Officials confirm death of warlord

BOGOTA, Colombia – Carlos Castano, a founder of Colombia’s brutal far-right militias, has died, officials confirmed Monday. He was 39.

Mario Iguaran, Colombia’s chief federal prosecutor, said that a skeleton unearthed from a shallow grave was that of Castano, who had muscled his way to the top of a shadowy, drug-financed underworld to become one of the nation’s most powerful and feared men.

“The federal prosecution has the full identification that this is Castano,” he said, pointing to a 99.99 percent match between Castano’s DNA and that of the skeleton.

A militia gunman who confessed to killing Castano in April 2004 led investigators on Friday to a shallow grave where he said he had buried the warlord.

The confirmation puts to rest a mystery that has haunted Colombia. Even as suspicions were rife that he was killed by his comrades, leading paramilitaries insisted he had simply disappeared, suggesting he had moved to the United States, where he was wanted on drug charges.

Colombia’s chief prosecutor has accused Carlos’ older brother, Vicente, of ordering the killing, saying he feared Carlos was planning to provide evidence of Vicente’s drug trafficking in exchange for leniency as he negotiated his surrender to U.S. authorities.

Both Vicente and Carlos had been indicted in the United States on cocaine trafficking charges and were wanted for extradition. Vicente, known as the “Professor,” remains on the run.

This modern-day tale of Cain and Abel has fascinated the nation, largely because Carlos fell victim to Colombia’s vicious civil conflict that he helped inflame.

Like others, Carlos joined Colombia’s conflict for revenge.

He was a teenager when rebels of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, kidnapped his father, a cattle farmer, in 1979. Despite a ransom payment, the rebels killed the family’s patriarch, setting Carlos and another brother, Fidel, on a journey of retribution that created the far-right militias known as “paramilitaries.”

At the pinnacle of his power in 1997, Carlos united 18 local blocs to form a national umbrella group called the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, known as the AUC, which would result in the deaths of thousands of Colombians.

In their early days as paramilitaries, the Castano brothers worked with the Medellin cocaine cartel, then run by Pablo Escobar. They were among a group that later turned on Escobar, helping lead a hunt for the drug lord that ended with his death in 1993 at the hands of police.

Fidel Castano, known as “Rambo,” disappeared in 1994. Carlos claimed he was killed in a firefight with rebels. Rumors persist that Fidel staged his own death and fled the country.

Landowners and businesses eagerly funded the AUC, wagering that the vigilante force could protect them from leftist rebels, which the state had failed to do.

Under Carlos’ guiding hand, the AUC went on a national offensive in the late 1990s. Thousands suspected of collaborating with rebels were slaughtered as the country’s now five-decade civil conflict entered its most vicious phase.

The AUC targeted human rights workers, journalists and trade unionists. In his book, Carlos detailed how he arranged the assassination of two presidential candidates, leftist politicians and even a television celebrity.

In 2002, an internal war broke out in the AUC, with a renegade commander declaring war on the drug-trafficking faction. His bloc was crushed and the drug-trafficking wing of the paramilitaries took firm control of the group.

Castano, meanwhile, became more marginalized in the organization he had helped found as peace talks started with the government of President Alvaro Uribe.

Recently married to a much younger woman with whom he had a daughter, Castano appeared more devoted to family life than the civil war.

“It’s my good fortune to have found a woman who has turned me once again into a young boy, filled with hope,” he said in “My Confession.”

At the end of his life, he had dozens of investigations pending against him and had been sentenced to more than 100 years in prison for roles in massacres and killings.