Colombia's secret police, with support from the US Drug Enforcement Agency, arrested 14 in connection with arming and funding far-right paramilitary death squads by selling cocaine abroad, police said today.
"A group of narco-traffickers dedicated to financing paramilitary groups on the Atlantic coast has been dismantled," said Col. German Jaramillo, head of the DAS secret police.
"We believe this has been one of the most severe strikes against illegally armed groups."
The 8,000-member Self Defense Forces of Colombia, known by its Spanish acronym AUC, groups far-right militias that target Marxist rebels fighting in Colombia's 37-year-old guerrilla war. The conflict has claimed 40,000 lives in the past decade.
Col. Jaramillo did not quantify the amount of arms or financial funding the suspected drug traffickers provided to the paramilitary forces, which are classified as a terrorist organization by the United States and blamed for some of Colombia's most brutal massacres.
He said the drug traffickers bought weapons in Central America and oversaw production of coca - the raw ingredient for cocaine - and the processing of the drug in paramilitary-controled zones along Colombia's Atlantic coast.
The traffickers shipped the cocaine through Central America, the Caribbean and Mexico, to the United States - the world's largest cocaine consuming nation.
The arrests came as Colombian President Andres Pastrana urged the United States today to include drug traffickers on its list of terrorist groups - since they outlawed fighters in this war-torn Andean nation.
"You have to put narco-traffickers on the list of terrorists because they are big financial backers of terrorism," he told reporters in Bogota.
President Pastrana travels to the United States today for a meeting with US President George W. Bush in New York on Sunday.
Washington is pouring up to 2 billion into President Pastrana's anti-drug efforts, making Colombia the biggest recipient of US military aid in Latin America since the civil war in El Salvador in the 1980s.
President Pastrana ran on an election platform of peace but fighting has escalated in the past several years, despite ceding an enclave the size of Switzerland to the country's largest rebel force, the 17,000-member FARC, in efforts to launch peace talks.
Negotiations with the FARC, also branded terrorists by the United States, are currently at a standstill.