BOGOTA, Colombia (AP) -- A rightist paramilitary leader admitted dispatching
                  gunmen who shot and wounded a Colombian labor leader last week. But in an
                  interview published Wednesday, he claimed the aim had been to kidnap, not kill,
                  the target.

                  Carlos Castaño, commander of the United Self Defense Forces of Colombia, or
                  AUC, acknowledged in an interview with Bogota's El Tiempo newspaper that his
                  gunmen were responsible for last week's shooting.

                  Wilson Borja, who heads the national public employees union, was hit in the leg and shoulder
                  and grazed in the head Friday in a spray of gunfire directed at his armored car. A sidewalk
                  coffee vendor and one of the gunmen were killed in a shootout with Borja's bodyguards. Borja's
                  driver and a bodyguard also were wounded.

                  Borja had said days before the shooting that he received death threats from the AUC, a group that
                  has killed and kidnapped those they suspect of supporting leftist guerrillas. The AUC allegedly
                  operates with support from renegade elements within the Colombian military.

                  "The intention was to massacre me and my bodyguards, and the proof is the 57 bullets they
                  fired at us," Borja told Colombia's Caracol Radio on Wednesday from a Bogota hospital.

                  Castaño accused Borja, a member of Colombia's Communist Party, of belonging to the National
                  Liberation Army, or ELN, Colombia's second-largest guerrilla group.

                  "This activity by Borja makes him an actor in the conflict and thus a military objective," Castaño
                  told El Tiempo.

                  Borja said his ties to the ELN are only as part of a group of civic leaders who
                  have met with the rebels to spur peace talks and bring an end to 36 years of civil
                  war.

                  President Andres Pastrana is under pressure internationally to rein in the
                  8,000-strong AUC. Human rights organizations claim the government tolerates
                  rightist violence because it helps weaken the guerrillas, the government's main
                  rival.

                  Copyright 2000 The Associated Press.