U.S. interests stoke the violence in Colombia.

• Author: Dudley, Steven
• Position: Multinational corporations - Escalating The Drug War - Cover Story

Fidel Castano, alias Rambo, is the most notorious paramilitary leader in Colombia. His armed "Self-Defense Groups" are known by names such as the Monchecabezas (named for their practice of beheading victims). For the past ten years, Castano's men have terrorized much of the northern coastal region known as Uraba. So legendary are Castano's escapades that even after members of his family announced his death. he is still the most feared man in Colombia.

Locals say his brother Carlos now runs the fiefdom in the upper Sinu Valley of Colombia. There the Castano clan has bequeathed large tracts of land to former guerrillas who have switched loyalties and now support the rightwing paramilitaries. "We begin by giving all these people work," Carlos Castano said in an interview with Cromos, a national Colombian magazine, "and when they've finished paying for the land, we hand it over to them." According to Castano, they have given away 6,000 acres of land and more than 5,000 livestock.

Castano himself symbolizes paramilitary legitimacy. He regularly meets with the press and human-rights groups to speak of his private war against the guerrillas.

"The fact that they can operate in such a public way shows the level of protection the paramilitaries seem to enjoy from the Colombian military," says Carlos Salinas, Amnesty International's Government Program Officer for Latin America and the Caribbean.

Colombia has the highest murder rate in the world--ten times that of the United States. According to Amnesty International, the country has been enduring a human-rights emergency for the last ten years.

Yet the United States remains Colombia's number-one trading partner. U.S. investment has tripled since 1991 as Colombia moves toward becoming a partner in the North American Free Trade Agreement. And Colombia receives more military aid from the United States than any other country in Latin America. Ostensibly, this aid is to fight the war on drugs. But for the Colombian government, the drug war is secondary to the war against its political opponents--leftist guerrillas and the civilians suspected of supporting them.

Colombia's seemingly endless civil war began in 1948 with the assassination of Liberal Party presidential candidate Eliecer Gaitan. The eruption that followed Gaitan's assassination marked the beginning of a period known as La Violencia. Throughout the country, the Conservative-backed military forces killed Liberal Party sympathizers. Liberal...