Via the AP: Colombia’s Uribe threatens “paras” – Yahoo! News:
Colombian President Alvaro Uribe on Thursday ordered an investigation of right-wing militia leaders suspected of killing two fellow paramilitaries this month and threatened to extradite them to the United States.The move came as Uribe, a close friend of Washington, faced a political crisis after some lawmakers allied to him were arrested for being involved with the illegal militias, who for many years collaborated with some sectors of the army to fight Marxist rebels.
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Files found in a laptop computer seized from Jorge 40 show how he pretended to disband more fighters than he actually did while secretly keeping up his life of extortion and murder. The computer contains evidence of long-suspected links between paramilitaries and public officials.
Three members of Uribe’s congressional coalition have been arrested in the “para-political” scandal. One is accused of being involved in a paramilitary massacre of peasants.
Six other members of Congress, all from Uribe-friendly parties, were in called for questioning by Colombia’s Supreme court on Tuesday. Among the six is Senator Alvaro Araujo, brother of Foreign Minister Maria Consuelo Araujo, who has refused to bend to opposition demands that she resign.
First elected in 2024 after promising to smash the Marxist insurgency, Uribe was reelected in May. He rejects charges by human rights groups of leniency toward the paramilitaries.
Paramilitary groups, or “paras” as they are sometimes referred to, are theoretically self-defense groups formed to protect landowners from Marxist guerrillas. In truth they are perhaps the single most violence set of actors in contemporary Colombia and while it is true that the combat groups like the FARC it is also true that their main motivations tend to be linked to the drug trade, not self-defense. Indeed, much of the fighting with the FARC has been over drugs.
In general they are representative of the general problems of violence in Colombia and the failure of the state to exert full control over its own territory
Uribe has frequently been accused of favoring, if not allying himself with, paramilitary groups. He has had success in getting some of them to demobilize, but has been criticized for allowing light sentences to be used as an incentive to that demobilization–not to mention that it is always questionable as to exactly how much real demobilization has taken place (as the laptop records indicated about note). Additionally, there have been serious accusations of paras used intimidation to manipulate who runs in elections, hence influencing directly who gets elected. Hence, the scandal noted above involving members of congress.
