[Jonathan Mann, Cnn Host:] First the atrocity and then the agreement. In Colombia, the punishment won't fit the crime because the criminals are still at it.
[Unidentified Male:] Everybody talks about it behind closed doors. Everybody knows who really took part in this massacre.
[Mann:] Hello and welcome. In most places, the cops try to solve a crime and the courts try to punish it once it's over. It's more complicated trying to serve justice when something terrible is still underway. That's where Colombia stands, trying to end a civil war that has stretched on for more than four decades, trying to convince guerillas and paramilitaries to put down their weapons while responding to their crimes and compensating their victims. The government has a reconciliation program that offers amnesty and jobs. It will let many of the guerillas who committed atrocities essentially go free. And some people in Colombia are very unhappy about it. On our program today, Bogota's bargain. We begin with CNN's Karl Penhaul in a town devastated by the violence.
[Karl Penhaul, Cnn Correspondent:] El Salado is a town of abandoned homes, of families torn apart by guns and machetes. A town of living nightmares and walking ghosts. "When I come by here alone or if it's late, after 10:00, then I'm afraid. I feel like I'm going to bump into the dead," he says. Five years after a right-wing death squad massacre killed at least 36 of his friends and neighbors, Jason believes he can still make out dark blood stains on El Salado basketball court. Nothing can erase his memories of two days in February 2000. "They cut off the ears of some of the victims. And others they cut off their fingers. Then they would kill them over by that post," he says. Witnesses recall how some 600 paramilitary fighters raided the town, some wearing ski masks, all clad in camouflage fatigues. They set up a kangaroo court here and accused the whole town of supporting the Marxist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia. Jason was then 13. His friend Leonardo Redondo was 16. "The paramilitaries went from home to home kicking down the doors and forced us out and assembled us on the basketball court. The men sat here, the women over there, by the church," he says. The gunmen played a game with the townspeople. Murder by numbers. "The paramilitaries began to count to people, and when they got to number nine, they would kill that person. They pulled them up and killed them with a garrot or a machete or a stick," he says. Leonardo escaped the lottery of death. His family was not so lucky. "Two paramilitaries walked up and started called out numbers, and between the two of them they grabbed my mother by the hair and dragged her over there by that door. One paramilitary grabbed a pole and hit her in the stomach. When she fell down, they hit her again, and then they cut her throat with a garrot," he says. The paramilitary celebrated the killings. "They would kill somebody and then start playing a tune on an accordion or a drum. They would begin to sing and laugh," he says. This is the spot a few yards from the basketball court where Leonardo says he dug with his bare hands to bury his mother, Rosemira. He laid his elder brother, Luis Pablo, to rest along side her. "A paramilitary came up behind him and shot a burst of bullets into the back of his head and he collapsed," he says. After a two-day orgy of bloodshed, the paramilitaries pulled out, setting fire to homes and crops. The survivors buried their dead and fled. Not all the victims were found. Tobacco farmer Alphonso Peretez and his wife, Osepha, say paramilitary gunmen abducted their 26-year- old son, Jorge. They never found a trace of him. "The most important thing in my life was my son. When I think of my son, it seems like this only just happened. A mother can never forget her son," she says. And as he strings up tobacco leaves, a father can't forget either. "It would have been better if they had killed him and that I had found the body and been able to bury him, but because they disappeared him, I don't know whether they cut his throat or shot him," he says. Of the hundreds of fighters who took part in the El Salado massacre, only 15 have been convicted. They received jail sentences of 30 to 40 years. But if others confess, they'll probably get just four or five years in a special prison facility. That's because Colombian President Alvaro Uribe and his government are cutting a deal with an estimated 12,000 paramilitary fighters under the Justice and Peace Law. The fighters are gradually demobilizing and in return getting light sentences for their crimes. Human rights groups are critical of the Justice and Peace Law. For example, fighters are under no obligation to make a full confession about their past or any collaboration with government forces. But Eduardo Pisaro, head of the Government Reparations and Rehabilitation Commission, believes Colombia must heal its wounds. "If we set impossibly high standards for truth, justice and compensation, then we may help the victims of the past, but we won't prevent more victims in the future," he says. Critics say the state also benefits from a compromise between peace and justice. Human rights groups accuse elements in the army and successive Colombian governments of backing illegal paramilitary squads in their attacks on civilians suspected of sympathizing with Communist guerillas. Activists say El Salado was a classic example of that collusion. Massacre survivor Elias Torres alleges the military gave air support to the death squad that attacked El Salado. "Everybody says the helicopters belong to the government. One was blue, the other was white. They flew over there and shot down into the town," he says. Many survivors I spoke to off camera described how members of this marine infantry battalion that still patrols the region sealed up all escape routes out of the town. Few dare make the same allegations publicly. "We can't talk like this out in the open. Everybody talks about it behind closed doors. Everybody knows who really took part in this massacre," he says. A marine captain was fired and a marine colonel was suspended for failing to prevent the massacre. Another marine colonel quit amid accusations he helped organize the killings. Government Peace Commissioner Luis Carlos Restrepo declined to be interviewed by CNN about the El Salado massacre, saying his timetable did not permit it. Former government minister Fernando Lontonio, a close ally of President Uribe, rejects allegations of state ties to the death squads. "Many times I challenged that joker from the United Nations Human Rights Commission, Michael Fruley, and human rights organizations to show me the link between the state and paramilitaries. They were never able to do that because those links do not exist," he says. Those assurances ring hollow with people like Elias Torres. He dragged nine bodies, including his own cousin, from the blood-splattered basketball court. He wants the government to round up all the gunmen and their allies, be their military allies or politicians, and force them to pay for their butchery. "The justice we need now is for somebody to do the same to them as they did to us. Kill them," he says. Government offers of compensation don't seem to have helped ease the pain either. Last year Leonardo says he received $5,000 for the death of his mother and brother. "What value can anybody but on your mother? It's a joke. Of course my mother is priceless," he says. Leonardo and others in El Salado may want to put the past behind them, but the graves of their dead make it impossible to forgive or forget. Karl Penhaul, CNN, El Salado, Colombia.
[Mann:] Colombia's capital has not seen the level of violence that the rest of the country has suffered, but its affects are felt in Bogota. People everywhere just want to war to end. Karl spoke to some people in the capital about the government's plans to negotiate peace and compensate victims.
[Unidentified Female:] Colombia needs peace and we all need peace in our homes.
[Unidentified Male:] The government has fallen way short in understanding the real situation and the real needs of Colombia. The government only seems to worry about carrying out talks but they don't seem to reach any point of common agreement.
[Unidentified Female:] There shouldn't be any pardon for those who have committed atrocities against innocent people. Those who should pay for what they've done are always the ones who pay the least while those who have done nothing bear the brunt of everything. There has to be some element of pardon, because without that there cannot be a peace process. But I think there are huge structural problems with the issues of compensation and also in how the paramilitaries will participate in politics, because I think that is the biggest threat for the 2006 elections.
[Unidentified Male:] Coming to agreement with those kinds of people is difficult, but I just wish we could have peace in Colombia, because this is a great country.
[Mann:] We take a break now. We'll talk more about reconciliation a little later in the program, but when we come back, who is behind the war and what do they want? Stay with us. Colombia's civil war is a little more complicated than most. The right-wing guerillas were primarily fighting alongside the government, not against it, and both government and right-wing forces were fighting against the leftist guerillas. But drugs, and the fortunes to be made from them, have been fueling the fight on all sides. Welcome back. In fact, some outsiders believe that the war between left and right is now only about who will control the cocaine. Joining us to talk about the guerillas and Colombia's war is the former U.S. ambassador to Colombia, Myles Frechette. Ambassador, thank you so much for being with us. What is this war about? What have they been fighting over for 40 years?
[Myles Frechette, Fmr. U.s. Amb. To Colombia:] Well, today they're really fighting about who gets to keep the drug profits. It was different in the early days, but it's all changed now. What we're talking here is narcotrafficking and both the guerillas and the paramilitaries are involved in it, and this Law of Peace and Justice is designed, I'm afraid, as passed by the Colombian Congress, to launder the narcotrafficking background of their leaders and allow them to escape extradition to the United States. There is nothing Colombians fear more than being extradited to the United States.
[Mann:] I wonder if you can take us back a little bit into how these groups began. And let's start with the people who are called the paramilitaries. There are some people who recount the history in this way. They say essentially these were thugs hired to protect the coke barrens from the left-wing guerillas and they're not really paramilitaries, they're not particularly right-wing. They're just an organized criminal group that sides with criminals against the guerillas.
[Frechette:] Well, essentially that's correct. They started up because the government did want have a presence in the countryside and people in the countryside were being attacked by the guerillas. So these people were paid first by narcotraffickers on the one hand and on the other hand land owners to protect them from the guerillas. But with time, of course, the paramilitary got involved in narcotrafficking. They never were more than armed thugs and mercenaries who carried out massive killings with chainsaws and machetes, as you heard earlier, and now it's very naked. It's the narcotrafficking. It gives them enormous money. They don't need any support from either the narcotraffickers, because they've now become part of that, or from the landowners.
[Mann:] Even in their own self-interest, and I say this and ask this in the most mercenary way, what was the point of carrying out atrocities like the one that we just heard about? What do they gain from that?
[Frechette:] To frighten the citizens of these little towns from collaborating with the guerillas. You see, they were disputing territory with the guerillas. And in order to maintain control of certain areas that they captured from the guerillas by, you know, by force of arms, what they used to do is go into a village and say anybody who is on the side of the guerillas is going to get it, and just to make sure the people understood it, in some towns they cut people apart in front of their children, their husbands, their wives, but this was a way of intimidating people. Intimidation is a big part of the political process in Colombia.
[Mann:] Now those are the people who are called, more or less accurately, and one suspects less accurately, the right-wing paramilitaries. Are the same kinds of motives, the same kind of history, behind the left-wing forces as well?
[Frechette:] These guys are called right-wing because they came out later, very cynically, when they were fully into narcotrafficking and said, well, we defended the country against these leftist guerillas. That's not true. They did it for the money, because they were being paid for it. Now, the leftist guerillas, of course, began 40 to 50 years ago with some Marxist ideas about land reform and all the rest of it, but the fact is when the Soviet Union went belly up as an economic system and Cuba didn't have any money, they lost their outside sources of support and they turned to narcotrafficking. Today, neither of them wants to leave it. Why? It makes narcotrafficking makes them totally independent of any outside forces. It gives them power, it gives them a nice living. And so they're both going full out to maintain their links and their financing from narcotrafficking.
[Mann:] One last question for you. The right-wing paramilitaries have this agreement. The left-wing had an agreement for a time. It got an extraordinary offer from the government way back when. To your mind, is anyone really ready for peace or is there just too much money to be made?
[Frechette:] Well, certainly not either on the guerilla side or the paramilitary side. They're not ready for it. And you will see that this process with the paramilitary is going to fail just as stupendously as President Pastrana's effort to make a deal with the guerillas. The guerillas showed after three years that they had absolutely no interest in reaching peace except on their terms, which was that they would take over power, and Pastrana was forced by public opinion to bring it to an end. And President Uribe, I predict, will be forced by Colombian public opinion to end this process with the paramilitaries, because it's not going to bring peace.
[Mann:] Myles Frechette, former U.S. ambassador, thank you so much for talking with us.
[Frechette:] Thank you, Jonathan.
[Mann:] We're going to take a break and then pick up on that very point. When we come back, the plan for peace. Stay with us. Alvaro Uribe had a reputation as a hardliner when he was elected president of Colombia. He promised a massive military response to the guerillas with a budget of a billion dollars and a million men enlisted as volunteers.
[Alvaro Uribe, Colombian President:] Whatever we have to do to strength the military and the police, we will do it.
[Mann:] But he did two very different things: confronted the left-wing guerillas and struck a deal with the paramilitaries on the right.
[Jose Miguel Vivanco, Human Rights Watch:] Well, actually, they have to give up their weapons. But it is unclear whether they have to give up their assets, illegal assets, their fortunes. And they have no obligation, really, to give up, you know, their power and to provide useful information for the justice system in Colombia, to go after the networks, the criminal networks that is supporting all of these mafias in Colombia. So it is a pretty good deal from the viewpoint of the leaders of paramilitary organizations.
[Mann:] What about from the point of view of the people of Colombia?
[Vivanco:] It is a bad deal. It's a bad deal essentially because, you know, what the leadership of paramilitary groups are getting out of this process is essentially laundering their criminal record and avoiding extradition to the United States for drug trafficking and legalizing their assets. Part of the problem is that they're going to receive a very, I mean a minimum time in prison. It's actually unclear all they will have to go to prison. But they're going to be eventually sentenced to, you know, a couple of years in an agricultural colony, and in exchange for that, they have no obligation to tell the truth, for instance, to the judges and prosecutors.
[Mann:] Now, the ambassador said he didn't like the deal, but he said something strong, which is it wouldn't work. Now, whether or not the bargain is a wise or a moral one, will it work in ending violence?
[Vivanco:] It's not going to work, Jonathan, because the central problem here is that the law and the whole peace agreement, let's say, it does not have minimal teeth, teeth that will allow it to dismantle the criminal organizations. So, unfortunately, this is just for show. It's a game of smoke and mirrors in Colombia, and it's going to strengthen the paramilitary power. You know, that is the really, really, bad news for Colombia, and I don't think it's in the best interest of the United States neither.
[Mann:] Is it a sweetheart deal because the government and the paramilitary's interests were so closely aligned, that the government isn't making peace with its enemies, it's making peace with its friends essentially?
[Vivanco:] That is part of the problem. But it is a good deal in some I would say that to some extent the Bush administration has some degree of responsibility here, because they haven't been able to really send a clear signal, a clear message to the Colombian government and to the public there. They somehow endorsed this agreement because my interpretation is because, you know, Uribe is the most important ally of this administration in the region and they're focusing all of their attention in a different country, Venezuela. So they need Uribe and they are willing to this administration is willing to look the other way on what is going on in terms of accountability, the rule of law, justice, truth and even drugs in Colombia.
[Mann:] Let me ask you one last quick question. The doubts you've expressed are very clear. The proof, to some extent, might be in the numbers. How many paramilitaries are taking the government up on its offer and really giving up weapons and, though you suspect they don't have any obligation, giving up the gains that they've made from their crimes?
[Vivanco:] We don't know. Nobody really knows. And there is, you know, speculation, a lot of speculation about the number of paramilitaries involved in this process in Colombia. But to tell you the truth, so far, what we have seen here, you know, numbers of combatants giving up weapons, but in exchange the government is learning nothing about their criminal records, operations, narcotrafficking, killing. Zero. Zero information. And, therefore, the government is really unable to take advantage of this process and dismantle and destroy these criminal entities.
[Mann:] Jose Miguel Vivanco, of Human Rights Watch Americas, thank you so much for talking with us.
[Vivanco:] Thanks are lot, Jonathan.
[Mann:] That's INSIGHT for today. I'm Jonathan Mann. The news continues. END TO ORDER VIDEOTAPES AND TRANSCRIPTS OF CNN INTERNATIONAL PROGRAMMING, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE THE SECURE ONLINE ORDER FROM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com