paramilitaries, if necessary, in an effort to keep the conflict from leaking across the border into his country.

The Colombian government, meanwhile, reiterated that any contact with the armed groups must take place in strict respect for Colombia’s internal affairs.

Foreign Minister Guillermo Fernández said his government expected to coordinate any contact between the Chavez administration and Colombia’s armed groups.

Eduardo Pizarro, with the Institute of Political and International Relations Studies, said Colombia had become an uncomfortable neighbour for Venezuela “due to incursions over the border by paramilitaries and guerrillas who consider those sparsely populated areas safe.”

In response to Castaño’s remarks, Defence Minister Luis Ramírez said that “any proposal from the right or left which leads to humanising the war” is welcome.

But he added that the paramilitary leader’s proposal would have to be studied by President Andres Pastrana and the commissions created to guide and oversee the peace process.

In the view of Willam Fadul, with the National Business Council – which groups the country’s 15 leading productive sectors – Castaño’s remarks pinned down “the guerrillas and the state even more” in the search for a serious peace agreement.

Fadul, president of the Colombian Association of Insurance Companies, said that without a doubt, “the self-defence (paramilitary) units are an important actor in the armed conflict, and will have to be taken into account sooner or later.”

In the late 1970s, Colombia’s paramilitary groups were created as counterinsurgency forces by landowners and rich farmers with army support, based on a 1968 law that authorised the creation of civilian “self-defence” groups to protect private property and lives.

However, the groups’ activities increasingly overlapped those of the private armies of gunmen set up by drug traffickers interested in eliminating rural communities – in order to take over their land – and social activists accused of ties to the guerrillas.

In 1988, both government and independent researchers blamed the paramilitary units for over 80 massacres (defined as the murder of four or more people in the same spot) and hundreds of murders of workers, trade unionists and politicians, which led the government to declare them illegal.

According to the non-governmental Centre for Popular Education and Culture, paramilitary groups were blamed for 88 percent of the 2,966 politically-motivated human rights violations reported from January to June – a figure equivalent to more than double the total number of abuses denounced last year.