BOGOTA (AP) -- Judicial authorities ordered the arrest of 20 politicians and business leaders, including five congressmen, on criminal conspiracy charges for signing a 2001 pact with illegal right-wing militias.

All are accused of benefiting — at the ballot box or otherwise — from close ties to the paramilitaries, which committed contemporary Colombia's must brutal massacres and stole land from tens of thousands of peasants.

It was the latest shock wave in a scandal that has badly marred President Alvaro Uribe's credibility because nearly all those implicated are his political allies, although the second-term president enjoys broad popularity for making Colombia's cities safer.

The nation's chief prosecutor, Mario Iguaran, rejected claims by some of the pact's signatories that they signed under duress.

"They willingly and freely participated in the meeting," he told reporters.

The Supreme Court has ordered the arrest of 14 members of Colombia's 270-member Congress since the so-called para-politico scandal broke last November. As of midday Monday, only two remained at large.

All but one of the implicated congressmen are political allies of Uribe, whose foreign minister resigned in February after her senator brother was jailed in the scandal.

Uribe's former spy chief is also under investigation, and opposition leaders claim Uribe himself let the militias gain strength when he was a provincial governor in the mid-1990s.

Colombia receives more than $600 million in mostly military aid annually for counterinsurgency and anti-narcotics.

Most of it has gone to strengthen military and police efforts that in the early 2000s put leftist rebels on the defensive even as the right-wing paramilitaries gained clout, infiltrated government and became major drug traffickers.

Among those arrested Monday was Eleonora Pineda, a former congresswoman who served as a go-between with paramilitary bosses before they surrendered under a 2004 peace pact, which limits jail terms to eight years for warlords who confess to their crimes.

She and the other 30 signatories pledged in the June 2001 pact to "rebuild the homeland" along with the paramilitary United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia.

Four paramilitary warlords signed, among them Salvatore Mancuso, who would later state publicly that the paramilitaries owned 35 percent of Colombia's Congress.

Mancuso is threatening to name politicians and business leaders — including multinationals — who benefited from ties with the paramilitaries.

Iguaran, the chief prosecutor, says the paramilitaries committed some 10,000 murders during a decade-long reign of terror.

Wealthy landowners and drug traffickers first created the paramilitaries in the early 1980s to protect them from rebel extortion and kidnapping but the groups largely degenerated into murderous gangs.