May 31, 2007

A decision looms for Jorge Noguera

Jorge Noguera, who headed President Uribe’s intelligence and security service (DAS) until late 2005, was sent to jail in February. He is to face trial for allegations that he worked closely with paramilitary leaders and narcotraffickers from his powerful office, even giving them lists of labor and human-rights activists to target.

Incredibly, Noguera was let out of jail in March on the barest of technicalities. (A document that should have been signed by the Prosecutor-General was signed instead by one of his top deputies.) Despite the seriousness of the charges against him, which caused the U.S. government to revoke his visa earlier this year, Noguera is a free man right now.

This display of leniency – for a man who was President Uribe’s campaign manager in the paramilitary-dominated department of Magdalena in 2002 – was viewed very poorly outside Colombia.

Now, Colombia’s José Alvear Restrepo Lawyers’ Collective informs us, Colombia’s prosecutor-general, Mario Iguarán, “must decide in the next few days whether he will send [Noguera] back to prison.” They urge Iguarán to oversee the case personally so that Noguera’s lawyers can find fewer legal loopholes for their client to slip through.

The prosecutor-general is under a lot of political pressure, and his office is overwhelmed by the “para-politics” scandal and the “justice and peace” trials of demobilizing paramilitary leaders. The Jorge Noguera case, however, is an early and important test of the Colombian judicial system’s ability to deal with the power and influence of paramilitarism and organized crime.

Last week, President Uribe proposed releasing from prison all alleged paramilitary collaborators not accused of serious human-rights crimes themselves – a proposal he has since softened a bit. But Noguera is accused of serious human-rights crimes, so he doesn’t even fit the president’s initial definition of who should be let out of jail.

The former DAS director should not be at large right now. Let’s hope that Mario Iguarán is able to do something about it.

Posted by isacson at 6:21 AM | Comments (0)

May 21, 2007

Out on a technicality?

An alarming issue appeared in yesterday's El Tiempo interview with Colombia's prosecutor-general, Mario Iguarán. There is a real possibility that all of the Colombian politicians and officials currently under arrest for suspected paramilitary ties could be freed on a legal technicality at the end of June.

Iguarán: [I]n these investigations, the [Supreme] Court and the Prosecutor-General's Office are working within the longer investigation periods allowed by the specialized justice system. But the Law of Specialized Justice, which gives much more time to investigate than the regular justice system does, expires soon, on June 30. That is why we have asked the Congress to approve, before June 16, legislation that will allow us to keep working within the terms of specialized justice. If Congress does not approve this law for us, our ability to investigate as we should will run serious risks.

El Tiempo: What risks?

Iguarán: That many people who today are being investigated and tried under the terms of specialized justice - for example, for conspiracy - will be let out of jail.

El Tiempo: They will all get out?

Iguarán: That is the risk. That is why I have sent official communications to the presidents of the Senate and House, and the bill has a “message of urgency” from the executive branch. It has passed in the committees, but has yet to go through the full houses.

El Tiempo: The congresspeople under investigation could also be freed?

Iguarán: The [Supreme] Court [which handles the cases against legislators] would also have its investigation periods cut back, because it is also working within the specialized justice system. That is what happened in the [César] Gaviria administration, when because the period expired, Prosecutor-General [Gustavo] De Greiff had to set Pablo Escobar free. In order to keep that from happening, Gaviria declared a state of siege.

In other words, Iguarán is saying that if the Congress doesn't approve a bill in less than four weeks, the twelve congresspeople and various other officials in prison awaiting trial for helping paramilitaries could receive a “get out of jail free” card.

Is this likely to happen? Probably not - the bill to renew the “specialized justice” system appears to be moving, slowly but steadily, through the Congress. Its passage will keep the suspected paramilitary collaborators in jail. Nonetheless, the prosecutor-general is clearly worried that the bill could quietly fail.

Will the members of the pro-Uribe majority in Colombia's Congress do the right thing and pass the bill? Or will they do a favor for their jailed colleagues - and for themselves, as many are also under a cloud of suspicion - by letting the “specialized justice” statute expire?

Posted by isacson at 8:18 AM | Comments (0)

May 16, 2007

Re-capping yesterday in Colombia

People who allegedly conspired with top paramilitary leader Salvatore Mancuso, according to Mancuso’s “Justice and Peace” testimony yesterday, which covered events up to 1997:

People revealed to have been subject to more than 8,000 hours of illegal police wiretaps over the past three years, in a scandal that emerged this week:

Posted by isacson at 11:36 AM | Comments (5)

April 25, 2007

President Uribe and his opponents

While on Capitol Hill viewing yesterday's House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing on Colombia, we started getting calls and emails. Colombian police were raiding the offices of Gustavo Petro, the opposition senator and nemesis of President Álvaro Uribe. This was happening a mere seven days after Petro's congressional hearing on paramilitarism in President Uribe's home state of Antioquia had transfixed the country.

It sounded like something a hack screenwriter would have written: the scene where the would-be dictator begins his crackdown on the opposition. By the end of the day, however, the episode - while troubling - appeared to be much less serious than that.

Two police delegations appeared at Petro's office. One was there to discuss Petro's own security, apparently with a prior appointment. A prosecutor had ordered the other - perhaps improperly - to obtain information from Petro's records about allegations the senator had made regarding bribery of army officers in 2003.

The Uribe administration's interior minister, Carlos Holguín, disassociated the government from the episode. Attorney-General Mario Iguarán, whose office is a separate branch of government beyond the president's control, added that he had no role in the prosecutor's decision to send police to Sen. Petro's office.

The incident appears to have blown over. What happened yesterday was not an all-out frontal attack on President Uribe's opponents. But it is still serious in the current context. Consider the following recent developments.

1. Espionage against the peaceful political opposition? In his extensive comments to the media last Thursday, President Uribe offered this startling piece of information.

Reporter: What evidence, what indicators do you have, that the free trade agreement is being attacked directly with this kind of information [allegations about President Uribe's past ties to paramilitaries]?

Uribe: I have proof, which I am not going to reveal - it is from military and police intelligence - that some of those who have gone to the United States say: we're going to attack the Treaty by accusing this guy Uribe.

I have this proof. And going [to Washington] to discredit the government has been a persistent purpose. And the coincidences. Many of the critics who go there to defame the government are the adversaries of the FTA here. And I have specific proof. In order not to reveal them, I will not make any personal references.

Did Uribe really mean to say that Colombian "military and police intelligence" are reporting on members of the peaceful opposition who oppose a free-trade agreement with the United States? An agreement that Colombia's Congress itself hasn't even ratified?

2. A plot to kill Sen. Petro, with a name we've heard before. Sen. Petro offered a new revelation to the Associated Press yesterday.

Sen. Gustavo Petro told The Associated Press that the public prosecutor's office learned of the plot from one of the would-be assassins, who testified he met with retired army Col. Julian Villate and others in January in the coastal city of Santa Marta to plan the killing.

The assassination was not carried out, and Petro said he had no more details about the plot.

Col. Julián Villate is a familiar name. He is a former U.S.-trained officer (Fort Leavenworth and the School of the Americas, where he was an instructor), who has headed a consulting / private security firm since retiring in 2004. The firm appears to specialize in helping companies embroiled in labor disputes.

Col. Villate is implicated in "Operation Dragon," an alleged assassination plot targeting a colleague of Sen. Petro's - opposition Sen. Alexánder López Maya - his companion Berenice Celeyta, a prominent Cali human-rights activist, and several other Cali-based union leaders who opposed the privatization of the local utility company.

According to the Associated Press piece, another of Col. Villate's clients is Drummond Co. Inc., the Alabama-based coal company that is currently facing a civil suit in U.S. federal court for allegedly paying paramilitaries to kill three union leaders in 2001.

Why does Col. Villate's name keep popping up?

3. President Uribe's defenders in the U.S. Congress fan the flames. Listen to this characterization of Sen. Petro from Rep. Dan Burton (R-Indiana), the senior Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere.

http://ciponline.org/colombia/070424burt01.mp3

Transcript: I'm a little distressed that we jump to conclusions so rapidly. You know, I just read that a leading opposition senator said Tuesday that "far right paramilitary fighters established a hold over the province of - Anticola? - while President Uribe was the governor of the region." And that he said that he was allowing these paramilitary death squads to convene on his property with his knowledge.

But what nobody really focuses on, is that this fella - this fella was with a - a terrorist organization down there for some time, and for him to be taken at his word, I think, is something that we should - really look at with a jaundiced eye. He was with - MI-21, was it? I'm trying to read - MI-19, MI-19. And he says he never fired a gun while he was with them, but nevertheless, he was one of their spokespeople. Now he's in the Senate accusing President Uribe of things that he probably has done. So I think we ought to look at that very carefully.

Posted by isacson at 1:37 PM | Comments (3)

April 20, 2007

"I saw my grave being dug"

Gen. Mario Montoya, the head of Colombia’s army, continues to face questions of alleged links to paramilitary groups. These allegations, first published by the Los Angeles Times in March, are among the reasons why, according to Sen. Patrick Leahy’s staff, the senator decided this week to “re-freeze” $55 million in military aid to Colombia. (That aid had been held up by a law requiring the State Department to certify that the Colombian military’s human-rights record is improving; that certification was issued on April 4.)

The allegations about Gen. Montoya center on “Operation Orion,” a late 2002 military offensive in Medellín’s western slums that was seen as one of the first tests of President Álvaro Uribe’s “Democratic Security” policy. The Colombian Army’s 4th Brigade, then headed by Gen. Montoya, carried out several weeks of house-to-house fighting. When “Operation Orion” ended, leftist guerrilla militias had been expelled from Medellín’s Comuna 13 neighborhood – but the paramilitary presence remained.

More evidence is emerging about the role that paramilitaries played during the “Operation Orion” offensive that Gen. Montoya led. A disturbing new contribution appeared on Sunday in Colombia’s most-circulated newspaper, El Tiempo. Here, thanks to CIP Intern Alessandra Miraglia, is a translation of testimony from one of the paramilitaries’ victims during the offensive.

“I saw my grave being dug”

Carlos Cano managed to escape from the paramilitaries, with three shots in his body, as they were about to put him in a grave. He currently lives outside the country. He is a witness to what happened in Comuna 13 after the military operation ‘Orión.’

“For 10 or 15 seconds I thought I was dead. I had a shot in my throat and another one in my left hand. I was bleeding a lot. One of the paramilitaries moved me with his foot and said to me: “Say something, talk faggot!”

Juan Carlos Cano Giraldo, a 25-year-old taxi driver, escaped death on November 30, 2002, fifteen days after the government officially concluded the much-spoken-of military operation known as ‘Orión’.

The operation’s goal was to re-conquer Medellín’s Comuna 13, which was dominated by both guerrilla fighters and paramilitaries. In charge of this task were 1,500 members of both the army and the police, supported by both secret police (DAS) and the attorney-general’s armed investigative force (CTI).

Five years later, U.S. journalists are pursuing Cano – currently in exile – in order to add depth to a story revived twenty days ago by the Los Angeles Times, based on a CIA intelligence report indicating that the Army received support from men linked to the paramilitary leader ‘Don Berna’ to implement the operation. The U.S. government later apologized to its Colombian counterpart because, it said, the report had not been verified.

“Before and after Orión – explained Cano to El Tiempo – two young men, with firearms and in plainclothes, asked me for my documents, supposedly to investigate me: they told me not to worry. They belonged to the paramilitary bloc ‘Metro,’ well-known in the Comuna.”

[The Metro Bloc, headed by “Rodrigo 00,” later feuded with the Nutibara Bloc, headed by “Don Berna.” The Nutibara Bloc won the internal battle; “Rodrigo 00” was killed in 2004 while “Don Berna” is in prison but believed to control much criminality in Medellín. By many accounts – none of them definitive – the Nutibara Bloc during this period had close relations to the Medellín police, while the Metro Bloc was aligned with the Army’s 4th Brigade.]

“In the past, people from the Army had done the same thing to me; they brought many boys to the CTI, located in the Santiago neighborhood. They accused me of carrying a weapon, but 15 days later they released me and told me that it was a mistake.”

“On November 30, after 8.00 p.m., the same AUC guys arrived in the Comuna. One asked me to accompany him and made me get into a Mazda 323 cab.”

Cano says that, several times, he had been obliged to give rides to the guerrilla militias who controlled the area, but he denies any direct link with the guerrillas.

“They brought me to a place where there were other four men; one of them was wearing a CTI bullet-proof-vest, while the others had AUC armbands. They forced us – another two guys who arrived in a Chevette taxi and me – to get into a dark blue Toyota Hilux.”

There, they aimed a gun at Cano’s testicles and later in his mouth, yelled ‘dirty little…guerrilla son of a bitch’ and punched him in the face.

“When we were almost arriving at the ‘La Loma’ terminal, one of the AUC guys told another one: ‘Brother, when the corporal told me to take off my uniform and wear civilian clothes, I thought it was meant to gather intelligence, I did not think it was to come here and join with you.’ The other guy laughed. Immediately, a police patrol passed by the truck they were carrying us in but did not do anything, although they had seen that in the bed of the truck, which was uncovered, there were six paramilitaries with rifles and both CTI and AUC distinctive marks.”

Cano says that he never knew whether the person who was talking about the corporal was a military or a police officer, but he now assures that also an Army patrol passed by but did not arrest them (the paramilitaries).

“When they (the paramilitaries) met the Army and the Police, I thought that a gunfight would ensue and I ducked in the truck, but nothing happened.”

“They kept going towards an inhabited area in the La Loma de San Cristóbal sector, at the summit of Comuna 13.

With a knife

“When we arrived up there, they made us get off the truck. Then, they told a group of nearby construction workers to dig our three graves and another six for more who were on their way.”

“I do not know the names of the two boys who were with me, but one was a baker who was still wearing his apron, while the other was an employee for an arepa factory. They told us, “hold your hands and walk in a row because this is hard to take.” They showed us some mounds of dirt and they told us “look there, there are your friends.”

According to Cano, the baker tried to escape: “they grabbed him by his apron and killed him. Later, they were frustrated because they did not have a machete and they started cutting him into pieces with a dagger or a pocketknife, I do not know. And that is when I saw them going up to dig my grave.”

“Then, they put a rifle close to my ear and shot me, and they shot me again in my left hand (…)”

Cano says that he gathered strength, he does not know from where; stood up and threw himself against the boy who was keeping an eye on him, launching himself down a slope.

“As I was falling, they shot me in the hip, I tumbled over a hillside and hid between bushes and a mud pit. One of the paramilitaries yelled at me: “Juancho, come out, nothing is going to happen.” I remained silent and I waited for them to go away. Then, I began to walk but my left side began to feel paralyzed.”

Around midnight, with the help of several people, he was admitted to the Intermediate Health Unit in Castilla.

Map of the graves

After leaving the hospital, and realizing that the paramilitaries were looking for him, he decided to tell everything to the Ombudsman’s office, which sent him immediately to Bogotá – and to the human rights offices of both the Minister of Internal Affairs and the Vice Presidency.

How credible is his version? El Tiempo obtained a copy of his medical history which makes evident that he reached the hospital with three rifle and gunshot wounds in his neck, left hand and hip, and that he presented hipovolemia (lack of blood) and tinnitus, as well as a buzzing in his ears which still accompanies him.

Furthermore, he showed a map he had made, with the location of where the incidents occurred: there, the District attorney's Office found 20 bodies in graves. “I only hope to come back to tell this, and many other things, to the country. What happened to me happened also to many innocent people who were not so lucky to come out alive.”

Meanwhile, 36 investigations of ‘Orión’ in the Inspector-General’s office (Procuraduría) were closed. The authorities have always denied any link with the paramilitaries in this operation.

36 cases on operation 'Orión' were closed in 2005

The Inspector-General's office (Procuraduría) began 36 disciplinary investigations shortly after ‘Operation Orión’ culminated. And although some of them deserved the opening of a formal investigation, all cases ended up being closed in 2005 for lack of merit or because the complainants never came to provide evidence. According to El Tiempo, three of the cases were remitted to the internal affairs bodies of the armed forces that participated in ‘Orión,’ in order to take measures against those implicated. The Military Justice System closed the cases. On the part of the Attorney-General’s office (Fiscalía), ‘Don Berna’ and some of his men are under investigation for deaths and disappearances. But no charges appear against members of the security forces.

Posted by isacson at 12:21 PM | Comments (4)

March 28, 2007

Responding to the charges against Gen. Montoya

When the fourth-most-circulated newspaper in the United States makes serious charges in a story on the front page of its Sunday edition, the response over the next few days is crucial. So far, how has the Colombian government sought to dispel allegations in a leaked CIA document, which claim that the chief of Colombia's army, Gen. Mario Montoya, has worked closely with paramilitary groups?

1. Deny the charges and demand to see the proof. Reasonable enough, and that is what Gen. Montoya and President Uribe said in their first public statements.

The government of Colombia asks of foreign intelligence agencies that any accusation based on evidence against members of Colombian institutions be presented to the competent justice and administrative agencies.

Some of the subsequent steps have been much less effective, though.

2. Return to the scene of the allegations and bask in a spontaneous display of the population's gratitude. The documents revealed by the Los Angeles Times allege that Gen. Montoya, during his time as head of the Medellín-based 4th Brigade, worked closely with paramilitaries under the command of alias “Don Berna” - a longtime narcotrafficker who remains one of the most powerful figures in Colombia's second-largest city.

Specifically, Gen. Montoya is accused of enlisting Don Berna's support for “Operation Orión,” an all-out offensive in late 2002 that ejected guerrilla militias from Comuna 13, a violent slum on Medellín's western outskirts. Operation Orión was widely considered one of the first major victories of President Álvaro Uribe's security strategy, and a key step in the dramatic reduction of Medellín's crime rate during the past four years.

On Tuesday, Gen. Montoya returned to Comuna 13, where he made a public appearance before hundreds of grateful citizens of the poor neighborhood. Medellín's main newspaper, El Colombiano, gushed effusively about the population's passionate support for the general.

The officer arrived at the Las Independencias high school at around 2:30 yesterday afternoon, where 200 people awaited him, many of them young people who violated the security cordon in order to touch General Montoya. ...

“I ask the press that when they are going to publish something, that it be because they have precise information. The general has come today to the community that supports him,” said one of the community leaders who participated in the event.

The high school was filled with posters bearing messages of support for the general's work, and one of the attendees carried a small sign on which a message in English, directed toward U.S. journalists, could be read.

“The media should generate peace and not violence. If what they said was the truth, there would still be paramilitaries here. There is greater tranquility after Operation Orión,” said Byron Ortiz, a conciliator from the zone who carried the small sign, and who shouted “viva” to the general every time a soldier put the megaphone in front of his mouth.

All was not as it seemed, however, according to this morning's edition of Bogotá's El Tiempo:

Instead of helping, the event that took place in the high school in the Independencias barrio, right in Comuna 13, raised questions about who really convened the meeting and who brought the nearly 200 people that attended it.

Montoya most certainly didn't know it, but many of those who were there had no idea what they had come for.

“It must be some recreation,” answered several elderly people as they emerged at noon from a car that had transported them from La Divisa. They noted that they had been invited by the permanent Army post that functions in their barrio.

Several leaders confirmed that the call to attend was received through the Fourth Brigade.

By 12:00 noon soldiers were seen carrying street banners with messages like: “Many thanks for your support Señor General Mario Montoya.”

Other soldiers prepared the high school's auditorium and received the first invitees.

It is also troubling that the microbuses [vans that brought many of those in attendance] were from Bellanita de Transportes and Tax & Col Ltda., businesses owned by Albeiro Quintero, who is justifiably questioned for his presumed ties with the “paras” of Diego Fernando Murillo, alias “Don Berna.”

An article on the website of the Colombian newsmagazine Semana also found that much of the audience did not know what they had been called to attend:

“I'm here to see what they're giving. I hope they give me some roof tiles for my house,” said María del Rosario Usuga, minutes before General Mario Montoya arrived at a high school in Medellín's El Salado barrio. [The Semana report refers to the same event; El Salado is adjacent to the Las Independencias barrios.] Like her, many were confused about what was to happen at 2:00 Tuesday afternoon at the education center. In addition to roofing tiles, some also came asking for food: “Is this where they are giving out chicken?” asked an elderly woman who had come from the 20 de Julio barrio.

The Semana article adds further information about paramilitary collaboration with the 2002 Operation Orión military offensive. It borrows much from testimonies of demobilized paramilitary fighters gathered by the Popular Training Institute (IPC), a Medellín-based human-rights organization. (Read in Spanish the IPC's more extensive excerpts from demobilized paramilitaries' testimonies about Operation Orión. Also read in Spanish the IPC's vivid account of Gen. Montoya's Tuesday visit to Comuna 13.)

According to these testimonies, some members of the former Cacique Nutibara bloc carried out coordinated actions with the authorities to re-take that sector of the city, which was being held by militias of the FARC, the ELN and the CAP [Armed Commandos of the People, an old organization of guerrilla-linked, putatively leftist street gangs.] These actions lasted for more than two months, during which they implemented a strategy of terror that left at least fifty disappeared.

“All the authorities who took part in the Operation helped us,” said one of the demobilized, referring not only to the Army but to the Police, the attorney-general's office and the DAS (the presidential intelligence service). “We received help, legally, from all the authorities. One of them communicated with 'King Kong,' the [paramilitary] commander in the zone. When they came to enter the neighborhood, we retreated, so that they entered and we left,” the account continued.

There are coincidences in the operation's name, which also create suspicions of possible ties between paramilitaries and the military operation in Comuna 13. According to the IPC, the paras themselves, led by Don Berna, gave the name Orión to the military command that entered the Comuna alongside the legal authorities. In addition, Orión is the alias of Fabio Acevedo, a former mid-level leader of the Cacique Nutibara Bloc.

Acevedo, the former Comandante Orión, is now a director and one of the most visible members of the Corporación Democracia, a Medellín-based NGO formed by demobilized members of Don Berna's Nutibara Bloc.

3. Threaten to sue. Colombian Defense Minister Juan Manuel Santos told a radio interviewer that a lawsuit against the Los Angeles Times is an option on the table.

Santos also told “La FM” radio that the press should “be very careful about mentioning the names” of military officers who face allegations, because “the enemies of the government, the enemies of the army will do a lot of damage to us.”

Asked by his interviewer whether he “would hold his hand over a candle flame” for Gen. Montoya, Santos said “I believe what the general says, that he did not work with paramilitaries.” When the reporter insisted, asking “would you burn your hands?” Santos replied, “I wouldn't burn my hands for anyone these days. But I believe Gen. Montoya.”

Posted by isacson at 10:56 PM | Comments (4)

February 11, 2007

Silencing the victims

In an important piece published Friday, Constanza Vieira of Inter-Press Service documents what can only be considered a campaign to intimidate victims of paramilitary violence. The following has happened during the past three weeks.

On Jan. 20, the headquarters of the League of Displaced Women near the Caribbean resort city of Cartagena, where the group had built their new settlement "City of Women", was set on fire.

Freddy Espitia, head of a local committee of displaced persons in the Caribbean province of Córdoba, in northwestern Colombia, was shot and killed on Jan. 28.

On Jan. 31, in Montería, the capital of Córdoba, gunmen on a motorcycle killed Yolanda Izquierdo, a 43-year-old community leader who had gathered evidence to help 863 rural families regain their land, which had been seized by the paramilitaries. She was presenting the evidence under the reparations system set up by the Justice and Peace Law.

The murder of Óscar Cuadrado, the leader of a regional association of displaced persons, was reported on Feb. 1 in Maicao, in the northeastern province of La Guajira.

And on Feb. 7, Carmen Santana was shot to death in Apartadó, a banana-producing region in the northeastern province of Antioquia. After great hesitation, Santana had decided to pursue the truth about the 1995 murder of her first husband, a banana worker.

All along Colombia's Caribbean coast, people are being attacked merely for demanding to know what happened to their loved ones, or for asking that their stolen property be returned to them.

Defenders of the paramilitary negotiation process point to the top leadership's December imprisonment, or the initial confession of AUC leader Salvatore Mancuso, and contend that the system is finally working - that the "Justice and Peace" process is steadily chipping away at the paramilitaries' enormous power and giving hope to their victims.

This wave of attacks shows, though, that it is far too early to be arguing that. Unless much more is done - quickly - to protect those victims who dare to demand what the law promises them, most will continue to be too afraid to come forward. That would deal a fatal blow to the credibility of a process that already has more than its share of skeptics.

Posted by isacson at 10:33 PM | Comments (1)

February 9, 2007

Terrorists in business suits

Colombian President Álvaro Uribe's speeches frequently include a passage in which he asserts that he has done more than his predecessors to create space for the often-threatened political opposition. Google tells us that the terms “garantías efectivas” (effective security guarantees) and “oposición” show up together in 156 different pages on the Colombian presidency's website. Here's an example from last October:


“The FARC said that they would not negotiate because the opposition's spokespeople are murdered in Colombia. But in the government of Democratic Security [that is, Uribe's administration] the opposition has had unprecedented effective security guarantees. They have always had rhetorical and formal guarantees in Colombia, but in recent decades these were not as effective as the guarantees that they have had under this government, as was demonstrated by the effective freedoms that protected the opposition during the last election campaign.”

“Effective guarantees” appear only to go so far, though. When leaders of the opposition bloc in Colombia's congress proposed to investigate why paramilitary groups expanded so quickly when Uribe was governor of Antioquia department in the mid-1990s, the president's rhetoric about the opposition changed. Uribe had this to say on Saturday about former M-19 guerrillas who disarmed sixteen years ago and who are now key opposition politicians proposing to investigate his past.

“[The talks with paramilitary groups] are different from the past, when those who burned down the Palace of Justice, with money from narcotraffickers, simply took off their camouflage uniforms, put on a business suit and came to Congress to teach the country about morality. Some have done it very well. Others, unfortunately, simply went from being terrorists in camouflage to being terrorists in business suits.”

Senator Gustavo Petro of the opposition Alternative Democratic Pole party, a former M-19 guerrilla, wants the Congress to hold a hearing to investigate then-Governor Uribe's actions - or inaction - during the paramilitary expansion in Antioquia ten years ago. He responded quickly to President Uribe's outburst: “I think there are terrorists wearing ties and civilian clothes, but they are being imprisoned right now - and almost all of them are friends of the President.”

As investigations into paramilitary infiltration of Colombia's government progress, things may become more dangerous, yet again, for Colombia's opposition. President Uribe's words only increase the danger and undermine the “effective guarantees” to which he so often refers.

There is nothing terroristic about calling for an investigation into the president's past. If there is nothing behind Senator Petro's allegations, then President Uribe has nothing to fear and Senator Petro's credibility will suffer. To call the senator a terrorist, though, is out of line, deserves strong condemnation - and in the end, it only increases the public's curiosity about what Petro proposes to investigate.

Posted by isacson at 11:53 AM | Comments (1)

January 30, 2007

The world's most evil PowerPoint presentation

Hannah Arendt died more than 30 years ago, but what she called "the banality of evil" is alive and well.

You can see it on full display on the website of the Colombian daily El Espectador, which has posted the entire 87-page PowerPoint presentation that top paramilitary leader Salvatore Mancuso used when confessing to his past human-rights crimes two weeks ago. This was on the laptop computer screen from which Mancuso was reading as he sat before prosecutors.

Page 12 Page 12
Page 12 of 87.

Open up the file (if you can bear it) and note how much it looks like a boring sales presentation from some faceless widget company. Note how the paramilitary leader, who admitted to ordering the killing or kidnapping of 336 people, presents each massacre or execution on individual slides, complete with a map showing where each occurred.

Note how Mancuso has mastered Microsoft's complex template feature, presenting each mass killing with pleasing colors, including the colors of Colombia's flag at the footer and the same snappy logo ("Salvatore Mancuso - Confession 2006") at the header of each page. Or did he hire a graphic designer to beautify this catalogue of serial murder?

Note how many of these massacres of civilian men, women and children are blithely referred to as "anti-subversive military operations." Note how many of the victims are referred to as "people identified by military intelligence as members of the guerrillas," even in some of the most famous, shocking and brutal cases like El Aro and Mapiripán. Note how he admits to crimes in nine of Colombia's thirty-two departments - plus one arms purchase in Miami - which sounds like a lot, though it excludes many zones known for high paramilitary activity.

Take a look at this breathtaking file. Then spend the rest of the day rebuilding your faith in humanity.

Mancuso's PowerPoint (from El Espectador).

Posted by isacson at 10:58 AM | Comments (3)

January 29, 2007

A U.S.-aided colonel tied to the paramilitaries

“Early one Sunday, when Colonel Mejía had barely been in command for ten days, he called me to headquarters and told me to get a weapon and come with him in the battalion's car. We both wore civilian clothing. We went to Bosconia [in Cesar department, in northeastern Colombia] and passed through a town called San Ángel. About five kilometers from the town there was a roadblock run by paracos (paramilitaries). One of them approached the car, he [the colonel] identified himself, and they let us through. We arrived at a farm where there were some 200 paramilitaries. In the main house, seated at a table, was the entire high command of the Northern Bloc: Mr. 'Jorge 40,' Mr. Hernán Giraldo [both wanted in the United States for narcotrafficking], 'Tolemaida,' 'Omega' and '39,' who was David Hernández, a retired military officer who had been a friend of the colonel. They greeted each other with much joy because they had been friends in school.”

This is the testimony of an unidentified retired military officer, reported in the Colombian newsmagazine Semana. It details a 2002 meeting between Col. Hernán Mejía, the new head of the Popa Batallion in the northeastern city of Valledupar, and the paramilitary drug lords who were (and perhaps still are) the true power in the eastern half of Colombia's Caribbean coastal zone.

That day, the witness contends, “Jorge 40” agreed to pay Col. Mejía 30 million pesos per month (about US$12,500) to guarantee that the Popa Batallion left the paramilitaries alone.

“Later, they all sat down to lunch,” the testimony continues, “and Mejía said he hadn't just come for the money, but that he came for glory, and glory meant bajas.” Bajas means guerrillas killed in combat, and Col. Mejía had already built up a reputation for commanding units that racked up large numbers of dead guerrillas. With five medals for battlefield victories, Col. Mejía was considered one of the army's rising stars.

“Old Hernán Giraldo said that it would be easiest for '39' to provide him with results. As is known, this man was the Northern Bloc's military chief in Cesar, and hundreds of deaths are attributed to him. '39' told the colonel that the only problem was that his men had different rifles from the army's Galils, which would make it difficult to ”legalize“ the dead bodies. So the colonel ordered that four decommissioned Galils in the battalion be delivered to '39' and his people. Since the order came from the colonel, nobody questioned the rifles' removal from the battalion.”

One such example of false “bajas” occurred in October 2005, when the Northern Bloc and other paramilitary units were already very far along in negotiations with the Colombian government.  The paramilitary leader “39” carried out a purge of men under his command who, in his view, had defied him. He ordered nineteen of them killed. The dead paramilitaries were then dressed in camouflage fatigues and ELN armbands, and delivered to Col. Mejía's  battalion, where they were presented as guerrillas killed in combat. The head of the armed forces even traveled to Valledupar to help celebrate the victory.

On Friday, perhaps because of the coming cover story in Sunday's edition of Semana, Defense Minister Juan Manuel Santos publicly announced that “a colonel” (he didn't name Mejía) was being suspended for links to “Jorge 40,” and his case turned over to the civilian justice system. This is the first time in Colombia's history that the Colombian Defense Ministry and high command have voluntarily, publicly turned over a high-ranking officer to face charges of helping paramilitaries. (There have been past firings, but they have never been acknowledged to be for paramilitary links, and no criminal investigations followed.)

That Col. Mejía has been suspended at the Defense Ministry's initiative, and is under civilian criminal investigation, is a good precedent. It is an important step forward for those in Colombia's military establishment - and there are some - who want to see the institution break with its long history of collaboration with the drug-funded death squads.

For the United States, though, the revelations about Col. Mejía are a nasty black eye. The colonel has commanded military units that have been key beneficiaries of U.S. assistance.

The Popa Battalion in Valledupar is not one of these units. But when he was suspended, Col. Mejía was commanding the army's 13th Mobile Brigade, based in Larandia, Caquetá.

This brigade has been central to U.S.-supported anti-guerrilla efforts in southern Colombia, including the large-scale “Plan Patriota” military offensive that sent 18,000 Colombian troops, with U.S. advisors, into a broad swath of territory from 2004 to 2006. The brigade forms part of the “Joint Task Force Omega,” which carried out Plan Patriota and successor efforts with significant amounts of U.S. assistance. U.S. personnel maintain a near-constant presence at the Larandia military base where Col. Mejía's brigade is headquartered.

The Colombian daily El Tiempo reports that Col. Mejía also commanded troops in the U.S.-aided 12th Brigade in Florencia, Caquetá, and at the military base in Santana, Putumayo, which contains many facilities built with U.S. funds, and which has been a center of operations for the Army Counter-Narcotics Battalions that were set up with U.S. funding when “Plan Colombia” got started in 1999-2002. Both Florencia and Santana (a sort of suburb of Puerto Asís, Putumayo's largest city), are strongly dominated by paramilitaries - demobilization notwithstanding - though guerrillas rule in the surrounding countryside.

It is terribly embarrassing that significant amounts of U.S. aid have apparently gone to military units commanded by someone with such intimate, friendly ties to drug-running paramilitaries. It calls in question the degree to which U.S. officials know with whom they are working. Are they asking questions about their aid recipients' past or present relationship to paramilitaries - no matter how senior or how “effective” they are? Is the vetting process credible? And how many more top officers may face similar charges?

A high-level U.S. delegation, including two assistant secretaries of state and a deputy assistant secretary of defense, is in Colombia today. They should be made aware of Col. Mejía's command of U.S.-aided units, and should make a priority of avoiding seeing this situation repeated. Even if that means making radical, uncomfortable changes to the U.S. military aid program in Colombia.

Posted by isacson at 2:05 PM | Comments (1)

January 19, 2007

What Mancuso has said

Salvatore Mancuso, one of the best known and most feared of Colombia's paramilitary leaders, has become the first top-level leader to testify about his crimes. Over four days between December 19 and Tuesday of this week, he has begun to give his "versión libre" - a confession of his past crimes - as part of the deal which gives leaders of the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC) vastly reduced prison sentences.

In a room on the fourth floor of Medellín's main courthouse, victims of the paramilitaries - those who can prove their status as victims, anyway - are able to watch, on closed-circuit television, the proceedings taking place on the twentieth floor. They get a view of the 48-year-old, impeccably dressed warlord and cattle rancher, impassively reading his crimes off the screen of a laptop computer, as prosecutors take notes and occasionally ask questions. (At this stage - the "versión libre" - Mancuso has the floor and may confess as he sees fit. The real questioning from prosecutors is to come later.)

Reporters are not allowed to view the proceedings, so what we know about the confession so far is second-hand, based on accounts from those allowed to view the television feed. The Colombian media reports, however, that so far Mancuso has admitted to ordering the killing or kidnapping of 336 people. So far.

Much of his testimony has been vague and raised many questions, particularly since most of the collaborators he has named are either dead, in exile, or already in prison. Nonetheless, it has covered many high-profile cases, and offered some new information. Here are some of the key revelations.

Where is this headed? Will we learn more as the "versión libre" continues, and as prosecutors begin to ask questions? Will the names of living and active military officers begin to come to light? It is impossible to know: the precedent is being set right now.

Mancuso's confession will continue next Thursday, January 25th, when he is to talk about his involvement in narcotrafficking and organized crime. The U.S. government requested Mancuso's extradition in 2002 for his role in sending tons of cocaine to the United States. Colombian courts approved the extradition, and Mancuso remains in Colombia only because President Uribe has refused to send him northward as long as he is "cooperating" with the demobilization process.

And what do the victims make of Mancuso's performance so far? Here is an impression recorded in Wednesday's El Colombiano.

The Hoyos Guerra family's farm measured a little more than 400 hectares (1,000 acres). On that piece of land, in different houses, lived the parents and 14 children with all of their descendants.

In 1994, the then-head of the Catatumbo Bloc of the United Self-Defense forces of Colombia (AUC), Salvatore Mancuso, sought to buy their land. [Correction: while Mancuso was a powerful paramilitary leader in 1994, the Catatumbo Bloc probably didn't exist yet.] When his intermediary did not convince Zolio Bautista Hoyos, the head of the family, to sell the land, Mancuso ordered the murder of two of his sons.

His men committed the crime "accompanied by the army," according to the family, on July 10, 1995. Never Fray and Luis Edelberto, the oldest son, died while working on the farm. Camilo Fajardo and Francisco Rozo, workers on the farm, were also killed.

A month later, according to the registry signed in the First Notary of Montería, the sale was recorded.

Mancuso paid 19 million pesos (at the time, about US$15,000) for that land. He delivered 10 million in cash, and left a check for the rest, which the bank returned three times [for insufficient funds], until the family members were convinced that there was no way to collect. ...

The Hoyos Guerra family, as well as other victims and relatives of victims who have attended the testimony, believe little of what the demobilized leader says.

According to them, Mancuso's tone is haughty and arrogant, "even aggressive," when he addresses the prosecutor.

He shows no repentance, they affirmed, and he presents things as though they were unavoidable actions, ordered by people who already died, "as if he were washing his hands."

Posted by isacson at 1:34 AM | Comments (1)

December 11, 2006

“Para-politics” and the security forces

A long and growing list of Colombian politicians and government officials face serious accusations of assisting or associating with paramilitary groups. The "para-politics" scandal continues to dominate Colombia's political process.

So far, though, none of the accused are members of Colombia's armed forces or police. This is not because the Colombian military has a long record of combating and refusing to collaborate with the right-wing militias. It is more likely that the scandal has simply not yet engulfed the security forces.

Witnesses - possibly including the paramilitary leaders themselves - continue to come forward. This makes it more likely that we may learn some disturbing, previously unknown facts about the role that key figures in the U.S.-supported armed forces played in the spread of paramilitary activity in Colombia.

There is no way to know when this information might begin to filter out. However, a look at recent statements from the paramilitaries and government officials indicates that it might be sooner rather than later. In the quotes below, note that President Uribe and armed-forces chief Gen. Freddy Padilla are both urging officers to come forward and say what they know about their institutions' relations with paramilitarism.

It is likely that they are serious: if the truth is to begin seeping out, they would much prefer a more controlled flow of incriminatory information, instead of a chaotic free-for-all like the one we are seeing right now in Colombia's congress. In particular, they have an interest in ensuring that new revelations of military-paramilitary ties emerge in a way that does not jeopardize U.S. assistance, particularly as more human-rights-conscious Democrats take control of the congressional purse strings.

Posted by isacson at 4:37 PM | Comments (0)

December 7, 2006

The victims' movement and the view from San Onofre, Sucre

Iván Cepeda is the son of Colombian Senator Manuel Cepeda, who was killed in 1994 while in his car on a Bogotá street. Senator Cepeda was the last surviving legislator from the Unión Patriótica, a leftist political party started during a 1980s peace process with the FARC. As many as 3,000 of that party's leaders and members were systematically assassinated during the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Iván now directs a non-governmental organization that bears his father's name. He is also a leading figure in the National Movement of Victims of State Crimes in Colombia, a group that formed during the negotiations with paramilitaries to advocate for their victims' rights. You may also know Iván from his regular column in Colombia's El Espectador newspaper, or remember him being escorted out of Colombia's Congress in July 2005, after he interrupted an address by paramilitary leaders by standing up in the gallery and holding aloft a photo of his murdered father.

Iván and his compañera, Claudia Girón, get threatened pretty frequently, and they have a government-provided bodyguard and armored car. A more serious episode occurred about two weeks ago. Here is a translated excerpt of a recent alert.

Last Friday, November 24, at approximately 9:00 at night, men carrying long weapons, identifying themselves as members of police intelligence - the SIJIN - blocked the path of the vehicle assigned for the security of the "Manuel Cepeda Vargas Foundation," which usually carries its leaders, Iván Cepeda Castro and Claudia Girón Ortiz, who are also members of the National Movement of Victims of State Crimes, who had left the vehicle minutes earlier.

The men pointed their weapons at the driver and proceeded to verify the presence of any others inside the vehicle, asking the driver if he was traveling alone. Then, before the driver could show them his identification card from the Administrative Security Department - DAS [the presidential intelligence service] - they fled, visibly nervous.

According to police authorities, the SIJIN had no operations in the zone that day, which indicates the seriousness of this incident, especially taking into account that it happened one day before several members of the National Victims' Movement were to travel to the municipality of San Onofre, Sucre department. They were traveling there to carry out, together with the Senate Human Rights Committee, a public hearing to listen to the clear denunciations from the community of residents of that zone about ties to paramilitarism, including those of that municipality's mayor, Jorge Blanco.
Sucre.
San Onofre.

The San Onofre hearing, which took place on November 27, was by most accounts a success. San Onofre, Sucre, a county on the Caribbean coast in a region called the Montes de María, was under brutal paramilitary domination from the mid-1990s until a couple of years ago, when the local paramilitary chief, known as "Cadena," mysteriously disappeared. The marine officer in charge of security for the zone from 2004 to 2006 actively opposed paramilitarism (his brother had reportedly been killed by paramilitaries), which created space for witnesses to come forward and report on the existence of mass graves that held the bodies of their loved ones. The Colombian and U.S. media have since reported widely on forensic anthropologists' grim work in the mass graves of San Onofre. Though fear of the paramilitaries has still silenced most, a few witnesses have also come forward with information about the paramilitaries' close relations with Sucre's politicians; their testimony helped to spark the current growing national scandal about legislators' links to paramilitarism.

Hundreds of San Onofre residents filled the town's stadium for the public hearing on November 27, among them the questioned mayor and several military and police officials. Unfortunately, the only members of the Colombian Senate's Human Rights Committee to attend were members of the opposition Democratic Pole party, Sen. Alexánder López and Rep. Wilson Borja.

Here are excerpts from the statement given at that hearing by Iván Cepeda and the National Movement of Victims of State Crimes. It concisely tells the story about what happened in San Onofre. Similar stories can be told in dozens of other parts of Colombia.

As a result of their persistence, San Onofre's principal community leaders have been threatened and harassed. There exists a list announcing the coming assassinations of 26 people, of whom nine have already been victims. For that reason we ask members of Congress to take up our demand that the national and local executive-branch authorities protect the lives and security of the community of San Onofre. The OAS Inter-American Human Rights Commission recently made this request to the national government, and demanded that urgent precautionary measures be taken to protect 17 members of the Movement of Victims of Sucre and the communities of this zone of the country. On November 23, 2006, Juvenal Escudero, a victim of paramilitarism, was the target of an assassination attempt and gravely wounded. We also know that several people have been threatened in the days before this hearing. We call for solidarity with this population and hold the authorities responsible for their security once this public event ends.

All of these acts clearly indicate that paramilitary structures continue to operate in this region, and that, as in so many other parts of the country, the demobilization ceremonies have been a hoax. We have testimonies from witnesses indicating that, at the beginning of October of this year, about 300 armed men from Córdoba have arrived in the department of Bolívar and are operating in the municipalities of Arjona, Turbana and María la Baja [adjacent to San Onofre].

Today, we want you to hear testimonies and reports from the people themselves about what they have lived through here. But before doing so, we want to remind you about the most important events that have marked this history, and present before you the demmands that the community itself is making.

Between 1994 and 1997 the Convivir associations [local self-defense groups started with government support between 1994 and 1998, when they were declared illegal] were developed in the department. In the municipality of San Onofre, they arrived with the administration of Mayor Yamil Blanco. "Danilo" (alias), who was a well-known head of the Victor Carranza organization [Carranza, a powerful warlord in Colombia's emerald-producing zone, helped form paramilitary groups in the 1990s], put into practice the paramilitaries' experiences in the country's interior. At this point, the killing began to spread.

Among the first assassins was a prosperous butcher from the district of Macayepo, Rodrigo Mercado Pelufo, alias "Cadena." He started organizing a group of hitmen who operated in the Montes de Maria. As one who knew the zone well, he was recommended by the cattle ranchers, for whom he worked eliminating the campesinos. They joined with the B2 [military intelligence] to carry out actvities against trade-union and campesino leaders. Afterward, Cadena organized, in the Carare hacienda, property of Miguel Nule, located in the district of Macayepo, the group of men that carried out several massacres. Cadena was rapidly recommended by Commander Eduard Cobo (alias "Diego Vecino," [one of the most senior paramilitary leaders]), before the AUC high command to be the head of the paramilitaries in Sucre. In this way, Cadena remained under the command of "Vecino," administrator of the Las Melenas hacienda.

From this moment the department of Sucre, and in particular the municipality of San Onofre and its districts, have been scenes of multiple violence that, without doubt, can be catalogued as crimes against humanity. Among these can be counted massive forced disappearances and the assassination of at least 3,000 people, 75 massacres from 1999 to 2000 which left 329 victims, the hiding of hundreds of bodies in mass graves, the forced displacement of 70,000 people in Sucre and 2,162 from San Onofre, according to the data of the muncipal ombudsman, the regular practice of torture and of inhumane and degrading treatment, the extermination of 90 members of the Unión Patriótica, the annihilation of agrarian organizations like the ANUC, the usurping of land and goods from the population, submission to forms of slavery and political control, and the looting of public goods and resources. A 2005 study by the United Nations Development Program, UNDP, reports that the paramilitaries exercise control over 90% of the territory in San Onofre.

...

The main parties responsible for these acts are high-ranking politicians from the region who today have begun to be processed by the justice system: the congressmen Álvaro García, Muriel Benito Rebollo, Jairo Enrique Merlano, Eric Morris Taboada, the ex-Governor Salvador Arana, the ex-Commander of the Police Norman León Arango – who still has not been processed -, and the ex-Governor Miguel Àngel Nule Amín. These sinister characters had paramilitary groups at their disposal to order forced disappearings and massacres, to gather votes, to rob public money, to get rid of their opponents and political enemies, and to make personal fortunes.

Like the cattle ranchers, the politicians also used the criminal services of the paramilitary leader "Cadena" and his lieutenants Marco Tulio Pérez Guzmán, alias "El Oso" and Uber Banquéz alias "Juancho Dique." Starting in 1998, the "Heroes of Montes de María" bloc imposed a regime of terror. They perpetrated massacres like Chengue, Macayepo, Chinulito, Pigiguay, Coloso and El Salado. Community campesino organizations were shut down, everybody had to pay protection money, the central plaza of San Onofre was used only to hear the paramilitary leaders' orders. The municipality and its districts became a concentration camp. A curfew was decreed, and from 6 PM nobody could use the roads or go fishing, because that was the time when the criminals activated their maritime narco-trafficking route. They perpetrated sexual abuses against women and they executed people in the public plaza. The authorities arbitrarily detained citizens and turned them into the paramilitaries so that they would be executed. In the department's other municipalities, just like in San Onofre, state functionaries had to give a contribution from their salary to maintain the AUC's troops. In sum, political corruption, paramilitarism, and narco-trafficking became three faces of the same reality.

Cadena converted several farms in the region into centers of torture and extermination, among which is the sadly famous El Palmar plantation. There exists a rubber tree where the detained were tied up, a torture chamber, a range where they were shot, and a cell called "the last tear" (the room in which the final hour was awaited with anguish). In other parts of El Palmar, they burned the bodies. In the pastures of this and many other estates exist common graves that were usually dug by the the condemned themselves.

And while these episodes of extreme violence ocurred, the hacienda was at the same time a social center. "Cadena" organized banquets for the local politicians and gave them fine horses as gifts. In those cookouts and parties were seen Commander Arango of the Police (named by President Uribe as Military Attache at the Colombian embasssy in France) and ex-Governor Salvador Arana (accused of being the intellecual author of the assassination of the Mayor of El Roble, Eudaldo Tito Díaz, and who was named by the President ambassador to Chile). El Palmar was equally the site where narco-trafficking business was planned, and where they organized beauty pageants like "Miss Flirt International" y "Miss Thong." The then-Congresswoman Muriel Benito Rebollo, intimate friend of paramilitary leader "Diego Vecino" (alias), was a judge in these competitions. To the corrupt politicians it was not enough that their executions got rid of their opposition. Their parties took place amid the graves left by the human butchery.

During the electoral campaign of 2002, "Cadena" gathered the population, and put in a bag the names of the town councilmen, taking out two of them. He stated that if the candidate [Muriel] Benito Rebollo was not elected, he would kill the two councilmen and other people in the community designated at random. No authority could be appealed to, because all of them benefited from the system of corruption. When the officials did not want to give them public money, they were killed. This is what happened with the Mayor of El Roble [a member of the leftist Democratic Pole party]. On the road to Sincelejo [the departmental capital], he was detained, taken to El Palmar, tied to a rubber tree and later disappeared for refusing to give them money being transferred from the central government to the municipality.

At the moment when he suspiciously disappeared, "Cadena" was the owner of various shopping malls in Sincelejo, controlled the public market, and he was owner of several gas stations. He also dominated the motorcycle taxi business.

The establishment's responsibility for this arbitrary empire in Sucre reaches the highest levels. It is hard to believe that all of this occurred wihout the national authorities' awareness. As has been said, the President of the Republic distinguished many of the implicated officials with diplomatic positions. The most bloody periods of the process of violence correspond with Sucre's declaration as part of an "area of consolidation and rehabilitation" and the self-defense groups' declaration of a cease-fire [at the beginning of President Uribe's term in late 2002 and early 2003]. The military authorities, with the exception of Colonel Rafael Colón and Colonel Carlos Arturo Millán, were complicit in everything that happened.

After murdering and disappearing thousands of people, the paramilitaries and their allies proceeded to loot the surviving families' lands, obliging them to transfer the deeds of ownership and later force them into displacement. The La Setenta farm, which is located outside the town center of San Onofre, is an example of this process. After looting the lands from their legitimate owners, through intermediaries, the new owners proceeded to increase their ownership from 70 to 300 hectares, while the invasion of the adjoining land displaced entire families. Juvenal Escudero, victim of an assassination attempt a few days before this hearing, was one of those affected by this strategy of violently usurping land. The attack against him took place shortly after, accompanied by the Movement of Victims, he demanded his right to recover his land.

...

There are solidly documented reports about the ficticious character of the demobilization. Before the Córdoba Bloc and the so-called "Heroes of Montes de Maria" publicly turned in their weapons, the forced recruitment of young people with few paramilitary ties was evident in vulnerable neighborhoods in southern Sincelejo like Villa Mady, Nueva Esperanza, Puerto Arturo and in the north in the neighborhoods of Altos del Rosario, Villa Orieta II, and El Salvador, among others. In addition, new developments in paramilitarism are appearing. In schools in Sincelejo we hear warnings about the recruitment of youth. Students are being invited to go south to care for coca crops in the department of Córdoba.

...

A first-order responsibility that has been exposed here is that of the current Mayor of San Onofre, Mr. Jorge Blanco Fuentes, who still has not renounced his post, but who should do it immediately for ethical, penal, and political reasons.

Mr. Blanco was the only candidate for the mayorship [in October 2003 elections] because of the pressure exercised by "Cadena." His candidacy was launched at a public event in mid-2002, organized by this paramilitary leader at the "March 29" cockfighting pit in Verrugas. Cadena's crimes were clearly known by Mr. Blanco, since before he became mayor, at the apogee of the regime of terror, he was the municipal treasurer. Mr. Blanco also participated in other public events with the paramilitaries. His first decision as mayor was to fire, illegally, all the municipal government's career administrative officials, and to replace them with the paramilitaries' political appointees, while the paramilitaries also controlled the municipal council. Those dismissed could not claim their benefits and were compelled to sign resignation letters and acknowledgements of termination pay that they never received. Something similar happened to the personnel at the municipal hospital. Mr. Blanco attended a meeting on July 16, 2006 in which paramilitary leader Diego Vecino, various councilmen, and the ex-Congresswoman Muriel Benito Rebollo also participated, with the goal of finding ways to pressure the population to guarantee that the ex-congresswoman's brother, Edgar Benito Rebollo, would be the municipality's next mayor. The meeting took place in the house of Mrs. Estefanía Balseiro, mother of the ex-congresswoman.

...

While these acts of corruption occur, the victims of forced displacement live in the misery of neighborhoods like El Porvenir. In many areas of the department, their houses consist of some large planks for walls, a dirt floor, and a precarious zinc roof. In contrast, the demobilized paramilitaries have integral aid programs. Many of them work as auxiliary community and transit police. They have been given land so that they can advance with productive projects, they are helped with training from the SENA [the government job-training program], and with programs of psychological treatment. Nonetheless, in San Onofre they have set up the business of "pagadiario," which consists of lending money and charging interest every day with extortive terms.

In other areas, such as Marialabaja, after the demobilization the returning displaced population was required to care for African palm plantations, whether as cultivators in their own land or as day laborers. They are paid with 150,000-peso [about $70] bonds, which can be exchanged for goods only at the plantation owner's stores. This shows, then, that the processes of return which are presented as happening in parallel with the so-called demobilizations have, in fact, sought to convert the displaced population into the social base of the paramilitary negotiation process.

...

The community of San Onofre has waged an exemplary fight about what it means to seek truth, justice, and reparation in Colombia. It is thanks to them, not to the Justice and Peace Law and its related governmental agencies, that the masks covering the faces of the political criminals are falling. Today, we ask you, senators, that in your capacity as legislators and charged with political oversight, you take up all actions necessary for this historic struggle to continues to progress, so that it may soon make irreversible gains towards democracy and justice.

Posted by isacson at 6:12 PM | Comments (1)

November 30, 2006

Para-politics scandal update

Here, as far as we can tell, is a current list of Colombian government officials and congresspeople facing accusations of assisting or associating with paramilitary groups.

Some are under investigation, some are facing accusations from witnesses in formal investigations, and at least one has made admissions to the media. All are members or supporters of the government of President Álvaro Uribe.

This list is not authoritative; it is what we've come up with after a thorough read of Colombia's press during the past few weeks.

Posted by isacson at 3:58 PM | Comments (1)

November 22, 2006

CCJ: Protect the victims - we need their evidence

Here is our translation of a brief memo the Colombian Commission of Jurists released last week. As Colombian prosecutors begin to look into the past crimes of demobilized paramilitary leaders, the memo reminds us, the testimony of their victims will be essential. However, in many parts of the country, the paramilitaries’ continued power, and the lack of credible government protection, may make it too risky for victims to come forward. 

It is necessary to defend the victims 

If the State wants truth, justice, and reparation under the framework of Law 975 [the so-called “Justice and Peace” law], it has to guarantee the security and integrity of all the victims, so that, without any type of pressure, they can play a proper role in the processes against paramilitary leaders.  

Unfortunately, various regions of the country are seeing the phenomenon of restructuring of paramilitary forces. These intimidate the victims who, in theory, should be part of the anticipated processes under Law 975. 

Despite the government’s promises and what this law proclaims, in practice many of the paramilitaries’ victims are in situations of abandonment by the government. They cannot, and do not even want to, risk participating in these processes. 

Law 975 leaves the security of the victims in the hands of the attorney general’s office (Fiscalía), but public opinion knows the enormous limitations that this agency’s program of protecting victims and witnesses has faced throughout its history.  

At present there is much worry over the security conditions that the victims face in regions like Antioquia, Bolívar, Casanare, Catatumbo, Cauca, Chocó, Magdalena Medio, Nariño, Putumayo, Santander, Urabá, and Valle del Cauca.

If victims from these regions are not secure enough to participate in the special processes that the attorney-general is beginning to open against the known paramilitary leaders, where then will the truth come from? And what will happen to justice and reparations for all those affected by crimes against humanity?

Since the middle of the year, in the Magdalena Medio, the regional human rights ombudsman at the time, Jorge Gómez Lizarazo, denounced deaths, threats, and displacements of campesinos at the hands of the paramilitaries that continue operating in the region.

Gómez said that the paramilitary groups, supposedly demobilized, operate in the region under various denominations, have organized private security businesses, and have committed crimes, which they blame on other armed actors, to pressure the contracting of their services.

In the port of Buenaventura the situation of insecurity, which has provoked close to 300 homicides so far in 2006, especially affects the paramilitaries’ victims, many of whom are displaced and find no conditions of security to participate in the processes of Law 975. In Buenaventura it is evident that the paramilitaries operate openly and control entire areas of the city.

In the meantime, complaints from elsewhere in Valle del Cauca department have been received about excesses attributed to the security force, and serious violations on the part of the paramilitary forces.

Meanwhile, in the Urabá region victims’ groups have received intimidating messages from people close to the paramilitary leaders that have taken refuge under Law 975, which reduces penalties to between 5 and 8 years for people responsible for crimes against humanity.

According to press reports, victims’ fear of participating in the Law 975 processes is such that in some regions, like San Miguel-La Dorada, Putumayo, the attorney-general’s office has taken to the streets with megaphones to summon them to denounce the paramilitaries’ acts.

Faced with this situation, the active participation of the internal-affairs office (Procuraduría) and human-rights ombudsman (Defensoría) is fundamental to guarantee not only the transparency of the processes, but also that the demobilized paramilitaries confess all crimes, that there be justice, that victims giving testimony have security guarantees, and that they receive integral reparations.

For all these reasons, it is urgent that the state decidedly intensify its efforts to protect, assist, and defend the victims, if there is to be truth, justice, and reparation.

Posted by isacson at 3:51 PM | Comments (8)

October 1, 2006

"Operación Dragón," 2 years later

Berenice Celeyta and Alexánder López Maya spent some time in Washington in mid-September, though they clearly would rather not have done so. They would have preferred to stay back home in Cali, where they have a lot of work to do. But they felt it would be best to leave Colombia for a short while, bringing their baby with them.

Berenice is one of Colombia's leading human rights activists, the 1998 recipient of the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial's Human Rights Award. She now heads a Cali-based human-rights group called NOMADESC.

In March, Alex was elected to Colombia's Senate from the Polo Democrático party, after serving for four years in Colombia's House of Representatives. He was the fourth largest vote-getter in his home department of Valle del Cauca. (Colombians elect their senators on a national basis, with everybody in the country choosing from the same list.) He first made his name as the outspoken head of SINTRAEMCALI, the union of employees of EMCALI, the publicly owned water, electric and telecommunications utility company in Colombia's third-largest city.

For five years now, the Colombian government has sought to privatize EMCALI, a move that the union has bitterly resisted. SINTRAEMCALI's opposition to privatization, combined with its frequent denunciations of corruption and mismanagement among the company's top executives, has brought wave upon wave of threats - including official accusations of "terrorism" - against the union leadership. NOMADESC is very occupied with efforts to keep SINTRAEMCALI organizers alive and out of jail.

All this has made Alex and Berenice two of the most threatened people in Colombia - and that's saying a lot.

This has been especially true since August 2004, when an unnamed military official tipped off Alex about "Operación Dragón." He told the then-congressman that hitmen had been paid to kill him, Berenice, and the president of SINTRAEMCALI, Luis Hernandez, that very week.

On August 25, 2004, Colombia's attorney-general's office carried out raids of a business consulting firm, Consultoría Integral Latinoamericana (CIL), and a related private security company, Seracis, in Cali and Medellín. The consulting firm has specialized in privatizations of state-owned enterprises throughout Colombia.

These raids uncovered ample evidence of a plan, using some intelligence gathered by the military, to "neutralize" 175 labor and social-movement leaders in Cali. Documents referred to the plan as "Operación Dragon," probably borrowed from the Spanish title of the Bruce Lee martial-arts film Enter the Dragon. Its stated purpose, according to recovered documents, was to "impede or neutralize the irregular actions of SINTRAEMCALI" and "research the personal security [and] vulnerability" of those seen as standing in the way of EMCALI's privatization.

The documents contained information about the local activists' daily movements and habits - where they could usually be found at specific times of day. A black leather notebook containing much of this information also included a detailed description of Rep. López's 2002 campaign headquarters.

The investigation pointed especially to Lt. Col. Julián Villate of the Colombian Army's Cali-based Third Brigade. Lt. Col. Villate is well-connected in the United States, having taken courses in English at Fort Leavenworth and served as both student and instructor at the U.S. Army School of the Americas. Lt. Col. Villate was working for CIL, the consulting firm, even though he had been on active duty until August 10, just two weeks earlier.

In Lt. Col. Villate's possession were names and contact information for some of the 175 activists under surveillance. He also had supposedly top-secret information about the security measures many of these threatened individuals had received from the Colombian Interior Ministry's Protection Program - a program that the U.S. government has long helped to fund.

One raid also uncovered a bizarre official document, dated May 24, 2003 and addressed to "Señor Coronel - Director Central de Inteligencia - Bogotá." It states that "SINTRAEMCALI has been characterized as one of the country's most belligerent [unions] in the country, with a high level of subversive infiltration by the ELN and the FARC."  It describes Berenice's role as "to legally de-link union leaders who have seen themselves involved in accusations of rebellion [sedition] and terrorism."

The document then becomes even more unhinged, describing former Polo Democrático presidential candidate and now Bogotá mayor Luis Eduardo Garzón as "carrying out effective political work (co-government) and mass leadership in the workers' sector, in compliance with the objectives laid out by the FARC with its Boliviarian Movement for a New Colombia."  It goes on to accuse Alexánder López Maya of leading a leftist vigilante / criminal mafia group called "Los Indumiles."

It has been two years now, and the Operación Dragón case has not moved at all within Colombia's justice system. The files are probably on somebody's desk at the attorney-general's office, but Operación Dragón hasn't even entered the formal investigation stage. Berenice says taht the authorities claim not to believe them: "they think we dreamed it up."

Worse, a year ago Lt. Col. Villate's defnse lawyer, Armando Otálora, was named to be Vicefiscal, the number-two position in the entire attorney-general's office - a very bad sign, if not an outright conflict of interest. (Otálora, however, had to resign his post last week for an unrelated reason - the tragi-comic revelation that a professional psychic had been given a position of high authority and responsibility among the attorney-general's top staff.)

Part of the assassination plot map.

Little new information had since surfaced about the case - and in fact, it was becoming difficult to draw attention to it in this year of mounting military scandals in Colombia - until about a month ago, when Berenice and Alex hastily arranged a trip to Washington. They came bearing two alarming documents that they had obtained over the past few months.

The first, which they had since May, is a crude but detailed sketch of Cali's airport and surrounding access roads. It includes instructions to wait for the arrival of the flight that Sen. López takes every Friday from Bogotá, after the week's legislative work is done. It shows where to place vehicles for the individuals assigned to spot Alex, and for those assigned to assassinate him.

Alex alerted the police, who visited an address indicated on the map, where they found a vehicle that appeared to meet a description written on the map. But the police decided that they didn't have enough evidence to proceed, and the investigation of this threat against a sitting senator is in limbo.

The other document is two years old, but it came into Alex and Berenice's possession in August thanks to a contact in the Colombian attorney-general's office. It is a 16-page report from that office, and it is full of incredible claims about the suspected terrorist activities of Alex, Berenice and other SINTRAEMCALI organizers and activists.

The document, dated June 23, 2004, is written on letterhead of the attorney-general's office by an investigator from that office. It is directed to the regional director of the CTI, the attorney-general's investigative police. Its stated purpose is "to verify or disqualify the information supplied by citizens, in which the leaders of the UNION of EMCALI appear to be active members of an illegal criminal group, with ties to the Bolivarian Militias of the national terrorist organizations FARC and ELN." It asks other government agencies to respond with "information about the relation between the UNION and the criminal group "Los INDUMILES," apparently at the command of Representative for Valle del Cauca Dr. ALEXANDER LOPEZ MAYA."

Hierarchy diagram from attorney-general's office documentIt claims that Sen. López sits atop a pyramidal structure of terrorist activity with five components. These are the union; an armed structure (the "indumiles"); a legal-judicial apparatus (which includes Berenice); the political organization that brought Alex to Congress; and the "Bolivarian Movement for a New Colombia," which is the FARC guerrillas' effort to form a clandestine political party.

It goes on to provide photos and profiles of several people it claims are members of Sen. López's criminal investigation, alleging that many of them are part of the guerrillas' political and support apparatus. In a particularly bizarre flourish, it accuses Berenice of having ties to the Irish Republican Army.

The document fails to provide any proof behind such wild claims, but does offer much personal information about these individuals. In many cases, this information would seem to be useful only to someone who wishes to do harm to these people: names of relatives, vehicles and license plate numbers, home addresses, and in one case, the fact that the subject "takes her son to school every day at 6:30 AM."

Where did this "intelligence" come from? We get a clue on the last page:  "The informant demands only security measures for him and his family, assures us that this information is valid and has proof to present at the resulting trial."

The threats - whether of airport assassinations or of arrest on trumped-up charges - continue, two years after Operación Dragón first surfaced. But after cooling off for a little while in the United States, Berenice and Alex are now back in Colombia. They refuse permanent exile, citing all the work that awaits them in Cali.

We wish them the best of luck. We urge the Colombian government to devote more resources - especially political will - to the investigation of Operación Dragón. And we reiterate a request that CIP and other human rights groups have made before to the U.S. State Department: that it include this case among those it considers when deciding whether to certify the Colombian military's human-rights performance.

Posted by isacson at 11:03 PM | Comments (1)

September 22, 2006

To whoever is sending those e-mail threats

This is a follow-up to last night's post about the e-mail threat sent last Friday to several Colombian human-rights groups. It was the seventh such threat since May. We'd like to direct this message to the individual or individuals, claiming to be former paramilitaries, who have issued these threats.

Dear Sir(s):

In your last message to our friends in Colombia's community of human-rights defenders, you promised to begin carrying out your threats on this date. "Starting next Friday, September 22, our men will arrive in your cities to look for you, and we know very well where to find you."

Before you do something so cruel, hateful and anti-democratic, please consider one thing. Keep in mind that support for Plan Colombia, and for President Uribe and his policies, is not strong in the United States, or in Europe for that matter.

You may hear U.S. officials express broad support for giving Colombia large amounts of aid, and occasional words of admiration for Mr. Uribe's security policies. That support is broad, but it is thin. Most U.S. decisionmakers can easily and quickly change their minds. They have many other foreign policy priorities and don't spend much time thinking about Colombia. International support for the president you claim to admire hangs by a surprisingly thin thread.

If you want to see that thread snap, go ahead and carry out your threats. If you do what you have threatened to do, you will have given Plan Colombia's opponents in the United States all the ammunition they need to take apart a policy that has been a disappointment anyway.

Recall what happened to U.S. aid to El Salvador in 1989, after the Salvadoran army killed six Jesuits on a university campus. It was cut dramatically, and the Salvadoran government was forced to get serious about negotiations with guerrillas. They ultimately signed an accord that yielded far more to the FMLN than Andrés Pastrana ever imagined giving up to the FARC.

The United States has given Colombia's government $4.7 billion since 2000. If you start attacking human-rights defenders, you will have exposed that government as one that is unable - or unwilling - to protect its peaceful opposition, even when given months' warning that attacks were imminent. Donor countries will recall that this government's president, on a few occasions, has rhetorically linked human-rights groups with terrorists - a sentiment echoed repeatedly in your own e-mail messages.

Let's be as clear as possible. If you so much as harm a hair on the head of one of our friends, you can kiss Plan Colombia goodbye. You can kiss U.S. support for the paramilitary demobilizations goodbye. You will create a huge new rift between the Bush and Uribe administrations. And you will embolden the U.S. government to push harder for the extradition of paramilitary leaders.

Posted by isacson at 10:20 AM | Comments (3)

September 21, 2006

The e-mail threats get scarier

Last Friday, several Colombian human-rights groups received another e-mail threat from someone claiming to represent an organization of ex-paramilitaries. The threat, the seventh since May, is more explicit than the previous six. It reads:

... [T]he cease-fire we granted you - so that you could get lost from our territories liberated by communism - has now expired. Starting next Friday, September 22, our men will arrive in your cities to look for you, and we know very well where to find you.

It ends with "September 22, don't forget!!!"

That is tomorrow.

Let's hope that these e-mails are just the work of a lone sociopath who has no intention of actually carrying them out. Because almost nothing has been done to investigate their origin and find out whether this is the real thing.

Posted by isacson at 10:03 PM | Comments (4)

September 15, 2006

The Jamundí precedent

Human rights cases involving Colombia's military face a frequent obstacle. Often, the armed forces seek to have allegations of abuse tried in their own justice system, arguing that the crime in question was an "act of service" or a breach of military discipline. The military justice system, conservative U.S. columnist Robert Novak reminds us, "has a conviction rate of only 4 percent." The likelihood that victims will see justice narrows dramatically when the military justice system gets jurisdiction.

This is not supposed to happen in cases involving murdered civilians, according to a 1997 Constitutional Court decision, which ordered all such cases to go directly to civilian prosecutors. It does happen less than it used to, but it still sometimes occurs. One recent example are the civilians allegedly killed by the Medellín-based 4th Brigade, their bodies passed off as guerrillas killed in combat. Of twenty-nine cases, only eight have entered the civilian system.

The armed forces even sought to assert military jurisdiction in the case of an army patrol that massacred an elite police counter-drug unit outside the town of Jamundí in May. In July, when a judge surprisingly determined that the case belonged in the military justice system, the army defendants - including Col. Bayron Carvajal, commander of the 3rd High Mountain Battalion - cheered in the courtroom as though they had already been exonerated. It took a number of unusual procedural machinations to get the case back into the civilian system.

President Uribe recently described one unprecedented maneuver that he performed himself in order to extract the Jamundí case from the military justice system.

The government made a decision, which to me seems historic, very important, which was to say: the military justice system can't intervene here, this investigation is exclusively in the hands of civilian justice. Some said, "The president of the republic cannot say that military justice must separate itself from an investigation," but I found the following and that's why I did it. I found that even though the president of the republic doesn't have authority over the military justice system's verdicts, it does have administrative authority. I cannot impose the result of a military justice verdict, but I did find that, through this administrative power, I could say to the military justice system: you must abstain from participating in that investigation."

In other words, any time there is a dispute over who gets to try a case of military abuse, the President - as commander in chief - can order the military justice system to yield and allow the case to be tried in the civilian system where it belongs. This sounds sensible, but it just hasn't been done.

The Jamundí case was an easier call for Uribe to make, because the victims here were police, not powerless civilians. In the Jamundí case, the victims' advocates aren't a bunch of leftie human-rights groups, but people at the highest levels of the National Police and the president's office. There appears to be sufficient political will at high levels to see this case move forward, even if it means taking unorthodox steps like ordering the military justice system to yield its claim to jurisdiction.

But what will happen the next time Colombia's military tries to keep a case of abuse against civilians within its own justice system? Will President Uribe repeat this precedent and order the armed forces to yield to civilian justice?

Posted by isacson at 4:11 PM | Comments (1)

September 6, 2006

Carlos Castaño's skull

On the Democracy Arsenal website, I've posted an essay about that gruesome image of the paramilitary leader's remains, and what it means for Colombia. (Answer: "not much.")

I have no idea what Castaño's many victims felt when they got one last look at Castaño's face last weekend. But my guess is that most didn't feel much - "good riddance," perhaps, but little else.

And why should they? Carlos Castaño was never brought to justice. Carlos Castaño never had to face his victims, or apologize to them. In fact, he died without ever expressing remorse of any kind. And to add insult to injury, Castaño's colleagues in the AUC leadership right now are congregating at a former recreation center south of Medellín, where they will confess to past crimes in exchange for light jail sentences.

Read the whole thing here.

Posted by isacson at 3:23 PM | Comments (0)

August 30, 2006

Three very bad weeks

We are alarmed to note that denunciations of human-rights abuses have been flooding into our inbox at a faster rate in the past several weeks. It's nearly impossible to measure accurately, but there seems to have been a noticeable uptick, especially in extrajudicial killings, threats and government security operations against civilians.

We're not sure why this is happening. President Uribe was sworn in again on August 7, and violence often accompanies presidential inaugurations in Colombia. Or it could be that the human-rights climate, which has been getting more tense in the past few months, is continuing to worsen.

Here are some of the alerts and denunciations we received just during the first three weeks of August. Note that this is not a comprehensive listing of everything that happened in Colombia during this period. Key parts of the country - particularly paramilitary-dominated zones throughout northern Colombia - appear as "black holes" from which information does not emerge.

Many thanks to CIP intern Christina Sanabria for compiling all of this.

Extrajudicial Executions
Date: Late July to early August, 2006
Place: Arauca
Victims: Campesino and urban residents from Arauca
Likely Perpetrators: Farc
Summary: The Farc has recently increased hostilities, leaving several victims: