Colombia's former right-wing paramilitary leaders said on Thursday that they would end peace talks after being thrown into jail last week while they await trial for crimes such as massacre and drug smuggling.
The threat by the once-feared 59 top commanders of the defunct United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC) appeared to be a test of their clout as they try to avoid extradition to the US on drug charges.
More than 30,000 AUC members have turned in their guns over the last three years under a deal promising reduced jail terms, part of Colombia's effort at ending 42 years of guerrilla war.
Critics had long called the deal with drug-trafficking militia bosses responsible for some of Colombia's worst massacres a farce, though the three-year-old pact was credited with helping bring down the country's sky-high murder rate.
Paramilitary spokesman Ivan Roberto Duque, alias Ernesto Baez, told local radio about yesterday's decision by the government to transfer him and other militia chiefs from a work farm to a high-security prison and said it was a betrayal of confidence.
The paramilitaries ended negotiations Wednesday after the government forcibly moved them from a relatively comfortable former holiday camp on Dec. 1, claiming it had information of a possible escape plot.
Uribe also accused the warlords of ordering assassinations from the center.
But Duque said they would abide by accords already signed with the government, adding that they were ready to point their fingers at public officials who had collaborated with their illegal fight against Marxist guerrillas.
"The country needs to know the whole truth," he said.
The paramilitaries, some of whom are accused of continuing lives of extortion and murder even after turning themselves in, were formed in the 1980s by landowners trying to protect their property from left-wing rebels.
Peace talks with the rebels, who like the paramilitaries fund their operations with Colombia's multibillion-dollar cocaine trade, remain elusive.
"The fact is the peace negotiations had already ended with the demobilizations," said Pablo Casas, an analyst with Bogota think tank Security and Democracy.
"Now comes the justice part and that's the part the paramilitaries do not like. They still want to bargain on the terms of their punishment," Casas said.
The government's peace commissioner, Luis Carlos Restrepo, accepted the end of peace talks, saying that there was nothing more to negotiate.
He said the leaders' would now appear before special tribunals where they will be judged for their actions in the course of the conflict and, according to terms of the peace pact, receive no more than eight years in prison each.
President Alvaro Uribe, a conservative US-ally whose father was killed by the rebels over 20 years ago, is threatening to extradite paramilitary honchos who refuse to dismantle their criminal networks.
Uribe is facing a political crisis in which three members of his congressional coalition were arrested last month for involvement with the paramilitaries.
The Supreme Court has been grilling members of Congress this week on their alleged ties with the murderous militias.
Following a stormy three-hour meeting on Wednesday in the maximum-security Itagui prison, 200km northwest of Bogota, the 59 imprisoned paramilitary warlords confronted the government's chief peace negotiator and a leading bishop known for his closeness with the illegal militias.
The paramilitary bosses' main complaint was that the government was not honoring its agreements, the head of the Organization of American States' mission in Colombia, who attended the meeting, said.
But it is unclear how much leverage the warlords now wield, given that they are behind bars and that new paramilitary organizations are springing up across Colombia, many run by their former lieutenants.
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