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Nearly 5,900 members of the outlawed United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, or AUC, have laid down their arms during two years of peace talks with the government, a step toward joining the Andean country's legal political system, said AUC political chief Ivan Roberto Duque, better known by his alias Ernesto Baez de la Serna.
"This organization is not going to disappear at all," said Duque in an interview near the town of Puerto Berrio in mountainous central Colombia. "Our goal is to outlive the war and transform ourselves into a democratic movement that will offer voters an alternative."
Sometimes working with renegade members of the armed forces, the AUC have killed thousands of civilians they accused of cooperating with Marxist rebels, with weapons including stones and hammers.
It was the first time the AUC publicly voiced democratic ambitions, which follow the example set by the heads of right-wing death squads who joined politics in Central America after that region's civil wars late last century.
Last month Colombia's Congress passed a bill setting the rules for disbanding paramilitary militias, ignoring objections from rights groups that the law would allow murderers to serve relatively short prison sentences. President Alvaro Uribe, who is in peace talks with the 15,000-member paramilitaries, says it is needed to end Colombia's 41-year conflict.
Paramilitary fighters who turn in their arms and cooperate with state investigators are offered reduced prison time under the measure.
The bespectacled Duque, wearing camouflage pants and seated in a red plastic chair under a tree in a farmhouse garden, said the AUC had built political support throughout Colombia over recent years.
"For years we have used guns to defend our ideals," the 50-year-old lawyer said. "We have penetrated, in a permanent way, the political process, building local and regional power structures. ... This will not end with the peace process."
Duque vowed to "legitimize the AUC's power and build it into a big political movement."
Washington has said that the AUC, which funds itself with Colombia's thriving cocaine trade, is a terrorist group. Duque himself has been accused of trafficking.
The paramilitaries were organized in the 1980s by drug traffickers and cattle ranchers trying to protect their land from Marxist rebels fighting since the 1960s for socialist revolution. Today they enjoy some measure of popularity in Colombia for having helped the army beat back the insurgency.
Duque, who has spent nearly half his life as a member of the "paras", said he and other militia members will insist in having a say over the direction of public policy after the last AUC rifle is turned in to authorities.
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