Reply #5: From "El Tiempo," a Colombian newspaper, on "Don Berna:"

[Judi Lynn]

El Tiempo reports this morning:

“Don Berna’s” multiple dead, displaced and disappeared may not tangle him up as much as his risky past in mafia.

During the 1980s he belonged to the Moncada and Galeano clan, which did business with the Medellín cartel. Later, he joined forces with the narcos of Valle del Cauca in the “Pepes” to combat Pablo Escobar.

The United States has asked for his extradition on narcotrafficking charges.

These unholy relationships continued until 1997, when he began to become part of the AUC and rose to the rank of inspector general.

He was the first of the big chiefs to go to the Itagüí maximum-security prison. “Don Berna” has remained silent and enigmatic.

Many still attribute to him an immense amount of power in the Antioquian capital , and although the mayor’s office dislikes these claims, academic researchers insist that the city’s current calm owes in part to the former “para” leader having ordered his gangs to cease their violence.

In two critical moments for “Don Berna,” Medellín was mysteriously paralyzed.

Intelligence agencies affirm that, from his cell, he continues to manage the “Envigado Office” network of hitmen-for-hire, whose leader on the outside is alias “Rogelio.”

Medellín’s ombudsman has registered 2,100 intra-urban displacements since Cacique Nutibara bloc demobilized , and 64 percent of them said that those who made them leave were “paras” or demobilized paramilitaries.

If these allegations are correct, and Don Berna is still controlling criminal and narco activity in Medellín, he should not be entitled to a light jail sentence under the “Justice and Peace” law - and indeed should be subject to extradition to the United States. That decision will be up to the prosecutors who will begin considering his case today.

Like other paramilitary leaders, Don Berna appears to be preparing to accompany his confession with a less-than-spontaneous show of support on the streets outside. Semana magazine reported yesterday on the pressure that “former” paramilitaries exerted on a charter high school in the slums of western Medellín.

Last Wednesday afternoon, a group of demobilized members of the Cacique Nutibara bloc arrived at the CEDEPRO educational institution in Medellín’s Alta Vista neighborhood. They confronted the directors with the peremptory order to fill two buses with students on Monday, and to send them to the prosecutor’s office building to support Don Berna’s hearing. The directors refused to do that, and the men immediately insulted them. They told them that by saying no, they were proving what “the boss” had said about them. That those from CEDEPRO were the only ones who wouldn’t collaborate, while the rest of the sector’s institutions, they said, had already obeyed.

This act demonstrates, once again, what has been happening with the paramilitary leaders’ confessions: they are becoming a circus spectacle in which the victims are hit the hardest.
(snip/...)

http://www.cipcol.org/?p=442
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Almost sounds like the smug, fixed justice system _Bush brought with him, doesn't it?