August 2001

On May 27th, a brief message from Carlos Castaño on the AUC's website (www.Colombialibre.org) announced his "irrevocable" resignation from the leadership of the AUC. Initially, many Colombians thought it was a hoax. Then on June 6, after a four-day meeting characterized as a "Conferencia Nacional Extraordinaria," the AUC's new leadership, made up of nine regional front commanders, issued a communique confirming Castaño's resignation as Commander in Chief.

At the time, an AUC spokesman stated that "within hours," Commandante Castaño would make a personal announcement. Castaño has not been heard from. His original, May 30th message, which made reference to the division within the AUC that is believed to have forced him out, has been removed from the website. "In the AUC we are friends and respectful of the institutions of the state," Castaño had written. "This principal is inviolable: respect it."

According to the June 6 communiqué, Carlos Castaño and another commander, one "Ernesto Baez", will be jointly responsible for the AUC's future political leadership. "Ernesto Baez" is the alias of Iván Roberto Duque, formerly the General Secretary of the Magdalena Medio Association of Farmers, Peasants and Cattlemen ( ACDEGAM). In 1989, Duque founded MORENA, a small, fascist political movement, dedicated to combat any peace negotiations, and promote "Christian values," the army, and the paramilitaries. MORENA functioned publicly until sometime in 1991.

No one knows yet what has happened to Carlos Castaño. Or even where he is. In the land of magical realism, speculation in Colombia is rife: Castaño is dead; he has fled Colombia; he has fallen in love, and wants out of the war; he has been shoved aside because he refused to order reprisals against the government for the Prosecutor General's raid on Montería. Not so, say others: Castaño's resignation is strategic, it allows him to evade responsibility for future atrocities and continue to build his public following; when the time is ripe, he will reappear as the man of peace; the only person capable of controlling the "hardmen," ending the violence, and bringing the AUC into negotiations with a new, more "patriotic" government.

Thus far there is only consensus on the following:

1) The crisis in the AUC is real;

2) It means greater violence, probably urban terrorism against government targets;

3) It was triggered by the Prosecutor General's raid on the headquarters of Ganacor (Federation of Cattlemen of Córdoba in Montería).

The Montería raid took place a week before Castaño posted his May 30th message. This first attack by the government on the far-right civilian-paramilitary network is considered a watershed in the relations between the state and the paramilitaries. Many in Colombia now believe it will prove the equivalent for Colombia's far right of the famous "Proceso 8 Mil" that exposed the Cali Cartel's participation in President Samper's election campaign. Reportedly, officials now have the names of 700 cattle ranchers and businessmen implicated in paramilitary support activities; they are investigating 478 bank accounts, and studying the tapes of twelve months of incriminating telephone conversations with politicians, business people, and army officers. On June 19th, based on information acquired in Montería, prosecutors issued 89 arrest warrants for business leaders in Barrancabermeja who are charged with financing and sponsoring the AUC's year-long terror to take control of the city.

A NEW, MORE VIOLENT AUC?

The AUC commander who is emerging as the new Jefe Supremo, is Salvatore Mancuso, a wealthy, Italian-born cattleman who has been Castaño's # 1 military strategist and closest collaborator since the early 1990s. Reportedly, the crisis in the AUC leadership that led to Castano's ouster was triggered when Mancuso, whose house in Montería was searched by police on the morning of the raid, demanded that the AUC change its policy and go on the offensive against the government. It is said that Mancuso and other AUC commanders wanted the head of the Prosecutor General in reprisal for Montería and that Castaño refused.

Educated in the private Javeriana University in Bogotá, Salvatore Mancuso traveled to Vietnam to study guerrilla warfare and learned English in the U.S. Mancuso commands the powerful northern block of the AUC. He is a skillful helicopter pilot and has control of the AUC's helicopter fleet. On New Year's Eve 1998, when the FARC invaded the AUC's headquarters in Córdoba and Castaño was surrounded, Mancuso saved his life by landing a Blackhawk helicopter gunship into the middle of the fighting and flew him out.

Before he was forced into hiding in 1998, Mancuso was a well-regarded member of the Córdoba social and economic elite. Today he is the subject of 10 or more arrest warrants for massacres and assassinations. The forces he commands have been responsible for many of the most brutal massacres in the northern states, including Chengue and El Salado.

Since the crisis, it has been reported that Castaño had grown tired of taking the blame for atrocities committed by Mancuso's troops. The Assistant Public Defender of Córdoba, who met with Castaño on May 27, three days before he disappeared, reported that on leaving the meeting Castaño had said, "I am not in a position to control Mancuso."

Many in Colombia fear that if the AUC now turns its violence against the government there will be urban terrorism on the scale already experienced when Pablo Escobar went on the offensive in the 1980s. Others are fearful that, without Castaño's authority, the AUC will fragment into autonomous regional forces, competing for power, resources, helicopters, access to drug routes, and control over policy, with ever more violent and chaotic results.

It is too soon to assess how the far-right's political agenda, so astutely promoted by Castaño, will fare in the absence of his charismatic presence, and without his ability to orchestrate the paramilitary terror without losing sight of the political effect of the violence, or the consequences for his paymasters of his multi-dimensional strategy.

It also remains to be seen how far the government will be prepared to pursue their current advantage against the far right, or whether, if the current investigation begins to touch sensitive circles in the political and military establishments, the government may back off and so permit the cattle ranchers and their violent narco allies to regroup. Sadly, Alfonso Gómez Méndez, the Prosecutor General who has led this fight against impunity and against "Las Fuerzas Oscuras," has reached the end of his term. Nothing is more foolish than to predict the future in Colombia.

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