From Jail,
Colombian Warlord Ponders Long Years of Conflict
ITAGÜÍ, Colombia
"The enemy
is not fought with flowers or prayer or song. The enemy is fought with weapon
in hand, which produces dead men."
SALVATORE MANCUSO
IN his prison
cell here on the outskirts of Medellín, Salvatore Mancuso reads Gandhi and
self-help books. He taps notes to his lawyers into a BlackBerry. He gazes at
photos of his 19-year-old wife and 8-month-old son. He listens to vallenato
music on his iPod.
And he
meditates on the meaning of war.
“There are no
good men or bad men in war,” Mr. Mancuso, 42, Colombia's paramilitary warlord
extraordinaire, said in a long, meandering interview. “There are objectives,
and the objective of war is to win by combating the enemy, and the enemy is not
fought with flowers or prayer or song. The enemy is fought with weapon in hand,
which produces dead men.”
As a commander
and the premier strategist for the death squads that committed some of the
worst atrocities in this country's long internal war, Mr. Mancuso knows a lot
about killing. He put into motion plans that transformed the paramilitary
militias from an anti-guerrilla force into major cocaine traffickers and allies
— some say masters — of high-ranking officials throughout Colombia's
government.
With that
chapter of war ceding to a more subdued conflict, Mr. Mancuso now spends his
days in prison alongside other paramilitary leaders as part of a deal to
confess his crimes and pay reparations to his victims. This arrangement allows
him to spend just eight years in confinement, and perhaps less, before
returning to society.
His confessions
have fed the slow-burning scandal over revelations of ties between
paramilitaries and a web of elite politicians, army generals and spies, almost
all supporters of President Álvaro Uribe . In a country weary of war, Mr. Mancuso has become an uneasy reminder
of how the conflict permeated so many areas of life.
“We were the
mist, the curtain of smoke, behind which everything was hidden,” Mr. Mancuso,
dressed casually in sandals and a black striped shirt and sitting in an
ergonomic chair in his cell, said of the paramilitaries.
A child of
privilege, Mr. Mancuso grew up near the Caribbean coast in Montería, the son of
an Italian father, a prosperous businessman, and a mother who had been “Cattle
Queen” in a regional beauty contest. After high school, his parents sent him to
study English at the University of Pittsburgh while he took a break from civil engineering
studies.
He returned
from the United States to a country strained by guerrilla subversion,
kidnappings and the rise of drug cartels. As a powerful cattleman by the
mid-1990s, Mr. Mancuso formed a paramilitary organization ostensibly to protect
the lives and property of his social class.
HIS own warpath
allowed him to extend his power far from Montería to the nebulous border region
with Venezuela, where the police in the frontier city Cúcuta respond to Mr.
Mancuso's authority to this day, according to Human Rights Watch , which has tracked his activities for the past
decade.
Mr. Mancuso
denies this, saying he leads a quiet life in prison. But he says he understands
the motivations that would push some of the 30,000 demobilized paramilitary
fighters into shadowy new organizations that still carry out selective killings
and export cocaine, describing them as “qualified labor.”
Victims'
groups, which contend that Mr. Mancuso oversaw hundreds of killings, see
crocodile tears in such emotion. “It contradicts reality for someone like
Mancuso to see themselves as heroes or martyrs,” said Iván Cepeda, the leader
of a victims' group whose father, a senator, was killed by paramilitaries.
“This peace process is fictitious.”
The
demobilization process is also in danger of collapsing. Other paramilitary
leaders said they would halt their confessions this week after a Supreme Court decision viewing the militias as common criminals, as opposed to
political ones. The ruling could jeopardize the militia leaders' hopes to
re-enter Colombian society after revealing details of their crimes before
prosecutors and victims.
Few things are
as elastic as the truth as Colombia grapples with the fallout from its war, but
Mr. Mancuso says he is prepared to set the record straight by writing a book
about what took place during the conflict. Few people speak so clearly about
the obstacles that prevent Colombia from moving beyond stalemate to peace.
War, Mr.
Mancuso would have Colombia believe, pushes its actors into unsavory options.
So does the situation that passes for a semblance of stability these days, he
says, pointing to the $5 billion in aid Washington has channeled to Colombia
this decade to combat drug trafficking and insurgencies, only to see cocaine
exports flow unabated.
THE Colombian
authorities, Mr. Mancuso said, “don't want to eradicate cocaine because the
conflict generates so much international support that puts money on top of the
table, and allows so much money under the table in the form of corruption.”
Assessing
Colombia's treatment of jailed paramilitary leaders, human rights activists
fear that Mr. Mancuso will avoid paying for his crimes.
Under Colombia's
lenient rules, Mr. Mancuso could end up spending much less than eight years in
a prison where he is already allowed amenities like satellite television in his
cell, bodyguards, visits each weekend from his wife, Margarita, and their son,
Salvatore, and a laptop computer with Internet access, said José Miguel
Vivanco, the Americas director for Human Rights Watch.
“This is
Uribe's gift to the leaders of paramilitarism,” said Mr. Vivanco, referring to
the criticism surrounding the policies of President Uribe in relation to the
militias.
Mr. Mancuso
shrugs off such statements, saying the change he has undergone in prison has
been “radical.” But innocence and guilt seem like malleable concepts to someone
who speaks like a polished corporate executive of his decision to use drug
trafficking to finance his activities, explaining he had no choice but to mimic
the guerrilla insurgency's methods.
“I could not
lose the war,” Mr. Mancuso said.
“We have a
narco-economy,” he added, as if Colombia wanted to be reminded of that curse.
“We are a narco-society.”
Jenny Carolina
González contributed reporting.
