Colombia's far-right paramilitaries, guilty of some of the worst massacres in the country's guerrilla war, want to end their bloody anti-insurgency and form a political party, a spokesman told Reuters. Nearly 5,900 members of the outlawed United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, or AUC, have laid down their arms during two years of peace talks with the government, a step toward joining the Andean country's legal political system, said AUC political chief Ivan Roberto Duque, better known by his alias Ernesto Baez de la Serna. "This organization is not going to disappear at all," said Duque in an interview near the town of Puerto Berrio in mountainous central Colombia. "Our goal is to outlive the war and transform ourselves into a democratic movement that will offer voters an alternative." Sometimes working with renegade members of the armed forces, the AUC have killed thousands of civilians they accused of cooperating with Marxist rebels, with weapons including stones and hammers.
