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"I negotiated a nominal price for the arms with the Self-Defence Militias of Colombia."

REUTERS
Tuesday, 9 November 1999

Ex-Nicaragua police boss admits Colombia arms deal

MANAGUA, Nicaragua - A former Nicaraguan police commander charged with arms trafficking has admitted planning to sell weapons to an illegal gang of ultra-right Colombian paramilitary fighters whose anti-guerrilla cause he supported.

"I negotiated a nominal price for the arms with the Self-Defence Militias of Colombia," Roger Ramirez Torres, a former police commander on Nicaragua's Caribbean coast, told criminal court judge Martha Quezada late on Monday.

The proceedings were closed to the media but a partial transcript was made available to reporters on Tuesday.

Ramirez was arrested on Saturday after police found 194 AK assault rifles, two rocket-propelled grenade launchers with 46 grenades, a submachine gun, 762 AK magazine clips and other weapons in a house in Managua. He is charged with terrorism, drug trafficking and arms trafficking.

He did not say how much the arms deal was worth, just that he had charged a minimal amount out of solidarity with the right-wing militia.

Colombia's burgeoning paramilitary groups or death squads, are also known eupehmistically as peasant self-defence forces. They have been blamed for massacring hundreds of civilians across Colombia over the last year.

Human rights groups accuse the Colombian military of backing the illegal groups, which are frequently hired by large landowners to fight Marxist guerrillas and their suspected sympathisers in a long-running civil conflict that has claimed more than 35,000 lives in just 10 years.

The "Self-Defence Militias of Colombia" to which Ramirez referred are not known by that name in Colombia. It seemed likely, however, that he was talking about the United Self-Defence Forces of Colombia (AUC), a nationwide alliance of paramilitary forces with some 5,000 combatants.

"Their struggle is similar to that of other military forces that last decade fought against dictatorial governments," Ramirez said, likening them with the U.S.-armed Contra rebels that fought Nicaragua's leftist Sandinista government in the 1980s in this Central American country.

Ramirez, a former Sandinista police commander, later turned against the Sandinistas and supported politicians who backed the Contras.

The weapons were discovered packed in grease and ready for shipping, police said.

Authorities also found 125 kg (275 pounds) of cocaine in a separate house belonging to Ramirez's ex-wife, but Ramirez denied any connection to the drugs.

Ramirez was fired from the National Police in 1993 for presumed links to drug traffickers on the Caribbean coast, authorities said. He later worked as a lawyer defending accused drug traffickers.

Ramirez, who was part of the Sandinista police before the Sandinistas lost a 1990 election, said he had been given the arms by his superiors in the Interior Ministry, which ran the police force.