Bodies of 105 militia victims found in Colombia

Bogota, May 6: Remains of 105 victims of right-wing paramilitaries were found in the southern jungles of Colombia, the biggest such discovery in the country's four-decade-old guerrilla war, officials said today.

More remains are expected to be found near the 65 graves uncovered late yesterday in Putumayo province on the Ecuadorean border.

A total of 211 bodies have been recovered from the province since last year, but yesterdat's find by agents from Colombia's attorney general's office marked the most number of bodies found in a single area.

More than 31,000 paramilitaries have disarmed since 2003 under a deal promising reduced jail terms to those who cooperate with investigations into crimes they committed in the name of fighting Marxist rebels.

Both the ''paras'' and the rebels are funded by Colombia's multibillion-dollar cocaine trade and are branded terrorists by Washington.

''We are horrified at this cruelty driven by the insatiable lust for land'' used for the production of cocaine, Interior Minister Carlos Holguin said in announcing the discovery of the graves.

The paramilitaries were organized in the 1980s by rich Colombians to fight the rebels. By the late 1990s the conflict had turned into little more than a turf war over drug smuggling routes.

Colombia is the world's biggest producer of cocaine despite billions of dollars in US aid, under a program called Plan Colombia, meant to fight narcotics.

But US Congress has frozen 55 million dollars in military assistance due to charges that the government of conservative President Alvaro Uribe has colluded with the paramilitaries.

Eight lawmaker from Uribe's governing coalition are in jail on charges of helping the illegal militias. The scandal has also implicated military officers and Uribe's former intelligence chief.

Uribe was in Washington this week lobbying for a free trade deal and trying to keep military assistance flowing, but faced skepticism from the Democratic-controlled Congress over his government's human rights record and progress in the fight against drugs.

''When Plan Colombia began, we were told it would cut by half the amount of cocaine in five years,'' Sen Patrick Leahy, a Vermont Democrat who chairs a key foreign aid committee, said last week.

''Six years and 5 billion dollars later, it has not had any measurable effect on the amount of cocaine entering our country.'' Uribe is popular in Colombia for cutting urban crime and reducing robberies and kidnappings on the highways.

Reuters ABM VP0130>