BOGOTA: Peace remains a distant prospect in Colombia despite the disarming of over 31,000 right-wing militia members, as cocaine has come to replace ideology as the main fuel for Latin America’s longest-running war.
The paramilitaries, who spread terror for 20 years in the name of fighting left-wing rebels, were promised reduced jail terms for disbanding and their leaders began trial hearings last week aimed at ending a bloody chapter in the conflict.
But with the rebels still fighting from secret jungle bases and both sides exploiting the world’s biggest cocaine trade, a peace deal similar to those that ended the Central American insurgencies of the 1980s is a long way off, analysts said.
“The paramilitary demobilisation has not in any way meant the dismantling of their criminal networks. Both they and the rebels have an enormous financial base provided by cocaine,” said Cynthia Arnson, director of the Woodrow Wilson Centre’s Latin American Programme in Washington.
“Once conflicts have entered the ‘greed’ phase, as Colombia’s has, they are very difficult to end,” she added.
The United States has given this Andean country billions of dollars to fight the drug trade, partly through aerial spraying of coca plants used to make cocaine. But progress has been slow as farmers simply replant in better-hidden fields.
Colombia’s army has never fully controlled the country, so landowners formed the paramilitaries to battle 17,000-strong rebel force called the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, which has been fighting since the 1960s.
With help from some sectors of the military, the “paras” beat back the FARC in many areas, but also branched out to provide security for local politicians and cocaine smugglers.
By the 1990s they dominated wide swathes of northern Colombia. They massacred peasants to cow local populations and served as a bridge between elected officials and drug traffickers.
Following pressure from opposition politicians, human rights groups and the US Congress, President Alvaro Uribe threw dozens of paramilitary bosses into jail three weeks ago.
The government admits that many paramilitaries, despite the tearful disarming ceremonies broadcast on television over the last three years, have formed new crime gangs.
“The paramilitary leaders who negotiated the demobilisation have lost a lot of power.
The new narco-trafficking bosses are rising from the paramilitary ranks,” said Mauricio Romero, director for disarmament and demobilisation at Colombia’s National Reconciliation and Reparation Commission.
