Plan Colombia and Beyond

Shortly after midnight Wednesday, Colombian authorities put Carlos Mario Jiménez, alias “Macaco,” on a DEA plane and sent him to the United States to face drug charges.

Jiménez was a longtime leader of the Central Bolívar Bloc, one of the most powerful, drug-money-fueled paramilitary groups. At least as recently as last year, he was perhaps the most powerful paramilitary leader in Colombia, controlling organizations in several regions all over the country. In 2007, the U.S. government requested his extradition to face drug-trafficking charges.

“Macaco” was kicked out of the paramilitary demobilization-negotiation process last year, when evidence indicated that he was conspiring from his jail cell to ship drugs and murder enemies. He will now stand trial in the United States on charges of shipping cocaine northward. U.S. authorities are also likely to press Jiménez for information: his knowledge of Colombia’s narcotics, organized crime, and paramilitary networks is no doubt encyclopedic.

Macaco’s extradition sounds like good news, and it mostly is. But it was bitterly opposed by advocates for the victims of paramilitary crimes. The arguments are strong on both sides, and they go something like this.

Pro:

Sending Macaco to the United States sends a strong message to the remaining paramilitary leaders that they cannot continue to carry out criminal activities, in violation of the terms of the “Justice and Peace” law. When Macaco was ejected from the “Justice and Peace” process, he lost privileges like a reduced prison sentence and avoidance of extradition.

Con:

The U.S. justice system will be trying and punishing Macaco only for drug trafficking. He might never have to face a judge for the mass murder he has committed. With Macaco a continent away, his many victims will be unable to learn what happened to their loved ones. It will also be difficult to win back lands and other property he stole from victims, or to use his assets to fund reparations.

Pro:

Colombian prosecutors and investigators will be able to travel to the United States to interview Macaco. Through an 18th-century law called the Alien Tort Claims Act, victims may be able to sue Macaco in U.S. courts. With Macaco’s threatening presence out of the picture, it may be easier to take back property he stole and return it to its original owners.

Con:

Investigators may visit Macaco, but probably only for a few cases. The Alien Tort Claims Act is rarely used, and has never involved hundreds (or thousands) of plaintiffs against one defendant.

Meanwhile, we will now be unlikely ever to find out what Macaco knows about who helped him over the years. In the past, Colombian narco-traffickers extradited to the United States have taken with them their secrets about past associations.

The “para-politics” scandal must be a tea party compared to what Macaco knows. Politicians, military officers, large landowners and businessmen who colluded with Macaco must have been relieved when he got on that DEA plane.

Pro:

Did Macaco ever intend to talk about his outside support network? By some accounts, Macaco was enforcing a code of silence among the rest of the paramilitary leaders. Macaco and Salvatore Mancuso even came to blows over the issue, according to this recent Semana magazine interview with Davíd Hernández, a paramilitary witness.

Semana: Is it true that there was a fight between Macaco and Mancuso in the prison?

DH: Just after they were brought from La Ceja [to Itagüí], in the first meeting, Mancuso stood up and said, “After the way they took us here and to La Ceja, now is when we have to start throwing water at all those politicians, at all those military officers, at all those police.” Macaco opposed him, stood up and said, “You are a snitch, you can’t do that, I’m never going to do that.” And they grabbed each other and came to blows. Macaco punched Mancuso. Macaco has always said that he will not throw water at any politician, and so far he has been true to his word.

It is just as possible that, with Macaco gone, some of the other paramilitary leaders might be more willing to talk about their illicit relationships with powerful Colombians.

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In Sunday’s edition of the Colombian weekly El Espectador, Iván Cepeda - a columnist who is also a leader of the National Movement of Victims of State Crimes - wrote the following column about a visit to the city of Montería. The city is the capital of the department of Córdoba, in Colombia’s Caribbean coastal region, which has long been a virtual paramilitary republic, for years strongly under the sway of Carlos Castaño, Salvatore Mancuso, and “Don Berna.”

Cepeda’s column inspired an enraged response from Colombian President Álvaro Uribe, which is excerpted and translated further below.

The Proof is Montería
Iván Cepeda Castro
El Espectador, May 3, 2008

This week I visited Montería for the first time. I did so by invitation of the Union of University Workers and Employees, Sintraunicol. The airport is near the city and adjoins the “El Ubérrimo” hacienda, which is the property of President Álvaro Uribe.

My companions spoke to me of the lawyer José Corena, who has been in charge of the President’s land business, and that of his cousin Mario Uribe [now in jail awaiting trial for collaboration with paramilitaries]. In the same region the Castaños, Mancuso and alias “Don Berna” have lands. A few kilometers away are the sumptuous neighborhoods of the region’s cattlemen and large landowners: El Recreo and La Castellana. In the latter, the Mancuso family has a large mansion. In the city are commercial properties which, everyone knows, belong to the paramilitary chief.

When I ask whether any authority has ordered the seizure of these lands and businesses, those accompanying me laugh. In that same zone are the social club and the open-air restaurants where the local high society meets. They tell me that at the parties one would frequently see the former prosecutor-general, Luis Camilo Osorio. We passed by the La Vittoriana restaurant, property of the brothers Jaime and José Maroso, partners and testaferros (property-holding figureheads) of Mancuso. This government named José to two diplomatic posts: one in Italy, the other in Switzerland. Now the paramilitary groups are led by Doménico Mancuso, cousin of Salvatore.

In the shadow of the bridge that President Uribe ordered to be built, and which goes to his hacienda, on the banks of the Sinú River, thousands of displaced people live in misery. They come from places like Tierralta and Valencia. The Civil Victims’ Committee of the department of Córdoba, Comfavic, is made up of 7,800 families. Many have more than one member murdered or disappeared by the paramilitaries. It is obvious that for anyone who lives in, or visits, the city or its nearby haciendas, it must be impossible to ignore the reality of these crimes. How can they not know that thousands of killings are being perpetrated, or not see the displaced people? How can they ignore who Mancuso and the Castaño clan were in a city in which everything is known and is commented in whispers?

Finally, we arrived at the University of Córdoba. The employees and students have begun a movement to demand the resignation of the current president, Claudio Sánchez Parra. They also demand truth and justice. Since 1995, 19 people belonging to the university have been murdered. On February 18, 2003, Mancuso called professors and employees to Santa Fe de Ralito [where the paramilitary leaders were gathered as they began negotiations with the government], and warned them that if they did not attend they should be prepared for the consequences. Present at the meeting was a delegate from the government, Félix Manssur Jattin. After reading the CVs of the professors, which had been taken from the University’s files, Mancuso introduced them to Sánchez Parra and said to them, “This person here by my side is my friend, and in the University I must have men that I trust.” The new president put Mancuso’s relatives in posts in the University leadership. Even though the Prosecutor-General’s Office and the Attorney-General’s office are carrying out investigations against him, he remains in the presidency. This week the Victims’ Movement will lead a petition of the government and will carry out an international campaign calling for his immediate firing.

Perhaps there are photos, witnesses or recordings of the meetings of the landholders, politicians and soldiers with Mancuso, while thousands of people were being killed or displaced. But beyond these elements of hard evidence, the whole social order, the nearness of the large haciendas and the centers of Montería’s high society show the reality of a criminal power: the city itself is the proof.

Excerpt from “Words of President Álvaro Uribe during the inauguration of the Montería Transportation Terminal“
Presidency of Colombia, May 6, 2008

Let me touch on another issue. There are people in Colombia, like Doctor Iván Cepeda. They dress themselves up in the protection of victims.

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I’ve been grounded by illness since Sunday. Nonetheless I hope to have another big Guaviare post up by tonight, tomorrow morning at the latest.

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• The Colombian authorities’ takedown of the Mejía Múnera brothers this week - one killed, one arrested - is a big deal. The “twins” (they really were identical twins) were top narcotraffickers who initially sought to avoid extradition by posing as paramilitary leaders in negotiations with the government. Later, they decided to become fugitives instead. They were believed to be some of the principal sponsors of “new” or “emerging” paramilitary groups.

• Also significant was Tuesday’s capture in Cúcuta of Raúl Hasbún, a fugitive paramilitary leader who was the main go-between collecting money from Chiquita Brands to paramilitaries after 1997. If he tells what he knows, Hasbún will be a key witness in investigations of banana companies’ illegal payments.

• A lengthy report in last weekend’s El Nuevo Herald details the testimony of a former paramilitary who says he recalls Álvaro Uribe, then governor of Antioquia department, participating in a meeting to plan the 1997 El Aro massacre. Here is an English translation (PDF).

• The Committee to Protect Journalists places Colombia 4th in its worldwide “Impunity Index” of countries that fail to prosecute murders of journalists. Only Iraq, Sudan and Sierra Leone had worse indices.

• A new report from the Fellowship of Reconciliation and Amnesty International questions the United States’ vetting of Colombian military units that receive aid, alleging that many of those units face allegations of carrying out abuses like extrajudicial executions. “Geographic regions with the highest levels of reported extrajudicial executions of civilians by members of the armed forces in 2006 were also largely regions with the most military units receiving US assistance.”

• The latest Gallup poll of 1,000 people with telephones in Colombia’s four largest cities shows little change in approval ratings of President Uribe and other major figures and institutions. All are down ever so slightly, as indicated by this large powerpoint file on the El Tiempo website.

• President Uribe testified for four hours Tuesday in his slander suit against César Julio Valencia, who until recently was chief justice of Colombia’s Supreme Court. Justice Valencia told reporters that Uribe, in a surprise phone call last September, asked him about the case against his cousin Mario Uribe, now in jail awaiting trial for colluding with paramilitaries. According to Colombia’s Caracol Radio network, “The hearing was prolonged amid the constant attacks, some of them virulent, between Uribe and [Valencia’s defense lawyer, former DAS (presidential intelligence) chief Ramiro] Bejarano, during with the president offered at least ten times to resign if Valencia’s representative’s statements could be proved.”

• “In less than a decade, this thousand-headed monster [paramilitarism] has taken over the state, infiltrating it at all levels. It is serious that this far into their supposed demobilization, it is still not possible to know how far they have penetrated the political sphere, much less the military, financial or business spheres. The scandals of the last few months (’para-politics’ in Congress) are nothing but the tip of the iceberg. … The violent ones, and their accomplices in power, never imagined that some men in togas, like a true suicide squadron, would stand up to defend the fatherland. The Penal Tribunal of the Supreme Court is the institutions’ last bastion against the barbarians.” - Parmenio Cuéllar, former Colombian justice minister, senator, and governor of Nariño department.

• Meanwhile in Bolivia, the relatively wealthy, relatively less-indigenous province of Santa Cruz will be holding a referendum Sunday to seek greater autonomy from La Paz. The central government says that the vote is illegal. Violence is expected: the U.S. embassy in Bolivia has put out a “warden message” warning U.S. citizens in the country to be on guard. “Americans are urged to avoid the areas of demonstrations and to exercise caution if within the vicinity of any protests. … You could become a convenient target of opportunity.”

• [Added 5/3, I almost forgot:] On the website of The Atlantic, Robert “The Coming Anarchy” Kaplan, clearly not a reader of this weblog, writes that “Colombia is what Iraq should eventually look like, in our best dreams. Colombian President Alvaro Uribe has fought — and is winning — a counterinsurgency war even as he has liberalized the economy, strengthened institutions, and improved human rights.” Kaplan’s three-paragraph polemic should remind us of what is turning out to be a central lesson of our post-9/11 foreign policy: beware the snap judgments of a foreign policy generalist, left or right.

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New Rainbow Corporation Director León Valencia in February, flanked by former Defense Minister Rafael Pardo (left) and El Tiempo Director Rafael Santos (right).

Despite its hippie-dippy name, the New Rainbow Corporation (Corporación Nuevo Arco Iris) is one of Colombia’s most serious, thoughtful and assertive think-tanks. Founded in the mid-1990s by leaders of a group of moderate ELN guerrillas who demobilized en masse, the group puts out first-rate analyses of Colombia’s security situation and trends in the conflict and violence.

Its director, León Valencia, is a regular columnist in El Tiempo, Colombia’s most-circulated newspaper, as well as the principal dailies of Medellín and Cali. We have featured Valencia and his work on two occasions.

The New Rainbow Corporation has also been one of Colombia’s leading investigators of the so-called “para-politics” scandal, in which a rapidly increasing number of politicians are accused of colluding with paramilitary death squads. (63 members of Colombia’s Congress are now under formal investigation or in jail awaiting trial.) León Valencia and associated investigators like Claudia López and Laura Bonilla helped break the story in 2006, and a second edition of their book on the subject has just been released.

The Corporation has begun focusing more intensely on ties between paramilitaries and the political elite in Antioquia, the populous, relatively wealthy department (province) whose capital is Medellín. This is more dangerous than investigating “para-politics” in poorer, more peripheral departments like Sucre or Casanare: there is a lot of drug money in Antioquia, and some of the politicians involved - for example, Álvaro Uribe’s cousin Mario, who was jailed last week - are well-connected on a national level.

The danger is increasing for the New Rainbow Corporation. Its directors have gotten word that an order to kill them has been issued by the so-called “Envigado Office.” The name, which refers to the Medellín suburb where narcotraffickers long ago set up a “collection office,” is synonymous with organized crime, narcotrafficking and paramilitary activity in Antioquia. At least until recently, the very powerful and feared organization was headed by Medellín paramilitary leader Diego Fernando Murillo, alias “Don Berna.”

Word of a specific threat from the Envigado Office is terrifying, even for a figure like León Valencia, who maintains cordial relations and regular interaction with the Colombian, U.S. and other foreign governments. Colombia badly needs to see its judicial system successfully carry the “para-politics” investigation to its full conclusion. To see it truncated by threats and intimidation would be devastating to Colombian democracy.

Here is a translation of a report posted to its site yesterday by the Popular Training Institute (IPC), a Medellín-based non-governmental organization, explaining the alarming new threats against León Valencia and his colleagues.

“Envigado Office” has ordered the killing of para-politics investigators
4/30/08

The so-called “Envigado Office” has issued an order, it would appear several months ago, to assassinate the investigators from the New Rainbow Corporation who are carrying out academic work on the relations between paramilitary groups and regional politicians, which now have several of them in jail.

“This all seems very serious to me,” said León Valencia, executive director of the New Rainbow Corporation and columnist for several dailies in the country. Based on a source to which he gives full credibility, he learned that the order to kill him and one of the New Rainbow investigators, Laura Bonilla - who along with Claudia López carried out the work on relations between paramilitarism and the country’s political class - came from the so-called “Envigado Office.”

This criminal organization, which acts from this locality in the southern Aburrá Valley [the Medellín metropolitan area], since more than a decade ago was under the command of Diego Fernando Murillo Bejarano, alias don Berna, now held at the jail in Cómbita, Boyacá under the “Justice and Peace” process. Since last year it has been coordinated by Carlos Mario Aguilar, alias Rogelio, who has surrounded himself with criminal groups who act according to paramilitary methods. These are based in Itagüi municipality, in the south of the metropolitan area.

In a conversation with the IPC Press Agency, the investigator explained that on April 4, a trusted person - the brother of a disappeared person - approached a paramilitary member related to the Envigado Office to seek information about his relative. The paramilitary told him that he had no information, and spontaneously commented to him that “the situation was going to get very hard, because there had been an order to kill León Valencia and Laura Bonilla.”

“We found out from third parties that this organization had an assassination order against us. We found out by pure accident, which is worrisome,” said Valencia.

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Last fall, I was part of a group that visited the Southern Command’s Joint Interagency Task Force that monitors suspected drug trafficking in Latin America and the Caribbean. We were shown a PowerPoint presentation that included maps showing the tracks of suspected drug-trafficking flights and boats. Officials denied our request for a copy of these maps.

These must not have been too secret, though, since they showed up yesterday in a presentation that Drug Czar John Walters gave to reporters at the State Department’s Foreign Press Center. Walters was arguing that Venezuela is now a key vector for cocaine trafficking between Colombia and Europe.

These and earlier slides indicate that U.S. radar images do not cover the eastern third of Venezuela, including the highly volatile Orinoco delta region. (Little cocaine moved that far east actually ends up in the United States.)

The map of suspect flights is nonetheless interesting, showing heavy traffic between Venezuela and both the Dominican Republic and Guatemala’s Petén region. Note the concentration of takeoffs from Venezuelan airstrips just across the border from Colombia’s department of Vichada. Venezuela clearly has a problem with control of its airspace.

Another story entirely is told by the monitoring of “go-fast” boats and other maritime drug trafficking - which accounts for a much higher portion of total drug trafficking. Here, the vast majority of suspect traffic originates from Colombia’s coasts.

Similar maps covering 2005 are in a long-ago post.

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The Nukak Makú are an indigenous group of perhaps 600 nomadic hunter-gatherers who were first “contacted” by the outside world in 1988. Deep in the jungles of eastern Guaviare department, they have their own language and intricate set of customs. The men hunt monkeys and other prey with blowguns, the women weave intricate armbands and baskets. They have only a rudimentary knowledge of agriculture.

The Nukak somehow missed out on the Spanish conquest and all that came after it. This has meant no access to even the most basic technology - not even light bulbs or radios - and no knowledge of what the rest of Homo sapiens has gone through. (Imagine gazing upon the moon and not knowing that people had been there.)

On the other hand, it also meant no enslavement, no theft of their lands, and no involvement in the frequent armed conflicts that have marked Colombia’s history. But their luck is quickly running out.

Increased contact with the outside world has meant death by unfamiliar diseases for perhaps half the Nukak since the early 1990s. It has meant murder at the hands of landowners on whose property Nukak hunters have unwittingly strayed. It has meant coca growers encroaching on the land that the Colombian government “reserved” for the Nukak, cutting down old-growth rainforest in order to grow the lucrative crop used to make cocaine.

And now, perhaps inevitably, it has meant combat between the military and the FARC guerrillas in the territory where the Nukak Makú have ranged for generations. Many of the remaining Nukak, a peaceful people, have fled.

Now about sixty are in a settlement about ten minutes’ drive outside San José del Guaviare, a patch of land called Aguabonita that is the property of the mayor’s office. A shifting, leaderless group of displaced Nukak (they go in and out of the jungle, and in and out of the town of San José) has been in Aguabonita since 2006.

Journalist Juan Forero, then writing for the New York Times, visited the site in 2006, shortly after their arrival. He compared them to a second group of Nukak that had previously arrived at a settlement in Barrancón, to the east of San José del Guaviare.

What everyone agrees on is that the Nukak of Aguabonita must avoid the fate of the Nukak who came here in 2003 and now live in a clearing called Barrancón.

Now in their fourth year in the area, the Nukak in Barrancón lead listless lives, lolling in their hammocks awaiting food from the state. They do not work, nor have they learned Spanish. They also have no plans to return to the forest.

That, unfortunately, is a fair description of what I saw in Aguabonita in April 2008.

After driving through an expanse of cattle ranches, one arrives at a stand of trees, which opens up into a clearing of perhaps an acre. The ground is well-worn dirt, and dust coats everything. The Nukak live in a cluster of six or seven open-sided thatch-roofed huts strung with hammocks, an arrangement similar to what they would have in the middle of the jungle.

In the huts, cooking fires are always burning; instead of set mealtimes, a Nukak eats small amounts all day long. As hunter-gatherers, they do not work if food stocks are sufficient; they spend much of the hot day reclining in hammocks. Donated food supplies - most bearing the seal of the Colombian Presidency’s “Social Action” office, some with the USAID logo - are stacked overhead, on planks laid just below each hut’s roof. Despite the food deliveries, I saw at least two children with the light hair and swollen bellies typical of severe malnutrition.

(This basket, I was told, holds aid items for which the Nukak have no use, like lentils, pasta and toothpaste.)

When they want something other than the donated food, Nukak go back into the jungle to hunt. Monkeys in particular are a preferred food. When a hunter kills a monkey carrying offspring, the baby monkey is kept as a pet. Several young monkeys were living alongside the Nukak at Aguabonita, some adopted by children on whose shoulders they inseparably sat. Monkey and child even eat from the same bowl.

Though it was hard to get definitive information from a few linguistically difficult conversations, I gathered that the violence the Nukak have suffered has been principally at the hands of guerrillas. As “Plan Patriota” and similar military offensives have brought periodic sweeps into increasingly remote parts of Guaviare, the FARC, fleeing frontal combat, has moved into the Nukak Makú reserve.

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This post continues the narrative of my visit last week to the department of Guaviare, in southern Colombia. This section gives an overview of the current security situation in the zone, based on what I learned from visits to one military and two police installations, and numerous conversations with civilian government and civil-society leaders.

I found a situation that probably describes much of Colombia today. The military and police presence is far greater. Violence levels are down significantly in town centers and along main roads. The security strategy is having far less success, however, in penetrating rural areas, where violence and illegal activity are near all-time highs. Increasingly frequent military forays into rural zones have knocked the guerrillas off balance and eased coca eradication, but have failed either to do long-term damage to the FARC or to make progress toward a permanent, non-military government presence. The combat has also brought a new wave for forced displacement. Meanwhile, re-armed paramilitaries are doing an active drug-trafficking business (at times with the FARC), and facing very little challenge from the security forces.

The military and police presence

Ten years ago, the presence of Colombia’s security forces was very scarce in Guaviare. The only army unit in the entire department was the Joaquín Paris Battalion based just outside San José del Guaviare’s town center. This roughly 400-man unit was a component of the 7th Brigade, which itself was based about 80 miles to the north in Villavicencio, Meta. Its members rarely left the confines of its base without a large display of force.

An Army Special Forces school had just been founded, with U.S. funding, in the town of Barrancón, along the river to the east of San José del Guaviare’s town center. The Special Forces facility was one of the largest outlays of aid to the military, at a time when most U.S. security assistance went to Colombia’s police.

A poster, which at first glance appears to show President Uribe taking aim at a helicopter, commemorates the Special Forces School’s tenth anniversary.

In 1998, the presence of police was minimal throughout the department, though the National Police Counter-Narcotics Unit was already quite active at its U.S.-funded base adjacent to the airport, from which fumigation missions flew almost daily. The rest of town was considered so dangerous, however, that the U.S. contractor personnel who flew and maintained the planes were confined to the base. A small group of contractors also operated a counter-drug radar facility on the grounds of the Joaquín Paris Battalion’s base, tracking the skies from a separate area behind tight security.

There had been a joint military-police counter-narcotics base in Miraflores, a coca boomtown in Guaviare’s far south, until it was overrun by a guerrilla attack in August 1998. The security forces pulled out of town, and the base was not rebuilt. Nine of those taken prisoner in that attack - five corporals, two sergeants and two lieutenants - remain guerrilla captives today, nearly a decade later.

Beyond that, there was no security-force presence in Guaviare. The municipalities (counties) of Calamar, El Retorno and Miraflores (after July 1998) had no permanent military or police presence at all.

Today, thanks in small part to U.S. funding and in large part to the Colombian government’s hugely increased defense spending, Guaviare’s military and police presence is many times greater.

The army’s Joaquín Paris Battalion now shares its facility with an entire mobile brigade, the 22nd (likely close to 2,000 men in five battalions) and - for the time being at least - the second battalion of the army’s Counter-Narcotics Brigade (about 600 members), a unit formed entirely with U.S. funds in mid-2000. (Mobile units, as their name implies, move around often: the U.S. State Department’s list of units approved to receive U.S. aid as of July 31, 2007 [PDF] lists a different mobile brigade - the 7th - present in Guaviare. At that time, the 22nd was at the Larandia military base to the southwest of Guaviare.)

The destroyed base in Miraflores has been rebuilt and is heavily manned. The Special Forces school in Barrancón is an occasional site of U.S. training missions. The National Police have a new headquarters in the middle of San José del Guaviare, and between 100 and 200 policemen stationed in each of the town centers of Guaviare’s other three municipalities. These police, however, rarely venture too deeply into the rural areas beyond the town limits.

With U.S. support, the Navy has set up an Advanced Riverine Post in Barrancón to patrol the Guaviare River. And the Counter-Narcotics Police fumigation base in San José continues to host very frequent missions: in Guaviare alone, the planes sprayed 15,000 hectares last year.

Assistance from the United States has contributed modestly to this increased security-force presence. The impunity enjoyed by those who facilitated the 1997 Mapiripán massacre continues to halt aid to the Joaquín Paris Battalion; the so-called “Leahy Law” prohibits aid to military units worldwide whose members have evaded punishment for gross human rights violations. Only a trickle of assistance has gone to the presence of non-narcotics-related units of the Colombian National Police. A greater amount of U.S. assistance, however, supports the counter-narcotics police, the Army Counter-Narcotics Battalion, the 22nd Mobile Brigade, the Navy Riverine Post, and the Special Forces School. The fumigation base continues to have nearly all of its expenditures covered by the U.S. government, and the U.S.-manned radar site remains in operation. (While the U.S.-aided units appear to have superior equipment, members of the Counter-Narcotics Battalion lamented that they still lack access to the Internet.)

Nearing the army roadblock on the main road by the Joaquín Paris Battalion’s base.

All told - and this is a rough estimate, because officials were reluctant to reveal force strengths - the combined military and police presence in Guaviare has increased from less than 1,000 in 1998 to at least 5,000 today. A very conservative estimate, then, would be a fivefold increase in the government’s armed presence in the department. This would mean that there is now approximately one soldier or policeman for every 30 residents of Guaviare.

I heard few denunciations that these forces were committing serious abuses against the population, at least not directly. The principal complaints - and these were general, with few specifics given - included continued toleration of paramilitary activity, and frequent use of civilian facilities, particularly schools, to shelter military personnel on patrol in small villages. Colombian human-rights groups have documented cases in Guaviare of the nationwide problem of “extrajudicial executions” - killings of civilians who are later presented as guerrillas killed in combat - though when I asked about such cases, local leaders instead cited more recent allegations of a rash of killings just to the north in the department of Meta.

The guerrilla presence

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(This is the first of a few posts of my visit to Guaviare last week. All photos posted here may be reproduced without permission, with credit given.)

From April 14 to 16, I paid a brief visit to San José del Guaviare, a small city in Colombia’s vast, empty southern plains. I was the guest of the town’s new mayor, Pedro Arenas, a young, reformist politician from a social-movement background who has visited us in Washington several times over the past ten years.

I had not visited San José, the capital of Colombia’s department (province) of Guaviare, since January 1998. That was my first of what is now nearly forty visits to Colombia. On that initial visit, I was part of a delegation of non-governmental organizations. Pedro Arenas, then the head of the Guaviare Youth Movement, a local social service and advocacy organization, organized our stay in Guaviare, arranging meetings with everyone from the governor, bishop and military authorities to the region’s peasant and indigenous leaders.

I had not been back to Guaviare in the intervening ten years, in part because Pedro Arenas, our main contact there, spent much of this period in Bogotá as a member of Colombia’s Congress. During those ten years, however, the United States was quite active in Guaviare.

In a vain effort to stem cultivation of coca, the plant used to make cocaine, U.S. spray planes blanketed about 500,000 acres of Guaviare with herbicides. U.S. funds paid for the training and equipping of new military units headquartered in the area, and supported a massive, years-long military offensive - known as “Plan Patriota” - in Guaviare and nearby departments. But the department was almost completely left out of the U.S. government’s far smaller efforts to help Colombia govern its territory and lift residents out of poverty. U.S. economic aid to Guaviare over the past decade, in all forms, has totaled less than $1 million.

After ten years, what has been the outcome of such an unbalanced approach? Is the department safer? Are its rural areas more secure? Are guerrillas and paramilitaries weaker? Has the drug trade been affected? Has the department’s overwhelming poverty eased at all? Have repeatedly fumigated coca-growing families found other ways to feed themselves? Is the department’s huge displaced population getting access to basic services and a dignified existence? Are the conflict’s thousands of local victims learning the truth about what happened to them and their loved ones, recovering stolen property, or receiving reparations? After ten years, has U.S. policy helped this lawless, stateless, violent zone move at all toward good governance?

The answers to some of these questions, I found, was yes. To others, however, the answer was a clear, resounding “no.” In general, the security situation was better, though gains were mainly concentrated in town centers. Coca cultivation was still widespread but reduced; most of those interviewed gave the credit to more frequent military operations on the ground, not fumigation from the air. Rural areas remain nearly as violent and ungoverned as they were ten years ago; though the once-absent military is now a frequent combatant, the rest of the state continues to be absent. The region’s huge population of displaced people and other poor residents are getting a modest amount of attention in the larger towns, mainly from programs that offer cash handouts. Meanwhile, efforts to help victims of some of the country’s worst violence are barely underway.

Looking across the Guaviare River at Meta department.
Guaviare’s recent history

The department of Guaviare is one of several that make up a vast California-sized region east and south of Colombia’s Andes mountains. Flat and hot, this zone of dusty savannahs and dense jungles, ribboned by muddy rivers that empty into the Orinoco and Amazon rivers, is home to only about 4 percent of Colombia’s population.

This is Colombia’s coca-growing heartland, an area so far from government presence that some smaller riverside towns lack access to the central government’s currency, relying instead on grams of crude coca paste as a unit of exchange. It has also been the historical rearguard of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), Colombia’s oldest and largest (9,000-15,000 members) guerrilla group.

Like much of Colombia’s southern plains, Guaviare was settled in the past few decades by cattlemen and coca growers, many of them displaced by violence elsewhere. As recently as the 1960s, this was wilderness, settled only by a few rugged frontiersmen and outlaws - as well as nomadic tribes of indigenous hunter-gatherers who had been there for perhaps thousands of years.

Within the past two generations, outsiders began to arrive in greater numbers, either pushed out by violence or drawn by the possibility of land for the taking - the property of any who wished to knock down jungle and carve out a life on the “agricultural frontier.”

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Here is a video featuring Pedro Arenas, the recently elected mayor of San José del Guaviare, Colombia (someone we’ve known for a long time). Here, the mayor gives a tour of a public housing project whose scale dwarfs anything else in this town of 40,000 people.

Begun back in 2004, the project is an unfinished semi-ruin because corrupt authorities made off with the construction funds. Pedro Arenas’ administration is now trying to get the building job finished.

Of course, there is no shortage of government contracts stalled by corruption in Colombia and Latin America (or, for that matter, in the United States). What makes this particular case outrageous, though, was that the intended beneficiaries were 168 of the thousands of internally displaced families who have arrived in San José del Guaviare over the past fifteen years.

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Hello from the Atlanta airport. Regular posting will resume soon. In the meantime, enjoy this quick passenger’s-window view of downtown San José del Guaviare.

The capital of Guaviare department about 200 miles south of Bogotá, San José has about 40,000 people in the town center and 60,000 throughout the Connecticut-sized municipality (county) of the same name. The town has grown rapidly over the past 15 years or so, due to coca, cattle ranching, and massive displacement from more remote areas.

And this is what it looks like from out the window of a pickup truck:

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(I’m writing from the Bogotá airport, where I’m on my way back to Washington. Expect some posts over the next few days about my visit earlier this week to San José del Guaviare, the town in southern Colombia where the U.S.-funded aerial fumigation program began 14 years ago.)

The Colombian newsweekly Semana has posted to its website a remarkable and troubling PowerPoint presentation (PDF version here, accompanying an article here) from Colombian Senator Armando Benedetti. Though Sen. Benedetti is a member of the pro-Uribe “La U” political party, he is one of a handful of uribista legislators who have criticized the government’s handling of efforts to demobilize, prosecute and reintegrate former paramilitaries while attending to their victims.

Two and a half years after these efforts - known as the “Justice and Peace process” - began, Sen. Benedetti’s slideshow paints a distressing picture. Here are a few current statistics that should make you very angry:

• 125,368 Colombians have registered as victims of the paramilitaries, seeking reparations, restitution of stolen assets, or simply the truth about what happened to disappeared and murdered loved ones.
• Though Colombia’s Human Rights Ombudsman’s office (Defensoría del Pueblo) is required by law to offer legal assistance to the victims, only 13 percent of registered victims have come to the ombudsman for assistance. Only 9 percent of victims are represented by a lawyer. The Defensoría has assigned a total of 68 ombusdmen to assist paramilitary victims; they are present in three cities. That means each ombusdman has a caseload of 815 of the victims who have requested help from the Defensoría.
• 15 victims inscribed in the Justice and Peace process have been killed under circumstances believed to be related to their claims. 92 have reported receiving threats as a result of their claims.
• The Justice and Peace unit of the Prosecutor-General’s Office (Fiscalía), which is handling 3,257 cases of armed-group leaders accused of serious crimes, has 23 prosecutors.
• The Justice and Peace unit of the Attorney-General’s Office (Procuraduría), which is supposed to oversee the prosecutions, has 12 lawyers assigned to it.
• Of the 3,257 paramilitary leaders accused of serious crimes in the “Justice and Peace process,” only 127 have even begun the process of giving voluntary confessions, and only 4 have completed the initial versión libre (”free confession”) stage. At this rate, Sen. Benedetti estimates, it will take 2,157 years to complete the “Justice and Peace” judicial process.
• 9,467 victims have come forward to denounce that the paramilitaries forced their displacement from their homes. (The actual number of people displaced by the paramilitaries is far higher.) But so far, paramilitary leaders have confessed to only 48 cases of forced displacement.
• 91 victims have come forward to denounce that they were subjected to sexual violence by the paramilitaries. (The actual number of such victims is far, far higher.) But so far, paramilitary leaders have confessed to only 2 acts of sexual violence.
• The Defensoría has only 12 psychologists on hand to provide psycho-social support to the 125,368 victims registered so far.
• The Justice and Peace law requires paramilitary leaders to turn over all illegally required assets to fund reparations to their victims. So far, only 12 of the 3,257 paramilitary leaders have so far turned in any goods. (The list of goods, which includes 70 pairs of used shoes and a 29-inch television in bad condition, can be found here [PDF] as part of a scanned document from the Procuraduría.) The total value of cash and goods turned over by paramilitary leaders so far totals US$470,685 - or US$3.75 per registered victim.

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I haven’t had much time to walk around, but here are a few pictures of northern Bogotá.

(This morning)

(This morning)

(This morning)

(Yesterday)

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Good morning from Bogotá. I spent the entire day yesterday in a conference / strategy meeting attended by more than 100 human-rights defenders from all over Colombia. Though it was fascinating and informative, it did have a few slow moments, during which I wrote the following about this week’s fight over the free-trade agreement.

Many Republican members of Congress from blue-collar, swing districts no doubt breathed a sigh of relief yesterday. Thanks to the House Democratic leadership’s unprecedented change in the “fast track” rules, these vulnerable legislators would not have to cast a potentially damaging vote for the Colombia Free Trade Agreement before the November elections.

While opinions about the FTA diverge sharply, few members of Congress could have been anxious to debate and vote on a controversial free-trade agreement in the midst of an election year (an election year in which the free trade issue has already arisen a few times), while the economy appears to be in recession. In this climate, even an FTA with Canada or Norway would have been in trouble - and Colombia is not Canada or Norway.

Now that “fast track” is stripped out, though, what happens next? This week’s move in Congress leaves some key questions unanswered.

1. Is the agreement dead, or is the intention to bring it up in 2009?

While the White House and House Republican leaders clearly believe that the FTA was “killed” on Thursday, that is not certain. Some speculate that the Congress might try to vote on the FTA between the November election and the January negotiation. A more likely scenario could be that it comes up in 2009, with a new (presumably Democratic-majority) Congress and a new (anyone’s guess which party) administration.

Bringing up the agreement in 2009 would give Colombia’s justice system more time to reach verdicts in dozens - we would prefer hundreds - of cases against union-members’ murderers. A year to take a big piece out of the impunity that labor leaders’ killers have traditionally enjoyed. If that progress takes place, one of the Democrats’ main objections to the FTA would be weakened, and even a President Obama or a President Clinton might argue that their expectations for change in Colombia have been met.

2. Will the agreement have to be re-negotiated?

Even if Colombia locks up dozens of unionist killers by next year, however, the agreement will still be very controversial. The U.S. labor community will continue to oppose the FTA as another example of an objectionable “model” or “template” that dates back to NAFTA and CAFTA. Others will remain concerned about other aspects of the treaty like its effect on smallholding agriculture in Colombia or the impact of higher intellectual property standards.
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Forgot to mention that I am on my way to Colombia for several days. This will make for less frequent posting, but hopefully for more interesting posts, between now and the end of next week.

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