Alleged drug traffickers are shown to the media at a police station in Yopal, Colombia, on Monday. Colombian police said they dismantled the private army of a paramilitary warlord Carlos Mario Jimenez, alias 'Macaco' by arresting 147 people believed to be protecting a major cocaine smuggling ring. Carlos is now awaiting extradition to the United States - AP

VALLEDUPAR, Colombia (Reuters):

The bodyguard business is booming in this northern Colombian city plastered with posters of rival political candidates, mostly tough-looking men with hard eyes and forced smiles.

New crime gangs are emerging in Valledupar and have delivered death threats to the candidates they do not control ahead of next month's local elections.

Colombian democracy has been bolstered by the dismantling of right-wing paramilitary militias that once dominated places like this. But the 'paras' are being replaced here and elsewhere by a hodgepodge of criminal bands with no ideology and no qualms about intimidating politicians into obedience.

Where threats came from

"When the paramilitaries were around, at least you knew where the threats were coming from," said mayoral candidate Luis Fabian Fernandez, who says he has received messages telling him to drop his candidacy or else.

"Now there are small gangs of 20 people here, 40 there, and no one knows who is in charge of them," said Fernandez.

Like most local candidates, he does not leave home without heavily armed bodyguards. Several politicians have been murdered throughout Colombia ahead of municipal elections on October 28.

Intimidation has for long been a staple of politics in Valledupar, in Cesar province at the base of the snow-capped Sierra Nevada mountains.

Paramilitary thugs

Senators Alvaro Araujo and Mauricio Pimiento, both from alledupar, are in jail on charges they used paramilitary thugs to intimidate opponents in past elections. A former governor of Cesar is locked up on similar charges.

Araujo's sister was forced to quit as Colombia's Foreign Minister in February and their father is on the run, accused of kidnapping a political rival of the family.

"Despite these scandals, the seeds of change have not been planted in Valledupar," Pablo Casas, an analyst at Bogota think-tank Security and Democracy, said of this cattle ranching area run by families tracing their roots to Spanish colonists.

The government in Bogota has never fully controlled the national territory, so Valledupar's elite set up paramilitary security forces in the 1990s to fight Marxist rebels who were hijacking goods, kidnapping and charging illegal taxes.