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Periodically,
attention focusses on the merits of brokering separate peace negotiations
with the fast-growing AUC. The FARC and ELN are strongly opposed,
on the grounds that the AUC is a covert arm of state counterinsurgency
policy. Everything is now complicated by Carlos Castaño’s
sudden retirement as the AUC’s military commander-in-chief
and his subsequent physical absence since that announcement in May.
In practice, Castaño is still likely to have the final say
in both military and political matters behind the scenes, given
that most of the leadership are fiercely loyal to him and that he
is still supreme commander of the Peasant Self-Defense Forces of
Córdoba and Uraba (ACCU), the largest single unit within
the paramilitary umbrella organization.
For some analysts, the leadership reshuffle will allow Castaño
to shrug off blame for the AUC’s flagrant human rights violations
and permit him to plan a political offensive aimed at opening peace
talks with the Pastrana administration or with the next president,
due to take office in August 2002.
"The big obstacle in the past has been that Castaño
was political and military head and had to respond for massacres.
With this decision the AUC is trying to artificially separate the
roles. The chiefs-of-staff will respond for military actions, while
Castaño tries to open the political doors," said Carlos
Lozano, senior Communist Party representative and member of the
newly-created anti-paramilitary commission, set up as part of slow-moving
peace talks between the government and leftist guerrillas.
One Western diplomat insisted Castaño would represent the
demands of his main paymasters--industrialists, politicians, landowners,
cattle-ranchers and drug traffickers--who, as part of the country’s
political and economic elites, are broadly represented by the state.
The diplomat suggested the government may decide to bring Castaño
(or his designate) into discussions in an effort to counterbalance
radical guerrilla demands.
"Castaño is a puppet on the strings of conflicting interests.
Castaño may have some regional independence, but he is not
strategically independent in either military or political terms.
He is dependent on his financial backers," the diplomat said.
"The government cannot sit down in public and talk with Castaño,
but deals cut with the FARC could be passed across to the AUC for
approval. That would be a two rooms, two tables scenario."
In the event of peace talks, Castaño would also likely attempt
to negotiate an amnesty and perhaps even some limited land deal
for his fighters, who include not only a growing number of former
soldiers, but also peasants and guerrilla deserters.
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