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.

• Author: Mitchell, Chip

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...