By Hugh Bronstein BOGOTA, April 17 (Reuters) - Colombia's opposition, launching a provincial election campaign, accused President Alvaro Uribe on Tuesday of supporting anti-crime groups in the 1990s that became drug-smuggling death squads, a charge the government dismissed. In a debate ahead of October elections, Sen. Gustavo Petro said Uribe, as governor of Antioquia from 1995 to 1997, supported Convivir community groups meant to help the police fight kidnappers, Marxist guerrillas and other criminals. Convivir was quickly taken over by far-right paramilitaries guilty of massacring thousands of peasants in the name of fighting the guerrillas, said Petro, a one-time member of the disbanded M19 rebel movement. "Any means toward the end of destroying the left was justified," said Petro. "This strategy ended up creating the monster of paramilitarism that still confronts us." Petro presented no concrete evidence of illegal activity by Uribe, who was first elected president in 2002. Interior Minister Carlos Holguin took the floor of the Senate after Petro spoke, accusing him of playing politics. "He is painting Colombia as a country of assassins and paramilitaries," Holguin said. "And people believe his nonsense." Petro's Polo Democratico party wants to capitalize on a scandal in which eight of Uribe's congressional allies are in jail on charges of collusion with paramilitaries. Thousands are killed every year in Colombia as guerrillas battle paramilitaries for control of the world's biggest cocaine trade. More than 31,000 "paras" have handed in their guns as part of a peace deal, while Colombia's biggest rebel army, known as the FARC, is still fighting the state. Petro, seeking to establish more links between the government and the illegal drug-running militias, accused Bogota's police chief of once meeting with Medellin cocaine lord Pablo Escobar, who was gunned down in 1993. Chief Daniel Castiblanco, speaking later to reporters, denied the allegation. After years of being hobbled by voters' concerns it was linked with still-active guerrilla armies, the Polo Democratico came in second in last year's presidential race, in which the conservative Uribe won a landslide re-election based on his U.S.-backed security policies.
