Along for the ride: how Colombia's paramilitaries retain power: the U.S.-backed government appears to be doing all it can to help paramilitary commanders evade hard time.

Three young men with crew cuts climb into a rickety taxi headed out of Tibu, the sweltering hub of a northern Colombian region known for its coca crops and peasant massacres. The cab is taking them four hours south to Cucuta, the provincial capital, where President Alvaro Uribe's government will enroll them in a program to help former paramilitary fighters adjust to civilian life. They'll be gone a few days but are carrying no luggage, just seven six-packs of cheap beer.

An hour down the road, the men have guzzled half their cargo. Their cab passes through Campo Dos, the village where their 1,450-member unit disarmed a week ago. They say they've been partying ever since that highly publicized ceremony, whose participants included a teary-eyed Salvatore Mancuso, the nation's most powerful paramilitary commander. The government has promoted such demobilizations as major steps toward ending Colombia's decades-old civil war.

The program includes identification papers, occupational training, health insurance, and two years of employment at $150 per month, roughly Colombia's minimum wage. To fund it all, the government hopes to raise $130 million from the United States and other international donors.

"We want to take the legal road," says one of the former fighters, "but if the government doesn't keep its promises, we'll report it to Mancuso."

Such threats aren't idle. Mancuso turned in a Beretta at the ceremony and asked the nation for forgiveness, but he hasn't dismantled the intelligence network or command structure of his organization, the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC). He has helped the government disarm more than 4,800 of the group's estimated 15,000 troops, but he warns he'll "return to the mountains" if negotiations over a legal framework for the demobilizations don't go his way.

So far they are. The U.S.-backed government appears to be doing all it can to help paramilitary commanders evade hard time for their human rights atrocities, reparations for the victims, or extradition for cocaine and heroin trafficking. "There is a real risk," Human Rights Watch reported in January, "that this demobilization process will leave the underlying structures of these violent groups intact, their illegally acquired assets untouched, and their abuses unpunished."

After more than two years of negotiations and ten ostensible demobilizations, paramilitaries have cut down on their massacres but have entrenched other illegal operations, from drug running to gasoline smuggling, from prostitution to extortion. The AUC, once an ideological outfit, is transforming into a quasi-legal mafia.

In the taxi's backseat, one of the former fighters knocks back his fifth brew with alarming speed, chucks the can out the window, and cracks open a sixth. The twenty-three-year-old is illiterate, his parents having pulled him from second grade to peddle gum on the streets of Cucuta.

The paramilitary movement took shape more than three decades ago when drug traffickers, ranchers, military officers, and businessmen began forming regional private armies. The most notorious, Death to Kidnappers, was formed in 1981 by drug-trafficking brothers Fabio, Jorge Luis, and Juan David Ochoa, whose sister was being held by one of the country's leftist guerrilla groups.

But the paramilitaries have rarely engaged in combat against the guerrillas. Instead, often working closely with government forces, they've focused on unarmed social movements, assassinating thousands of trade unionists, peasant leaders, human rights advocates, and politicians. "They've destroyed the legal left," says Hector Mondragon, economic adviser to a coalition of rural, black, and indigenous groups.

Paramilitaries have also carried out most of the war's civilian massacres, a major factor convincing three million Colombians to flee their homes since 1985. Now 61 percent of the nation's arable acreage is in the hands of 0.4 percent of landholders, according to a study by the Agustin Codazzi Geographic Institute and the Colombian Agriculture Research Corporation. Paramilitary chiefs themselves acquired more than twelve million acres abandoned by peasants between 1997 and 2003, according to a December report by the Consultancy for Human Rights and Displacement. Bolstering the land grabs, Uribe and his allies have removed teeth from agrarian reform laws, including a 1936 measure allowing public reallocation of parcels left idle.

Paramilitaries have played a key role in turning the narcotics trade into Colombia's largest export sector. The United States has requested extradition of at least seven paramilitary chiefs on drug-trafficking charges. They include Mancuso and AUC founder Carlos Castano, now missing. Both were indicted in 2002 for allegedly exporting more than seventeen tons of cocaine over the previous five years.

Across the country, the paramilitary movement has infiltrated city halls, provincial governments, and federal agencies, most notably the health care program and the attorney general's office. The infiltration helps them control a range of illegal activity. "Here in Cucuta, not a single kilo of coca is sold without their authorization," says Wilfredo Canizares, executive director of the Progress Foundation, a human rights group in that city. "They'll kill you."

The AUC's major rival has long been the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), a guerrilla group that doesn't let its leftist ideology get in the way of taxing coca farmers, kidnapping for ransom, or murdering civilians. Near La Gabarra, a town just north of Tibu, the FARC carried out the country's worst massacre in years last June, gunning down thirty-four peasants on a paramilitary coca ranch. But in some parts of the country, FARC and paramilitary units are now managing the illegal economy in harmony. They've reached nonaggression pacts, protected drug transport routes together, and exchanged drug-processing materials for coca.

Many legislators adore the paramilitaries. Senator Miguel Alfonso de la Espriella fondly recalls attending high school with Mancuso and reuniting with him in 1999 to help negotiate the release of a senator the AUC had kidnapped: "Mancuso told me he would have greeted me with a hug if we weren't in public."

President Uribe has similar ties. "Uribe's family was very close to the Ochoa and Castano families," notes National University political scientist Mauricio Romero, who studies the paramilitaries. "Saying so publicly here in Colombia is very risky, very dangerous, but I believe there's some continuity over the last twenty years."

Uribe directed Antioquia Province's Civil Aviation Authority from 1980 to 1982, a time when the agency granted licenses to known drug traffickers, according to a 2002 biography by Joseph Contreras of Newsweek and Fernando Garavito, a Colombian columnist who fled the country after receiving death threats over the book. As Antioquia governor from 1995 to 1997, Uribe was one of the leading promoters of Convivir, a national program of civilian watch groups known for human rights atrocities and paramilitary links.

But by the time Uribe won the presidency in 2002, the United States was providing Colombia hundreds of millions of dollars a year in military aid. "The AUC had lost its strategic value," Romero says. "The government assumed it would be able to control the country without assistance from irregular forces." The Uribe administration quickly initiated peace talks with the AUC as if the group had been fighting against the government. In December 2002, the AUC declared a "unilateral ceasefire," a gesture that proved hollow. Paramilitaries killed or caused the disappearance of at least 1,899 people during the next twenty-one months, according to the nongovernmental Colombian Commission of Jurists.

In July 2003, the AUC promised to demobilize by the end of 2005. The first unit was the Medellin-based Cacique Nutibara Bloc, commanded by Diego Fernando Murillo Bejarano ("Don Berna"), another drug trafficker wanted by the United States. After the group wiped out a rival paramilitary unit in the city, Murillo sent 860 men to turn in weapons in a November 2003 ceremony.

"Some of those who were presented as paramilitary members to be demobilized turned out to be common criminals and were included in the demobilization," notes Susan Lee, director of Amnesty International's Americas program. "And the people who were paramilitary members continued to commit very, very serious human rights violations."

Murillo's organization has developed into a vast clandestine network known in whispers as "the office." The group oversees drug dealing and gas smuggling throughout Medellin, and it controls many liquor stores, taxis, buses, and charities. In many districts, Murillo's people extort from home-owners and businesses in a door-to-door process known as "vaccination." His teenage sentries stand guard on street corners, wearing baggy pants and packing pistols and knives.

"They're the same as before the demobilization," says a twenty-five-year-old woman hunched over a sewing machine in Comuna 1, a district on a steep mountainside. Murillo's group stops by every week to extort a few dollars from her shop, which assembles counterfeit Reebok sneakers. Police look the other way, she says, even as the paramilitaries recruit girls into prostitution.

After three hours in the cab, all forty-two cans of beer are gone. The three former fighters nod off between army checkpoints, where boyish troops nervously pat everyone down and examine IDs. Yesterday, a soldier on the road was killed in an ambush by the FARC.

Throughout the 1990s, the FARC and the smaller National Liberation Army (ELN) controlled this area, known as Catatumbo. They ran coca plantations, bombed a pipeline that carries oil through the region for Los Angeles-based Occidental Petroleum, and crossed at will into nearby Venezuela to resupply.

Then the paramilitaries arrived. A 200-man unit commanded by retired Army Captain Armando Alberto ("Camilo") Perez debuted in 1999 by massacring twenty coca workers near La Gabarra, prompting 1,000 civilians to flee the area.

The FARC responded a week later by assassinating thirty peasants and kidnapping another fifty in El Tarra, a nearby municipality. The war was on.

Perez developed his force into an 800-strong army that drove most guerrilla units into Catatumbo's mountainous west. The paramilitaries have also led the way in attacking Catatumbo civilians, according to the government human rights office, which tallies 5,200 murders and 200 disappearances in the region since 1999.

The paramilitaries in Catatumbo, as elsewhere, have flouted the AUC cease-fire. Between July 2003 and July 2004, they carried out at least 211 individual killings and forty-four massacres, according to the Progress Foundation. The victims have ranged from accused guerrilla sympathizers on coca plantations to kids swept up in social cleansings.

The men in the backseat insist they took no part in such atrocities--saying otherwise would disqualify them for the demobilization program. But there's no telling, because survivors of the attacks rarely pursue justice. Back in Tibu, four displaced widows, interviewed individually, claimed to have no idea whether paramilitaries or guerrillas killed their husbands. "People are afraid of reprisals," explains Yinith Guerrero, head of the government human rights office in town. "We rarely receive any complaints."

"Our squad had thirty members," one of the young men yells over the taxi engine. "We'd spend a week or two on each coca farm, keeping the civilians safe from the enemy."

"Our biggest concern is revenge by the FARC," another says. "We're worried about our families."

For others, the greatest fear is not the guerrillas but the remaining paramilitaries. Between December 23 and 25, according to the Bogota-based Association for Social Alternative Promotion (Minga), an AUC unit carried out several murders and kidnappings in Convencion, a municipality west of Tibu. The attacks displaced about 1,000 people, the group reported.

In Venezuela, meanwhile, officials say paramilitary demobilizations have increased gasoline smuggling, drug trafficking, kidnapping, and extortion in states bordering Colombia. That crime, they say, convinced them to purchase a fleet of Russian attack helicopters in March. "The fact that they're demobilizing doesn't mean they're going to start farming potatoes," Venezuelan Interior Minister Jesse Chacon told a newspaper.

Human Rights Watch has urged donor nations to withhold funding for the demobilization "unless Colombia enacts a law that can effectively dismantle paramilitary groups and hold their members accountable for massacres and other crimes against humanity."

Colombia's Interior and Justice Minister Sabas Pretelt responded in a January radio interview by likening Human Rights Watch to a fringe Danish group that supposedly donated $8,500 to the FARC last year. It wasn't the first time the Uribe administration has claimed human rights groups support the guerrillas, an accusation that can be deadly in Colombia.

The European Union and most other international donors are demanding that the Uribe government set up a legal framework for establishing truth, administering justice, and providing reparations. The United States, in contrast, has earmarked an initial $3 million for the demobilizations, despite officially pursuing extraditions and classifying the AUC as "terrorist."

But many humanitarian groups say the demobilizations are futile, given the country's poverty. Renan Dario Lopez Gallon, who coordinates counseling programs in Colombian war zones for the Italian-based International Committee for Popular Development, notes that paramilitary chiefs will never have trouble replenishing their ranks "as long as millions of Colombians lack jobs, schooling, housing, and clean water."

The men in the taxi are proof of that point. Uneducated, desperately poor, and now drunk as can be, they show no sign of a future outside Colombia's war.

Chip Mitchell is a radio and print journalist based in Bogota.