KEY POINTS:
BOGOTA - New Colombian crime gangs are picking up where drug-running paramilitaries left off when they disbanded last year, hindering government efforts to retake control of the country, says an official report.
The gangs, specialising in cocaine smuggling and extortion, have about 4000 members, an estimated 17 per cent of whom served in paramilitary militias organized in the 1980s to fight leftist rebels, says the report by the National Reparation and Reconciliation Commission.
The "paras" disbanded between 2003 and 2006, but many former fighters say the government has not delivered on promises of job training and other support meant to keep them from falling back into crime.
The demobilisation has been largely successful but new gangs are blocking the government's US-funded drive to retake wide swathes of countryside controlled by illegal groups fighting in Colombia's four-decade-old guerrilla war.
"We cannot discard the possibility of the emergence of a new generation of paramilitaries, with traits similar to the old United Self Defence Forces of Colombia (AUC), given the continuance of the armed conflict and the inability of the state to control the national territory," the report said.
The semi-autonomous commission, which is monitoring the paramilitary demobilisation, urged authorities to better target organised crime.
The state is principally at war with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, a cocaine-financed rebel army fighting in the name of communism.
The commission warned that local authorities may be tempted to enter into alliances with the new crime gangs against the rebels as their drug trafficking operations provide revenue that can buy police, army and political protection.
The United States has given Colombia billions of dollars in aid to help fight the insurgency and the drug trade.
But that aid is being questioned by Democrats in the US Congress who are concerned about a scandal in which President Alvaro Uribe's former security chief, his senator cousin Mario Uribe and other political allies are being investigated for illegal ties to demobilised paramilitary leaders.
- REUTERS
