The Paramilitary Effect.(Colombia)

Salvatore Mancuso is a wanted man. The 37-year-old military chief of Colombia's outlawed right-wing militias was convicted in absentia last month of organizing armed "vigilante groups" and sentenced to 11 years in prison on charges arising from the November 1997 murder of a small- town mayor. But in the humid lowlands of northwestern Colombia, where the country's ruthless paramilitary forces reign supreme, Mancuso is an untouchable warlord whom no one dares cross. That crude fact of life seems to apply to the government of lame-duck President Andres Pastrana as well--despite two outstanding warrants for his arrest. "We have replaced the state in various areas," Mancuso told NEWSWEEK in an exclusive interview at a paramilitary camp two weeks ago. "We have had to arm and defend ourselves, we build schools and health clinics--all because the state has failed to fulfill its constitutional duties."

Mancuso and his estimated 8,000 comrades in arms have indeed become a state within a state in vast tracts of the Colombian countryside. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency says the militias fund their operations with cocaine-smuggling profits, an allegation Mancuso now disputes. No one denies that the self-styled United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC) have acquired a military capability in recent years that puts them on a par with the country's more numerous and longer established communist guerrilla armies. As Colombians from nearly all walks of life swing sharply to the right in outrage over the summary executions and kidnapping practices of the nominally Marxist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the six right-wing militias grouped under the AUC's umbrella banner have never wielded more power at home. "They have grown at such a rapid rate that they are now fast approaching the FARC," says counterinsurgency expert Thomas Marks of the Hawaii-based Academy of the Pacific. "The FARC has adopted the paramilitaries as their main enemy instead of the Colombian armed forces."

There is mounting evidence that the right-wing militias' power is no longer confined exclusively to the battlefield. Colombia held congressional elections in mid-March against the backdrop of hard-line presidential candidate Alvaro Uribe Velez's meteoric rise in opinion polls. Dozens of pro-Uribe candidates won seats in both houses of the national legislature, and Mancuso issued an official communique hailing the results that, by his reckoning, delivered victory to more than one third of the paramilitary forces' preferred candidates.

Some of those congressmen-elect were political unknowns prior to the voting, and left-of-center politicians accused AUC leaders of restricting their freedom to campaign in areas under the militias' control. Interior Minister Armando Estrada expressed "grave" concern over the alleged infiltration of the National Congress by known paramilitary elements and their supporters. "If we don't confront the paramilitary forces head on, they will increasingly become the biggest threat facing the country," says Luis Alberto Moreno, Colombia's ambassador to the United States. "Three quarters of their money comes from drug trafficking, and they must be stopped at all costs."

Those warnings will likely go unheeded in the current political climate. The abrupt collapse of Pastrana's three-year-long peace process in February soured millions of ordinary Colombians on the notion of a negotiated settlement with the FARC. For many voters, the repeated peasant massacres and other human-rights atrocities carried out by the rightist archenemies of the FARC pale in significance alongside the guerrillas' defiant refusal to conclude a ceasefire agreement with the Pastrana government.

Salvatore Mancuso came to the antiguerrilla crusade relatively late in life. The husky, balding son of an Italian immigrant grew up in the sparsely populated cattle country of northwestern Colombia and took up ranching after studying in Bogota. ...