Plan Colombia and Beyond

The drop in aid to Latin America foreseen in the Obama administration’s 2011 aid request to Congress, issued a week ago, has caused a minor stir in the region’s media. Typical is this opening sentence in Miami Herald columnist Andrés Oppenheimer’s Sunday column.

If President Barack Obama’s foreign aid budget request for 2011 is a reflection of his priorities in world affairs, it looks like the president is saying “adios” to Latin America.

A look at the region as a whole does reveal U.S. aid declining sharply in the hemisphere, by 15 percent from 2010 to 2011. A region-wide view also makes 2011 appear to be the least militarized aid package since 2001; the ratio of economic and military aid would approach 2:1 for the first time in ten years.

(As always, do keep in mind that we’re looking only at assistance in the foreign aid budget here. The U.S. defense budget also provides military aid to the region, much of it for counter-narcotics programs, which normally increases the military-aid total by about one-quarter to one-third. The Defense Department does not have to report its aid expenditures, however, until the year after it spends the money.)

The picture changes dramatically, however, if you remove just two countries: Mexico and Colombia. These two countries:

• are the number-one and number-two recipients of U.S. aid;
• account for more than two-thirds of all military and police aid to the region;
• have been the recipients of mostly military U.S. aid packages big enough to get their own “brand names:” the Mérida Initiative in Mexico, and Plan Colombia in Colombia; and
• both would see aid cuts — with almost all of the reductions coming from military aid — as both “brand-name” aid programs exit their “delivery of big expensive helicopters and other military equipment” phase.

Here is the same chart as above, leaving out Mexico and Colombia. The difference is striking.

When Mexico and Colombia are removed from the equation, aid to the rest of the region follows a different trend.

• Total aid actually increases from 2010 to 2011. The only reason 2009 is higher than 2011 is that it included the Millennium Challenge program, which provided much aid to El Salvador, Nicaragua and Honduras that year (despite cutoffs to the latter two) and has not gone on to aid other Latin American countries.
• The aid is far less military in nature, with military and police aid making up less than one-sixth of all aid in the foreign aid bill. However, it becomes slightly more military from 2009 to 2011, with the economic-to-military aid ratio slipping from over 6:1 to just barely over 5:1. The main reason for this is the Obama administration’s launch of a new Caribbean Basin Security Initiative, an anti-crime and anti-drug program in the Caribbean.
• The 2010 bar on these graphs will grow taller. Economic aid — and, as a result, overall aid — will grow by hundreds of millions of dollars once the administration requests, and Congress approves, a special “supplemental” aid appropriation to help Haiti rebuild from the January 12 earthquake. The amount of this additional 2010 aid is not yet known, as the request has not yet been issued.

Look at the aid this way, and it’s pretty clear that nobody is saying “adiós” to anybody. We need not lament that the tempo of helicopter-buying for Mexico and Colombia has slowed, and we note that economic and social assistance is holding remarkably steady despite the Millennium Challenge program’s decline in the region.

Share This

Jorge Noguera, President Uribe’s former intelligence director now standing trial for murder, testified that he gave information about labor union activity directly to the president.

• We have added a podcast to the “Just the Facts” website. The first episode discusses the debate in Colombia over President Álvaro Uribe’s apparent desire to run for a third term in office, which just suffered a setback in the justice system. Download or listen to the 12-and-a-half-minute .mp3 file here or at our podcast page. Keep in mind that we’re new at this. They will get better.

• Cambio, one of Colombia’s two main newsmagazines, is going to stop publishing on a weekly basis. Instead, it will be a monthly devoted to lifestyle issues. This is a loss for Colombia; in 2009 Cambio broke two big stories: the existence of military-base talks between the U.S. and Colombian governments, and the use of an agricultural subsidy program to give cash to some of the country’s biggest landholders. The “La Silla Vacía” website speculates that the magazine’s abrupt retreat owes to indirect pressure from Álvaro Uribe’s government.

• The recently formed Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) will meet in Quito on Tuesday the 9th to discuss responses to the earthquake in Haiti. Colombia’s President Uribe, who doesn’t always attend these meetings, plans to go to this one. He is not expected to meet bilaterally with Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa, even though Colombia and Ecuador appear to be nearing the end of a two-year break in diplomatic relations. Though they’re unlikely to have a bilateral meeting, this will be the first time in many very tense months that Uribe and Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez will be in the same room.

• Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner told a congressional panel that the Obama administration would “absolutely” work with Congress to pass the Colombia Free Trade Agreement in 2010. He was quickly contradicted, however. Reuters reports: “Both the Treasury Department and U.S. Trade Representative’s office later issued statements clarifying Geithner’s comment. They said U.S. trade officials still had to resolve outstanding issues with the three countries before Obama would send the FTAs to Congress for a vote.”

• President Uribe held a rare debate with academic detractors at Bogotá’s Jorge Tadeo Lozano University. (Much better link here.)

• Columbia University Colombia expert Aldo Cívico interviewed Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Massachusetts) for Colombia’s El Espectador newspaper. English here, Spanish here.

• Colombian police trained counterparts from 23 countries last year, including 4,500 Mexicans.

• Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, a California Republican, spent three days in Honduras. At the end of his trip he told reporters he disagreed with the Obama administration’s call for the Honduran government to nominate a “Truth Commission,” which would investigate crimes committed since the June 2009 coup. It’s better to “close the book,” Rohrabacher concluded.

• President Obama called Chilean President-Elect Sebastián Piñera to congratulate him on his recent election win. Piñera asked Obama for a bilateral meeting.

• Ecuadorian authorities seized 63 tons of cocaine in 2009. That is by far a record, showing the country’s increasing use as a narcotrafficking corridor. By comparison, Colombia seized 203 tons in 2009 (Excel file).

• Costa Ricans go to the polls Sunday for a presidential election. Laura Chinchilla of President Oscar Arias’s PLN party has a comfortable lead in the polls, though it is not clear whether she will beat the 40 percent threshold needed to avoid a runoff.

• Much coverage of the Haiti humanitarian and rebuilding effort is linked here, at the “Just the Facts” website.

Share This

At a site called “FedBizOpps.gov” is an interesting collection of 2009 documents from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). The U.S. foreign aid agency discusses its experience with U.S.-supported “Integrated Action” programs in Colombia. It also offers a glimpse at the U.S. government’s plans for aid to Colombia as the annual amount becomes gradually smaller and somewhat more balanced between military and economic priorities.

Three documents in particular are worth a look.

1. PCIM Lessons Learned (Microsoft Word [.doc] format): This is an at times candid discussion of the U.S. government’s experience with the “Integrated Action” counter-insurgency program in the La Macarena region about 200 miles south of Bogotá, a program that has received over $40 million dollars in U.S. assistance since 2007. Some findings of our December 2009 report on this program are paralleled here, such as the challenge of corruption, the need to consult communities, and the need to speed civilian government involvement. Others, particularly concerns about militarization and human rights, are not.

The paper includes some language that would have been unthinkable in a public U.S. government document even a few years ago:

Government policies related to zero coca, and strict verification procedures, take a long time and limit the State’s ability to work with communities in transitioning from a coca economy to a legal economy.

When security and coca eradication are not synchronized with the arrival of socio-economic projects, the mood of a community can quickly become hostile.

The dismantling of illegally-armed organizations in an area is often accompanied by an increase in common crime and criminal gangs linked to narco-trafficking.  This situation can present a threat to the legitimacy of the armed forces in a region if not accompanied by the effective presence of the justice apparatus (fiscales and judges).

Some public agencies responsible for key services in the consolidation process have a history of corruption, which can paralyze decision-making, at the risk of being accused of more corruption.

2. CSDI Implementation Concept Paper (Microsoft Word [.doc] format): The “Colombia Strategic Development Initiative” or CSDI is the framework that will guide U.S. aid to Colombia over the next few years. While humanitarian projects (like aid to the displaced) will continue throughout the country, the plan is to focus security and development assistance in a few geographic areas. Though a bit heavy on the jargon, this year-old document is the most detailed description of the CSDI that we have seen.

USAID/Colombia will invite all eligible and interested parties to participate in full-and-open competitions for the right to implement this new approach. … Each organization will lead consortia or networks, preferably made up of Colombian entities, to provide the needed skills and systems required for results achievement. The process will result in awards during 2009-2010.  USAID/Colombia envisions a total combined ceiling of all awards of no less than $500 million but no more than $800 million.  The maximum life of the base period of any resulting agreement will be five years.

3. Briefing Presentation: Partners Meeting (PDF): This is a PDF version of an April 2009 PowerPoint presentation laying out USAID’s strategy from 2009 to 2013. It discusses the “Integrated Action” effort and the new CSDI.

It also includes this map of the U.S. government’s chosen CSDI zones. (While this map has been widely circulated, this is the only public copy we’ve seen online.) These are the geographic areas where the U.S. government will focus its military and development aid for the next few years, as overall aid amounts decline. Any zone outside these red ovals will receive humanitarian aid and little else.

Share This

Photo source and article

Last Thursday we posted excerpts from two articles in Spanish-language media about a mass grave in the town of La Macarena. The grave is in the middle of a historically guerrilla-controlled zone in Meta department that, in the past five years or so, has been the site of several U.S.-supported military operations. The articles indicated that the La Macarena gravesite contains as many as 2,000 bodies, and that many of the bodies were deposited by the Colombian Army.

Though official investigations of the site won’t begin until March and we are, of course, not present in the zone, we’re following this closely. If true, these allegations could have strong implications for U.S. policy toward Colombia, which has included generous support for military units based in this zone. We have communicated with governmental, non-governmental and journalistic sources. Without violating these communications’ confidentiality, what we’ve heard can be summarized as follows.

• Sources agree that the site in question is an official cemetery in the La Macarena town center, not a clandestine area where bodies were dumped.

• The cemetery includes a large number of “NN” (name unknown) gravesites. The military recognizes burying unidentified individuals killed in the very frequent combat that has taken place between the armed forces and the FARC. The Army says that all of its burials have been duly registered with the Technical Investigations Unit (CTI) of the Prosecutor-General’s Office (Fiscalía).

• Estimating the number of dead at these gravesites is not possible at this time. Official sources doubt that the number is anywhere near as high as 2,000, and it is unclear how the media reports derived that estimate. If even a fraction of that total were “NN” cadavers, however, it would still be unusually large, as the town center of La Macarena municipality  is home to only about 4,000 people.

• The mayor of La Macarena, quoted in one of last week’s articles as saying “we became the site for the depositing of the war dead,” now insists that the cemetery is not a mass grave site. He says that the cemetery contains 1,000 human remains, many from nearby combat incidents, and that 346 are unidentified combat dead buried since 2004. The mayor’s remarks came yesterday at a press conference for reporters brought to La Macarena by Colombia’s minister of defense.

• There is no clarity about the timeframe of the burials. Some sources contend that most of the bodies were buried before 2005, when the FARC had nearly uncontested dominion over La Macarena, which between 1999 and 2002 was part of the demilitarized zone where FARC-government peace talks took place. Bodies buried before 2005 would be considered more likely to have been buried by the FARC. The news reports, however, claim that most bodies are from the post-2005 period.

Much remains to be clarified. It will be especially difficult to determine whether any of those buried are “false positives” — civilians killed and claimed as guerrilla combat deaths — or others extrajudicially executed on suspicion of guerrilla ties. (Colombian human rights groups have documented a large number of “false positives” in Meta department.)

All of this will have to await further investigation, forensic and otherwise. Meanwhile, one source says, the people in the zone who had made the original denunciations about the grave — a group that includes employees of state institutions — are now too fearful to give any more information.

Share This

Human Rights Watch has just released its first major report on Colombia in more than a year, and it looks like required reading.

“Paramilitaries’ Heirs: The New Face of Violence in Colombia” documents the rise of “emerging” paramilitary groups throughout the country, including zones that have been a heavy focus for U.S. military assistance. It is quite critical of the Colombian government’s “weak and ineffective” response to this rapidly growing phenomenon.

It’s 113 pages and they’ve been working on it for a long time. Very highly recommended.

Share This

Last week Colombia’s most-circulated newspaper, El Tiempo, ran an article with a rather outrageous headline:

“Clowns, Aromatherapy and Suckling Pig for the 46 Soldiers Charged with ‘False Positives’”

The article details an event, hosted by the Colombian armed forces’ human rights department, held to attend to dozens of Colombian soldiers recently released from prison. The soldiers, who still await trial, are accused of participating in a plot to kidnap young men in the poor Bogotá suburb of Soacha, kill them, and then present their bodies as those of armed-group members killed in combat, thus reaping rewards.

The Soacha “false positives” scandal, which came to light in September 2008, shocked Colombia and those who carry out Colombia policy here in Washington. As a result it was very troubling to see, in January, nearly all of the defendants released from preventive detention after a court determined that the pre-trial procedures had taken too long. Though the judicial delays were largely caused by defense lawyers’ maneuvers and efforts to move the cases to more lenient military courts, the soldiers were let out of jail and immediately confined to a base in Bogotá.

There, El Tiempo reports, the soldiers were given a day with their families, who were brought from all over Colombia to see them.

The event started at 8:00am with a Catholic Mass attended by two generals of the institution, followed by a conference held by several psychologists.

Around mid-morning, the soldiers were separated from their families: the uniformed personnel were taken to one of the casinos, decorated with candles and aromatherapy scents. According to one person who attended the event, they then had a long relaxation and meditation therapy.

Simultaneously, the wives, mothers and sisters of the militaries received a  ‘spa’ treatment in the other casino. They got facials, massages and hair dyes done by a renowned beauty brand. Meanwhile, the children were entertained by a group of clowns.

El Tiempo spoke to five of the families that attended the event, who pointed out that the militaries were told to go on vacation once they were released, but when the minister [of defense] gave the order to confine them, they were sent back to Bogotá immediately.

I contacted the Colombian Army’s human rights office about the event. (It is unclear why this event was the responsibility of the human rights office, which presumably exists to offer training, channel human rights complaints, and cooperate with judicial investigations.) An official there was clearly displeased with El Tiempo’s coverage, contending that the reporter who wrote the story was not present at the event, and that the lunch was “austere,” not suckling pig. He added that since the soldiers were not allowed to leave their bases, the event sought to give them a chance to see their families, whom some had not seen since 2008. The event did consist of a mass and psychological support for the soldiers, as well as clowns (“soldados payasos”) for the soldiers’ children.

While this clarification is helpful, this treatment for soldiers who may have dome something unspeakably awful contrasts very poorly with the treatment being given to the relatives of the young men killed in Soacha. Their mothers, who live at or below the poverty line, are still receiving threats, getting few responses from the government, and even had to pay their sons’ funeral expenses. This disparity in the government’s responses to perpetrators and victims is very troubling.

Share This

Lea una versión de este artículo en español.

This afternoon, the Obama administration made public its 2011 budget request to Congress, including its proposal for next year’s foreign assistance. This is the first “real” foreign aid request for an administration that had barely arrived in power a year ago.

Congress will use this request as the guideline for its State and Foreign Operations budget funding bill, which provides about three-quarters of all military and police assistance to Latin America and the Caribbean. (The Defense budget bill provides nearly all of the rest.)

The Obama administration’s foreign aid request differs significantly, if not radically, from what came before. For Latin America, the difference is notable, as this slideshow indicates.

2011 Foreign Ops

(Note: estimates of military and non-military aid in the slideshow are exactly that: estimates. One program, International Narcotics Control and Law Enforcement (INCLE), pays for both military and economic aid, and we don’t yet know how the administration plans to divide it between those priorities. Therefore we had to estimate INCLE military and non-military aid by prorating based on previous years. Our estimate, while not exact, is likely very close.)

Here are a few things we’ve observed after entering the new aid numbers into the “Just the Facts” database.

• A sharp decrease in military and police assistance, while economic aid levels hold steady. Two-thirds of this request is non-military aid. (Keep in mind, though, that additional military aid comes through the Defense budget.)

• Reductions for the region’s two largest aid recipients, Mexico (-30%) and Colombia (-11%). With most equipment deliveries already funded, the “Mérida Initiative” is winding down. Similarly, “Plan Colombia” programs are increasingly being turned over to Colombia. Most of Colombia’s aid cut comes from the State Department-managed International Narcotics Control and Law Enforcement account, which funds the aerial fumigation program and the maintenance of aircraft belonging to the Colombian security forces.

• The launch of a “Caribbean Basin Security Initiative” providing citizen security and counter-drug aid to Caribbean countries.

• Notable increases in assistance, both military and economic, to Central America.

• No major increase yet in aid to earthquake-battered Haiti; after donors’ conferences conclude, more Haiti aid will likely be included in a supplemental request for 2010.

Share This

Para-politicians and their “avatars,” from Pequeño Tirano

• Colombia’s biggest political controversy of the week came from President Uribe’s proposal, apparently unconsulted with Medellín authorities, to fight gang violence by paying the city’s students who serve as informants passing intelligence to the authorities.

• President Obama’s brief “State of the Union” mention of trade with Colombia raised hopes in Bogotá that the White House might seek congressional ratification of the free-trade agreement signed in 2006, even though U.S. Ambassador William Brownfield warned a week ago that trade agreements never win approval in legislative election years. Colombian Ambassador to the United States Carolina Barco counseled patience, and former Bush Assistant Secretary of State Roger Noriega noted that Obama’s language did not state clearly that he intends to act for the agreement’s ratification.

• The Colombian non-governmental organization CODHES reported its estimate of the number of Colombians newly displaced by violence in 2009: 286,389 people. That number, while shockingly high, is actually lower than the group’s 2008 estimate of 380,863 newly displaced people.

• A very strange story in El Tiempo covers an event the armed forces held for the accused Soacha “false positives” defendants, who were recently released from jail as they await trial for killing Colombian civilians. The 46 soldiers participated in aromatherapy and psycho-social workshops, while their visiting family members were entertained: clowns for the children and massages and makeovers for the women.

• Of every 100 guerrillas that the Colombian government has taken out of commission, estimates José Fernando Isaza, the FARC manages to recruit 83 new ones.

• The VerdadAbierta.com website has a long and disturbing interview with “Jorge Pirata,” one of the leaders of the paramilitaries who dominated Colombia’s eastern plains in the late 1990s and early 2000s. In text and video, he tells the history of the AUC’s brutal rise in the region south and east of Bogotá.

• The “Pequeño Tirano” cartoon is back, this time mocking the relatives, or “avatars,” of jailed para-politicians who are running for office in Colombia’s March congressional elections.

• As Porfirio Lobo takes over the presidency of Honduras and Manuel Zelaya leaves for exile in the Dominican Republic, the Tegucigalpa government’s treasury is down to its last US$50 million. U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Arturo Valenzuela warned yesterday that Washington will not support Honduras’ return to the OAS until President Lobo takes steps foreseen in the San José Accord, like forming a “unity government” and establishing a “truth commission” for crimes committed after the June 2009 coup.

• “Bloggings by Boz” excerpts all references to Latin America in the draft Quadrennial Defense Review that leaked this week. It’s definitely not too much to read in one sitting.

• Recently re-inaugurated President Evo Morales just named a new high command and now wants to change the Bolivian armed forces’ doctrine. “My great dream, my great desire,” he said, “is that our armed forces be internationally recognized as anti-capitalist.”

• Chile is buying 18 F-16 fighter planes from the United States for $270 million. “We don’t want to go out and hit anybody” with the country’s fleet of 44 F-16s, said Chile’s armed forces chief, Ricardo Ortega. But “everyone who is watching us, everyone around us, now knows that we have the capacity to hit hard, that is, it’s best that they leave us alone.”

• A USA Today/Gallup poll finds 63% of Americans favoring a longer-term U.S. military presence in Haiti, going beyond the emergency phase until “basic services are restored.” Meanwhile U.S. military logistics authorities estimate that most troops will pull out of Haiti within three to six months.

• In Venezuela, Hugo Chávez’s vice president and defense minister, Ramón Carrizález, abruptly quit on Monday, citing “personal reasons.” Some Venezuelan analysts speculate that he quit over disagreement with the role of Cuban officers in the Venezuelan military’s high command, or that it was part of a “loyalty test” amid rising internal discontent within the armed forces.

• New America Media reports on Latin American militaries’ increasing use of unmanned drone aircraft, most of them purchased from Israel.

Share This

Picture from the El Nuevo Herald coverage of the mass grave.

Miami’s El Nuevo Herald and Spain’s Público have run stories in the past two days about a shocking find in La Macarena, about 200 miles south of Bogotá.

Residents say that after it entered the strongly guerrilla-controlled zone in the mid-2000s, Colombia’s Army began dumping unidentified bodies in a mass grave near a local cemetery. The grave may contain as many as 2,000 bodies.

Público reports:

Since 2005 the Army, whose elite units are deployed in the surrounding area, has been depositing behind the local cemetery hundreds of cadavers with the order that they be buried without names. …

Jurist Jairo Ramírez, the secretary of the Permanent Committee for the Defense of Human Rights in Colombia, accompanied a delegation of British legislators to the site several weeks ago, when the magnitude of the La Macarena grave began to be discovered. “What we saw was chilling,” he told Público. “An infinity of bodies, and on the surface hundreds of white wooden plaques with the inscription NN [name unknown] and dates from 2005 until today.”

Ramírez adds: “The Army commander told us that they were guerrillas killed in combat, but the people in the region told us of a multitude of social leaders, campesinos and community human rights defenders who disappeared without a trace.”

El Nuevo Herald reports:

A spokesman of the Prosecutor-General’s Office (Fiscalía) in Bogotá revealed to El Nuevo Herald that a mission from that institution’s Technical Investigations Corps (CTI) has already gone to the cemetery and confirmed the existence of “a large number” of cadavers in the grave, though it only made a few excavations.

“We became the site for the depositing of the war dead,” declared Eliécer Vargas Moreno, mayor of the municipality. …

Residents of La Macarena interviewed over the phone by El Nuevo Herald, under the promise that their identities would not be revealed, expressed their suspicion that among the bodies are relatives who disappeared during the last four years. They denied that the bodies are those of guerrillas and asked for the chance to prove it.

Colombia’s Prosecutor-General’s Office will make its first excavations at the site in mid-March. While we are not jumping to conclusions, we will be watching this case closely.

La Macarena, the site of the grave, has been a very important site of U.S.-aided military operations since the mid-2000s. In this area, the U.S. government supported and advised the Colombian Army’s 2004-2006 “Plan Patriota” military offensive, and since 2007 has supported the “Plan for the Integral Consolidation of La Macarena” or PCIM, part of the new “Integrated Action” framework that is now guiding much U.S. assistance.

Share This

Posted to the website of El Tiempo, Colombia’s main newspaper, early this morning:

• “Revelations of Jaime Fernando Ovalle, key witness to resolve the case of the ‘wiretaps’ [in the Colombian government's presidential intelligence service, or DAS]“

Posted minutes ago to the website of El Tiempo:

• “Jaime Fernando Ovalle Olaz, key witness in the DAS ‘wiretaps,’ dies“

Note as of 10:15AM January 29: Semana magazine is reporting that Ovalle, 54, died of cancer diagnosed in December.

Share This

Photo source and good article in Cambio.

Note as of 1:00 AM January 28: After 13 hours of deliberation today, El Tiempo reports, Colombia’s National Electoral Council decided to suspend the ADN party, citing the active role played by imprisoned politicians.

(This post was composed with research assistance from CIP Intern Cristina Salas.)

As Colombia inches closer to its March 14 legislative elections, it is growing ever clearer that the country has not left “para-politics” behind.

The last time Colombia reelected its Congress, in March 2006, about a third of the winners ended up under investigation, on trial or in prison for ties to mass-murdering, drug-trafficking paramilitary groups who were politically powerful in many regions. (Download a recent list here.) The resulting scandal raised public awareness of organized crime’s infiltration of Colombia’s government, and spurred Colombia’s Supreme Court to attempt an ambitious housecleaning in the legislature. But the phenomenon continues in the current election cycle.

Since the 2006 cycle, three parties all but ceased to exist because of the huge number of office-holders who ended up in trouble for sponsoring, aiding and abetting, or otherwise making deals with the right-wing militias. But “Colombia Viva,” “Colombia Democrática” and “Convergencia Ciudadana” are back in new guises, running candidates for the March vote.

The three parties have undergone a makeover, reemerging as Alianza Democrática Nacional (National Democratic Alliance) and Partido de Integración Nacional (National Integration Party), but maintaining the legal registrations of Convergencia Ciudadana and Colombia Democrática, respectively. (This El Tiempo editorial asserts that they maintain the legal registrations of Convergencia and Colombia Viva.)

Alianza Democrática Nacional, or “ADN” (the Spanish initials of DNA, as in genetic code), was created in early December by former members of Colombia Viva, Convergencia Ciudadana and Colombia Democrática, the latter party founded by President Álvaro Uribe’s second cousin Mario Uribe, who is currently under investigation for paramilitary ties. Colombia Viva included Senator Vicente Blel, sentenced this week to seven years in prison, and Álvaro García, accused of conspiring with paramilitaries who carried out a notoriously horrific string of massacres in the Montes de María region during the early 2000s. Juan Carlos Martínez, a Convergencia Ciudadana senator from Valle del Cauca, is accused of helping to organize the ADN party from his prison cell.

Former members of Convergencia Ciudadana created the Partido de Integración Nacional, or “PIN”, after the earlier party ceased to exist because its founder, ex-senator Luis Alberto Gil, was jailed and another one of its leaders, ex-governor of Santander Hugo Aguilar, came under judicial investigation.

Colombian analysts say that these political parties exist in part to support the campaigns of political heirs of the “para-politicians,” thus guaranteeing their continued influence and local political power. As the scandal leaves voids in local political leadership structures, the parties aim to fill them with the scandal-tarred bosses’ friends, relatives or allies. In the candidates list for the upcoming elections, for instance, ex-senator Gil has been replaced by his wife, and ex-governor Aguilar by his son. (More examples of family members serving as substitutes can be found in this piece in the Colombian newsmagazine Cambio.)

The head of the largest “mainstream” pro-Uribe party, former Defense Minister Juan Manuel Santos of the “Partido Social de la Unidad” or “U”, claims that the party is doing its utmost to avoid paramilitary influence. (Several “U” party legislators have been embroiled in the para-politics scandal, though the party was not hit as hard as the three parties being re-packaged today.) Santos announced that all “U” candidates for the upcoming Congress elections will be investigated for ties with illegal groups, including the signing of sworn statements and verification by an “ethics committee.”

Left-of-center Semana columnist María Jimena Duzán says that those who do not pass muster in La U will end up in the ADN or PIN parties, “enchanted creations conceived at the last minute by the Palace of Nariño [Colombian 'White House'] to house the scum of the paramilitary mafia that the ‘U’ no longer has the luxury of admitting.”

Meanwhile, ADN and PIN, their campaigns flush with cash, are blanketing several regions of Colombia with advertisements professing their support for President Uribe, hoping to ride his coat-tails back into office, four years after the “para-politics” scandal first broke.

Share This

Three Senate Democrats on committees with jurisdiction over U.S. aid to Colombia sent a letter to Secretary of State Clinton on January 21. The letter calls for a changed U.S. approach to Colombia: a reduced military focus, greater support for civilian governance including the judicial system, a stronger priority on human rights and democratic institutions, and increased openness to facilitating a negotiated end to the conflict.

The three senators are:

• Russell Feingold (D-Wisconsin), who sits on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee;
• Chris Dodd (D-Connecticut), who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Western Hemisphere Subcommittee; and
• Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont), who chairs the Senate Appropriations State/Foreign Operations Subcommittee.

Here is a brief excerpt. Or download the whole 3-page letter as a 1.3-megabyte PDF file.

Reports suggest further deterioration of the rule of law and basic rights in Colombia in other areas as well. The well-documented abuses of the presidential intelligence agency, the Departamento Administrativo de Seguridad (DAS), are particularly troubling. … Colombia’s highest officials continue to publicly denigrate human rights defenders in ways that jeopardize their safety. Additionally, a possible third term for the current president threatens to further erode the checks and balances that help protect Colombia’s fragile democracy.

In light of these trends, the State Department’s September 8th decision to certify that Colombia has met the human rights conditions in U.S. law was very disappointing, as were statements indicating that the Administration’s new base-access agreement with Colombia is intended to deepen relations with the Colombian military. President Obama’s words of concern about human rights abuses during President Uribe’s June 2009 visit were welcome and helpful. But it is also essential that the administration send an unambiguous signal that these abuses are unacceptable and that stopping them is a priority and a prerequisite for our continued partnership with the Colombian government.

Share This

A new post at the “Just the Facts” program blog discusses two trends:

• The State Department’s apparent acquiescence in a Defense Department plan to increase, from $350 to $500 million, a controversial military-aid program run out of the Pentagon’s budget.
• A December proposal (PDF) from Secretary of Defense Gates to Secretary of State Clinton to create a common State-Defense “pool” of funding for both security assistance and development aid.

Both trends weaken diplomatic management of military assistance to Latin America and the rest of the world, and could also weaken congressional oversight and protections – including human rights protections. There appears to be a pitched bureaucratic battle going on, and we’ll be following it.

Share This

Chileans didn’t elect Sebastián Piñera a week ago Sunday because of their antipathy for Hugo Chávez. Bolivians didn’t re-elect Evo Morales in December out of admiration for Venezuela’s president. Nor will Chávez be an issue on February 7, when a center-left and a rightist candidate face off in Costa Rica.

If you read Jackson Diehl’s column in today’s Washington Post, though, you might come away with the impression that Latin American politics today are “all Chávez, all the time.” That the region is lined up, cold-war style, in monolithically opposed blocs, with ideological tides ever advancing and receding.

Latin America has quietly passed through a tipping point in the ideological conflict that has polarized the region — and paralyzed U.S. diplomacy — for most of the past decade.

This is true in a few politically polarized flashpoint countries, such as post-coup Honduras, increasingly authoritarian Nicaragua, or Colombia, whose war of words with Chávez continues. But in most of Latin America today, elections are quietly and undramatically ratifying presidents or parties in power (Bolivia, probably Costa Rica), or uneventfully bringing oppositions to power (Panama, Mexico’s legislative elections, Chile, probably Brazil later this year). There is no regional cold war.

Instead, it’s hard to discern any pattern in the current set of polls and political outcomes. To the extent that there is one, Latin American voters’ mood is turning against angry, extreme, polarizing leaders of all political stripes. Approval ratings seem to favor moderate pragmatists of the right and left (Martinelli in Panama, Funes in El Salvador, Bachelet in Chile and Lula in Brazil). They are less kind to more combative, partisan leaders (Ortega in Nicaragua, Fernández in Argentina, and even Chávez and Colombia’s Uribe who, while still quite popular, has seen a modest decline in his ratings). An exception is Morales in Bolivia, who won a landslide despite a very combative political style.

Whatever the regional pattern, it seems to have little to do with the personality or influence of Hugo Chávez. In fact, as Diehl points out, Chávez is in trouble at home, facing rising crime rates, power shortages, inflation and a steep currency devaluation. The Venezuelan leader has reacted by hardening still further, nationalizing retail stores, pulling the plug on cable TV networks, and other steps that risk misfiring politically in advance of September legislative elections. As the Venezuelan leader’s direction appears more erratic, the Colombian magazine Semana notes, one ally, Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa, is visibly distancing himself.

Diehl writes that “Hugo Chávez’s ’socialism for the 21st century’ has been defeated and is on its way to collapse.” That may be. But if true, it would be a huge error to imagine a significant change in U.S. relations with Latin America as a result.

As president of a country of 28 million people, Hugo Chávez’s ability to determine his neighbors’ political destiny was never great. His influence may be less of a concern than what he leaves behind: if the Chávez government should implode under the weight of its mounting economic and social pressures — a possibility that can’t be dismissed within the next five years — it could leave a chaotic competition to fill a power vacuum, making the whole region less secure.

Meanwhile, the popular anger and aspirations that first elected Chávez could easily manifest themselves among voters in another country, sending new leaders of the left to power. And as this happens, still other countries may move rightward.

There are no cold wars in Latin America, no rising or falling tides to be fostered or contained. Just democracies going in different directions, occasionally directions quite distant from the United States. Here in the United States, we have to get used to that, and stop viewing each electoral outcome as a harbinger of triumph or tragedy.

Share This

The Colombian Army is carrying out an offensive against the FARC’s powerful 48th front in Putumayo this week. (Colombian Army photo)

• Of Colombian officers and soldiers facing trial for the 2008 murder of young men in the Bogotá suburb of Soacha, the number now freed from preventive detention because of lapsed prosecution deadlines now stands at 38. The men are accused of presenting their victims’ bodies as those of armed-group members killed in combat, an alarmingly frequent practice that has come to be known in Colombia as “false positives.” Mothers of the victims — whether in Soacha or in other cases — are furious. “We want truth. They let them go so they can go and kill more boys,” said one.

• The La Silla Vacía website has a very useful – and troubling – interactive timeline of the judicial delays and procedural maneuvers that caused the accused soldiers’ legal processes to drag on so long that, under the rules of Colombia’s new oral justice system, they had to be set free pending trial.

• For similar reasons, ten soldiers implicated in the 2005 San José de Apartadó massacre could be freed in February.

• The “false positives” scandal was among the topics in a debate Wednesday between two opposition presidential candidates, Rafael Pardo of the center-left Liberal Party and Gustavo Petro of the leftist Democratic Pole party. Interestingly Pardo, a former defense minister, took a harder line against soldiers found guilty of committing extrajudicial executions, calling for “severe punishment,” while Petro said he would favor reduced sentences for those who “collaborate with truth.”

• Francisco Leal of the National and Andes Universities published a concise but thorough evaluation of the Uribe government’s “Democratic Security” policy on the “Razón Pública” website.

• Colombia’s Army found a cache of brand-new weapons in southeastern Córdoba department, which it believes to be part of an arms-for-cocaine barter arrangement between the FARC and “new” paramilitary groups in the region.

• Colombia’s Ideas for Peace Foundation released an interesting report [PDF] on emerging paramilitary groups and “the consolidation of a third generation of paramilitaries.”

• Colombia’s Constitutional Court is reviewing the legality of scheduling a congressionally approved referendum on whether to change the Constitution to allow President Álvaro Uribe to run for a third straight term. The court’s new chief justice — a one-year rotating position — served as President Uribe’s legal secretary until 2007.

• If you had invested $100 in Colombia’s stock market index on December 31, 1999, it would be worth $1,529 today.

• The OAS Inter-American Human Rights Commission released an extensive report on the human rights situation in Honduras since the June 28 coup d’état.
  • “The report states that along with the loss of institutional legitimacy caused by the coup d’état, serious human rights violations have occurred. These include deaths; the arbitrary declaration of a state of exception; the repression of public demonstrations through the disproportionate use of force; the criminalization of social protest; the arbitrary detention of thousands of individuals; cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment and poor detention conditions; the militarization of the territory; an increase in situations of racial discrimination; violations of women’s rights, arbitrary restrictions on the right to freedom of expression; and serious infringements of political rights.”

• “Shot in the Back: The Human Impact of the Honduran Coup” is a video on Honduras’s human rights crisis produced by Witness for Peace.

• Secretary of State Hillary Clinton sent a letter to Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa accepting his invitation for eventual dialogues between the United States and UNASUR, the recently formed Union of South American Nations. Correa said that U.S. use of bases in Colombia must be part of any such dialogue’s agenda.

• Chilean President-Elect Sebastián Piñera promised that his government will “collaborate” with judicial investigations of past human rights abuses, and said he will seek to do away with the Pinochet-era provision that gives the armed forces 10 percent of the state copper company’s revenues.

• The Mexico-based Consulta Mitofsky took a “poll of polls” of Latin America’s leaders’ approval ratings, coming up with this ranking. The list does not include Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez.
  • Ricardo Martinelli, Panama: 91%
  • Mauricio Funes, El Salvador: 88%
  • Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, Brazil: 83%
  • Michelle Bachelet, Chile: 81%
  • Álvaro Uribe, Colombia: 64%
  • Tabaré Vázquez, Uruguay: 61%
  • Evo Morales, Bolivia: 60%
  • Felipe Calderón, Mexico: 55%
  • Fernando Lugo, Paraguay: 50%
  • Barack Obama, USA: 48%
  • Álvaro Colom, Guatemala: 46%
  • Óscar Arias, Costa Rica: 44%
  • Rafael Correa, Ecuador: 42%
  • Stephen Harper, Canada: 32%
  • Alan García, Peru: 29%
  • Daniel Ortega, Nicaragua: 25%
  • Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, Argentina: 19%

Share This