Colombian crime gangs cut off tribes from food

BOGOTA (Reuters) - Colombia's indigenous tribes are being surrounded and cut off from food supplies by criminal gangs made up of right-wing paramilitaries that disbanded under a government peace plan, rights experts said on Wednesday.

To control lucrative cocaine-smuggling routes, new gangs with names like the Black Eagles are blocking access to and from indigenous communities around the country, tribal leaders told a United Nationsforum.

More than 31,000 paramilitaries have turned in their guns over the last three years, but the government admits that thousands of former militia fighters have regrouped into drug and extortion gangs.

"The Black Eagles are a paramilitary army that is refining itself as an organized crime group," said Luis Andrade, president of the National Indigenous Organization of Colombia.

He said that about 12,000 tribe members throughout the country have been hemmed into their villages by new and old paramilitary groups as well as soldiers enforcing President Alvaro Uribe's hard-line security policies.

"They can't leave to fish or hunt, which has caused hundreds to starve," Andrade said. "This confinement is causing more victims than direct actions such as assassinations."

Indigenous people who do try to leave their villages risk being shot as rebel collaborators, he said.

Urban violence associated with Colombia's four-decade-old guerrilla war has declined under Uribe, who was re-elected last year. But wide swathes of countryside are still controlled by left-wing rebels, paramilitaries and other criminal bands.

The government has never controlled all of the Andean country, which is the world's biggest producer of cocaine. The "paras" were formed in the 1980s to help cattle ranchers, drug lords and other rich Colombians beat back the rebels.

'WILDER, YOUNGER'

The United Nations says the new crime gangs are less disciplined and more dangerous than their paramilitary predecessors.

"They are wilder, younger and not as well organized as they were before. They do not have a political agenda at all. It is pure narco-trafficking," said Roberto Meier, Colombia's representative for the United Nations refugee agency UNHCR.

"They run over everything in front of them," Meier said.

Uribe's international standing has been damaged by a scandal in which some of his closest allies in Congress have been jailed while awaiting trial on charges of colluding with paramilitary drug gangs.

Human rights groups say the demobilization has not forced paramilitary chiefs to get out of the cocaine business.

The northern Sierra Nevada region remains filled with coca crops used to make cocaine as well as laboratories for processing the drug, said indigenous leader Leonor Zalabata.

"That illicit economic structure is not being dismantled," she said.