Plan Colombia and Beyond

Human rights

• Whether politically motivated and conflict-related killings have declined similarly. (The answer is “not really”: 11,084 civilians were killed or disappeared for political reasons during Uribe’s first four-year term, or 7.7 per day, the Colombian Commission of Jurists reports . This is down only slightly from the four years preceding Uribe’s term, when about 9 people per day were killed or disappeared.)
• Whether Colombia is preventing future abuses by punishing government personnel responsible for past abuses. (The answer is “hardly.” The State Department found only twelve sentences issued for human-rights cases against government personnel during the first eleven months of 2006.)

UN human rights report

• Whether this is the same report that cites an increase in civilians killed by the armed forces in 2006 – finding such “extrajudicial executions” on the rise in 21 of Colombia’s 32 provinces – and adding that “in many of the reported cases three common elements were observed: the presentation of the civilian victims as killed in combat, the alteration of crime scenes by the perpetrators, and the cases’ subsequent relegation to the [notoriously lenient] military court system.” (The answer is “yes,” it is the same report.)

Para-Politics”

• Whether much credit shouldn’t go to brave Colombians outside the government whose work to uncover paramilitary ties has made them more threatened and – in some cases – has invited angry criticism from the president himself. These include investigators in the Colombian judicial system, members of the political opposition in the Congress who have carried out their own investigations, and journalists at some of Colombia’s main newspapers and magazines.
• Regardless of who should get the credit, whether the president will promise to give the investigators what they need – including security and a sufficient budget – to guarantee that their work brings a historic break in Colombia’s decades-old problem of links between organized crime and government institutions.
• What is the president’s opinion of the recent release from prison, pending trial, of his former intelligence director, Jorge Noguera, who is accused of helping paramilitaries kill union leaders, among other charges?

Labor rights

• Why these and earlier killings are almost never punished, and whether this creates a climate that fosters more anti-union violence. (A recent Colombian government report on convictions of unionists’ killers shows an impunity rate of 98% under the Uribe government, with only 7 convictions for the over 400 murders of trade unionists since Uribe came to office. And there has been only 1 conviction for the 236 murders committed in the last three years.)
• Couldn’t the decline in union killings just as easily mean that, after so many years of threats and intimidation, union activity is simply diminished overall?
• With 58 to 72 people killed last year for trying to organize, isn’t Colombia still the most dangerous country in the world for union activity?

U.S. aid

• Why the Bush administration, then, is once again asking Congress for a package of nearly 80 percent military and police aid. Why must the U.S. government always provide the weapons, while other countries help Colombia (with far smaller amounts of aid) govern and create economic opportunity in conflictive zones?

Drug-crop eradication

• Why the U.S. government found more coca in 2005 than it did in 2000 – the year Plan Colombia began. (2006 data are still unavailable.)
• Why the White House Drug Czar’s office found that the price of cocaine fell to a new low in 2006, indicating that supply is meeting demand better than ever.
• Whether President Uribe thinks that the U.S. government needs to do more to reduce its own addict population’s demand for cocaine.
• Whether President Uribe would support a change in strategy that puts more emphasis on creating employment and opportunities in coca-growing zones.

Internal displacement

• Whether progress has been significant when 219,886 people – 1 in 200 Colombians – were newly displaced in 2006, according to CODHES, the principal Colombian NGO monitoring displacement.
• Whether three months of emergency assistance, which is what most registered displaced families get, is really enough.

Extradition

• Whether President Uribe plans to extradite drug traffickers wanted in the United States who “joined” the paramilitaries just in time to demobilize and benefit from lighter sentences.
• Whether President Uribe will pledge to extradite demobilized paramilitary leaders wanted in the United States if evidence indicates that they are still sending drugs here. (Follow-up: the flow of cocaine from paramilitary-controlled zones, especially the Caribbean coast, continues unabated. Is President Uribe certain that former paramilitary leaders are not involved in this trafficking?)

Colombia’s economy

• Whether this growth has trickled down to rural areas where poverty rates still hover around 70 percent. These areas, where thirty percent of the population lives, are the centers of Colombia’s violence and drug trade. (Answer: unlikely.)
• How President Uribe plans to ensure that Colombia’s investment boom (Bogotá’s stock market index is up more than 700 percent since Uribe took office) benefits the poorest, the unskilled, and those living in remote and conflictive rural zones.
• Whether President Uribe is disappointed that economic growth has had so little impact on unemployment and underemployment . (Early 2002: unemployment 16.4% / underemployment 33.6%; Early 2007: unemployment 12.8% / underemployment 33.2%.)

Demobilized combatants

• How many demobilized fighters the government has simply lost track of (answer: over 4,700 as of March).
• How the government is working to arrest the extremely rapid rise of re-forming paramilitary groups. (The OAS conservatively estimated in February that 3,000 people have organized in 22 “new” paramilitary groups. A few months earlier, in September, it had reported that an unknown number had organized in only six groups.)

Bonus question

• “Every time a security policy to defeat terrorism appears in Colombia, when the terrorists begin to feel weak, they immediately send their spokespeople to talk about human rights. … These human-rights traffickers must take off their masks, appear with their political ideas and drop this cowardice of hiding them behind human rights.” – 9/8/03
• “Many of those who attack the government saying that the president is a paramilitary, basically what they are is enraged that the president attacks the guerrillas. They are not able to say that they defend the guerrillas, and that they are very bothered because the government is fighting them. They should be more authentic, more sincere.” – 11/19/06
• Opposition members of Colombia’s Congress who are demobilized guerrillas “went from being terrorists in camouflage to terrorists in business suits.” – 2/3/07
• “I am very worried that the guerrillas’ political friends, who live here constantly posing as political enemies of yankee imperialism, frequently travel to the United States to discredit the Colombian government, for two purposes: the purpose of keeping the Free Trade Agreement from being approved, and the purpose of suspending the aid. … [These are] friends of the guerrillas, politicians who want the guerrillas to triumph in Colombia, but lack the authenticity to call for it openly.” – 4/19/07