On 15 July, after seven months of secret negotiations, the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (AUC), the largest of the paramilitary organisations, together with two smaller groups, the Bloque Central Bolívar and the Alianza Oriente, signed an agreement which provides for the demobilisation of the paramilitaries. The deal does not include one important paramilitary group, the Bloque Metro, and makes no mention of arrangements regarding the paramilitary leaders, such as Carlos Castaño and Salvatore Mancuso, whose extradition on drug-trafficking charges has been requested by the US (though the matter was discussed back in May, when a representative of the US government presented Washington's list of 'concerns').
Demobilisation is to be gradual, tentatively concluding towards the end of 2005. As a first step the paramilitaries will cease hostilities, then begin to concentrate in designated areas. These will not have the same features as the autonomous despeje, or demilitarised area, granted to the guerrillas of the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (Farc) by the government of President Andrés Pastrana (1998-2002) to facilitate peace negotiations which ultimately proved fruitless.
AUC leader Castaño has said that the fighters will retain their weapons until a full peace agreement is concluded. Nonetheless, he said, the demobilisation is 'irreversible'. He promised to concentrate in an area in the western department of Urabá, within the next three months, the 'banana country bloc' (the core of the AUC under his own command) and other blocs operating in the western part of Antioquia.
No impunity?
Peace commissioner Luis Carlos Restrepo insists that the agreement does not include a grant of impunity for 'atrocious crimes' (a legal term which technically includes murder). Those accused of such crimes will be tried and convicted - but the government will seek 'alternatives to prison' when it comes to sentencing.
These alternatives will involve unspecified 'actions of social reparation'. Many of the actions of the paramilitary groups fit the category of 'atrocious crimes': in all tallies of violence in Colombia they figure as the principal authors of massacres, events involving the killing of several people at once.
Regarding the pending US extradition requests, Restrepo said the issue was left out of the agreement because it had to do with the 'particular affairs of some leaders'. He added, 'We will handle [this matter] with the greatest care and prudence [at] the appropriate time.' As a separate matter, the US government has agreed to help finance the demobilisation of the paramilitary organisations.
That is a decision likely to be challenged, if the reaction to the US State Department's recent certification of Colombia's rights performance is anything to go by. Virtually all rights organisations in the US said that it flew in the face of the evidence to claim that Colombia was severing its links with the paramilitary. This observation became even more pertinent when, in the run-up to the demobilisation deal, persuasive evidence surfaced of direct military participation in an AUC attack on the Bloque Metro, the Antioquia-based paramilitary organisation that refused to join in the AUC-brokered accord.
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