Laht.com: The chairman of Colombia's National Reparations and Reconciliation said Wednesday that some of the murderous right-wing militias which ostensibly demobilized in 2006 are re-arming in border regions of the Andean nation.

Eduardo Pizarro said 10 percent of the 30,000 members of the AUC militia federation who laid down their arms have resumed illegal activities in areas bordering Ecuador, Venezuela and Panama.

"The violence is departing from the center of the country and is moving to the borders. Right now, the worst affected areas for Colombia are those where there is drug trafficking," he said in Bogota at a forum on the decades-long armed conflict and its victims.

Half of Colombia's 32 provinces are experiencing violence from the 22 "emerging bands" made up of AUC fighters who took part in the 2003-2006 demobilization process, according to Pizarro.

Organizations that aid former combatants interested in rehabilitation say those individuals face threats and pressure from the militiamen who have returned to the way of the gun.

On Tuesday, leftist Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez blamed Colombia-based "paramilitarism" for the "vile murder" of two Venezuelan guardsmen this week in the border state of Tachira.

The AUC, which arose in the mid-1980s to protect landowners and businesses from Marxist rebels, degenerated over time into a fractious coalition of death squads whose chiefs grew rich from drug trafficking, land grabs and extortion.

Rightist gunmen were responsible for at least three-quarters of the more than 27,000 forced disappearances in Colombia over the past two decades, a top government prosecutor said last month, while a preliminary report compiled last summer blamed the AUC for 21,000 deaths since 1987.

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