Colombian senator acknowledges signing loyalty pledge to paramilitary groups

26.11.06

www.iht.com

A pro-government senator revealed Sunday that he and dozens of other politicians, some of them now members of the government, signed a loyalty pledge in 2001 to right-wing paramilitary warlords.

The comments by Sen. Miguel de la Espriella, published Sunday by the newspaper El Tiempo, are bound to deepen a crisis for the government of President Alvaro Uribe that has already seen the arrest of four former and current congressmen.

De la Espriella, whose Democratic Colombia party is headed by the president’s cousin, said he and some 40 other politicians — among them congressman, governors and lawmakers who are now members of Uribe’s government — were ordered by paramilitary strongmen to attend a meeting at a ranch near the town of Sante Fe de Ralito, 285 miles (458 kilometers) northwest of Bogota.

With heavily armed fighters looking on, Carlos Castano and Salvatore Mancuso, leaders of the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, or AUC, beseeched the politicians to sign a document creating a clandestine political movement to back the AUC ahead of its decision to demobilize.

“We politicians didn’t seek this — we were forced into making agreements with the paramilitaries,” said De la Espriella Sunday on Caracol Radio. “We all signed it. Everyone who was there, without exception.”

The United States considers the AUC a foreign terrorist organization and several of the group’s leaders, including Mancuso and Castano, are wanted for extradition by U.S. courts for being among Colombia’s biggest cocaine traffickers.

De la Espriella did not reveal who was at the meeting, but said it was overwhelmingly attended by politicians like him from the Caribbean coast, a longtime paramilitary stronghold.

During the 2002 elections, the paramilitaries reportedly intimidated voters in areas under their control to elect lawmakers amenable to their interests.

De la Espriella said he no longer possessed a copy of the allegiance document, but said he hoped it would show up as part of an ongoing Supreme Court investigation into the political-paramilitary nexus.

As part of that investigation, four former and current congressman from northern Sucre state have been arrested in recent weeks. One of them, Sen. Alvaro Garcia, is accused of murder for his role in “organizing, promoting, arming and financing” a paramilitary massacre of 20 people in 2000, the court said in a statement.

Several other lawmakers, including close allies of Uribe, are expected to testify before the court in the coming days.

Uribe has exhorted lawmakers to publicly confess whatever contact they’ve had with the paramilitaries and other illegal armed groups.

But the president’s call hasn’t curbed the fallout from the scandal, which many fear could affect Congress’ legitimacy.

De la Espriella said he would gladly testify in court, but suggested that the forced meeting with paramilitaries was not a crime in itself.

As the country discovers the depth of collusion between the paramilitaries and the political elite, de la Espriella told the newspaper he expected some colleagues in Congress to declare themselves members of the AUC to benefit from reduced sentences contained in a 2002 peace deal with the government.

Mancuso and 60 other leaders of the AUC are being held in a former vacation resort awaiting trial for their role in some of the worst atrocities in this country’s conflict, now in its fifth decade.

In September, officials confirmed the death of Castano, who went missing in 2004, after a militia gunman allegedly hired by the warlord’s brother Vicente led investigators to his corpse in a shallow grave in northern Colombia.

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