BOGOTA – The former top leader of a disbanded, far-right Colombian paramilitary federation, Salvatore Mancuso, presented government prosecutors with the names of 31 high-ranking soldiers and police officers who had ties to the militias and even allowed them to carry out several massacres, the press reported Thursday.

Caracol Radio made public a document from the Attorney General’s office that mentions the names of soldiers ranging from the rank of sergeant to general who, according to Mancuso, participated in joint operations with the paramilitaries.

It will now be up to the AG office to determine whether to launch an investigation into the officials mentioned by Mancuso, jailed in the United States on drug-trafficking charges.

The former warlord mentioned nine generals with ties to the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, or AUC, including Rosso Jose Serrano, former National Police chief, whom he accused of taking part in joint operations with the militias.

He also cited Gen. Rito Alejo Del Rio, one of the former officials closest to hard-line Colombian President Alvaro Uribe.

The documented made public by Caracol Radio, which also cited Del Rio as the person responsible for the creation of right-wing death squads in the banana-growing region of Uraba, said that general had agreements “with the AUC’s (now-deceased AUC founder) Carlos Castaño, Salvatore Mancuso and Freddy Rendon Herrera.”

Also mentioned were Gen. Carlos Alberto Ospina – armed forces commander during Uribe’s first term in office, from 2002-2006 – whom he accused either of directly participating in massacres in 1996 and 1997 or failing to prevent them.

The statements by the former AUC leader, extradited to the United States in May 2008, were delivered to the AG office from the prison in Washington where he is being held.

Mancuso and other high-ranking Colombian ex-militia chiefs extradited to the United States last year to face drug charges asked leftist opposition Sen. Piedad Cordoba last month to help get their families out of the Andean nation, her office said.

Stressing their concern about an increase in death threats against their families, the warlords subsequently asked Cordoba to sound out other governments about the possibility of asylum for their loved ones, an aide to the senator told Efe.

The AUC chiefs appear to be conditioning any further cooperation with investigations of militia activities – and of the gunmen’s ties to the security forces and politicians – on help in securing a safe haven for their families, the aide said.

Among the more explosive revelations to come from the former AUC commanders so far was Mancuso’s testimony in April that his men systematically burned hundreds of their victims at the behest of officials and military brass seeking to downplay the level of violence in Colombia.

Under the terms of the 2005 Peace and Justice Law, pushed through Colombia’s Congress by President Uribe to regulate the militiamen’s reinsertion into society, AUC fighters were promised they would spend no more than eight years in detention.

In exchange, the paramilitaries were required to give a full accounting of their crimes and make some kind of restitution to victims and their families.

A number of the 15 men extradited last year to the United States – for allegedly continuing to commit crimes from prison and not cooperating with Colombian investigators – provided valuable information, directing authorities to mass graves and exposing politicians’ links to the militias.

The AUC demobilized more than 31,000 of its fighters between the end of 2003 and mid-2006 as part of the peace process with Uribe’s rightist administration, but the militia federation’s involvement in the Colombian political system remains under investigation.

AUC penetration of Colombia’s public life came to light in November 2006 when the “parapolitica” scandal broke, leading to the arrests of dozens of politicians, most of them allies of Uribe, now in his second four-year term and mulling a bid for a third mandate.

The AUC was made up of numerous rural defense cooperatives formed more than 20 years ago to battle leftist rebels.

Many of the militias, however, degenerated into death squads and carried out massacres of peasants suspected of having rebel sympathies, along with slayings of journalists and union members accused of favoring the leftist insurgents. EFE