Colombian Death Squad leader betrayed by his masters

Ex-boss of Colombian paramilitary forces bemoans fate

By Frank Bajak, Associated Press

ITAGUI, Colombia — In his glory days, he ran an army of 30,000 men, personally ordering the deaths of hundreds with weapons often bought with drug profits. Today, he sits alone in a jail cell, cultivating his battered image on his website and fuming over what he considers his abandonment by Colombia's political elite.

Salvatore Mancuso was the last commander of the illegal United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, or AUC, which protected wealthy landowners from leftist guerrillas and eliminated their political opponents before dissolving in a peace pact with President Alvaro Uribe's government.

Now, he walks a fine line between confessing all to avoid U.S. extradition and a lengthy prison term, and keeping mum to prevent powerful interests from killing him and his family in retaliation.

In a recent jailhouse interview, the 43-year-old former rancher and rice farmer reflected on his predicament and his extraordinary journey from well-educated child of privilege to dreaded lord of war.

"It's complicated, that blow to one's insides when one has to make a decision about people's lives," he said with moist eyes. "It continues to hurt my soul."

The son of an Italian immigrant who established auto and farm equipment dealerships, Mancuso was a teen motocross champ who honed his shooting skills at the Monteria Gun Club. After high school, he spent a year studying English at the University of Pittsburgh.

He married his childhood sweetheart and went to work in the late 1980s on the farm she inherited in the fertile Sinu valley, a region where harsh treatment of farmworkers had bred an ugly rebel backlash.

Plagued by kidnappings, many landowners fled. Mancuso held his ground, picking up his shotgun and helping the army hunt down guerrillas who tried to extort him, according to biographer Glenda Martinez.

Mancuso became a vigilante, one of a growing number of armed irregulars who were publicly banned but privately backed by Colombia's establishment. The militias worked closely with the army, compensating for the poorly equipped military's inability to put down the leftist threat.

Hiding in plain sight as he collaborated with generals and police chiefs, senators and mayors, Mancuso started out distributing radios among farmhands to tip off the army to guerrillas' whereabouts and guiding army patrols into combat. He installed a radio antenna at the Tierralta military base, recognizing good communications as key to victory.

Before long, Mancuso and his comrades were hiring fighters of their own, many of them former soldiers, and putting the rebels on the defensive.

The militia federation, meanwhile, was developing into a power apart.

As the AUC violently displaced tens of thousands of people, Mancuso's feudal empire grew from his home state of Cordoba across the Caribbean coast, where he put like-minded lieutenants in charge of drug-running and guerrilla eradication.

He told The Associated Press that he exacted "tributes" from almost all commercial activities, including six cents on the dollar for every crate of Colombian bananas exported.

Mancuso's shock troops wrested coca fields from rebels along the Venezuela border in a forbidding zone where they're still digging up mass graves today. It wasn't long, prosecutors say, before he was supplying the Italian mafia with cocaine.

Mancuso told the AP that 254 tons of cocaine were produced in his direct zones of control between 1997 and 2004 and that the paramilitaries often purchased arms and ammunition with cocaine.

A refined man with a taste for fine wines and smart clothes, Mancuso was called "a blue-blooded dandy" by Carlos Castano, who preceded him as head of the AUC. Far from writing him off, however, Castano was impressed that Mancuso learned how to fly a helicopter after just seven hours of instruction.

Mancuso said Colombia's armed forces trained him in warfare, provided his units with intelligence and often coordinated joint operations against guerrillas. The nine helicopters under his direct command, for example, were allowed to travel freely from east to west across the entire northern coast of Colombia, he said.

Mancuso admitted personally ordering more than 300 killings, but insisted that with few exceptions, his men killed only guerrillas and their collaborators.

"If people were going to be taken out there was a reason," he said. "I never told them to torture anyone."

He vigorously denied, for example, the widely documented February 2000 massacre in the village of El Salado in which men under his command killed 36 people in what witnesses described as a sadistic multiple-day orgy of drunken violence against civilians.

"When testimony is given in guerrilla zones, the guerrillas always plant people who say: 'Here's where they played with the head. Here they had a party. Here they drank blood mixed with liquor,"' he said. "These things weren't done, and we never gave orders to do them."

In December 2003, Mancuso turned himself in as part of the government peace pact. Tears streamed down from behind his sunglasses as he asked for forgiveness from Colombia and the world.

Since then, he has cooperated more than any of his peers in naming congressmen, generals and U.S. and Colombian businesses he says benefited from the paramilitaries' blood-soaked rise. To qualify for prison terms of no more than eight years, paramilitary leaders must confess to all their crimes and surrender all their assets.

As long as Mancuso abides by the peace pact, he will avoid a 40-year Colombian prison sentence for the 1997 massacre of 15 peasants at El Aro, which he called "a military operation." And Interior Minister Carlos Holgiun told the AP that unless Mancuso stops cooperating, Colombia won't extradite him on a 2002 U.S. indictment for drug trafficking.

But Mancuso has gone only so far. Colombians suspect that's a matter of self-preservation. Beyond himself, the jailed warlord has four children from two marriages and an extended family to worry about.

"I've been walking all the time on the knife's edge," Mancuso said, sitting sockless in loafers, a yellow striped shirt and olive slacks in a prison office, a charm bracelet on his left wrist.

He is being held in the maximum-security Itagui prison, outside Colombia's second city of Medellin, with some 50 militia bosses. Like many, he has an Internet-connected computer, cellphone, shared personal chef and extended visiting hours. Songbirds chirp outside.

Mancuso keeps busy running his own website, recently joined the Facebook online social-networking community and says he is writing a history of Colombia's recent conflict.

He is neither repentant nor apologetic about the blood shed in "the war we had to fight," and complains of being demonized and marginalized by the very elites for whom he served as hatchetman. People he once served now deny knowing him, he said.

"Why don't they come out and admit it? Because they're afraid," he said. "Afraid of what? That they'll be tried and thrown in jail."

Mancuso, who has forfeited $25 million in properties, said he's done with reparations. He said he has no money in the bank and nothing held by third parties. He has, however, managed to hire a U.S.-based lawyer who he said has approached prosecutors there.

Does that mean Mancuso would prefer a U.S. prison cell to the prospect of walking free in Colombia, where his life could be in danger? After all, the drug lord and master criminal Pablo Escobar chose death in Colombia over extradition.

Mancuso laughed nervously.

"Don't make me answer that."