On paper, it appears that the national police departments of Nicaragua and Panama, working with Guatemala-based Israeli arms merchants, sent a large quantity of munitions to Colombia's AUC paramilitary through the port of Turbo with the complicity of the Colombian government. All who appear to be involved, except for the AUC, deny it. AUC leader Carlos Castaño, theoretically wanted by Colombian Police for a series of grisly massacres but generally operating as an auxiliary of the Colombian Army, brags about it.

Last November's transfer of some 3,500 AK-47 assault rifles from Nicaraguan government arsenals aboard the freighter Otterloo, now under arrest in Colon, to the AUC came to public attention earlier this year, sparking accusations and counter-accusations between the Panamanian and Nicaraguan national police chiefs, and in turn promises by the US government and the Organization of American States to help with investigations to get to the bottom of the affair.

Nicaragua's and Panama's official investigations have been conducted, with no fault found. Published reports that the Bush administration was displeased with this state of affairs were sternly denied in full-page newspaper ads taken out by the US Embassy here.

Now the OAS is demanding that Panama, Nicaragua, Guatemala and Colombia conduct more thorough investigations. Here in Panama, prosecutors plead they can't do much more without documents that Nicargua hasn't delivered.

Meanwhile, it seems that the arms smuggled in the Otterloo were only part of a five-shipment package that brought the AUC more than 13,000 assault rifles, millions of bullets, grenade and rocket launchers, machine guns, explosives and other implements of death and destruction. Human rights groups in Colombia and around the world fear that with the August 6 inauguration of Alvaro Uribe as Colombia's next president, the alliance between the Colombian Army Castaño's group will be solidified and Colombia's long-running civil conflict will be seriously escalated.

The United States, for its part, has just dropped the anti-drug pretense for its aid to the Colombian Army and admits that its military objective is to defeat the leftist FARC and ELN rebels. During George H. W. Bush's administration, the US Army's Delta Force and Drug Enforcement agency conducted joint operations with the PEPEs --- People Persecuted by Pablo Escobar, Carlos Castaño's Cali Cartel-funded precursor of the AUC --- in an effort to smash the Medellin Cartel. In those days the US government urged its Colombian counterpart to strengthen its ties with Castaño and develop his 50-man death squad into a paramilitary movement to fight the leftist guerrillas. Though George W. Bush's administration has added the AUC to its official list of terrorist groups, that sounds an awful lot like the Reagan and elder Bush administrations' denunciations of the Salvadoran death squads, with whom the US military was working at the time. Moreover, some of the key people who carried out Central American policy back then, most notably Otto Reich and Elliott Abrams, are advising the present US administration with respect to Colombia.

So there may be reason for official US satisfaction with a gun-running investigation that's going nowhere.

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