Colombian priest who ran far-right militia nabbed
BOGOTA, Colombia (AP) — Colombian officials announced Friday the capture of a fugitive Roman Catholic priest who was convicted in absentia last year of organizing a killer far-right militia made up of members of a dismantled paramilitary bloc.
Beginning in 2003 and lasting for nearly a decade, the Rev. Oscar Albeiro Ortiz formed and ran an organization engaged in murder, extortion and forced displacement, according to his sentencing document.
He did so in San Antonio de Prado, a village near Medellin. From the pulpit, Ortiz had accompanied members of the paramilitary bloc then recruited them after the bloc was ostensibly disbanded under a peace pact brokered by the government of then-President Alvaro Uribe.
Critics of that "peace process" point to cases like that of Ortiz, who was arrested Thursday night in the town of La Virginia in Risaralda state, as evidence that it was a sham.
Ortiz was arrested in 2010 but cleared by a lower court and continued to maintain that he was innocent.
But he was later retried and convicted last August of criminal conspiracy and sentenced to 19 years in prison.
His sentence, a copy of which The Associated Press obtained, says investigators using wiretaps had overheard Ortiz fingering people as leftist rebels who later turned up murdered.
The sentence said that people beaten or driven from their homes by paramilitary henchmen of Ortiz were told they were being punished "for disobeying the orders of the priest."
One witness quoted in the sentence described Ortiz "as a person of two faces: the good angel and the bad angel" and described seeing him late at night drinking liquor with death squad members.
When Ortiz announced to his faithful at church one Sunday that some people would be coming to protect them, the witness said, he was announcing the arrival of paramilitaries who formerly belonged to the Cacique Nutibara bloc that had killed hundreds of people.
The so-called paramilitaries, organized under the umbrella of the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, or AUC, committed more than 70 percent of the killings in the country's nearly half-century-old dirty war, according to prosecutors.
The AUC "demobilized" from 2003-2005, its leaders surrendering in exchange for reduced sentences of up to 8 years in prison if they confessed to their crimes.
Their foes in The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia are now engaged in peace talks with the government in Cuba.
___
Associated Press writer Frank Bajak in Lima, Peru, contributed to this report.
