Colombian paramilitary head confesses

Miryam Areiza traveled halfway across Colombia to hear the man who orchestrated the 1997 massacre of her father and 14 others admit to the crime.

But Ms. Areiza became angry – and ill – when former paramilitary leader Salvatore Mancuso read out her father's name and described the massacre during a precedent-setting judicial hearing here this week.

Mr. Mancuso, currently in a maximum security prison in this western Colombian city is the first of the country's death squad leaders to confess to his crimes as part of a negotiated deal under which 30,000 illegal right-wing fighters laid down their arms.

"He seemed proud of what they'd done, not remorseful," Areiza said bitterly after hearing him narrate how the massacre was organized. She added that Mancuso described how the top paramilitary leader at the time, Carlos Castaño, handed out military decorations to the illegal fighters who participated in the killing spree in northern Antioquia Province.

Mancuso began recounting his crimes in the first stage of a judicial process set up for demobilized paramilitary leaders.

In exchange for full confessions and paying reparations to victims, the paramilitary leaders will get reduced prison sentences that can be served on special detention farms, and they can avoid extradition to the United States on drug charges. Instead of serving a maximum of 50 years, paramilitaries who confess will serve a maximum of eight years.

In a day and a half of testimony, Manusco confessed to about 50 crimes, several for which the Colombian justice system had already absolved him. Reading from the screen of the laptop computer he brought to the hearing, Mancuso listed off in chronological order murders he either committed or ordered.

But while victims and their families have been anxious to hear paramilitary leaders acknowledge their crimes and to agree to reparations, many in Colombia's political and military elite fear the information Mancuso or other paramilitary leaders could reveal during their confessions.

"He's starting to spill the beans and he's going to be implicating a lot of people," said Carlos Iván Lopera, head of the Redepaz human rights group, who watched the hearing on closed-circuit television in a room for victims and victims' advocates. The hearing is officially closed to the public.

In the case of the El Aro killings, Mancuso said he had met personally in 1996 with now-deceased Gen. Alfonso Manosalva, commander of the Army's 4th Brigade, and they had planned the operation to rout out alleged subversives in the area.

In 2003, a Colombian court convicted Mancuso in absentia for the massacre.

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