In an interview with the Colombian newspaper El Espectador, paramilitary leader Carlos Castaño has admitted that his United Colombian Self-Defense (AUC) right-wing paramilitary stole two helicopters from Panama in 1999 and uses them now.

The two Bell Ranger 206 choppers were stolen from the Kuna Yala island of Nargana in November of 1999. The aircraft were purportedly rented to take four women "tourists" to Kuna Yala, from Canera SA and Aero Charter, two charter air services. Once at Nargana, the aircraft were seized by four armed men and flown away.

At the time, police and reports in Panama's daily newspapers blamed the thefts on unspecified "Colombian insurgents." Sources close to the left-wing FARC guerrillas at the time alleged that the crime was the work of the AUC, whom they accused of trying to frame FARC for air piracy in order to prompt US intervention under the pretext that it was necessary this was necessary to protect the Panama Canal from a Colombian rebel threat.

Because the United States maintains a constant aerial and satellite surveillance of the airspace over and around both Panama and Colombia, it is very likely that the Americans quickly learned the truth about who stole the helicopters and where they were taken. If that is so, it may explain both the Clinton administration's avoidance of the bait offered in this and other AUC attempts to stage a bogus Colombian guerrilla threat to Panama, and the Bush administration's decision to add the AUC to the American list of international terrorist organizations (on which both FARC and the smaller left-wing ELN guerrilla force are also listed).

Castaño's announcement, however, has elicited no specific public response from either Panamanian or US authorities.

Panama, however, has complained to Colombia about another AUC air piracy attempt. Early in 2000 Panamanian police arrested a total of seven AUC paramilitary members in separate incidents at Albrook and Colon, when they attempted to rent helicopters using false identifications. The Albrook plot was discovered when a member of Panama's police air patrol, the Natonal Air Service, noticed that a man with whom he had trained in a US-sponsored anti-drug program, then a Colombian military officer, was using a false identity in the attempt to rent one of the choppers.

Earlier this year, a Panamanian prosecutor conducting the investigation in the 2000 attempted theft cases petitioned Colombian authorities for help in locating and questioning an eighth suspect, Carmen Rosa Araujo. The woman was working as a Colombian consular officer here at the time of the attempted thefts.

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