SINCELEJO, COLOMBIA — This is the chronicle of a death foretold.
Mayor Eudaldo "Tito" Diaz knew he was a marked man. He had resisted right-wing paramilitary fighters in El Roble, a town in the northern state of Sucre, and the assassins had him in their sights. In a town hall meeting, he confronted Colombian President Alvaro Uribe, grabbing the microphone and warning that he was going to be killed.
Two months later, Diaz was seized by a dozen men in several cars, apparently betrayed by members of his personal security team.
He was taken to the notorious paramilitary "concentration camp," a ranch called El Palmar where several mass graves have been found. He was tortured for five days before being shot to death.
The assassination of Diaz, a 47-year-old doctor, affords a glimpse of the nightmare that war-torn Colombia has experienced for decades. The nation relived the nightmare this month with the testimony of paramilitary capo Salvatore Mancuso, as he confessed to drug trafficking, mass murder, extortion and usurping vast tracts of land -- all with the help of corrupt politicians.
In the four northern states, including Sucre, that Mancuso controlled, politicos who resisted were ruthlessly cut down. Diaz became one of the victims in April 2003.
"My father died wanting a better country, where mafias can't traffic in drugs and loot cities, where innocent people aren't killed at the whim of politicians to perpetuate themselves in power," said Juan David Diaz, the late mayor's 28-year-old son, who also is a doctor and who now heads the local victims rights group Movement of Victims of State Crimes, based here in Sucre's capital.
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Tell-all testimony
In his tell-all session before a special tribunal, Mancuso was the first in a parade of paramilitary leaders expected to testify before a special court to comply with terms of Colombia's peace process and exempt themselves from extradition to the United States.
Tales of atrocities committed by paramilitaries and left-wing rebels are nothing new in Colombia after four decades of civil war, and the nation will probably hear many more such accounts in the coming months as other paramilitary leaders appear in court.
But the first-person account from Mancuso, reading calmly from a laptop computer and dressed impeccably in expensive-looking business suits, added a special note of horror. As he ticked off the names of dozens of politicians he controlled and of the businessmen he extorted for financial support, the extent to which the paramilitaries' tentacles reached into Colombia's political and business life became vividly evident.
