BOGOTA (Reuters) — Peace remains a distant prospect in Colombia despite the disarming of more than 31,000 right-wing militia members, as cocaine has come to replace ideology as the main fuel for Latin America’s longest-running war.The paramilitaries, who spread terror for 20 years in the name of fighting left-wing rebels, were promised reduced jail terms for disbanding and their leaders began trial hearings last week aimed at ending a bloody chapter in the conflict.

But with the rebels still fighting from secret jungle bases and both sides exploiting the world’s biggest cocaine trade, a peace deal similar to those that ended the Central American insurgencies of the 1980s is a long way off, analysts said.

“The paramilitary demobilisation has not in any way meant the dismantling of their criminal networks. Both they and the rebels have an enormous financial base provided by cocaine,” said Cynthia Arnson, director of the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Latin American Program in Washington. “Once conflicts have entered the ‘greed’ phase, as Colombia’s has, they are very difficult to end,” she added.

The United States has given this Andean country billions of dollars to fight the drug trade, partly through aerial spraying of coca plants used to make cocaine. But progress has been slow as farmers simply replant in better-hidden fields.

Colombia’s army has never fully controlled the country, so landowners formed the paramilitaries to battle 17,000-strong rebel force called the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, which has been fighting since the 1960s.

With help from some sectors of the military, the “paras” beat back the FARC in many areas, but also branched out to provide security for local politicians and cocaine smugglers.

By the 1990s they dominated wide swathes of northern Colombia. They massacred peasants to cow local populations and served as a bridge between elected officials and drug traffickers.

Following pressure from opposition politicians, human rights groups and the US Congress, President Alvaro Uribe threw dozens of paramilitary bosses into jail three weeks ago. The government admits that many paramilitaries, despite the tearful disarming ceremonies broadcast on television over the last three years, have formed new crime gangs.

“The paramilitary leaders who negotiated the demobilisation have lost a lot of power. The new narco-trafficking bosses are rising from the paramilitary ranks,” said Mauricio Romero, director for disarmament and demobilisation at Colombia’s National Reconciliation and Reparation Commission.

Daniel Coronell, visiting professor at the Center for Latin American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, said paramilitary chiefs are using their political status as demobilised combatants to win benefits that are allowing them to stay in the drug business.

“Peace processes in El Salvador and other countries were different because those conflicts had to do with ideology. The paramilitaries are not trying to protect a political platform but a multibillion-dollar business,” said Coronell, who left Colombia after receiving death threats for making such comments. Nicaragua, Guatemala and El Salvador negotiated an end to their insurgencies in the 1990s but talks between the rebels and Uribe, a staunch US-ally whose father was killed by the FARC more than 20 years ago, remain as elusive as ever.

The FARC says it is fighting to close the wide gap between rich and poor in Colombia. But even left-wing politicians say the group has almost no popular support.

“Income for Central American insurgents was seen for the most part as a means to an end, which was defined in political terms,” said Arnson. “In Colombia as in other resource-based conflicts, wealth and enrichment have become ends in and of themselves.”