By Hugh Bronstein VALLEDUPAR, Colombia, Sept 18 (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. "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 Oct. 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. Senators Alvaro Araujo and Mauricio Pimiento, both from Valledupar, 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. MILITIAS 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. The paramilitaries soon got involved in cocaine trafficking and became wealthier and more powerful than their patrons. Most have disbanded over the last four years under a peace deal promising reduced jail terms, but the government says thousands of demobilized paramilitaries have joined new cocaine and extortion gangs countrywide. "The traditional family-based feudal system, backed by old and new criminal structures, will determine the outcome of the October vote in Valledupar," Casas said. A pressure cooker of all things Colombian, the city is home to fierce left- and right-wing militia leaders and is the birthplace of the country's signature Vallenato music. Rodrigo Tovar, better know as regional paramilitary chief "Jorge 40", grew up on the same Valledupar street as Ricardo Palmera, the local bank manager who reinvented himself as rebel leader "Simon Trinidad" and was extradited to the United States for drug smuggling. Before the scandals, Valledupar was best known for its yearly music festival, where tourists dance until dawn and cool off with a dip in the river that runs through town. As a younger man Sen. Araujo starred in a popular television soap opera about the roots of Vallenato music. "Valledupar was once admired for its culture and its people. Now it is defined in terms of corruption," said novelist Alonso Sanchez Baute, a city native. "No matter who wins in October, Valledupar, abandoned first by the state and then by God, is going to lose."
