BOGOTA – Colombian warlord and drug kingpin Daniel Rendon Herrera showed up Monday for a judicial hearing with 200 million pesos ($100,000) in “reparations” for his victims.

“Don Mario,” as he is known, was arrested in April. He and brother Freddy Rendon formerly led an outfit affiliated with the AUC militia federation.

Daniel Rendon, who appeared at the Attorney General’s Office in Bogota to answer questions, also announced that he was surrendering a clinic and three ranches in the southern province of Guaviare.

The defendant, who has expressed a willingness to cooperate with authorities, said one of the properties alone might be worth $15 million.

The government seized assets from Rendon worth more than $100 million several months ago in various provinces.

Officials describe Don Mario as one of the most feared and powerful drug traffickers in Colombia since Medellin cartel founder Pablo Escobar, who was killed in a 1993 shootout with police.

After the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, or AUC, accused of committing numerous human rights violations, demobilized more than 31,000 of its fighters between the end of 2003 and mid-2006 as part of the peace process with President Alvaro Uribe’s administration, Rendon went underground.

He seized control of the smuggling routes and markets of other drug warlords, including Salvatore Mancuso, Diego Fernando Murillo Bejarano and Ramiro Vanoy Murillo.

All three of those men were extradited by the Colombian government to the United States on May 13, 2008.

The former AUC commanders were wanted in the United States on drug, money laundering and other charges.

Officials offered a reward of $2.5 million for Rendon, who is accused of the deaths of some 3,000 people and sent some 100 tons of cocaine to the United States.

U.S. authorities have filed an extradition request for the drug trafficker.

The AUC encompassed most of the rightist rural security organizations created in the 1980s to fight leftist guerrillas.

Over the years, however, those groups turned into drug-running death squads that carried out numerous massacres.

Under the terms of the 2005 Peace and Justice Law, pushed through Congress by the U.S.-backed Uribe administration to regulate the militiamen’s reinsertion into society, former AUC members face a maximum of eight years in prison if convicted of any of the scores of massacres of suspected rebel sympathizers attributed to the rightists over the years.

Colombia’s Constitutional Court upheld the law in 2006 but conditioned the sentence reductions on full disclosure and confession of crimes and reparations to victims.

The penetration of the AUC into Colombian politics came to light in November 2006 when the so-called “para-political” scandal broke, and dozens of legislators, the overwhelming majority of them supporters of Uribe, now in his second four-year term, have been implicated.

Since then, more than 60 politicians, including some three dozen members of Congress, have been arrested for their alleged links to the AUC. EFE