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By DAVID ADAMS, Times Latin America CorrespondentIn a country that has been at war for almost 40 years, a historic peace agreement won't instantly dissolve skepticism.
MIAMI - The announcement last week of a historic peace agreement with one of Colombia's most violent illegal armies should have been heralded by a fanfare of trumpets.
Instead, the country's president, Alvaro Uribe, modestly said he believed it could "contribute to the country laying down the foundation for peace."
After all, Colombia has been at war far too long for anyone to get too carried away with talk of peace.
The paramilitaries in question - the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, or AUC - are widely held responsible for some of the country's bloodiest civilian massacres, as well as a major share of the drug trafficking industry. Colombia produces 90 percent of the cocaine that enters the United States, U.S. officials say.
The agreement follows six months of secretive talks with government officials after the AUC declared a unilateral cease-fire in December. The timing of the announcement comes just as the U.S. Congress is discussing a $600-million aid package for Colombia, on top of $2-billion in the past three years.
Accusations of collusion between the AUC and the Colombian military have been among the toughest obstacles to more U.S. aid. With the AUC out of the picture, Uribe's hand could be greatly strengthened in future aid debates.
The peace talks are backed by the United States, which is considering offering up to $5-million to help pay for the social reintegration of paramilitary combatants who agree to disarm, State Department officials say.
But U.S. officials were noticeably silent last week. While Washington remains deeply involved in the Colombian conflict, officials would like to see Bogota take greater command and responsibility for the war, with a view to winding down U.S. involvement in the future.
While that might be a long way off, peace with the paramilitaries would remove one important player from Colombia's drug-fueled conflict, relieving the burden on overstretched and underequipped government troops, analysts say.
"You take 10,000 enemy fighters out of the field and that frees troops for other purposes," said Gabriel Marcella, a Colombia expert with the Department of National Security and Strategy at the U.S. Army War College.
That would allow the government to focus its efforts on tackling the larger guerrilla forces: the 18,000-strong Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia and the far smaller Army of National Liberation.
Under the agreement, the AUC agreed to extend its cease-fire and discuss laying down its arms by the end of the year. Full demobilization of its 13,000 troops could be completed by the end of 2005, according to a statement posted on the Colombian government's Web site.
The preliminary peace agreement is likely to be welcomed by most Colombians, who are tired of the heavy toll of the country's 39-year-old conflict. The fighting has cost an estimated 20,000 lives in the past three years.
Because of Colombia's long history of paramilitarism, any optimism is tinged with a strong dose of caution.
"This is the first time anything like this has been attempted," conceded Daniel Garcia-Pena, a former government peace commissioner and director of Planeta Paz, which promotes peaceful solutions to the conflict.
"But people are looking at it with a lot of skepticism," he added. "There's still so many questions left open and doubts about where this is going."
Some activists are wary of the terms of any peace deal with the "paras," as they are known. Lawyers linked to the AUC want a sweeping amnesty for the group's commanders, covering crimes of murder and drug trafficking. But human rights activists say the government must first do an accounting of the AUC's crimes as part of a "truth and reconciliation" process.
"I don't think the government has any intention to go to the root of things," Garcia-Pena said. "Instead, they are looking to cover up the past and whitewash and launder the names of the commanders of the AUC."
That might not be so easy. The Colombian and U.S. governments have officially branded the AUC a terrorist organization. Its leader, Carlos Castano, faces dozens of lawsuits in Colombia for murder. His role in Colombia's bloodshed has been compared to Slobodan Milosevic, the former Yugoslav president accused of genocide and on trial at The Hague. Last month a Colombian judge sentenced Castano in absentia to 40 years in jail for the massacre of 30 peasants in the village of Mapiripan in 1997.
The United States also is seeking his extradition, along with two other top AUC commanders, after they were charged in September in a U.S. court for their alleged role in smuggling 17 tons of cocaine to the United States and Spain.
Colombian officials say they will have to offer inducements to paramilitary leaders, including options other than jail. The government's peace commissioner, Luis Carlos Restrepo, told reporters Friday that, among other possible alternatives, the demobilized fighters might pay for their crimes by financially compensating their victims' families.
Compromises will be necessary, analysts say.
"You have to end the bloody conflict. Otherwise it will just go tragically on," said Michael Shifter, a Colombia expert at the Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington think tank.
The AUC was founded in the 1980s as an illegal armed force to combat rural kidnapping and extortion of wealthy landowners and cattle ranchers by left-wing guerrillas.
For years the AUC operated with impunity, often in collusion with military and police commanders, in areas where the Colombian government exercised little or no control. The paramilitaries ruthlessly executed suspected guerrilla collaborators in raids on rural hamlets.
The AUC controls an estimated 40 percent of Colombia's drug trafficking, accounting for about 80 percent of its finances, according to a recent Colombian government report leaked to the Washington Post.
In an interview last week from a paramilitary mountain stronghold, one of the top AUC leaders, Salvatore Mancuso, praised Uribe and the Colombian military for making progress in the war against the guerrillas. "Before, the government didn't have the political will to defend institutions and Colombians," he told an Associated Press reporter.
But he didn't sound ready to surrender to authorities. "We are not negotiating thinking that we are going to go to jail," said Mancuso, 38, who is considered the AUC's military chief.
The government says it recognizes the need to impose state control in lawless rural areas to prevent a return of paramilitarism, even suggesting a role for the United Nations.
Uribe has made strengthening the state a central plank of his year-old presidency. As a symbol of that, the peace deal announcement was made while he had temporarily transferred his office to the northeastern city of Arauca, a hotbed of paramilitary and guerrilla violence.
"The truth is that they (the paramilitaries) have filled a void dangerously left by the state," Uribe told foreign reporters. "Their disappearance imposes the responsibility on the state to strengthen itself."
- Times correspondent Sibylla Brodzinsky contributed to this report from Arauca, Colombia.