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Ex-Colombian Paramilitary Chief Pleads Guilty

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By ELAINE SILVESTRINI | The Tampa Tribune

Published: October 27, 2008

TAMPA - A former commander in a right-wing Colombian paramilitary organization pleaded guilty this morning to conspiring to smuggle cocaine into the United States.

Guillermo Perez-Alzate, 45, was one of 14 former members of Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia, also known at the AUC, who were extradited to the United States in May. He is the only one of the group being prosecuted in Tampa, and he is the highest-ranking member of the AUC to be prosecuted here.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Joseph K. Ruddy said the extradition of the group, which included some of the highest-ranking members of the AUC, marked the end of the AUC as it was once known. "The AUC, as we have known, is pretty much dismantled," he said.

Perez-Alzate, former commander of the AUC's Southern Bloc, taxed and sanctioned the cocaine processing laboratories for the AUC, Ruddy said in court this morning. Perez-Alzate told federal Magistrate Elizabeth Jenkins that the facts described by Ruddy were accurate.

The laboratories either produced cocaine for the AUC or were required to pay a tax to the AUC for protection from Colombian law enforcement and military, guerrilla forces such as the Fuerzas Armas Revelucionares de Colombia, also known as FARC, or competing narcotics traffickers.

Laboratories not affiliated with the AUC that failed to pay the tax would either be destroyed or have their cocaine seized. The cocaine was taken to the west coast of Colombia and then smuggled into the United States, including Florida, on fishing vessels or go-fast boats.

The investigation that resulted in Perez-Alzate's arrest also resulted in the seizure of thousands of kilograms of cocaine traceable to the conspiracy in which he participated, including the seizure by the Colombian Navy in September 2002 of 2,136 kilograms of cocaine destined for the United States, Ruddy said.

In the 1990s, paramilitary organizations enmeshed in Colombia's civil war moved in to fill the void left by the dismantling of the country's once-powerful drug cartels, financing their fighting through drug sales, experts have said.

The AUC was formed by wealthy landowners and drug lords to fight the left-wing Marxist rebels of the FARC, Colombia's largest paramilitary organization. After starting out as a band of vigilantes, the AUC absorbed many of the successors to the Medellin and Cali cartels.

The charges against Perez-Alzate carry a mandatory minimum of 10 years in federal prison and a maximum possible sentence of life.

Colombia will not extradite its citizens, however, unless prison sentences are capped at 40 years.

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