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The Inter-Press Service news agency leans to the left, but is usually unimpeachably accurate. Yesterday, IPS published a plausible reconstruction, based on several sources, of the mid-June incident that caused the deaths of eleven state legislators whom the FARC had been holding hostage since 2002.
According to IPS reporter Constanza Vieira, the eleven were likely killed in the crossfire during a days-long battle between a guerrilla column and Colombian Police Jungla commandos on the Cajambre River, inland from the Pacific coast port of Buenaventura. The guerrilla column was transporting the eleven hostages by boat when the Junglas engaged them. The commandos were soon joined by other military units.
The motorboat pulled up to the bank to join the FARC land unit, and “two or three” military helicopters immediately brought in troops who joined the fighting.
“The shooting went on for three days, and the bodies were left on the boat,” said the source.
After three days, the Jungla commando and the guerrillas both took shelter on the steep hills of the Andean valley that the river runs through.
“The bodies were left there for another three days” before the guerrillas “returned to see what was left.” They were incommunicado, having lost their radio telephones, the source added.
The guerrillas were moving their captives to a new location, IPS reports, because some of those assigned to guard them had suspiciously deserted. The deserters – who may have even been infiltrated members of the security forces – likely informed the Junglas about the hostages’ presence.
The leader of the guerrilla unit, Milton Sierra or “J.J.,” was killed in the fighting. The Colombian Navy noted this on its website, says IPS:
A report on the Colombian navy’s web site dated Jun. 15 states that “in a joint operation between the army, the navy and the air force, the guerrilla leader….alias ‘J.J.’ was killed in combat while riding in a vessel on the Cajambre river, upriver from the town of Barco, in the department of Valle del Cauca.”
(See a similar June 15 report on the Colombian Presidency’s website. Also see this May 1 comment posted to the forums on the website of Cali’s El PaÃs newspaper, which reads, “Attention señores from the security forces: two hours from Buenaventura, passing by Punta Soldado, is a river called Cajambre. Upriver is a big FARC encampment, there are laboratories and coca fields. Alisa JJ has been seen there, so there may be kidnap victims. You should arrive by air and exterminate them.”)
While we still don’t completely know for sure, IPS may indeed have discovered how the eleven hostages were murdered.
If they got it right, however, the consequences would be serious. It would mean that the Colombian government has been lying.
The FARC’s June 28 communiqué about the incident only referred to a firefight with “a still unidentified military group.” The Colombian government then denied that its forces had been involved in any combat with guerrillas anywhere nearby at the time of the incident.
Yet IPS claims that there was in fact intense combat on the Cajambre River, during which the hostages were killed. If the IPS version is accurate, this may be the most disturbing part of its story:
According to Colombia’s intelligence chief, Andres Peñate, the hostages’ deaths were the result of an accidental clash between rebel units.
President Ãlvaro Uribe himself denied any military attempt to rescue the hostages by force. He also denied that there had been any fighting in the departments of Valle del Cauca and Cauca, further south, on Jun. 17, 18 or 19.
The death of J.J. was reported by Vice Admiral Edgar Celi Núñez, head of naval operations, on Jun. 15. The guerrilla leader’s body was not shown to the press.
The entry for the week of Jun. 16-22 in the military actions logbook of the Observatory of the Presidential Programme for Human Rights and International Humanitarian Rights, maintained by the vice president’s office, has been altered, eliminating the report of the combat originally entered as having taken place on Jun. 15 in Barco.
The original version on the web site, which was downloaded by IPS on Jul. 16, said: “In Barco, in the district of Cajambre and the jurisdiction of Buenaventura (Valle), fighting broke out between the navy and subversives of the Manuel Cepeda Vargas Front of the FARC, in which Milton Sierra Gómez, alias ‘J.J.’, the leader of this Front, was killed. In the same action, two of the guerrilla camps were dismantled. Source: El PaÃs,” the main regional newspaper.
The following note appears next, in blue typeface: “However, according to information from the navy, this event happened in the same way and place described, on Wednesday Jun. 6, 2007.”
Did the hostages in fact die in a botched rescue attempt, which the Colombian government has since sought to cover up?
UPDATE as of 12:00 PM August 24:
IPS journalist Constanza Vieira (see her blog here) offers the following “precisiones” (my translation):
- I don’t dismiss the possibility that the hostages were executed by their captors, even in a scenario in which the guerrillas themselves were killed.
- Nor do I dismiss – but I didn’t follow this thread – the possible participation of foreign mercenaries. This topic has been investigated by Gonzalo Guillén of El Nuevo Herald, a great journalist with good sources for this issue.
- I have been careful not to specify a date [for the incident]. I believe that everyone is lying, except for the community [a nearby Afro-Colombian community that issued a statement, cited in Vieira's article, about the humanitarian crisis the Cajambre River combat was causing]. That’s why I simply wrote that the legislators died “in the wee hours one night in June.”
August 22nd, 2007 at 10:38 pm
It’s possible. I was in Colombia when the announcement about the friendly-FARC-fire scenario was annouced, and was skeptical. So I would not be surprised if there was cover-up, personally. Noting the incredibly high number of scandals, and the incredibly high delicate nature of this situation, a cover-up may be easier and better for the government. As far as the actual report, I don’t know. It definitely is possible, but I think the most accurate thing to say is that we just don’t know. They have provided more evidence and seem to have done more work than the government though, with regards to truly finding out what happened.
The only people that know truly are the FARC front in the area and probably their Secretariat. Other than that, maybe military troops, or the “unidentified armed group,” if they exist. There are many plausible events.
August 24th, 2007 at 11:27 am
Sounds plausible but I sense a missing piece here. If the report is correct, it would be a great PR coup for the FARC to expose the cover-up and they are in the best possible position to do so. After all, they have the corpses, which could be furnished as forensic evidence (I imagine it’s not hard to identify the ammunition used). Not to mention that the FARC’s initial talk of an “unidentified armed group” is a bit mealy-mouthed, especially by their standards. Why would they use such an ambiguous language, effectively giving the government a way out of the crisis, without any need?
August 24th, 2007 at 9:19 pm
Possible it is, strictly speaking. But I don’t share the confidence that seemingly surrounds this piece of news. At least not just yet.
LFM raises a couple of relevant questions that still need to be resolved. That kind of thing makes the reconstruction rather incomplete and still questionable, at the very least. Why did FARC not reveal this information in a more complete manner before, and instead chose to use very vague language? Why have they not released the bodies already? And so forth.
It may be that, as Viera says, everyone (FARC, the government and, I would add, maybe even others) is lying to a certain extent, even if we don’t know exactly how as of now.
August 24th, 2007 at 9:21 pm
Also, I continue to find it questionable that FARC often says that most of its deserters are merely “infiltrated” . Realistically speaking, that’s not very likely. If the Junglas or anyone else in the Army had such massive infiltration capabilities, FARC could be hurt in far more substantial ways, I would think.
August 28th, 2007 at 12:42 pm
Lies in the Uribe administration are pathological and cronical. So whatever they say that contradicts the official government story is probably true. Don’t forget he said that he never had met a paramilitary, when a few months ago a video came out in which he was holding conversations with several dangerous thugs from these organizations in his first campaign, and the only thing missing was a vallenato group to animate the huddle.
August 30th, 2007 at 2:34 pm
I’m sorry, but I don’t reach such an automatic conclusion when FARC’s own version (or versions) is also susceptible to errors or lies, so I’m not willing to give them such an undeserved benefit.
As for the video you’re talking about, there is no clear indication in it that Uribe knew who those people where, although one would think that he should have. The dialogue itself doesn’t reveal much.