Colombia’s Peace Process Grinds to a Halt

With peace talks stagnating between the government and right-wing paramilitary forces, warlords operating along the miry Magdalena River announced a gesture of goodwill: the unconditional withdrawal of hundreds of fighters from this grimy oil town and several hamlets upstream.

But the deadline, March 14, came and went with little fanfare and no visible troop movement, deepening concerns that Colombia’s peace process has entered an unruly and precarious phase.

“We have to face it, nothing is going to come of it,” said a paramilitary fighter who identified himself as Dubal, sitting in the stuffy front room of a cinderblock house.

On leave for a month from his unit, he said he hadn’t received any order to demobilize. Nor would he obey one if it meant going to jail for paramilitary atrocities, including massacres, torture and selective killings.

“It doesn’t mean you’re a bad person,” he said of the paramilitaries’ bloody methods. “It’s a job.”

Conceived 16 months ago, Colombia’s paramilitary peace process has stalled.

The most recent tensions stem from the outlaws’ unwillingness to withdraw from strategic hubs and concentrate themselves in areas where international observers from the Organization of American States can monitor their activities.

Ongoing cease-fire violations by paramilitary fighters, meanwhile, are chipping away at credibility. By the government’s count, considered conservative, the right-wing militias have killed 250 people since they declared the cease-fire in December 2002. Yet another sticking point involves U.S. extradition orders issued against top paramilitary commanders. Two of them, the stout and husky-voiced Carlos Castano and a former motocross champion named Salvatore Mancuso, are key figures in the talks.

Charged with shipping 17 tons of cocaine to the United States, they implied in a recent communique that negotiations couldn’t advance while “the ghost of extradition” hung over their heads. U.S. authorities say the extradition orders are nonnegotiable.

“It’s not easy. We have a lot of obstacles,” said government peace commissioner Luis Carlos Restrepo, who is holding talks with four paramilitary groups. “There is distrust on the part of men who have been outside the law for a long time and who are afraid to hand in their guns and return to civil society. But we are confident we can advance.”

Although imperfect, he said, the paramilitary cease-fire has at least reduced overall rates of paramilitary violence. The number of massacres is down by more than half.

Colombia’s paramilitary groups grew in the 1980s, hired by drug lords and land barons to ward off extortion and kidnappings by Marxist rebels. Since then, they have become a 20,000-strong network of death squads, most of them deeply involved in drug trafficking. The vigilante groups enjoy tacit support from an overstretched military in many regions.

They also control large swaths of land, including weapons corridors and drug crops once held by the rebels. If they withdraw to “concentration zones” as part of a wider demobilization, the right-wing militias argue, the rebels will swarm back in, retaliating against suspected paramilitary collaborators and opening a gory new chapter in Colombia’s decades-old civil conflict.

Military analyst Alfredo Rangel said that concern was logical given the state’s inability to control all its territory. But he warned that peace talks could easily collapse without some kind of give and take.

“As long as there are no concentrations [of paramilitary fighters], it will be very complicated to monitor the process,” he said. “This will bring continued cease-fire violations, which in turn will continue to take away credibility from the process.”

Besides security assurances, paramilitary commanders are waiting on a controversial legislative proposal that would allow them to avoid prison by paying fines and participating in reparation programs. Critics have called the bill a formula for impunity.

One paramilitary front has dipped a toe in the water. In November, 850 members of the paramilitary’s Nutibara Bloc turned out in fatigues and crew cuts for a demobilization ceremony in Medellin. Human rights groups reported that fewer than 200 guns had been collected by the end of the day.

The government declared that none of the fighters had committed “crimes against humanity” and bused them off to a three-week job camp.

“A level of transparency and monitoring was lacking,” U.S. Ambassador William Wood said on a recent trip to the city. “The world doesn’t know what happened with the former combatants participating in this program.”

Washington has channeled $2 million into the logistics of the paramilitary peace process, arguing that any effort to remove fighters from Colombia’s killing fields is worth pursuing. The State Department lists the largest paramilitary umbrella group, known as the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, as a terrorist organization.

“It’s a deception. It’s a [peace] process between me and myself,” said Yolanda Becerra, coordinator of Barrancabermeja’s grass-roots women’s organization, referring to longtime ties between paramilitary fronts and government troops.

Sitting in a small office behind a heavy, bulletproof door, she predicted that left-leaning community activists would be at risk from right-wing paramilitary fighters for some time, despite the recent demobilization announcement in her city.

Colombia’s hawkish president, Alvaro Uribe, has vowed to break ties between state troops and vigilante groups. On Thursday, the army displayed the bodies of 14 paramilitary fighters killed in combat near this oil refining port.

Restrepo, the peace commissioner, also said fronts that broke the cease-fire would “receive a military response.”

The paramilitary Central Bolivar Bloc, or BCB, moved into Barrancabermeja three years ago, taking over a lucrative contraband gasoline business and cracking down on theft. First-time offenders are beaten with the flat side of a machete, Dubal said. Second-time offenders are shot.

Reports on whether paramilitary fighters actually left the city were inconclusive. The district police chief declined to comment, and BCB commanders did not respond to an e-mail interview request. The peace commissioner’s office said it had not been consulted about the demobilization.

“We have information that they didn’t leave, and that others have come in,” said Barrancabermeja’s human rights ombudsman, Jorge Enrique Gomez. “They continue controlling the city.”

Gomez attributed all 141 violent deaths registered in Barrancabermeja last year to paramilitary fighters.

According to a contraband gas vendor who identified himself as David, paramilitary fighters in charge of siphoning gasoline outside the city were still in place.

David can earn $45 a day transporting stolen gasoline back to the city, an illicit income that he says has saved hundreds of impoverished families from going hungry.

A peace settlement with the paramilitary groups “would be very pretty,” he said. “But if they take the [gasoline] away ... we have nothing else.”

His friend Dubal, however, didn’t see any chance of that happening. “I don’t plan on turning myself in,” he said, shrugging. Noting that the paramilitaries’ primary foes, thousands of Marxist guerrillas, were still roaming the countryside, he added, “This is a war where neither side will give in until the other one does.”