BARRANQUILLA, COLOMBIA — Having gotten 602 killings off his chest, paramilitary leader Edgar Ignacio Fierro has moved on to dollars and cents: how he and other leaders looted municipal treasuries, hospitals and even schools to finance their armies and enrich themselves.
Like thousands of other leaders of the right-wing militias, Fierro is testifying in compliance with a 2005 disarmament accord under which the commanders were promised light sentences in exchange for their surrender, full confessions and a promise not to return to a life of war and terrorism.
Fierro spent his first days on the stand last year meticulously reviewing hundreds of killings, a litany that included university professors, union leaders, peasants accused of giving aid and comfort to leftist guerrillas. Family members of victims, many of them in tears, watched via closed-circuit video.
Now the former Colombian army captain is just as scrupulously detailing how paramilitaries bled dry not just businesses and landowners, large and small, but public officials who either turned over chunks of their government budgets and revenue or were killed.
"They justify it by saying they were defending the fatherland, but most of these people ended up behaving like any other common criminal," said one prosecutor, who like other officials interviewed for this story spoke anonymously for fear of reprisal.
The wrenching confessions by Fierro and 3,200 other militia leaders, being made one by one in highly guarded rooms in this city's civic center and in Medellin and Bogota, the capital, shine a light on a sordid chapter in Colombia's 4-decade-long civil war.
"What the government is trying to do is reconstruct the truth," said a university researcher. "With that, it can dispense justice and finally order reparations to the victims. But it's all a gamble. The versions so far are incomplete and don't always coincide."
From 2003 to '06, Fierro was in charge of this city and most of Atlantico state as a sectional leader of the Northern Block paramilitary army. He answered to the block's supreme commander, Rodrigo Tovar, who last May was extradited to the United States to face drug and terrorism charges.
In a recent interview in this city's Modelo prison, where he has been an inmate for two years, Fierro said his troops and other militias took the fight to the leftist guerrillas because the central government was incapable of doing so.
