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:

In other cases, the perpetrator has been unclear:

Security Operation
Date: August 2nd, 2006
Place: Bogotá
Victims: Permanent Committee for the Defense of Human Rights (CPDH)
Perpetrator: National Police
Summary: The Police conducted a search without a warrant of the CPDH offices and took note of the names of all CPDH staff. The Police explained the search saying that the building was suspicious, although the authorities themselves had granted the organization the use of the building.
(Source: CPDH)

Threats / Break-in
Date: August 3rd, 2006
Place: Bogotá
Victims: The non-governmental Consultancy for Human Rights and Displacement (Codhes) and other human rights non-governmental organizations
Perpetrator: unknown
Summary: In the early morning hours, the hard drive and memory cards were stolen from two Codhes computers. These had stored information for Codhes's database on internal displacement. According to an August 14 UN High Commissioner for Human Rights memo, several NGOs have been victims of stolen computers and digital information in recent weeks.
(Source: Codhes and the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Office)

Security Operation
Date: August 3rd, 2006
Place: Bogotá
Victim: SINALTRAINAL, food and beverage workers' union
Likely Perpetrator: Service for Judicial Investigations and Intelligence (SIJIN) police intelligence agency.
Summary: Uniformed men identifying themselves as part of the SIJIN judicial police entered at about 12:15 p.m and conducted a search without a warrant, calling the search "voluntary." The officers claimed that it was a preventative operation in anticipation of President Uribe's upcoming inauguration on August 7th. Police were seen filming the office building from the outside in the morning hours.
(Source: SINALTRAINAL)

Security Operation
Date: August 3rd, 2006
Place: Aguazul, Casanare and surrounding villages
Victims: Luís Alejandro Moreno Barahona, Juán de Jesús Rodríguez, Maria Fernanda Hurtado Burgos, Edgar Vitalina Fula, José Epaminondas Rodríguez Martínez, and Jefry Martínez
Likely Perpetrators: Officials from the Administrative Security Department (DAS) in Yopal, Casanare
Summary: In separate incidents, the above listed people were apprehended by DAS officials. Luís Alejandro Moreno Barahona, president of the Community Action Junta of his town of Retiros Milagro, was arrested during a lunch event sponsored by the BP oil company. Juán de Jesús Rodríguez, Maria Fernanda Hurtado Burgos and Edgar Vitalina Fula were arrested at their homes in Triunfo village, as was José Epaminondas Rodríguez Martínez from his home in Cunamá village. Jefry Martínez was arrested at the hospital emergency room where his wife was giving birth. After his family protested, Jefry Martínez was released, but, as of August 10th, the remaining six were still in custody. Juán de Jesús Rodríguez, Maria Fernanda Hurtado Burgos and José Epaminondas Rodríguez Martínez have all been victims of threats and other persecutions in the past. This is the sixth time that a group of civilians has been similarly arrested by DAS officials; in the past, residents have been arrested, taken to Yopal for questioning, and handed over to the Fiscalía investigators who, realizing there are no grounds to continue holding them, eventually release them.
(Source: the Committee for Solidarity with Political Prisoners Foundation - FCSPP, the Corporation for Community Capacitation and Counseling - COS-PACC, and the Association of Family Members of the Disappeared - ASFADDES)

Security Operation
Date: August 3 and 4, 2006
Place: Ibagué, Tolima
Victims: Orlando Raúl Flores Orjuela, Carlos Alberto Castaño Martínez, Jhon Jairo Nieto Rodríguez. The men are prominent community activists with ties to the University of Tolima, the local government of Ibagué's Comuna 8, the opposition party Polo Democrático Alternativo, and other groups.
Likely Perpetrators: the Cuerpo Técnico de Investigación (CTI) of the Fiscalía, and others unknown
Summary: In the early morning hours (starting at about 3:30 a.m.) of August 3rd, the houses of all three men, separately, were surrounded by soldiers. A prosecutor and several CTI officials entered the homes and conducted a search, apparently without a warrant. Victims and their families were told they were searching for weapons, explosives and, in Castaño's case, members of the Farc and the Eln.
At 11 a.m. the same day, Nieto received a phone call from someone who claimed to be from the government reintegration program. The caller accused Nieto of being part of the Eln, demanded that he stop his activist work and that he leave Ibagué before Monday, August 7th, saying that even if he had a bodyguard he would not be saved because "we don't want anything to do with guerrillas anymore" before abruptly hanging up.
The next day at 11:40 a.m, Flores received a phone call from a person calling himself Juan Carlos who said he was from the government reintegration program. He insinuated that several of Flores' colleagues were part of the Eln, mentioning "JJ," Nieto and Castaño specifically. He then accused Flores of being a member of the Eln, and offered him money for "turning in" his Eln friends. "Juán Carlos" called again at 6:30 p.m. that day, with a similar message.
(Source: the Committee in Solidarity with Political Prisoners - FCSPP)

Threats
Date: August 4th, 2006
Victims: Several human rights NGOs: The José Alvear Restrepo Lawyer's Collective; Media for Peace;Voz, the Communist Party newspaper; Consultancy for Human Rights and Displacement (Codhes); MINGA; Colombian Indigenous Organization (Onic); Corporación Compromiso; the Philosophy department at the Industrial University of Santander; Ethnicities of Colombia; Notipaco; Prensa Rural; University of Caldas; University of Valle del Cauca; University of the Llanos; Movement of the Victims of State Crimes; and the Arauca, Pasto and Valledupar Permanent Assemblies for Peace.
Perpetrators: "Amigos Colombia Pro Derecha"
Summary: On the evening of August 4th, the above listed organizations received a threatening email promising to "exterminate the revolution," adding that the group was "taking measures against those low-caliber lawyers and journalists that claim to be defenders of human rights," and claimed to be acting in support of President Uribe.
(Source: Coordinación Colombia-Europa-Estados Unidos)

Extrajudicial Execution
Date: August 4th, 2006 and
Place: Cristal Páez indigenous reserve, near the town of Florida, Valle del Cauca
Victims: Rosa Tulia Poscue Ortiz
Likely Perpetrators: unknown
Summary: At about 6:30 a.m., a group of hooded men stopped the public transportation vehicle that the victim was riding, forcing her to get off. Hours later her body was found brutally stabbed.
(Source: Indigenous authorities in Valle)

Disappearance / Extrajudicial Execution
Date: August 5, 2006
Place: Las Heliconias village, outside the municipality of Puerto Asís, Putumayo
Victims: Duglas Antonio Pérez Silvaja, and other village residents
Likely Perpetrators: Fifty armed men dressed in camouflage and seen wearing armbands with the letters AUC
Summary: At about 9 p.m., the armed men entered the village, interrupting a town celebration. Residents were verbally and physically assaulted and threatened with death; women were sexually assaulted, although not raped. The men stayed for two hours, stealing the funds collected at the event, any valuables and cash that residents had on hand, and even the food for the party. Upon leaving, villagers were warned against reporting the incident or leaving the village before 7 a.m. the next day. The men took three individuals with them when they left, including Pérez Silvaja, a member of the Nasa indigenous nation and resident of the Kiwnas Chxab reservation. Two days later, Pérez's body was found, dressed in camouflage, at the Puerto Asís morgue; the body had been brought in by the army, and reported as a guerrilla member killed in combat. The other two kidnap victims were still missing as of August 9th. These events took place in the context of days of heavy military presence in the area.
(Source: MINGA)

Security Operation
Date: Morning of August 6th, 2006
Place: La Julia, La Uribe municipality, Meta
Victims: Twenty-four residents of La Julia, including two elderly persons
Likely Perpetrator: National Army, Fiscalía Sexta of Bogotá
Summary: When residents arrived at a town meeting, the National Police selected twenty-four individuals, saying they needed to take them to the neighboring municipality of La Macarena to make some statements, and telling the community that the group would be returned to La Julia as soon as they had finished. Hours later the group was informed that there had been a warrant for their arrest on charges of sedition and criminal intent to act for terrorist purposes; these charges are based on testimony of Farc deserters.
(Source: the Inter-Ecclesiastical Commission for Peace and Justice)

Extrajudicial Execution
Date: August 6th, 2006
Place: road that links the towns of Villa Pinzón and Florida, Valle del Cauca
Victims: José Olmedo Pillimue
Likely Perpetrators: unknown
Summary: At about 6:15 a.m., an unidentified armed group halted the public transportation vehicle Olmedo was driving and shot him three times in the head.
(Source: Indigenous authorities in Valle)

Security Operation
Date: August 6th, 2006
Place: Río San Juan residents, in the El Retén region outside Buenaventura, Valle del Cauca
Victims: Activists from the Río San Juan community, particularly Jairo Gómez, Janeth Perdomo, Jair Mina, Demetrio Conquista and Euclides Membache
Likely Perpetrators: SIJIN (Service for Judicial Investigations and Intelligence) police, including SIJIN Comander Fabio Mauricio Gómez Méndez.
Summary: Fifty residents riding a bus towards Buenaventura on their way to a regional conference on social and community issues were stopped, searched and threatened. They were held for five to seven hours at a local CAI (satellite police station), questioned and, in the case of the leaders, interviewed on film. During the conference, individuals both in plainclothes and in the uniform of state agencies, took photos, filmed, and harassed participants for information. Delegates from Cajambre, Yurumanguí and Chocó were prevented from participating in the conference, having been stopped on the way there and told to turn back.
(Source: Comité Permanente por la Defensa de los Derechos Humanos, Capítulo Valle del Cauca)

Massacre
Date: August 9, 2006
Place: Altaquer, Nariño
Victims: Jesús Chagui Chambuza, Mauricio Burbano, Jairo Ortiz, Marleny Pai and Adelaida Ortiz
Likely Perpetrators: unknown
Summary: Nine hooded men entered the village and conducted house-to-house searches before dragging out five Awá indigenous people and shooting them. The victims were part of the 1,700-person Awá exodus displaced in early July due to heavy military-Farc combat, and are the latest of thirty-two indigenous murder victims from Nariño department so far this year.
(Source: WOLA/AFSC, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, others)

Security Operation
Date: August 13th, 2006
Place: Fortul municipality, Arauca
Victims: Sixteen community activists in Fortul
Likely Perpetrators: Army, members of the Grupo de Caballería Mecanizado Number 18, "General Gabriel Revéiz Pizarro," part of the 18th Brigade
Summary: Between the night of August 12th and August 13th, sixteen community leaders were detained, informed of charges against them for sedition, and transferred to Arauca, the departmental capital. The arrests occurred days before the deadline to register a candidacy in the upcoming mayoral elections, leading community members to suspect a political motive, especially considering the rising popularity of the opposition party, the Polo Democrático Alternativo, in Fortul municipality, made evident after the May presidential elections earlier this year. Similarly motivated arrests took place in 2003. Among the arrested were teachers Abdón Goyeneche, president of the teacher's union, William Saenz, and activist Luz Marina Rodriguez.
(Source: the "Joel Sierra" Regional Committee for Human Rights Foundation and Scott Nicolsen)

Threats / Assault
Date: August 15, 2006
Place: Bucaramanga, Santander
Victims: Martha Cecilia Díaz Suárez, president of ASTDEMP, the Association of Departmental Workers
Likely Perpetrators: unknown
Summary: At about 5:30 a.m., the victim was approached by two strangers in a car who began taunting and intimidating, displaying a photo of her daughter and claiming to have kidnapped her. Finally the strangers forced Díaz into the car and drove to a spot on the road that links the cities of Girón and Florida Blanca. There the two beat her severely, showing her photos of herself at marches and demonstrations and shouting at her that if she was tough enough to go to protests, she should defend herself. (For this reason union workers complain about the police and army's practice of taking covert photos at union demonstrations and conferences, as they are often used by attackers to identify leaders and intimidate them.) This incident was preceded the week before by threatening calls to Díaz's cell phone and a stranger following her on a motorcycle; both incidents were reported to local authorities.
(Source: Central Unitaria de Trabajadores - CUT - Santander)

Threats / Security Operation
Date: August 17th, 2006
Place: Bogotá
Victims: Carlos Lozano, editor of the Communist party weekly Voz
Likely Perpetrators: Officials from the Administrative Security Department (DAS) and/or the Police Service for Judicial Investigations and Intelligence (SIJIN)
Summary: On August 17th, Lozano described being followed and photographed by four men from the time he left an interview with Álvaro Leyva, opposition politician, as he traveled across Bogotá to the airport where he awaited the arrival of Liam Craig-Best, director of the British NGO Justice for Colombia, and until he dropped Craig-Best off at his hotel. At that time, Lozano decided to confront the men. Three fled, and one told Lozano's bodyguard that he was a SIJIN agent; Lozano also noticed another man wore a DAS vest and believes he was a DAS official.
(Source: Carlos Lozano, in a letter addressed to President Uribe)

Extrajudicial Execution
Date: August 17th, 2006,
Place: Barrancabermeja, Santander
Victim: Carlos Arturo Montes Bonilla, member of the unions SINALTRAINAL and SINTRAHOCAR
Likely Perpetrator: unknown
Summary: The victim was assassinated at approximately 11:00 p.m. as he was arriving at his home in Barrancabermeja. The victim was involved in protest activities against Coca Cola and in union work in the city's petroleum industry.
(Source: SINALTRAINAL)

Extrajudicial Execution
Date: August 19, 2006
Place: Saravena, Arauca
Victims: Anival Flórez Becerra
Likely Perpetrators: Army, members of the Grupo de Caballería Mecanizado Number 18, "General Gabriel Revéiz Pizarro," 18th Brigade
Summary: On the night of August 19th, the victim was killed on the Banadias II bridge in Saravena. Official reports claim that the young man was a member of the guerrillas and was trying to place explosives on the bridge when he was killed. His family and longtime community residents, however, contest that version, saying that he was a young worker with a clean record and no involvement with guerrilla groups, and call this incident an extrajudicial killing.
(Source: the "Joel Sierra" Regional Committee for Human Rights Foundation)

Disappearance
Date: August 19th, 2006
Place: Bucaramanga, Santander
Victim: Adalberto Carvajal Salcedo, founder of the Association of Labor Lawyers and counsel for several unions, including the Petroleum Industry Union.
Likely Perpetrator: unknown
Summary: At about 7 p.m., Carvajal arrived at the hotel of the La Triada shopping center, where he was staying, and has been disappeared since then. There was an order for Carvajal's arrest (medida de aseguramiento) related to a case in which he had represented faculty at the University of Antioquia, but Carvajal's family had not received any government notification that he was in state custody. Carvajal had defended workers in the court room for over forty years, had been a president of the FECODE teachers' union and a founder of several others. 
(Source: National Board of Directors, Oil Workers' Union)

Posted by isacson at 1:47 PM | Comments (1)

August 26, 2006

Gen. Padilla's record

Gen. PadillaOn August 15, newly re-inaugurated President Uribe made changes to the Colombian military's high command. The new chief of the armed forces is Gen. Nelson Freddy Padilla, who has been in Colombia's army since 1966.

A look at this 40-year career makes clear that Gen. Padilla won't be receiving any human rights awards anytime soon.

This record does not reflect well on Gen. Freddy Padilla's concern for human rights and the rule of law. But it is also not unusual among top military officialdom - many careers are full of postings in charge of notorious units or in zones of paramilitary expansion, with no "smoking gun" to indicate the officer's direct involvement in human rights crimes.

Nonetheless, it speaks volumes about Colombia's supposedly "reformed" military institution that a career path like Gen. Padilla's can still guarantee a quick promotion to the very top.

Posted by isacson at 9:54 AM | Comments (2)

July 20, 2006

A judicial barbarity

Though we’re reluctant to bring up Robert Novak again, we must recall this passage in his June 26 column on Colombia. Here, the columnist cites as a sign of progress the Colombian authorities’ investigation of a military massacre of anti-drug police in Jamundi, near Cali.

During the June 9 House debate, floor manager [Rep. Jim] McGovern and other left-wing Democrats harped on the May 10 drug-related slaughter of 10 crack national anti-drug policemen by the army's High Mountain Battalion. The unit's commander, Col. Bayron Carvajal, has been imprisoned and removed from jurisdiction of military court-martial (which has a conviction rate of 4 percent). Carvajal is being prosecuted by Colombian Attorney General Mario Iguaran, who has evidence of the colonel's ties to drug trafficking.

In response to this evidence of Colombia's escape from degradation as a narco-terrorist state, Democrats in the House voted 161- 28 for McGovern's disastrous cut in U.S. aid.

Sadly, “this evidence of Colombia's escape from degradation as a narco-terrorist state” has become just the opposite. Yesterday, in what a representative of Colombia’s attorney-general’s office called “a judicial barbarity,” a judge decided that Col. Carvajal and the other soldiers accused of massacring the police unit should be tried in the military justice system, with its “conviction rate of 4 percent.”

Col. Carvajal, reports Semana magazine, could not disguise his glee at the surprising decision.

Both he and his soldiers exploded with jubilation at the news, so much that part of the public in attendance believed that they had won the case, when in reality they were being notified that a military penal judge would head the investigation.

Judge Oscar Hurtado, notes Semana, has been questioned before for decisions that have benefited narcotraffickers. But his decision cannot be appealed.

While we can hope for a miracle from the military justice system, right now it looks very likely that even a case as shocking as the Jamundí massacre might end up going unpunished. Once again, Robert Novak is wrong, and Rep. McGovern got it right.

Posted by isacson at 2:37 PM | Comments (6)

July 8, 2006

Keep the UN's human rights mandate

It sounds like an inappropriate joke, but it's not. Colombia's government wants to silence – not strengthen, but weaken – a UN office that monitors and reports on human rights. And it proposes to do so amid a wave of threats against human-rights defenders, growing allegations of soldiers killing civilians, and scandals involving paramilitary infiltration of the state. And the U.S. government is backing the Colombians.

The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights has had a field office in Colombia since 1996, when the Colombian government, in response to petitions from Colombia’s human-rights community, allowed it to have a presence. The office’s mandate, which has been renewed several times, allows it to offer advice and technical support to Colombian government bodies with human rights responsibilities, to monitor the country’s human rights situation, and to issue publicly available reports and recommendations.

This mandate is to expire in a few months. Recent press reports indicate that the Uribe government is so displeased with the UN office that, while it is not going to cancel its mandate and kick it out of the country, it is going to take away its ability to make public statements and reports. The office will be reduced to offering advice and expertise on a largely confidential basis.

This would essentially mean gagging the UN High Commissioner’s office in Colombia. If that happens, it will mean the loss of a badly needed independent, impartial and credible source of information on Colombia’s human rights situation. It will also mean the disappearance of a key “referee” offering an expert critique, based on Colombia’s international human rights commitments, of the Colombian government’s controversial security policies.

At the same time, it is also the rather predictable result of an unstable situation: how long can a government unwilling to confront its serious human rights flaws approve the presence of an outside agency that publicly points out these flaws? Simply by doing their job – reporting on rights violations, noting that these violations are rarely punished, critiquing policies and laws – the office’s employees inevitably become a nuisance to a government that would rather not see such issues aired in public.

Since the 1990s, for instance, every Colombian government has been unhappy with the office’s annual reports on the human-rights situation. While they have rarely disputed the reports’ facts, they have complained about their tone and emphases, arguing that they focus too strongly on the negative.

The Uribe government, for instance, has wanted credit for the reduced violence that resulted from increased military operations and negotiations with paramilitary groups. The UN High Commissioner’s reports, however, have voiced concern about the impunity that this strengthened military continues to enjoy, and have raised warning signs about the paramilitary process – not just impunity, but the challenges of dismantling the groups, attending to victims, and making the truth publicly known.

Relations between the UN human rights office and the Colombian government worsened under Álvaro Uribe’s administration, as evidenced by a controversial June 19 speech in Geneva by Vice-President Francisco Santos. Before the new UN Human Rights Council, Santos complained that the UN clings to “preconceived” ideas when producing reports, and prefers scolding, or “señalamiento,” to advice or constructive criticism.

Santos even accused the UN office of issuing “value judgments” about candidate Uribe during the 2002 election campaign, “portraying him as a leader of the extreme terrorist right wing.” This is a charge we have never heard before, and the Colombian government has yet to produce an example to back it up.

The Uribe government granted the UN office a four-year extension of its mandate in 2002, a surprising gesture at the time. But relations with the office were troubled under Michael Frühling, the Swedish diplomat who assumed office that year and left in early 2006.

Under his tenure, the office issued a yearly list of recommendations for getting Colombia’s policies and performance in line with international human rights standards. Frühling considered this to be central to the office’s advisory role. When the Uribe government fell short on these recommendations, the office said so publicly. The office also offered public human rights critiques of Uribe’s security initiatives and actions, such as the declaration of a “state of internal commotion,” the failed attempt to gain new anti-terror powers, the use of civilians as informants, speeches attacking human rights groups, and of course the paramilitary process.

While these critiques angered the Uribe government, they were carefully worded and were derived from a careful – not expansionist – interpretation of international human rights law.

One of the touchiest subjects has been that of impunity for abusers, and the UN office’s allegations that Colombia’s government has not shown the political will necessary to punish human rights crimes. Santos alluded it to it in his Geneva speech.

Individual errors should not be presented, as is done today in my country, as institutional policies. Or institutional weaknesses that are common to many developing states, such as judicial inefficiency, should not be interpreted as a lack of political will to fight against impunity on the part of the part of the Colombian state.

This argument makes no sense. If human rights crimes in Colombia were just individual errors, it would be easy to punish them with reasonable swiftness and transparency. But the extreme difficulty of identifying and sentencing perpetrators indicates that something else is wrong. And all signs point to political will.

When cases of abuse run into miles of red tape, face difficulty getting out of the military justice system and its 96% exoneration rate, when files are stolen and judges, witnesses, prosecutors and advocates are threatened or even killed by parties who are never punished, that is more than just an “institutional weakness,” and it is insulting to call it that. It is a complete and utter lack of political will.

The UN officials are professionals. If they saw a good-faith effort to overcome institutional obstacles and punish violations committed by powerful government elements, of course they would take a more positive tone. In fact, it would be in their interest to give a strong show of international-community support to those Colombian officials who are showing that they have the will to see justice done. But that will has been tragically lacking.

But even the “political will” question has been outdone by the Uribe government’s anger at the UN office’s critique of the paramilitary demobilization process. Frühling and the High Commissioner have made clear on several occasions that the “Justice and Peace” law – the legal framework for dealing with former illegal combatants – does not meet international human rights standards.

This critique led Vice President Santos to charge in his Geneva speech that the UN and other critics’ positions would lead to more bloodshed.

During the intense debate within the country about the elaboration of the framework law for this peace negotiation, a rigorous and inflexible tendency consolidated, supported by the [UN] human rights system, which has made the law’s application difficult and has had a negative impact on sectors of the demobilized groups, endangering the stability of the process. I ask whether, if this process fails, if thousands of men take up arms again and the violence reaches unimagined extremes, if the murders of unionists and social and political leaders resume, all because of the efforts to make every single one of them respond to the international community’s expectations in the text of a law, who will take responsibility to this worsening of violence?

This argument echoes paramilitary leaders’ threats to take up arms if they disapprove of the law, when Santos should in fact be condemning such threats. The vice president also fails to mention that many former paramilitaries continue to be armed, many may still be at the command of their former leaders, and that killings of unionists and leaders have not ceased, only declined. A key reason is that the Colombian government did not give itself the legal tools necessary to ensure that paramilitary groups have truly dismantled.

The Uribe government complains that the UN’s critiques were often arrogant, treating Colombia like an inferior third-world country. If UN officials took such a haughty attitude, that is wrong and regrettable. But it doesn’t disguise the fact that the “Justice and Peace” law is indeed a “third-world” piece of legislation.

More developed or established democracies make it a priority to protect the rights of minorities. Thus, a more developed democracy would have sought broader consensus – rather than a bare legislative minimum – in favor of a law protecting the rights of one powerless minority in particular: the armed groups' many victims. The current law abridges victims’ rights by throwing up obstacles to efforts to learn the truth, dismantle persistent paramilitary networks, and ensure the return of millions of acres of land and other property.

Instead of doing that, the government passed a weak law. And now its highest representatives go to Geneva and argue, in effect, that “we had to violate international standards and give huge concessions to a pro-government group whom we hardly bothered to fight. Those who disagree risk having blood on their hands.”

If the Uribe government takes positions like that, there is nothing that the UN office, if it fulfils its mandate, can do to make them happy. And the Uribe government is manifestly unhappy. So now the office appears likely to see its mandate severely reduced.

The international outlook makes that look even more likely. The European Union has made clear its support for the UN office to continue with its current mandate. But the United States appears to be backing the Uribe government.

The Bush administration has not yet made its position public, but State Department officials, when asked, have refused to offer explicit support to the UN office’s current mandate. The Bush administration is very unlikely to challenge the Uribe government, its best friend in Latin America, and support an office that publicly reports on abuses by a military that receives heavy U.S. support. The only thing that could change the U.S. position would be strong pressure from appropriators in Congress, particularly key Democratic senators, who have taken a past interest in the office’s functioning. But this pressure may not be forthcoming.

As a result, an important voice for human rights protection in Colombia is likely to be muzzled. The office cannot participate publicly in its own defense, though the high commissioner could help its case by making public some accounting of its key achievements.

If the office loses its ability to speak up, it will be reduced to silently offering advice to a government that, by and large, has no intention to follow it. That is a rather sterile and uninspiring mission, and it is not clear why the High Commissioner would want to stay in Colombia to carry it out.

Posted by isacson at 11:07 PM | Comments (4)

June 13, 2006

More threatening e-mails

(For commentary on President Uribe’s visit tomorrow, see our memo here.)

Here are translations of two more threatening e-mails recently received by human-rights groups and academic departments in Colombia. Messages like these have been arriving in Colombian human-rights activists’ inboxes for over a month now.

The May 20 message below refers to break-ins that were then occurring at human rights groups’ offices and employees’ homes. Knowledge of this makes it less likely that these messages are merely the work of some crackpot at his computer keyboard.

Email sent June 7, 2006

From: Frente Democratico Colombia Libre [mailto:contactodirectofdcl@yahoo.com]
Sent: miércoles, 07 de junio de 2006 20:03
To: 20 NGOs and left-wing news organizations
Cc:salvatoremancuso@salvatoremancuso.com, porcaminosdepaz@yahoo.es, convergencia@intercable.net.co, colombiasincomunistas@yahoo.es
Subject: <blank>

Central Office of National Director’s Office
“Colombia Free of Communists”

Memo to revolutionaries masquerading as NGOs, supposed leaders, “lawyers” and communicators camouflaged in civil society, hidden behind your columns as if we could not find you.

We have taken careful note of all the steps that you have been taking with the community of nations who are friends of the negotiations at Ralito, which is now even more committed to the direction our nation will be taking after reelecting, legitimately and democratically, our president, Álvaro Uribe Vélez.

By the way, did you like the beating we gave you at the ballot box? If you want more, let us know!

We are not surprised by the tantrums you throw about supposed human rights violations you claim we commit daily. Instead, we suggest you stop complaining to other countries that are also busy with their own internal issues. There is no war here, nor conflict, nor anything of the kind. What we have here is a bunch of revolutionary guerrilla members that do nothing but be the cause of the constant violations of the population’s rights. And the only thing you do in this country is lend yourselves to continuing their little game when you aren’t also financing it with the money you get from foreign countries intended to help your fellow citizens.

With the help of the National Army we have been able to take possession of places that were once the free territory of the FARC and the ELN.

From now on, you will have to deal with us. We will be a solid presence in more of half of the Colombian territory, now free from this cancer that is the guerrilla and all of you.

We are on a war footing, and we have been able to enter into very difficult territories, for example the Serranía de Perijá, Guicán, San Lucas, Yarig[u]ies, Montes [de] Maria, Ayapel, San Jerónimo, [Sierra Nevada] De Santa Marta, Baudo, Farayones [Farallones], Los Nevados, San Agustín, and we are about to arrive in Macarena and Sumapaz.

We have begun to give you proof that we are not playing around. We’ve laid our traps for you (les dejamos los tendidos de barranca), that’s where we have started. But soon we will start taking action in departmental capitals like Barranquilla, Medellín, Cali, Bucaramanga, Cúcuta, Manizales, Pasto and Bogotá.

The fake bombs in the Atlantic Coast region are not ours; ours don’t fail. Blame the FARC; theirs do fail.

Speaking of Bogotá, we’re going to run some errands there this week. Let’s see what you do, keep crying?

You are declared military objectives
At war in blood and fire against the Left
Colombia free forever from Communists

Email sent May 20, 2006

From: Grupo Democratico Colombia Libre [mailto:colombiasincomunistas@yahoo.es]
Sent: sábado, 20 de mayo de 2006 13:39
To: 20 NGOs and university departments
Subject: General Communiqué

The “Colombia Free from Communists” group
Central Office of National Director’s Office 

We warn all organizations mentioned here that our group has clear proof of the links all of you have with the Colombian insurgency.

We refuse to continue allowing a bunch of masqueraders, like you all are, to continue consuming our country in the mud of Communism, and even less so under the influence of current versions of socialism like Chavism, Castrism, Evomoralism, Lulism, or whatever other version in which you might try to dress yourselves.

We have knowledge of the permanent dialogue that you hold with the National Headquarters of the FARC and the ELN, even helping them to finance their campaigns of fake social coverage. You are to blame for all this history of horror in which the country found itself during the blossoming of the FARC and the ELN, since it was you yourselves who sponsored and supported with your supposed “dialogue tables,” good-for-nothing s**t.

We are warning all of you supposed human rights defenders, as well as those guerrilla members dressed up as university professors who say they are opening spaces to free thought in the sacred public universities. We will for no reason allow those glory days to return.

It is the time to continue with the Democratic Security policies of our legitimate president, Doctor Álvaro Uribe Vélez. You’ll get to know more about us, as we continue in power, helping the president and working hand-in-hand with the legitimate Colombian Armed Forces, ridding our countryside and our cities of spineless people like you.

What credibility could you possibly have before the world if there is nothing going on here? What we have here is a good president and we will keep supporting him.

Abstain from continuing to annoy us with your little themes of human rights and education and inequality and all that which you are always inventing. What we have here is work to do…

Clean our country of unproductive elements like you. You are all warned that we have you in our sights. Or haven’t you noticed that someone took a couple of things, you know what we’re talking about…

Cooperatives, organizations, foundations, departments, research institutes, rights forums, committees… the list is interminable and always the same costume.

You bunch of sons-of-b*****s, your glory days are over.

Long live Colombia free of Communists
Long live the authentic democracy of the Right
Out spineless servants of Leftism
Long live our legitimate president for four, eight … or many more years.
Colombia free from the left, forever!

Posted by isacson at 6:09 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

May 19, 2006

A taste of what is to come?

Last weekend, Colombia’s principal indigenous organizations announced that Monday the 15th would be a day of protest. Thousands of indigenous people and allied organizations were to gather at a “National Summit of Social Organizations.” Participants were to protest the free-trade agreement that Colombia has signed with the United States, and to demand that the Colombian government comply with previous commitments regarding land and indigenous rights.

Over 10,000 indigenous activists met at the La María de Piendamó reservation, along the Pan-American Highway in Cauca department, north of Popayán. Their demonstration, while largely non-violent, did include a blockade of the highway, stopping traffic along southwestern Colombia’s principal artery.

In a communiqué posted two days before the protest, the National Indigenous Organization of Colombia (ONIC) had issued the following warning.

We call on national and international human rights organizations to remain alert against any reprisal that the government might take against these national demonstrations, as it is public knowledge that when the people take part in peaceful protests, the government uses its elite anti-disturbance commandos to repress and to attack the free use of our right to demonstrate publicly and peacefully.

The groups were not exaggerating. The Colombian government chose not to negotiate with the protesters in Cauca. Instead, the Army’s Third Brigade, the National Police’s Mobile Anti-Disturbances Squad (ESMAD), and other units did not hesitate to use force, wielding clubs, tear gas, and rubber bullets – some fired from helicopters – and possibly other, more lethal means, such as whatever killed Nasa indigenous leader Pedro Coscué in Monday’s disturbances.

On Tuesday, the protesters cleared one lane of traffic on the highway in anticipation of the promised arrival of a team of government negotiators, which was understood to include the ministers of Interior and Agriculture. The protest’s leaders gathered in Piendamó to receive the government representatives, who were to arrive at 1:00 that afternoon, an arrival that was postponed until 3:00.

They government team did not show up. Instead, at 2:30, the demonstrators and their would-be negotiators were met by another assault from 300 ESMAD commandos. Two of the indigenous leaders who had come to negotiate were arrested. The ONIC and ACIN (the indigenous organization in northern Cauca) condemned this operation as a government “lie” and a “trap.”

In all, the toll from two days in Cauca included one dead, over fifty wounded (including about twenty-three police), thirty-six arrested, and three police being held by the indigenous protesters. Meanwhile, about 150 miles south in Nariño department, the Colombian government also used force against a gathering of about 5,000 farmers, many from indigenous groups, protesting aerial herbicide fumigation of coca. Though reporting is still sketchy, the Nariño human rights ombudsman’s office claims that at least two protesters have been killed. The situation in both areas remains tense, and information is still emerging.

While this week’s protesters were mainly non-violent, there were exceptions. Colombian media reports told of protesters throwing rocks, attempting to burn a truck, and taking police hostage. In a statement condemning the Cauca and Nariño violence, the Bogotá office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights had words for all sides, including the protesters: “The Office also reminds the members of the indigenous, afro-descendant, and campesino communities, and other sectors participating in the demonstrations, that the pursuit of their aspirations or interests does not justify, in any case, the use of violence.”

The government response, however, has been heavy-handed and disproportionate. It has been accompanied by accusations – from Cauca governor Juan José Chaux, from Police Director Gen. Jorge Daniel Castro, from Interior-Justice Minister Sabas Pretelt – that the protests were in fact encouraged and sponsored by the FARC guerrillas. According to Chaux, the guerrillas “obligated the campesinos, almost with a gun at their backs, to go out and take over the Pan-American highway.” These officials presented no proof, other than a reference to intercepted guerrilla communications.

The Colombian human rights group CODHES responded well to these dangerous accusations: “To try to confuse social protest with terrorism is not just irresponsible, but it endangers the lives and safety of those who participate in the mobilization.”

Meanwhile, this week’s violence places front-and-center the role of the ESMAD, the Colombian Police anti-riot unit, which has been building an alarming record for brutality. (Recent examples of people killed or abused by the ESMAD have been denounced here, here, here, here and here.) This unit clearly has some serious problems, and it is frequently being deployed as the government’s front line for dealing with citizens who take to the streets to make demands. (CIP has no data right now indicating whether the ESMAD receives U.S. assistance, but we will be trying to find out.)

The picture gets worse, however. The violence that met the “National Summit of Social Organizations” is just the latest of several recent indicators of a rapidly worsening human rights climate in Colombia. Two reports released in the past week by Colombian human rights groups make clear that we should be worried.

First, the Consultancy for Human Rights and Development (CODHES) released its latest annual report on forced internal displacement in Colombia. In 2005, CODHES found, 318,387 people were forced to leave their homes and relocate, the third year in a row in which the group’s estimate of newly displaced people increased. (CODHES’ figure for 2004 was 287,500 people.)

CODHES counts 1.069 million Colombians displaced between August 2002, when President Álvaro Uribe was inaugurated, and December 2005 – a horrifying figure indicating one in every forty Colombians, but about 100,000 lower than what was measured at a similar point in the presidency of Uribe’s predecessor, Andrés Pastrana.

Second, the Colombia-Europe-United States Coordination group (CCEEU) released a very troubling report on the sharply worsening environment for Colombia’s non-governmental human rights defenders. (The report has not been posted to the group’s website yet, but is available here as a PDF file.) It cites the following recent examples of aggression against Colombia’s human rights community, among a few dozen others:

Critics dismissed as “disguised communists” helping the guerrillas? Increasing threats, intimidation and attacks? Demonstrations met with official violence? Is this what awaits Colombia in Uribe’s likely next term? Is Colombia about to undergo another mean season, another closure of space for peaceful opposition and criticism?

We hope not, but the worsening climate – which has corresponded with Colombia’s presidential election campaign – offers much cause for worry. Even the possibility that things will get worse requires the following actions of the U.S. government.

Posted by isacson at 8:25 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

May 10, 2006

A scary e-mail

Here is a translation of an e-mail sent Monday to the José Alvear Restrepo Lawyers’ Collective, a prominent Bogotá human rights organization. Copies were also sent to the National Indigenous Organization (ONIC), the Latin American Institute for Alternative Services (ILSA), the CUT (Colombia’s largest labor union), and the Colombian Platform for Human Rights, Democracy and Development.

We have no idea whether this is a missive from Colombia's lunatic fringe or a taste of what is to come for Colombia's human-rights defenders.

May 8, 2006 12:59 p.m.
From: alberto gabriel palomino (colombialibre2006_2010@yahoo.es)
Subject: no more disguised lies

We view with great concern how you give protection to rebels who claim to be social leaders under the supposed coverage of international humanitarian law. It is not possible to give credibility to the supposed defense of human rights you claim to do when 70 percent of the country sees that what you are doing is to favor the insurgency’s interests, masquerading as [social] leaders.

Since we decided to help President Doctor Álvaro Uribe Vélez with the issue of security policy, we have done nothing different than to believe that only under the iron fist and the use of force can the enemies of authentic democracy be defeated.

Therefore we are communicating to you, Alvear Restrepo Collective, that since you do not align yourselves with the governmental system that 40 million Colombians have elected and will re-elect, you will not have a space for participation or any credibility before our sovereign government. We are going to make the international community see that, in reality, you are nothing more than protectors of terrorists, fomenters of large-scale terrorism in a fatherland that wants nothing more to do with you or the FARC or the ELN or anything else that sounds like leftism, Chavez-ism, socialism or disguised communism.

We are struggling together with the president, and we make it known to you that the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia [the AUC] was our origin, and has now completed one cycle of service to the people and in favor of the people. Now that the demobilization processes are completed we are the present and future of the Colombian state, its security and its society, for many years to come. We have an active presence in the rural and urban areas of 21 departments and we act under many types of groupings, we have a working group under a national directorship. We are here, señores of the Collective, to offer a hand to the authentic democratic right and to all those who, recognizing the only path to saving our country, join with us.

Señores of the Alvear Restrepo Collective, this is an invitation for you to join with our crusade against terrorism, or else to prepare to have each of your members suffer the entire weight of our presence. We have in our favor the state armed forces themselves, who always support us in a great show of sovereignty.

And this also goes to all the parties to whom we are sending copies of this warning today. If you do not align yourselves to our reality, it is better that you go with your humanitarian ideas to some other place that is not our sacred Colombian territory. Let Señores Castro, Chávez, Morales or Lulla (sic) take you in.

This is your first warning.

And also stop helping the little leaders of the riff-raff, stop wasting time with those strident letters that you send to our president, he is very busy resolving the state’s real problems.

Long live the authentic state rebellion of the democratic right
Down with the servile socialists
Long live Álvaro Uribe Vélez 2006-2010 … and many more years!!!!!!!!!!
“Colombia free forever from the left”

Posted by isacson at 6:03 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

February 22, 2006

A general goes down, but will the torturers face justice?

Gen. Reynaldo Castellanos, the head of Colombia’s army until yesterday morning, should not have been forced to resign. His departure cannot be considered a blow against impunity in the armed forces. We’re still waiting to see whether such a blow will be struck.

Gen. Castellanos was forced out following revelations of horrific torture suffered by twenty-one young recruits in late January, as they underwent basic training at the army’s Center for Instruction and Training in Piedras, Tolima department. According to the Colombian newsmagazine Semana, which broke the story, the soldiers – most from poor rural backgrounds – were subjected to extremely cruel treatment: burned with hot irons, forced to eat animal excrement, and sexually abused.

The episode raises real questions about the extent to which such a sadistic culture exists in Colombia’s military – “violence against soldiers by their superiors is extensive, this isn’t news,” one officer who requested anonymity told Semana – and how it may manifest itself in the armed forces’ interactions with Colombia’s civilian population. It raises questions about class in Colombia: in an economically unequal country where those with high school educations stand little chance of being recruited, it is hard to imagine this being done to young Colombians from a wealthy or middle-class background. (The guerrillas, incidentally, also stand accused of horrific abuse of young, poor recruits – read Human Rights Watch’s 2003 report on child combatants.)

The torture episode also shows what can happen in an environment in which commanders have little reason to believe that they will be punished for their crimes. It is thus encouraging that four instructors are under arrest and some other officers, including the local battalion commander, have been suspended while investigations proceed. The decision yesterday to move the case from the military court system to civilian jurisdiction – where human-rights cases belong in Colombia, thanks to a 1997 Constitutional Court decision – is also good news.

These steps are positive, but they don’t guarantee that justice will be done. While Colombia’s military courts are notoriously lenient in human rights cases, we have also seen dozens of serious cases languish in civilian jurisdiction (Mapiripán, Arauca unionists, Cajamarca and many others). Many trials of human-rights abusers end up going nowhere – or ending with unexpected acquittals – due to threats, corruption, endless legal maneuvering, or a simple lack of prosecutorial zeal.

The hope is that the Piedras torture case will not end up this way: that the judicial system will assign punishment to those who ordered the torture, those who created an environment that rewarded such behavior, and any who sought to cover it up. Oft-quoted security analyst (and senatorial candidate) Alfredo Rangel writes that the most “prudent” course for sending “a necessary message of zero tolerance” would be “to punish the commanders closest to the acts, like some of the respective battalion, brigade or division commanders.” Colombian media reports have so far indicated that only the battalion commander is under investigation – and he has been suspended, not sacked like General Castellanos, the army chief.

Why was Castellanos, who commands nearly 200,000 men, fired for a crime committed far down the chain of command? Clearly, President Uribe was angry that the general knew about the episode for about three weeks before informing him and Defense Minister Camilo Ospina – and that he did so only when complaints from the victims’ family members began to generate media interest. If Gen. Castellanos’ silence violated Colombian law – whether civilian or military – then he should be tried for that, not fired. (This recommendation, of course, comes from a citizen of a country whose vice president just went many hours without telling his boss that he had accidentally shot a man in the face.)

The fear is that firing Gen. Castellanos is a distraction, an attempt to relieve pressure for a real investigation of the torture allegations, one that leads to strong penalties against those responsible. Months or years from now, when human-rights defenders complain that the case is stuck in the justice system, and that most officers with command responsibility have paid no penalty for the tortures, the response might well be, “but the head of the army was fired, how can you say there was impunity?”

Gen. Castellanos should not be the fall guy. A much better outcome would be that he keep his job, and that those responsible for the tortures – perhaps up to the brigade or division commander – undergo real trials and serve real penalties. But we may be seeing the opposite: Gen. Castellanos is now a civilian, and those responsible have a fair chance of going free.

The danger of impunity is why the State Department must include the Piedras tortures on the list of cases it considers when it decides whether to certify the Colombian military’s human rights performance, a step that the law requires in order to free up much military aid. (A certification decision may be made within the next month or two.) If the case is not moving, and there is a danger that impunity for the torturers could result, then State must not certify – no matter that Gen. Castellanos was forced out.

Posted by isacson at 11:59 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

January 31, 2006

Ciao, Michael Frühling

After more than three years in Colombia, Michael Frühling is leaving. The head of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights’ field office in Bogotá is off to Geneva, where he will become the High Commissioner’s chief of “Policy, Planning, Monitoring and Evaluation.”

Frühling will be missed. Without ever being accused of “combative” or “outspoken” behavior, he became known for firmly but diplomatically calling “foul” in the face of the Uribe government’s frequent human rights lapses.

In October 2002, Frühling replaced Anders Kompass, another very competent Swedish UN official, in a very tough job. The Bogotá field office, founded in 1996 at the strong urging of Colombia’s human rights community, is one of only a few that the UN High Commissioner maintains worldwide. In addition to offering human-rights training, advice and technical support, the office monitors the human-rights situation in Colombia, producing public reports, investigating cases, receiving denunciations and issuing recommendations.

Through documents, press statements, interviews and speeches, the office’s director has a very influential pulpit from which to inform Colombia’s public – as well as to advise, critique, and contradict Colombia’s government and other armed actors. When he criticizes or praises someone, it makes headlines in Colombia. This implies a delicate balancing act. When the director uses his pulpit too bluntly or aggressively, he earns a backlash from the Colombian government, media, and ruling class in general. However, should a director step back from the pulpit, soften his tone, or choose to work “off the record” with government officialdom, human-rights activists, opposition figures, and even the media accuse him of being too timid.

Frühling did face occasional charges of being if not timid, at least too indirect in his human-rights advocacy. The main reason for that was his writing and speaking style, which was one of the best examples you’ll ever see of the careful, measured, legalistic tone of the career UN diplomat.

A perfect example came a few weeks ago, when the field office issued its opinion on the Colombian government’s regulations for implementing the very lenient “Peace and Justice” law for demobilizing paramilitary groups. Few could write a sentence like this one in a million years, no matter how hard they tried:

The Office observes that the regulations issued under Law 975, do not succeed in establishing the advisable comprehensive legal framework that simultaneously achieves the effective dismantling of the illegal armed groups, the reintegration of their members into society and the full respect for the rights to truth, justice and reparation of the victims of atrocious crimes perpetrated by members of those groups.

When you read this closely, you see that these are strong words: the UN’s highest human rights official in Colombia thinks that the law is not going to do away with paramilitary groups, reconcile Colombian society, or give victims their due. Frühling’s speeches read similarly, requiring the listener to stay alert for the elaborately worded sword-thrust, usually somewhere in the second-to-last paragraph.

Though these critiques have often been aimed at the Uribe government’s banner policies, their wording and Frühling’s thoughtful, diplomatic style usually kept the office’s disagreements with government officials out of the spotlight and out of the news media. This is necessary, because the office’s mandate must be renewed periodically – the next time is in August – and the Colombian government could always risk international disapproval and close it down (or force it to do less).

In addition to overseeing an expansion in the office’s size, with new satellite offices in Medellín, Cali and Bucaramanga, Frühling adroitly chose a strategy for dealing with the popular Uribe government that centered on proposals instead of criticisms. Each year, Frühling would issue a series of recommendations to the Uribe government and the armed groups for bringing their policies and actions in line with international human rights and humanitarian law.

Frühling convinced most donor nations to endorse the recommendations and to include them in their own official foreign policy declarations regarding Colombia, including the statements that emanated from influential donors’ meetings in London in 2003 and Cartagena in 2005. The United States, however, has not endorsed the High Commissioner’s recommendations. Along with the Uribe government, it objects to the UN office’s adherence to the “principle of distinction” – the element of international humanitarian law that requires efforts to separate civilians from the conflict. Many of the Uribe government’s security policies, which the Bush administration supports, are predicated on greater civilian proximity to the conflict. (Examples include networks of paid informants and the establishment of fortified military and police posts in the middle of densely populated areas.)

These and other criticisms often surfaced in the office’s annual reports, which have always been more strongly worded and remained so under Frühling. An example from the last one:

The human rights situation continued to be critical. There was an increase in reports of extrajudicial executions attributed to members of the security forces and other public officials. High levels of torture and forced disappearances continued. Reports of arrests and mass searches carried out without an appropriate legal basis by members of the army and the Attorney-General’s Office continued.

These reports often angered the Uribe government, whose officials insist that the UN office does not give them enough credit for reductions in violence measures.

The recommendations and the annual reports have helped keep human rights at the top of Colombia’s political debate. The office has ensured that information about the country’s human rights situation comes from a source whose members cannot simply be dismissed as an interest group with a political agenda.

Most importantly, the High Commissioner’s office, both before Frühling’s arrival and during his tenure, has consistently voiced its concerns about the Uribe government’s security policies. The office has quickly gone on record whenever President Uribe launches an initiative that appears to violate Colombia’s international human rights commitments.

Even when phrasing its objections in such florid, diplomatic language, Frühling and the UN office have displeased many in the Uribe government. Peace Commissioner Luis Carlos Restrepo has been unhappy with Frühling’s critiques of the “Justice and Peace” law. Uribe’s first minister of interior and justice, Fernando Londoño, still calls Frühling nasty names in many of his columns and public declarations.

Of course, the UN High Commissioner’s office doesn’t exist to make the Uribe government happy. But it does depend on the Colombian government’s willingness to allow it to be present in Colombia. In August, when President Uribe is likely to be sworn in for his second term, the office’s mandate must be renewed. Its future is unclear: while it is unlikely to be abolished, the second Uribe government may seek to clip its wings. For instance, last year Vice-President Francisco Santos – whose portfolio includes human rights – spoke publicly in favor of limiting the office’s duties to technical assistance and reducing its human-rights monitoring.

This must not happen. As Frühling’s tenure has shown, the UN office’s role is more important now than at any time in the ten years of its existence. It is a crucial voice for international human-rights standards that remain under assault by illegal groups’ abuses and by a popular government’s policies.

If anything, the office’s mandate should be strengthened and expanded, and its next director should be even more pugnacious.

Posted by isacson at 1:25 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

November 19, 2005

San José de Apartadó update

On Thursday, Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont), the ranking Democrat on the appropriations subcommittee in charge of foreign aid, gave an excellent, detailed statement condemning the failure to clarify the February massacre in the Peace Community of San José de Apartadó. The Peace Community, in the Urabá region of northwestern Colombia, was founded as an attempt to shield residents from the zone's out-of-control violence.

An excerpt from Sen. Leahy's statement:

"This case presents the Bush Administration with an important challenge. It shows that despite billions of dollars from the United States and lofty rhetoric about human rights, the Colombian government’s initial reaction to this despicable crime was not appreciably different from what we saw years ago. They denied responsibility and blamed the victims even before an investigation began, and some of the key witnesses may not even have been interviewed eight months later."

Sen. Leahy's declaration is very highly recommended reading, and we thank him for making it. We wish that there were many more in the Senate like him.

We're very sad to report, though, that just a few hours before Sen. Leahy said these words, yet another member of the San José community was murdered. A statement that the community released yesterday blames the army for the death of Arlen Salas David, who was killed by grenades and gunfire while removing weeds from a cornfield. Mr. Salas is the latest in a list of more than 150 community members murdered, by killers from all sides, since San José was founded in 1997.

Posted by isacson at 10:47 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

September 12, 2005

"Liberty: Hostage to 'Democratic Security'"

Imagine having police or soldiers seize you while you are walking down the street, charge you with aiding terrorists, parade you in front of reporters’ cameras as a captured terrorist supporter, and throw you in jail. Imagine that your arrest was based on accusations from somebody whom you cannot question or confront (if you know who your accuser is at all). Imagine that, after a period of days, weeks, or months, you are released for lack of evidence and must begin your life again. 

Last month, several Colombian human-rights groups released a report [PDF format] documenting one of the most troubling aspects of the Uribe government’s security policies. According to Liberty: Hostage of Democratic Security, more than 6,000 people were arrested and charged with supporting guerrillas during the first two years of Álvaro Uribe’s term in office. Of those, 5,535 were detained in mass roundups of ten people or more. 

“In the framework of the struggle against terrorism, entire populations are being classified as dangerous, and as a result are exposed to the risk of administrative detention. The arrest of more than 2,000 people in Arauca city, Arauca, on November 12, 2002 is still the worst example of what a state should not do with regard to personal liberty. However, it is not the only one: between August 7, 2002 and August 6, 2004, the report states, 5,535 people were victims of arbitrary arrest in 77 mass-detention events, in which the number of people simultaneously arrested was between ten (for example, the May 22, 2002 arrests in Villa Hermosa, Tolima) and two thousand (for example, the Arauca arrests).” 

The prominent national organizations who collaborated on the report (Center for Popular Research and Investigation [CINEP], José Alvear Restrepo Lawyers’ Collective, Colombian Commission of Jurists, Permanent Committee for the Defense of Human Rights, Humanidad Vigente, Freedom Legal Corporation, and Committee in Solidarity with Political Prisoners, in coordination with the Colombia-Europe-United States Coordination [CCEEU]) define “arbitrary arrest” as one in which the detainee is not informed of the reasons for his arrest, he is not granted an opportunity to inform a third party about his arrest, or he is not presented before a judge.

The growing rate of arbitrary detentions coincides with the beginning of the Uribe government. Between August 7, 2002 and August 6, 2004, the report found that at least 6,332 people were detained arbitrarily in Colombia (including events in which less than ten people were arrested). During the six previous years, by contrast, 2,869 people were detained arbitrarily.

The investigators attribute this explosion of arrests to President Uribe’s active support for the imprisonment of “terrorist supporters” as part of his “Democratic Security” strategy. Speaking in December 2003 about the security situation in part of Colombia’s coffee-growing heartland, Uribe called for still more mass arrests.

"It may disgust many national and international observers, but it is a way of isolating the terrorists, of taking key supports away from them, of affecting their supply lines. Last week, I told General Castro Castro [the chief of Colombia’s National Police] that in this zone we cannot go on with mass arrests of 40 or 50 every Sunday, but instead 200, to accelerate the jailing of the terrorists and to deliver a blow to these organizations. Those captures have been massive, but not arbitrary." 

According to the report, these detentions unfairly target human rights workers and other activists, as well as farmers who live in zones traditionally controlled by guerrilla groups. As is well known, Uribe has said in public on several occasions that human-rights groups serve the interest of Colombian guerrilla groups, as “terrorist spokespeople.” As a result, Uribe’s plan to “isolate” terrorists by capturing their alleged associates puts human rights workers at particular risk of arbitrary detention. 

The majority of arrests, however, occur during military operations in which civilians are indiscriminately detained. A few examples from the report:. 

The report raises several tough questions not just about mass arrests, but about the “Democratic Security” strategy in general. 

What counts as a credible intelligence report? One of the Uribe government’s signature security efforts has been its “Network of Cooperators,” in which civilians offer tips to army and police officials, usually in exchange for financial compensation. But what is “suspicious” enough to warrant action? 

“It is suspicious to me if the person is not from this town,” one civilian informant from Cesar department told an interviewer for the NGOs’ report. 

"If a street vendor goes down the same street several times, I call the police right away. … If some guy is dressed like a campesino, he doesn’t know how to match his clothing, he puts on a red shirt with green and has scratches on his arms, right away I look at his waist [where a pistol might be] because he could be a guerrilla. … If he has tattoos or an earring, he could be a paramilitary." 

“Based on criteria such as these,” the report informs, “many people have been arbitrarily detained in Colombia.” 

In addition to civilian reports, the Colombian state relies on the testimony of “reinsertados,” former guerrilla members, who accompany the security forces on operations, identifying those who they believe are guerrilla collaborators. In some cases, suspected guerrillas have been arrested based on accusations from demobilized paramilitaries. 

How solid is the proof connecting those arrested to guerrilla organizations? Frequently, the report contends, those arrested are let go shortly afterward due to a lack of evidence against them. While it is unfortunate that the report’s authors were unable to give a more exact estimate of how many detainees are subsequently released, we do know that the case of Alfredo Correa de Andreís – a Barranquilla profesor arrested for being a FARC supporter in mid-2004, then released for lack of evidence – is not unusual. (Correa was killed, probably by paramilitaries, weeks after his release.) 

Investigators found various inconsistencies within the “solid” evidence underlying cases against detainees. For example, Operation Orion documents held that a single defense attorney was assisting different detainees in different places at the same time. In addition, various prosecutors were questioning and identifying people in different places at the same time. Police officials added to data provided by informants. Occasionally, “reinsertados” provided identical testimonies, altering only names, for different cases. 

Where does the “burden of proof” lie? The defendants are not given access to intelligence-based evidence against them. The defense must prove a negative – no ties to guerrillas – while testimony given by “reinsertados” is not submitted to a credibility check. 

Are some accusations coerced? In some instance, witnesses were trained and prompted before giving their testimonies. In fact, informant Jampiero Grajales Correa admitted in November 2002 that during Operation Orion he’d been forced to “identify” a man that he’d never seen before. 

In addition to these concerns we must add the rather obvious point that mass arrests on flimsy evidence are a terrible way for the Colombian government to win the population’s support. Many of the mass arrests have taken place during military operations aimed at re-taking territory that has been in guerrilla hands. The government has long been absent in such zones, and will need the population’s support in order to hold on to this territory. It is a mistake, then, to make its first appearance in the zone by antagonizing the population, locking up dozens or hundreds of citizens. In areas already under government control, the policy of large-scale arrests has a chilling effect on democracy and free speech, when so many of those detained are human-rights workers, activists and others who criticize the Uribe government. 

“How many more innocent people have to be arrested,” asked an August El Tiempo editorial, “before it is recognized that the costly and counter-productive strategy of mass arrests is a mistake and should be suspended?” The practice of mass and arbitrary arrests must stop – it is a black mark on the record of the Uribe government, and on its number-one supporter, the United States. The Colombian groups who authored this report deserve congratulations and thanks for making this information public.

(This entry was largely written by CIP Intern Robin Rahe.)

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July 25, 2005

With defenders like these...

Whenever Fernando Londoño publishes a column in Colombia’s newspapers, it’s always worth a thorough read. Not because we agree with a word he writes, nor because he’s a gifted essayist (which he is). It’s that nearly all of his columns offer an unflinching glimpse into what many members of Colombia’s governing class, and perhaps many members of the Bush administration, are actually thinking – even if they won’t say it in public.

Londoño is a man of the extreme right; his writings go so far as to reveal an occasional hint of paranoia. But he is not a fringe figure in Colombian politics. For the first year of Álvaro Uribe’s term in office, Fernando Londoño was Uribe’s minister of interior and justice – and thus one of the most powerful people in the country.

Londoño was driven out of office after fifteen months, consumed by scandals about shady investment deals and embarrassing misstatements (such as suggesting that Uribe, if denied a chance to run for re-election, would resign, call new elections, and run again). But he has not disappeared from public view. Almost every week, a column bearing his name appears in one of Colombia’s main newspapers.

Last Thursday’s column in El Tiempo was classic Londoño. If it is at all indicative of what many in the Uribe and Bush administrations really believe, the column shows how far Colombia has to go to become a democracy ruled by law, and how vital and necessary is the role of the country’s human-rights defenders.

Londoño begins by praising the sacrifice of the troops and police who marched in Colombia’s Independence Day parades on July 20. “Those men are not afraid of death,” he writes. But by the second paragraph it is plain that Londoño’s praise is merely a preamble to another attack on human-rights defenders. “While they do not fear hatred, bullets, bombs, or cowardly landmines, they have asked themselves more than once if anyone remembers them when they fall into the talons of political persecutions, infamous legal processes, falsified investigations, and vile calumnies.”

Londoño then offers a remarkable defense of military personnel facing prosecution in some high-profile recent human-rights cases.

“At some difficult moments,” concludes Londoño’s column, “there is no choice but to feed some prisoner to the hungry wolves. Nothing easier than to ask forgiveness and to condemn without law, before the sentence arrives. … For the beasts, a second lieutenant is sometimes enough. But they always come back for the rest.”

In Fernando Londoño’s world, the “beasts” – human-rights groups both here and in Colombia, whom he believes to be allied with Colombia’s guerrillas – are always on the prowl, trying to bring down the brave members of Colombia’s security forces.

He’s got it exactly wrong. By putting them up on a pedestal, and attacking all who would dare to criticize them, Londoño is actually doing harm to Colombia’s armed forces, and to the future health of Colombia’s democracy.

Though perhaps it seems counterintuitive, Colombia’s military is better served by those who criticize its violations, abuses and excesses. Its critics are doing the institution two enormous favors.

1. By calling for swift punishment of human rights abuses and corruption, they are helping to professionalize the military. When abuses happen – and they always do in war – they must be fairly investigated, judged and punished. That accountability is what distinguishes a democratic government from the irregular groups it is fighting. When Londoño opposes such accountability, he is holding the military to the same standards as the guerrillas and paramilitaries. By promoting this accountability – by seeking to punish those whose actions damage the military’s reputation – the so-called critics are in fact strengthening the institution.

2. By calling for more investment in civilian governance, development assistance, and humanitarian aid, critics support a strategy that would in fact make the military’s job easier. Colombia has been trying a mostly military approach for years, and has yielded nothing but a repeated pattern of military offensives that manage to hold on to territory only for as long as the troops remain present. Those of us who support a more balanced strategy want to guarantee that soldiers who risk their lives to re-take territory leave behind judges, doctors, teachers, roads and a viable economy – and thus have not risked their lives in vain.

Those like Londoño, who would blindly defend the military institution and uphold the present strategy, are doing a disservice to the Colombian military. By finding abusers blameless and portraying those who disagree as “wolves” and “beasts,” Londoño helps to cement in place a status quo that has failed. If Londoño and those who agree with him get their way, Colombia’s military will continue to be an institution with a severely blemished reputation, following a strategy that has yielded only marginal gains, measured either in territory or in enemy captures.

“We don’t understand why nobody defends the defenders,” writes Londoño. While he may seek to be the Colombian military’s defender, Londoño is in fact a poor ally.

Posted by isacson at 1:23 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

July 13, 2005

Just answer the question

Madrid, July 11. Here comes the setup. Near the end of a question-and-answer period after a long speech, President Uribe clearly wants to confront somebody from Amnesty International and make headlines back home.

Álvaro Uribe: They had told me there would be a question from Amnesty International.

Moderator: No, I summarized them in two or three questions [presented earlier].

Uribe: That was it? I thought that Amnesty International was going to be tougher. I would give a spokesman from Amnesty the right to ask again, because I felt that the questions were very soft.

The Spanish Amnesty rep asks two low-key, non-confrontational questions.

Amnesty International representative: Thank you, Mr. President. And yes, the summary was a bit over-summarized. There were two questions, one about the Justice and Peace law which you have answered; we do not agree, we believe that the law encourages impunity. And the second, which the moderator was unable to ask, was whether you are going to comply with the UN human rights recommendations, and the human rights action plan in your country.

Uribe: I want to ask you a question: I responded that there is no impunity in our law. Tell me the reasons why you consider that there is impunity. 

AI rep: Well, in the first place since the cease-fire was declared, at least 2,200 people have been documented as killed by paramilitaries. That is the first question. The second, I want to say that war crimes, crimes against humanity and torture are imprescriptible, and thus cannot be amnestied, whether committed by guerrillas or paramilitaries. 

Uribe: Regarding the second part, I ask that you correct your information. In the law there are no terms of exception for crimes against humanity, they are still imprescriptible. Second, there are no amnesties or pardons for crimes against humanity. And I call on you and all members of the institution of Amnesty International, to undertake the intellectual exercise and prepare yourselves to respond to the other sector, to the guerrillas, the ELN and the FARC, who demand total amnesty, total pardon, regardless of the seriousness of their crimes.

Three points about this response, which the Amnesty rep wasn't given a chance to follow up:

1. The Amnesty rep’s question made clear that he was talking about guerrillas and paramilitaries. Why, then, did Uribe insist on advising Amnesty International to “undergo an intellectual exercise” of imagining the same standards applying to guerrillas? Either Uribe wasn’t listening to the question, or he was determined to use this opportunity to imply, once again, that Amnesty International harbors a fondness for Colombia’s guerrillas.

2.Uribe never answered the charge, documented [PDF format] by the Colombian Commission of Jurists, that the paramilitaries have killed over 2,200 people since they declared a “cease-fire.”

3. Uribe is technically right that “there are no amnesties or pardons” in the new “Justice and Peace” law for crimes against humanity. Earlier in his speech, though, he admitted that “there are [maximum] sentences of between 5 to 8 years for those crimes. Yes, they are reduced: this is a cost of peace processes.” Uribe conveniently neglects to mention that, with credits for good behavior and time spent negotiating, paramilitary perpetrators of crimes against humanity could end up spending less than three years in confinement – and it is possible for them to serve these terms at “rural estates” instead of regular jails. This seems like a rather big point to leave out.

The President went on to respond at length to the question about the UN recommendations, going off on numerous tangents (“you believe wrongly that the Colombian Army is a ‘murderous’ force”; “when the High Commissioner visits me, she says ‘you’re doing well, it’s just that we’ve given you high standards’”), without referring specifically to any of the recommendations. He handed that off to Foreign Minister Carolina Barco, who assured him that most unmet recommendations “have to do with process, with procedures, or have budgetary requirements that have to be taken into account.”

This is inaccurate. “Special and urgent measures to defend indigenous communities at risk of extinction,” “full observance of the humanitarian principles of limitation, distinction, proportionality and protection of the civilian population,” or “confronting the problem of impunity … advancing in the examination of selected cases” are not “process” recommendations. But they are far from satisfied [PDF format].

The Colombian daily El Tiempo called this exchange an example of “hand-to-hand combat between President Uribe and Amnesty International.” The playing field was far from level, however. From the time the Amnesty rep began speaking to the next time the moderator intervened, this was the word count:

(This is the hundredth posting to the PC&B blog since we began it in October. We're pleased with the traffic it has received and we've found it to be a useful way to get ideas out in rapid, "rough draft" form. We look forward to our next 100 posts.)

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June 13, 2005

A Visit to San José de Apartadó

From May 29 to June 2, the Fellowship of Reconciliation led a delegation of NGO representatives and congressional staffers concerned about the peace community of San José de Apartadó, in the Urabá region of northern Colombia. While relatively small in population – approximately 1,000 people, the majority of them children – the San José peace community has suffered a disproportionate number of attacks because of its outspoken refusal to let armed actors into their community, as well as its criticism of the Colombian armed forces’ links with paramilitary groups in the region.

Most recently, on February 21, two community leaders, along with their families, were brutally killed; several witnesses allege that members of the Colombian Army’s 17th Brigade were responsible. Eight people, including three children, were killed.

The delegation was organized to visit the community and inquire about the state of the investigations. The case has gained a particularly high international profile because of the coincidence of the massacre with the annual State Department human-rights certification, required by law for the release of 12.5% of funds for assistance to the Colombian Armed Forces. The law requires that the State Department certify, among other things, that the Commander-General of the Armed Forces is suspending officials who have been credibly alleged to have committed human rights violations, the government is vigorously investigating and prosecuting such personnel. The February 21 massacre is one of four cases that have delayed the State Department certification since early March.

San Jose in the Eye of the Hurricane

The Peace Community of San José de Apartadó emerged as a response to the massive displacements generated by paramilitary violence in Urabá in the mid-1990s. Supported by a number of groups, including the Diocese of Apartadó, the Jesuit Center for Research and Grassroots Education (CINEP), and the Inter-Congregational Commission of Justice and Peace, the community declared itself a “peace community” on March 23, 1997. According to the rules they established, members must participate in communal work, may not directly participate in the war or carry arms, nor may they deliver information to either side. From the beginning, the community garnered significant international support, including accompaniment by Peace Brigades International, the Fellowship of Reconciliation, humanitarian agencies and European embassies.

The “urban center” of San José de Apartadó – really a few dirt streets lined with adobe houses – is located 12 kilometers from the municipal capital Apartadó, but is a world and almost an hour away on nearly impassable dirt roads. This region, at the foothills of the Serranía de Abibe overlooking the fertile banana fields of Urabá, has a long history as an extremely conflictive zone. A historic guerrilla presence, primarily the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) after the majority of the Popular Liberation Army (ELP) laid down their arms in 1991, was disputed by a paramilitary offensive in the mid-1990s that forced thousands to flee their lands. Today, the FARC and paramilitary forces still wrestle for control.

The paramilitary demobilizations, negotiated between paramilitary leaders and the Colombian government in neighboring Córdoba, have been a recent destabilizing force. Last November, 447 members of the most active paramilitary group in the region, the Bananero Bloc under the control of still-active paramilitary commander Hernán Hernández, demobilized in Turbo, a 45-minute drive from Apartadó. Paramilitary activity in the region has not diminished, however. The “Héroes del Tolová” Bloc, under the control of now-demobilized drug trafficker and paramilitary commander Diego Murillo (“Don Berna”) has moved into the area. The Americano Bloc, under the control of “El Alemán,” who is not participating in the demobilization talks, has also been active in the area. FARC presence in the region is reportedly also on the rise. Shifting political alliances and efforts to consolidate territorial control further endanger the civilian communities caught in the crossfire.

Since their founding as a peace community, San José residents have experienced little peace. Since 1997, over 130 community members have been killed, approximately 20 by the FARC and the rest by paramilitary groups allegedly working with military forces in the region. The community considers the paramilitary and military so closely linked that in their denuncias, the military and paramilitary are listed as a single force. In addition to these killings, the community has suffered from threats, violent incursions in which houses have been burned, theft of market goods and communal property, and the murders of public transportation drivers who travel the road to the community.

The community’s most controversial stand has been their refusal to allow members of the security forces into their community, considering them to be a party in the conflict through their direct collaboration with paramilitary forces, rather than a fulfilling a protective role. The community in turn has been continually criticized by Colombian military officials and politicians, who accuse it of sheltering the FARC. Álvaro Uribe, first in his position as governor of Antioquia (1996-2000) and now as president, has been one of the community’s fiercest critics. As governor, he argued that neutrality in the conflict meant directly supporting the Colombian armed forces, and according to community residents, offered to provide the community arms and training to become a Convivir, or rural security cooperative – structures that were later linked with the expansion of paramilitary activity in the region. As president, Uribe has repeated allegations that community members maintain links with the FARC.

Events of the massacre

News of the massacre first reached international accompaniers on Wednesday, February 23. The next day, more than one hundred community members, along with members of the FOR and PBI teams and staff from Concern America, walked more than seven hours to reach the shallow graves of Alonso Bolívar, his wife, six year old daughter and 18-month old son, and a neighbor. Later exhumations revealed that the bodies had been dismembered. Less than an hour’s walk away, the tortured and dismembered bodies of Luis Eduardo Guerra, his common-law wife and son were found alongside the river.

Authorities continue to dispute responsibility for the massacre. The community blames members of the 17th Brigade for the killings. Witnesses from the community reported military presence in the area, including soldiers threatening community members; Luis Eduardo and his family were last seen alive detained by uniformed soldiers on February 21. Witnesses from the community also report evidence linking two crime scenes. Members of the community that went to find the bodies saw soldiers tampering with evidence. A Colombian journalist and international observers saw military personnel erasing military-themed graffiti from houses. The Colombian government claims that the massacre was committed by the FARC, angered because of Luis Eduardo and Alonso’s intention to leave the peace community.

The massacre has had a devastating impact on the peace community because of the important leadership role played by Alonso Bolívar and especially Luis Eduardo. One of the founding members of the community, Luis Eduardo was the public face and community spokesman in meetings with the Colombian government and the international community. In November 2002, he traveled to the United States on a speaking tour, speaking against U.S. military aid for the Colombian armed forces at the School of the Americas Watch protest at Fort Benning. Alonso was active in organizing efforts to expand the peace-community presence into the surrounding sparsely populated rural areas through the establishment of humanitarian zones, where civilians could take refuge and seek protection during combat or attacks.

Certification and Investigation

Although community leaders have met with foreign embassies in Colombia, including the U.S. ambassador, and members of international delegations, they refuse to testify before the Fiscalía, Colombia’s Attorney General’s Office. Community leaders point to the Fiscalía’s failure to investigate the hundreds of attacks they have suffered in the past eight years. In particular, they highlight the failed efforts of a special investigative commission that was formed to investigate the June 8, 2000 massacre of six community members in La Unión (part of the larger peace community of San José), allegedly by members of the 17th Brigade. The commission gathered more than 100 witness testimonies, but no one was ever charged for the crimes and the case was closed. Witnesses in this and other cases who provided testimony to the Fiscalía faced severe reprisals, including threats and in some cases assassination. According to the Fiscalía, the testimony offered by witnesses had little value as evidence, consisting mainly of hearsay.

The community leaders have listed among their demands an evaluation commission to study why there has been no forward motion on these cases, particularly the 2000 La Unión massacre. Witnesses to the February 21 massacre will not testify until these conditions are met, including action on past cases. The Fiscalía claims to have advanced as much as possible in the collection of forensic and other physical evidence, and to have suffered attacks themselves during the course of the investigation. On March 2, a commission from the Fiscalía traveling to San José de Apartadó was attacked. Several investigators were wounded and one policeman killed.

On February 22, the day after the massacre, the U.S. State Department held a consultation with human rights groups in Washington, as required by the human-rights certification legislation at least 10 days before issuing the certification. Since then, they have not issued the certification, in part because of concern about the possible role of the Colombian military in the murders. According to U.S. Ambassador William Wood, they are “agonizing” over the decision.

The Police Post and Displacement

Controversy over the case has grown. Prior to the massacre, community leaders, among them Luis Eduardo, and the Colombian government, including the Vice President’s human rights program, had been meeting to improve the relationship between the community and the government, and to address community concerns. In part, these meetings were the result of recommendations from the Inter-American Court, a human rights body of the Organization of American States, which had ordered protection measures for the community and people working directly with them following previous attacks.

The government plan to locate a police post in the urban center of San José de Apartadó was among the most controversial issues during these meetings. According to the government, the police post was needed to guarantee security for both community members and the inhabitants of Apartadó, who feared FARC presence in the region. Community leaders rejected this plan, however, because it violated their stated refusal to allow armed people within their community, and because they feared it would make the community a military target of the FARC. They suggested that the police presence be located around the perimeter of the community and along the road from San Jose to Apartadó, where many of the most violent attacks against community members had occurred. They also repeatedly asked for an increased presence of civilian state officials in the community, including a representative of the national Defensoría del Pueblo (Human Rights Ombudsman).

Community leaders suspended their meetings with government representatives immediately following the massacre. Seven weeks later, the government established a police post in the center of town. In response to this violation of their principles, the entire community of San José de Apartadó abandoned their homes, and settled a few kilometers down the road on land previously donated to the community by the Dutch government.

According to the Colombian government, the police post is staffed by specially trained community police, who carry pistols rather than machine guns, and are carefully monitored by civilian oversight agencies. Community members claim that having such a post in the center of their town makes them a military target for the FARC, and fear devastating attacks such as that of Bojaya (when a FARC cylinder bomb hit a church and killed 119 people during combat with paramilitaries) and Toribío (when a FARC attack killed three people after the police had set up trenches and sandbags around local houses). They also claim that the police post is being used by members of the military. International accompaniers have seen soldiers from the 17th Brigade gathered with police outside the school. According to one of the UNHCR staff in the area, the police post is used to garrison counter-guerrilla forces at night.

In response to the police-post presence in San José de Apartadó, the community immediately displaced to a nearby farm known as La Holandita, in honor of the Dutch government who gave the land. As private property, the government cannot build a police post on the land.

In only a little more than two months, the community has made an impressive display of building new homes from the ground up. With some material support from Oxfam, and the collective labor of community members not just from San José but from surrounding hamlets as well, the community now includes a large open air kiosk for public meetings, and several long rows of attached single room houses. During our visit, men were busy digging trenches alongside the houses, while women washed clothes and young children in the small stream that winds between the houses and the main road to Apartadó.

Life in La Holandita, now also known as San Josesito, is extremely hard, however. The community lacks basic services, including water and sanitation. The stream is the only source of water, and the only bathroom for the entire community is a small black plastic hut perched downstream of the community. (International agencies have promised to supply collective latrines). The lack of electricity and phone service is both a nuisance and a serious danger, as the community remains cut off and in the dark. Apart from periodic visits from Doctors Without Borders, the community has no health services, and there are no schools.

The police post in San José was inaugurated with a circus sponsored by the police, and community members have reported that the mayor of Apartadó has offered hand-outs of supplies for families that have resettled in San José, whether from Apartadó and other towns, or returned there from San Josesito. Many families that originally displaced from San José have chosen to return out of concern for the health and education of their children. Those that remain in San Josesito face serious deprivations in their new homes, and worry over the fate of their abandoned property.

During our interview, Ambassador Wood concluded that “San José has not been a success story. People have died.” He went on, “It has been a source of political controversy and turmoil, more than any other random town of your choosing.”

On one level, this assessment is impossible to dispute: far too many people have died, and the experience of this small community that has attempted to carve out a space for non-violent existence in the midst of one of the most violent corners of Colombia has generated both controversy and turmoil. The Colombians and the international community that work the closest with the people of the peace community of San Jose, however, do not define their journey as a failure.

Of the numerous small peace communities that began with the support of the Diocese of Apartadó and other organizations eight years ago, San José is only one of two remaining peace communities. In villages and hamlets throughout Colombia, peasants face in silence and without support the same kinds of attacks by armed actors. Even as the current political and humanitarian crisis facing San José is one of the most intense in recent years, their collective survival, as a community dedicated to living a peaceful way in a violent land, and their refusal to remain silent, are testimony to their success.

Posted by Winifred Tate at 10:43 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 25, 2005

Uribe and the UN

Álvaro Uribe has picked fights with some unusual opponents: human-rights groups, former presidents, and former guerrillas turned politicians, among others. One of his most surprising and frequent targets, however, has been the United Nations – an organization known more for caution and diplomacy than for stepping on toes.

The UN, several of whose agencies have a significant presence in Colombia, can’t do anything to please Uribe. The world body consistently finds itself on the other side of the Colombian government in what Uribe’s High Commissioner for Peace, Luis Carlos Restrepo, called a “war of concepts.” In a recent speech at Colombia’s military university, Resrepo laid out several fronts in this “war.”

Debates about whether or not an internal armed conflict exists; whether a cease-fire must be a condition to begin conversations with illegal armed groups; whether zones may be temporarily demilitarized in order to hold dialogues; the way in which a humanitarian accord [to free hostages] can take place; whether citizens must collaborate with the security forces or the possibility that civilians may declare themselves neutral before the state’s military actions; the status of international facilitators who help us to find peaceful solutions to our problems of internal violence; these are all authentic points of division, upon which much of the fatherland’s future depends.

UN representatives in Colombia, who have no choice but to make judgments based on international agreements which Colombia has signed, differ from the Uribe government on nearly all of these questions.

Whether or not there is an armed conflict

The UN firmly rejects the notion, repeatedly promoted by Colombian government officials, that the country’s violence, while a terrorist threat, doesn’t qualify as an armed conflict. This is not a semantic trifle. If Colombia works under the assumption that no armed conflict exists, Protocol II of the Geneva Accords (dealing with rules of war for internal armed conflict) goes out the window. Standards would be lowered for humane treatment of prisoners, separation of civilians from combat, and similar issues. In addition, to dismiss the existence of an armed conflict is to reject any negotiation of reforms or political questions, as took place in El Salvador and Guatemala in the 1990s. If there is no armed conflict, terms of surrender are the only issues on the table.

Protocol II is quite clear, however, about what constitutes a “non-international armed conflict.” It specifies that it “shall not apply to situations of internal disturbances and tensions, such as riots, isolated and sporadic acts of violence and other acts of a similar nature.” Instead, it defines internal armed conflicts as those in which a government confronts “dissident armed forces or other organized armed groups which, under responsible command, exercise such control over a part of its territory as to enable them to carry out sustained and concerted military operations and to implement this Protocol.”

It’s pretty clear that this language applies to the Colombian situation. The protocol doesn’t specify that the “organized armed groups” must have a high approval rating in national polls, and it doesn’t disqualify groups that wantonly kill civilians. While their behavior is murderous and their political judgment is poor, the FARC undeniably have a clear chain of command and have amply demonstrated their ability to carry out “sustained and concerted military operations” throughout the country. Colombia’s violence, then, meets the definition of an armed conflict.

As a result, even though it enrages President Uribe, the UN continues to use the “C” word to describe Colombia’s situation of violence. The UN Development Program’s 2003 National Human Development Report for Colombia – a must-read document that was well-received by most but blasted by Uribe government officials – was entitled “The Conflict: A Blind Alley with an Exit.” The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights’ excellent report on the 2004 human rights situation, published in March 2005, uses the term “armed conflict” thirty-six times.

During her visit to Colombia two weeks ago, High Commissioner Louise Arbour said several times that it is important to recognize that an armed conflict exists, given the “seriousness” of the violence and its effect on the civilian population. She added that the current four-year mandate of the High Commissioner’s Bogotá field office, as signed by the Uribe government in 2002, is “to advise the Colombian authorities in the formulation and application of policies, programs and measures for the promotion and protection of human rights ‘in the context of the violence and armed conflict the country is experiencing.’ And that is what the office is doing.”

This view of whether Colombia’s violence is a “conflict” is shared by most of the international community. The U.S. government, in its eagerness to support Uribe, has been shakiest on this question; while Bush administration officials haven’t gone out and repeated Uribe’s view that no conflict exists, they have been careful not to use the words “conflict” or “war” when talking about Colombia.

Negotiations with guerrillas

April 30 saw the formal end of the “good offices” role played by two special representatives of the UN Secretary-General, first Jan Egeland and then James Lemoyne. They were given the usually frustrating task of facilitating dialogues between the Colombian government and guerrilla groups. While Lemoyne played a key role in keeping talks with the FARC alight during the latter stages of the 1998-2002 peace process, his role was diminished after those talks ended. His relations with President Uribe – who was elected by a populace tired of the soft line toward guerrillas epitomized by press photos of Lemoyne embracing FARC leaders – were consistently difficult.

Lemoyne’s job was basically impossible during the Uribe years. A “good offices” mission requires the facilitator to be able to meet with both parties to a conflict. Yet the Uribe government, which denies the existence of a conflict in the first place, was reluctant to see Lemoyne meeting with FARC leaders, which it felt would make the guerrillas appear to be legitimate counterparts to the government. (There was nonetheless at least one attempt, a 2003 plan to meet in Brazil, with the Brazilian government’s permission. The encounter never took place for lack of a guerrilla response.)

In September 2003, Uribe said flatly that “the Colombian state can’t keep being put on the same level as the violent ones,” adding that “more effectiveness is needed in the good offices work. They should talk less and work more.” Added Luis Carlos Restrepo, the government peace negotiator, “We believe that the first task of a UN functionary in a good offices role should be to encourage an immediate cease-fire. Otherwise these armed groups’ actions end up being legitimized. … The United Nations cannot seek to be neutral before Colombia’s terrorist groups in order to build bridges to them. … There can be no neutrality in the face of terrorism.”

Restrepo’s position is misguided, Augusto Ramírez Ocampo, a former foreign minister and UN official, told Cali’s El País. “He confuses neutrality with impartiality. … The trust that so many have for the UN is rooted in its impartiality.”

Negotiations with paramilitaries

Lemoyne also earned Uribe’s ire by refusing to participate in the Colombian government’s talks with paramilitary groups, insisting that the AUC should not be recognized as a political actor.

The UN has played no role in the ensuing negotiations, though the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights’ Bogotá office has done a superb job of explaining how proposals for dealing with serious AUC human-rights abusers fit within the scope of Colombia’s international human rights commitments.

Since the “Justice and Peace” law working its way through Colombia’s Congress is remarkably weak on crucial issues like impunity, reparations, and dismantlement of paramilitarism, this has required the High Commissioner’s office to point out the legislation’s inadequacy. During her visit, Louise Arbour was quite clear.

I share the concerns expressed by many others that the draft bill currently before Congress … needs to be strengthened with regard to the right to truth. Its current formulation provides no incentive to perpetrators who want to be eligible for benefits to come forward and fully disclose the crimes to which they have been party. Instead, the draft Bill induces them to disclose as little as possible as they do not lose any of the benefits granted if it later transpires that they have not disclosed the full extent of their criminal participation. In my view, the law should also provide better access to reparations to all victims.

Arbour also pointed out an uncomfortable fact about the talks that the Uribe government has consistently downplayed: the proliferation of violations of the paramilitaries’ declared cease-fire, which Uribe had required as a pre-condition for talks. She told El Tiempo, “I have been able to observe that the prerequisite of an absolute cessation of hostilities demanded by President Uribe has not been complied with as might have been expected, and there have been no concrete consequences for the AUC’s failure to comply.”

Contrast that strong statement with the five-paragraph discussion of cease-fire violations in the March quarterly report (Word [.doc] format) of the OAS “verification” mission for the negotiations (MAPP-OAS). “Although the AUCs [sic.] have not totally fulfilled the commitment to the cessation of hostilities,” the report reads, “in the areas where this force has territorial control there has been a marked decline in violations.” It then goes on to confirm only 31 cease-fire violations during the previous three months, and devotes much of the discussion to concerns that guerrillas may return to zones where AUC blocs have demobilized. The Colombian Commission of Jurists, meanwhile, has documented 1,899 in a twenty-month period [PDF format]; even if they are wrong about half of them – which is unlikely – it is clear that the OAS mission is either oblivious to, or deliberately de-emphasizing, a major problem. (Another branch of the OAS, the Inter-American Human Rights Commission, has been much more forthcoming about what it characterizes as “constant violations of the cease of hostilities declared by the AUC.”)

Separating civilians from the conflict

The UN has also diverged from the Uribe government on the crucial subject of how civilians should relate to the conflict. Uribe’s “Democratic Security” policy is predicated on the idea that all citizens must contribute to the military’s war effort, primarily by serving as the security forces’ eyes and ears as “informants” and “collaborators.” According to the Colombian Defense Ministry’s guiding Democratic Security and Defense Policy document (PDF format), “Security is … the result of a collective effort by the citizens: it is the responsibility of all. Active citizen participation, co-operation in the administration of justice and support for the authorities all play a major part.”

The UN reminds the Uribe government that, in a situation of conflict where civilians are subject to retribution from armed groups, the level of citizen involvement must be limited. The “principle of distinction,” a core element of international humanitarian law, states that efforts must be made to exclude civilians from combat, and that they must not be compelled to take part.

UN officials, particularly those in the office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, have expressed concerns that several of the Uribe government’s security policies may infringe on the principle of distinction. These include the creation of civilian informant networks; the passage of a constitutional amendment (later struck down by the Constitutional Court) allowing the military to detain, interrogate, and tap the phones of unarmed civilians; and the recent clampdown on “peace communities” that seek to prohibit entry to all armed groups, including the security forces.

Next target: the UN High Commissioner’s office?

It is likely that, as Colombia’s presidential (re)election year approaches, Uribe government attacks on the UN system may grow more shrill. While Colombian government representatives, after several days of negotiations last month in Geneva, ultimately accepted a critical statement from the UN Human Rights Commission, we can expect the High Commissioner for Human Rights’ Bogotá field office to become a principal target.

The office, founded in 1996 at the strong urging of Colombia’s human rights community, has played a crucial role as an interlocutor with the Colombian government, a provider of advice, and a fair and balanced documentor of the country’s human rights situation. Three skilled, measured and careful diplomats have served as its directors: Almudena Mazarrasa of Spain, and two Swedes, Anders Kompass and Michael Frühling.

The office’s annual reports on Colombia’s human rights situation, which acknowledge problems with the security forces including continued collusion with paramilitaries, have often angered the Uribe government. Though the launch of this year’s report was calmer, some officials still complained in Colombia’s press that the UN office has not given them enough credit for what they feel they have achieved.

The High Commissioner’s office’s mandate must be periodically renewed, and expires next in August 2006, when President Uribe leaves office. While the Colombian government doesn’t plan to close down the office as it did with James Lemoyne’s mission, Vice-President Francisco Santos, the official who holds the human-rights portfolio in the Colombian government, has indicated that he wants to “re-evaluate” its role.

“The intention seems to be to lower the office’s profile, so that its work becomes more that of technically assisting the government and less monitoring [of the human-rights situation],” according to El Tiempo. “Santos alleges that improvements [in human rights] have been substantial, and that the UN must accommodate itself to the new prevailing winds.”

The UN agencies in Colombia are unlikely to bend to the prevailing winds, however, since their positions are based on some rather unambiguous guidelines in international law, and since their professional, experienced staff will continue to call them as they see them. This means that President Uribe, who is not known for handling criticism well from any quarter, is likely to continue to keep picking fights with the UN system.

Posted by isacson at 2:17 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 1, 2005

San José de Apartadó: Jesús Abad's disturbing account

After the February 21-22 massacre in the San José de Apartadó Peace Community, members of the community formed a commission to travel to the massacre zone to find the bodies and determine what happened. Community members believe that the Colombian Army, perhaps jointly with paramilitaries, committed the killing. The Colombian authorities insist that it was the FARC. President Uribe, charming as ever, has gone so far as to accuse the community’s leaders – who refuse entry to all armed groups, including the military and the guerrillas – of helping and protecting the FARC.

Jesús Abad is a respected Colombian photojournalist who accompanied the peace community’s commission to the massacre site. He published a record of his trip last weekend in El Tiempo. His account is highly disturbing, and appears to point both to military involvement in the massacre and a continued pattern of close military-paramilitary collaboration in the region.

Here are some excerpts, translated into English.

 

Four days in search of the bodies from the San José de Apartadó Peace Community massacre

El Tiempo (Colombia)
March 25, 2005
By Jesus Abad Colorado

I cannot remain silent. I spent four days in the San Jose de Apartadó Peace Community, where I documented, in photographs, the search for the region’s leaders and their murdered relatives.

Thursday, February 24h

On this night I receive an e-mail bearing the tragic news that seven members of the Peace Community had been murdered. The statement blames members of the Army for the deaths and announces the departure of a commission for the hamlet of La Resbalosa, nine hours from San José, to search for the bodies.

Since 1997, the year I got to know this town in the Antioquia part of Urabá, after the declaration of the Peace Community, I have seen the growth of the Monument to Memory, a memorial built of stones with the names of murdered residents etched into them. These have surpassed 150.

Friday, February 25

At 7:15 PM, we hear the noise of two helicopters leaving the mountain. We figure that they have finished an exhumation. Minutes later, we come across the commission that had departed at daybreak. They were about 80 people who, on foot and by horse, had stopped at the farm of Alfonso Bolívar Tuberquia, one of the leaders of the peace community who was killed, and in whose cacao fields were found graves with mutilated corpses.

Several community leaders inform us that five bodies have been found. “There were bullet holes in the kitchen, some words written in firewood ash and bloodstains on the floor. The bodies were in two graves, a few meters from the house in the midst of the cacao grove. There we found Alfonso Bolívar, his wife Sandra Milena Muñoz, and their children, Santiago (20 months) and Natalia Andrea (6 years). We also found the body of Alejandro Perez, who had worked picking cacao with Alfonso.”

Minutes later, another commission appears with news that they have found the site with the rest of the bodies. Luis Eduardo, Deiner, and Beyanira.

One of the women from the community, who says she was born in the zone, tells us that “until a decade ago, we were living, some 200 families, in all of the Mulatos Canyon. There were community stores, a school, and a health center, [but now] there is nothing but ruins. So many armed incursions and farmers’ deaths have emptied out our land. One year ago, there were close to 90 families [but] after an army-paramilitary incursion there were only 16 left. Now, who knows how many will stay.”

Other farmers point to the Mulatos Canyon and speak of Nueva Antioquia in Turbo municipality. “From there, the paramilitaries have organized many incursions and they coordinate them with the army. With the demobilization of the Bananero Bloc [of the AUC, in November 2004] and the arrival of the police in Nueva Antioquia nearby, other groups and encampments have been set up further into the rural zone, toward the zone that borders Mulatos, in a place known as Rodoxali.”

Saturday, February 26 – at the massacre site in Mulatos

At 5:15 PM, a commission of soldiers and police arrive.

The campesinos tell me that a soldier wearing no identification took away the machete that had been lying near Beyanira’s boots. The soldier cleans it and sharpens it against the stones. When he realizes that I am watching him, he turns his back. When the lawyer and the community representative return, they are told about it, and they go to speak with the captain. They ask him to tell his superior in the army “because this is a manipulation of evidence.” When we come back to where the campesinos are, they are even more fearful. “The soldier who grabbed the machete passed by us and without shame or pity for what we’ve been through, gestured and told us that this machete was the one they cut their heads off with.”

The representative of the community and the lawyer tell the official in charge, and his army counterpart, that the next day “the community will form two commissions, one will return to this same site to pick up the bodies, and the other will go to the hamlet of El Barro, nothing is known about what happened to the families there, even though they live so nearby.” The army officer responds that the army is in that hamlet and there are no families there. The community insists.

Sunday, February 27

It is 6:00 AM. The first commission departs with the lawyer for the site where the bodies of Luis Eduardo, Deiner, and Beyanira were found. The fourteen people leaving for El Barro ask me to accompany them. We follow the river downstream for twenty minutes. The procession stops for a moment. There is a roadblock with three men in uniform. They ask the campesinos what they are doing in this area. They explain. One soldier has an insignia on his arm that says “Battalion 33 Cacique Lutaima.” The other two have nothing. They ask who I am and why I am with this group. I tell them about my documentary work and the search for several families in this sector whose whereabouts are unknown after the events of Monday the 21st or Tuesday the 22nd. The soldier speaks with the other two and then goes a short distance away, where there are other uniformed men. He comes back and allows us to pass. He warns that a few meters further is a well where several soldiers are bathing. We pass and see them washing their clothes.

Just two blocks further are three wood houses with zinc roofs. On the first is graffiti written with ash from burned wood. “Guerrillas must go, your worst nightmare, El Cacique, says so”; above that can be read “The scorpion BCG 33.” There is nobody in the house. The people who live there are in the other two dwellings, very close to the first. Two girls throw corn to the hens and a pig. When they see the commission arrive bearing the flag of the community, they come out and greet us. An old man, seated in an armchair, closes a Bible and smiles. He calls two women who are in the kitchen. Behind the commission arrive three uniformed men who keep tabs on us from between the houses. Another man, wearing no shirt and a hat, enters from the bedroom and greets us very timidly. He is Rigo (name changed), say the campesinos.

The youngest woman nurses a baby and the grandmother speaks in a low voice. She wants to know when we arrived in the zone and if we came for them. She thanks God that this nightmare is going to end. “It began on Monday when they arrived and did not let us leave. They had detained Rigo, who lives nearby. They didn’t allow him even to go to his house which is across the way, on the other hill. His wife and children are all alone. They interrogated and threatened me, because they say that I am a nurse for the guerrillas. With them was Melaza, who is a paramilitary. This is the third time he has come to my house with the army. He said he is going to do away with everyone in the peace community because they are a bunch of guerrilla sons of bitches, and that if he has to, he’ll kill the foreigners too [the U.S. and European citizens from Peace Brigades International and Fellowship of Reconciliation who accompany the community]. He said that we are in a zone that belongs to them [the paramilitaries]. They have threatened to cut my daughters’ heads off when they go to the well for water. They have dug several holes looking for arms.”

One of the members of the commission says that they have been in the zone since Friday. First in La Resbalosa and later near Cantarrana, 30 minutes away. They say that several bodies still need to be taken away, those of Luis Eduardo, Deiner and Beyanira. The woman’s eyes fill with tears. She takes our hands and speaks more quietly: “so is it true that they killed them? Why did they do that? I told Luis Eduardo not to go that morning to the cacao fields to pick beans. We knew that they were carrying out a military operation. I did everything but beg him not to go to San José. … He didn’t heed me because he wasn’t afraid, and he needed the money to pay for his son’s schooling. He left that morning and was supposed to come back, but did not. These people [the soldiers] have not let us do anything but suffer since noon on Monday (February 21). We’ve been passing the time praying until today, when you came. They hardly let us pick a bit of corn to eat. On Wednesday, they told us that they had killed some guerrillas by the river, that one was with his woman and his child. And I said to them, “Could it be that you killed Luis Eduardo and his son? They are my family. Beyanira is his compañera. The soldiers changed their attitude and said no, the paramilitaries killed him.”

At 10:30 AM, the families are ready for their displacement. There is much sadness, but also joy. The uniformed men have erased the graffiti from the first house.

Posted by isacson at 6:16 PM | Comments (1)

March 3, 2005

San José de Apartadó and the U.S. human rights certification

Did the Colombian military massacre eight people last week in Urabá, including a founder of the San José de Apartadó peace community? If not, who did? And why is Colombia's Defense Ministry trying to blame the crime on the community members themselves?

Nobody knows – but until we have a better idea, the State Department must not certify the Colombian military’s human-rights performance, a step that the law requires in order to free up 25 percent of U.S. military aid.

Statements about the massacre

Here is what witnesses claim happened.

Luis Eduardo Guerra was a leader of the San José de Apartadó Peace Community in Apartadó, Antioquia, part of the Urabá region near Panama. Founded in March 1997, the Peace Community was set up by citizens who sought to separate themselves from the conflict by refusing entry to all armed groups – guerrillas, paramilitaries and the state security forces. (In this sense it bears a passing resemblance to the Popular Resistance Communities – CPRs – that sought to provide safe havens from Guatemala’s civil war.)

Excluding armed groups has not been easy: about 130 of the community’s members have been killed by the FARC, the paramilitaries, and the security forces. Even though the community has suffered guerrilla attacks, the armed forces consider its members to be subversive sympathizers. Constant threats, followed by a grenade explosion that killed his wife, forced community leader Luis Guerra to leave the town for two years. According to Peace Brigades International, none of these murders, threats or attacks has ever been solved or punished.

Unlike the Guatemalan CPRs, the San José community has sought and received accompaniment from outside groups, who have embraced it as a model of non-violent resistance to war. Peace Brigades and the Fellowship of Reconciliation have maintained a volunteer presence for years. Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Massachusetts) has visited the remote town. Leaders like Luis Guerra have toured the United States and Europe, educating grassroots groups. The Peace Community has received provisional protection from the Inter-American Court of Human Rights.

Just over a week ago, between February 21 and 22, a group of armed men detained Luis Guerra, his son, his partner and another person near the Mulatos river, several miles from the San José town center.

The two army brigades in the area, both of them signaled by different witnesses, have less-than-stellar human rights records.

  • The Carepa, Antioqua-based 17th Brigade gained notoriety for its role in the brutal paramilitary takeover of Urabá, which had long been a guerrilla-held banana and cattle zone, in the mid-1990s. Gen. Rito Alejo del Río, the head of the 17th Brigade 1996-97, became known on Colombia’s right as “the pacifier of Urabá.” Several witnesses – including Col. Carlos Alfonso Velásquez, Gen. Alejo’s chief of staff – testified that the general maintained contact with paramilitaries and ordered troops to cooperate with them while carrying out an antiguerrilla offensive, “Operation Genesis.” Gen. Alejo was kicked out of the army in 1999. (Shortly afterward, Álvaro Uribe, who had been governor of Antioquia at the time Gen. Alejo ran the 17th Brigade, was the keynote speaker at a Bogotá dinner held in the general’s honor.)

  • The 11th Brigade, meanwhile, is based in the city of Montería, the capital of Córdoba department, which has basically been an independent paramilitary republic since the rise of Carlos Castaño’s United Self-Defense Forces of Córdoba and Urabá (ACCU) a decade ago. The Brigade’s area of operations comprises the Santa Fe de Ralito demilitarized zone where negotiations with paramilitary groups are taking place. One of Montería’s most prominent citizens is Salvatore Mancuso. Except for a 2001 raid on Mancuso’s wife’s house – which caused such a stir that it helped force Carlos Castaño to resign from the AUC’s top leadership – the 11th Brigade has somehow proven unable to find or combat any paramilitaries. (Read the State Department’s human rights certifications CIP has posted [(1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6)], in which U.S. diplomats must endeavor to find examples of military action against paramilitaries; Córdoba never comes up in the context of an Army action.) Unable to find paramilitaries in Córdoba? Call it the “Mr. Magoo” brigade.

To the best of our knowledge, neither brigade receives any U.S. assistance, though some individuals may be admitted to training courses.

According to an eyewitness who was detained and escaped, the armed men identified themselves as members of the Colombian Army’s 11th Brigade, which is based in Montería, Córdoba (San José lies near the border between Antioquia and Córdoba). However, other witnesses indicated that the army’s 17th Brigade – based in nearby Carepa, Antioquia – had been carrying out operations in the Mulatos area. According to Amnesty International, “Soldiers in the area have reportedly told local inhabitants that if the killings had not been reported, they would have killed more civilians. The soldiers have allegedly referred to the eight victims as ‘dead guerrillas’ (‘puro guerrillero muerto’).”

The detainees were taken to the farm of Alfonso Bolívar Tuberquia, whom Peace Brigades identifies as “a member of the Peace Council of the hamlet of Mulatos.” Neither the detainees, their families, nor Tuberquia was ever seen again. An investigative commission that traveled to the zone on the 25th found recently-dug graves with the bodies of five adults and three children, aged two, six and eleven. Among the bodies was that of Luis Eduardo Guerra, showing signs of torture.

While we do not know for sure who is responsible, the accounts of witnesses and accompaniment groups (PBI, FOR, Corporación Jurídica Libertad, Justicia y Paz) point to the military, as does the community’s own statement.

Colombia’s military, however, angrily denies any involvement in the massacre, stating that none of its units were in the zone at the time. The Defense Ministry’s latest declaration emphatically makes this point, and then makes some dangerous accusations of its own. Citing “a series of suspicious coincidences,” the document suggests that the Peace Community itself, acting in league with the FARC, had the eight people killed.

The ministry asks how a communiqué from the Peace Community dated February 23rd could have detailed information about the condition of bodies that were not exhumed until the 25th. (We have not seen the communiqué in question.) But the document goes further with the following allegations:

Witnesses exist who affirm that Mr. Luis Eduardo Guerra, who was murdered, had expressed his intention to leave the Apartadó community.

In addition, Mr. Alejandro Pérez, alias ‘Cristo de Palo,’ the head of guerrilla militias of the Cristalina region, who was also killed, had expressed his desire to enter the government’s demobilization and reinsertion program and had begun the process.

Meanwhile Mr. Alfonso Bolívar Tuberquia was being accused by the FARC of having served as an informant to troops in an earlier case in which a dangerous bandit named ‘Macho Rusio,’ the head of militias for the FARC’s Fifth Front, was killed.

The armed forces apparently continue to hold to the thesis that the Peace Community is some sort of guerrilla concentration camp from which citizens are forbidden to leave – an allegation voiced by Gen. Jorge Enrique Mora, at the time the head of Colombia’s army, in August 2003. In May 2004, President Uribe fueled these allegations by warning foreigners accompanying the community that they could be jailed or deported for “obstructing justice.”

Unfortunately, the Colombian military’s initial denials of involvement in abuses cannot always be taken at face value. Last August, when military personnel killed three union organizers in Saravena, Arauca, the Defense Ministry insisted that the victims had fired on troops who had found them meeting with ELN members, and hotly denied NGOs’ claims that the civilians were murdered. The killings, however, complicated the U.S. government’s plans: within a few weeks, the State Department had hoped to free up military aid by certifying to Congress that the armed forces’ human-rights record was improving. Under this urgent pressure, the cover-up ended, the ministry’s story changed, soldiers were arrested, and investigations began.

In that case, the much-derided human-rights conditions proved useful in stopping an abuse from going uninvestigated and unpunished. This legal tool could again make a big difference in the San José de Apartadó case.

Last week, before details of the massacre emerged, the State Department held its consultation with human-rights groups for its next certification. (The law requires State to consult with “internationally recognized human rights groups” at least ten days before making its twice-yearly decision to certify that Colombia is doing more to cooperate with human rights investigators, suspend and dismiss violators, and fight paramilitaries. Each certification frees up 12.5 percent of military aid destined for Colombia.)

During last week’s hour-and-a-half-long meeting, at which CIP was present, State Department officials indicated that they had yet to decide whether they could certify any improvements. Now that the consultation has taken place, however, the next certification can happen at any time.

Though it is entirely possible that the military did not commit last week’s massacre, it is impossible even to contemplate certifying military aid to Colombia until we know more. Civilian Colombian government authorities must first carry out a thorough investigation that takes into account testimony from witnesses and community members. If this investigation finds that soldiers took part, arrests and prosecutions must follow.

For now, any certification should remain on hold: it may offer the best hope for clearing up what actually happened last week in San José de Apartadó.

Posted by isacson at 12:04 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

February 6, 2005

Why is this man crying?

The man in the picture is retired general Jaime Uscátegui, one of the highest-ranking Colombian military officers ever to face indictment and a criminal trial (as opposed to a dropped investigation or a dismissal) for a human rights case. Uscátegui could get up to 40 years in jail if a Bogotá civilian court finds that he knew about, and did nothing to prevent, a grisly July 1997 paramilitary massacre in the hamlet of Mapiripán, deep inside FARC-controlled territory in south-central Colombia.

In this image from nearly two weeks ago, Uscátegui has just been asked for the name of the paramilitary leader who ordered the massacre. The general tearfully responds, “I’d rather my children have a father in jail than a father in a tomb.” Later, he indicated that the massacre’s mastermind was among three paramilitary leaders who, amid much controversy, addressed Colombia’s congress in July. Everyone understood this to mean Salvatore Mancuso, the AUC leader who has been a prominent presence in the current negotiations with the Colombian government, and who is accused of planning the massacre from a ranch in San Pedro de Urabá, hundreds of miles away from Mapiripán in Colombia’s far northwest.

That Mancuso may have coordinated Mapiripán is not exactly earth-shaking news. Far more interesting – especially to those of us whose government has donated billions to Colombia’s security forces – is the nature of the military-paramilitary cooperation that made it possible.

Uscátegui claims to know a lot about that relationship. In July 2003 recordings that were revealed last March in the Colombian newsmagazine Cambio, Uscátegui threatened to tell all unless the high command helps to keep him out of jail.

If I go to court, it will be a much more serious case than number 8,000 [the term used for the mid-90s narco-money scandal that almost took down President Ernesto Samper]. In fact, it will be more serious than everything that has happened in Colombia. With this issue [the Mapiripán massacre] I discovered what is really happening. It is very serious, very grave, because it proves an allegation that we have denied for all our lives, the one about the military’s links with paramilitaries. … It seems that in the attorney-general’s office, in the inspector-general’s office, in the presidency, they know that terrible things happened there, very grave things for the army and for the country. And that these things could even bring down Plan Colombia.

In the tapes, Uscátegui mentions a computer recovered from the nearest military base to Mapiripán. On the hard drive, with U.S. decryption assistance, was found a wide assortment of paramilitary documents, from the pamphlets the local fighters handed out to their internal rules and bylaws.

So far, however, Uscátegui has hardly followed through on his threat. His trial has revealed little that is new about military-paramilitary collaboration, either in general or as it played out in Mapiripán.

The massacre

The Mapiripán massacre, which began on July 15, 1997 and lasted for several days, was one of the worst of the hundreds of massacres Colombia has suffered during the past twenty years. It took place in a market town of about 1,000 people, a port on the Guaviare River. Mapiripán was a key link in the coca economy of a longtime guerrilla-held zone, a remote area on the border between Meta and Guaviare departments. (Mapiripán, incidentally, is now in the middle of the zone where the “Plan Patriota” military offensive is taking place). Though the town was less than 2 hours’ travel from significant-sized military bases, the paramilitaries were able to take several days to murder thirty civilians (some estimates go as high as 49), closing all outside access, shuttering all businesses, and methodically combing through the town with a list of people to kill.

Mapiripán was more than just another example of wanton slaughter: it was also a big strategic step for the paramilitaries. Until then, the right-wing militias were a phenomenon largely confined to northern Colombia (Antioquia, Córdoba, the Magdalena Medio, a bloody mid-1990s foray into Urabá). This was their first move in southern Colombia, in an area of vast jungles and plains whose population, mostly made up of recent arrivals, had grown accustomed to the uncontested dominion of the FARC guerrillas. The paramilitaries would soon be all over southern Colombia, facing no military resistance as they came to contest lucrative coca-growing zones with the FARC.

To get there, the killers had to charter two planes from northwestern Colombia, halfway across the country. The planes, a Russian aircraft and a DC-3 loaded with about 20 people each, landed in the nearest airport, San José del Guaviare. I was at that airport in January 1998, six months after the massacre, and there are two things worth mentioning. First, everyone who gets off the plane has to sign in with the police; yet for some reason the arrival of two planeloads of armed, camouflage-clad fighters didn’t appear in the police registers. Second, the airport is located alongside a counternarcotics police base which, at the time, was the only place in Colombia where the U.S.-funded fumigation program, with its spray planes and DynCorp pilots, was operating.

(These personnel were vaguely aware that something was up on the day of the massacre, according to a 1998 letter [PDF format] from the State Department to Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont): “The Embassy has reported that U.S. personnel involved in counternarcotics programs at San Jose remember seeing an unusual number of Army personnel at the airport on the day in question.”)

The fighters were met outside San José by about 180 more recently recruited local fighters, split up in groups and traveled by both land and downriver. The fighters arrived in Mapiripán and set about their work for days. Mapiripán’s judge made anguished calls to the nearest military battalion, back in San José del Guaviare. The colonel in charge, Hernán Orozco, says that he had no troops at his disposal but called and sent memoranda to his superior, General Uscátegui, whose 7th brigade was responsible for Meta and Guaviare. The calls for help appear to have died in Uscátegui’s office.

The Barrancón Special Forces base

But there’s more, says investigative reporter Ignacio Gómez, who published a rigorously researched investigation in El Espectador, with assistance from the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, in 2000. The paramilitaries who traveled by boat would have had to pass the Colombian Army Special Forces base and training school at Barrancón, built with U.S. assistance in 1996 on an island in the Guaviare River, just downstream from San José del Guaviare and its airport.

According to Uscátegui’s testimony of two weeks ago, “This base [Barrancón] was a fortress. It was located seven kilometers [4 miles or so] from San José del Guaviare. How is it possible that the paramilitaries, in their passage along the Guaviare River, could pass through the [riverine] checkpoint at the base’s entrance without being detected by the highly trained professional soldiers stationed there, who had been given such powerful weaponry?”

The paramilitaries’ passage by the Barrancón checkpoints would not have occurred at a routine moment. From May to July 1997, the base had some foreign guests: members of the U.S. Army’s 7th Special Forces Group who were carrying out “military planning” training with the Colombian Army’s 2nd Mobile Brigade. (It is possible that U.S. personnel left shortly before, and returned shortly after, the period in which the massacre took place.) This brigade was headed at the time by Col. Lino Sánchez, who is currently serving a jail sentence for abetting the Mapiripán massacre.

Col. Sánchez was new to his post, having just assumed command of the 2nd Mobile Brigade in May 1997, the same month the U.S. Special Forces team arrived in Barrancón. His immediate predecessor was Carlos Alberto Ospina. By the time the Mapiripán massacre happened, Ospina was out of the area, heading the 4th Brigade in Medellín, capital of the department of Antioquia, where Álvaro Uribe was serving as governor. In October 1997, troops under Ospina’s command helped make possible another of the worst mass killings in recent Colombian history, the paramilitary massacre at El Aro in northern Antioquia. Gen. Ospina is now the commander-in-chief of Colombia’s armed forces.

The fate of whistleblowers

What happened to Col. Orozco, the battalion commander who relayed his concerns about Mapiripán to Gen. Uscátegui? He was sentenced to thirty-eight months in prison for “failing to insist” that a superior officer act. “They convicted me for informing on a general, and by extension, offending all generals,” he told the New York Times. His career ruined, he now lives in Miami.

Orozco's case is an object lesson for would-be whistleblowers in the Colombian military. A similar fate befell Col. Carlos Alfonso Velásquez, who testified against Gen. Rito Alejo del Río, the head of the Colombian Army’s 17th Brigade in Urabá in 1996-97. A region near the Panamanian border, Urabá at the time was suffering a brutal campaign of paramilitary massacres and displacement that effectively moved the strategic zone from guerrilla to paramilitary control. Gen. Alejo – known on Colombia’s right as “the pacifier of Urabá” – had his headquarters in the town of Carepa in northern Antioquia. At the time – again – the governor of Antioquia was Álvaro Uribe. Col. Velásquez, who served as Gen. Alejo’s chief of staff, testified that his boss maintained contact with paramilitaries and ordered troops to cooperate with them. Gen. Alejo was kicked out of the army in 1999; Álvaro Uribe was keynote speaker at a dinner in his honor shortly afterward. Col. Velásquez saw his career come to a swift end as well; he is now a professor at the Opus Dei-run Universidad de la Sabana north of Bogotá. Being a human-rights whistleblower in the Colombian military has little to recommend it.

As should be apparent, the Mapiripán story is one with a meandering plot and a lot of tangents. The massacre and its aftermath seem to be a limitless source of hints and shreds of information about the linkages that existed, and may still exist, between elements of the Colombian military, paramilitaries, politicians and other powerful figures. (It also offers inspiring examples of the police and military figures who believed in their institutions’ mission and who tried to break these linkages, at times at the cost of their careers.) What we still don’t know about these sinister relationships, however, could fill a very compelling book – a book, perhaps, that would strike at the very foundations of U.S. policy toward Colombia.

Can a "Truth, Justice and Reparations" bill reveal the rest of the iceberg?

Seven and a half years after Mapiripán, Gen. Uscátegui’s testimony is interesting, and offers more tantalizing clues. But it does not live up to the promise of his earlier threat to lay bare the entire arrangement that created and sustained paramilitarism in Colombia. The general still leaves us with a strong sense that we’ve barely scratched the surface.

We’re probably not going to learn much more from trials in which retired generals, afraid for their lives, are driven to tears. But there may be another way, as part of an overall effort to dismantle paramilitarism in the context of the AUC negotiations.

Many Colombians, including much of the human-rights community, are frustrated that so much remains unknown or unproven about who are complicit in paramilitarism's rise, growth and persistence. On the other hand, many of the Colombian military’s backers are outraged that officers like Uscátegui and Lino Sánchez are facing 40 years in jail for facilitating crimes like Mapiripán, while the actual planners and trigger-pullers – the paramilitaries themselves – may end up serving no more than ten years, more likely five if they fully confess their crimes. (The main competing versions of an eventual "Truth, Justice and Reparations" law to govern the paramilitary demobilizations – the Uribe government’s bill and legislation introduced by a multiparty group of congresspeople led by Sen. Rafael Pardo – would require no more than ten years in prison for crimes against humanity.)

A possible solution may be in the Pardo legislation. According to Congressman Luis Fernando Velasco, a backer of the bill cited in Semana magazine, the draft law “contemplates that accomplices or those who somehow collaborated with the paramilitaries’ actions can benefit from the prerogatives that the law would offer [such as reduced sentences], as long as they tell the truth and admit their collaboration with these crimes.”

Since we haven’t yet seen the exact language of the Pardo bill, which was formally introduced in Congress late last week, it is unclear how explicitly this offer to the paramilitaries’ outside “accomplices and collaborators” is spelled out. However, if combined with (a) a requirement that demobilizing paramilitaries reveal what they know about their support and financing networks, and (b) a real prosecutorial effort to go after the individuals whose names emerge from these testimonies, a provision like this would do a great deal to identify those – whether in the military, the business and landowning elite, or in the drug underworld – who made common cause with AUC leaders, backed massacres and displacements, and thought they would suffer no consequences for doing so. We might know, for instance, whether Mapiripán was the work of a few bad apples or a strategy vetted and approved by powerful people in Urabá, at Barrancón, in Medellín, or in Bogotá.

And that, I fear, is why the Uribe government will oppose it vigorously. Better to have a couple of generals in tears, after all, than hundreds – or even thousands – of people identified as patrons of paramilitary terrorism.

Posted by isacson at 10:45 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

January 25, 2005

Does Colombia pass the "town square test"?

President Bush has read a book. That book is The Case for Democracy: The Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny and Terror, published late last year by Natan Sharansky, a former Soviet refusenik turned conservative Israeli cabinet minister. According to the Washington Post, Bush has since “been recommending the book to nearly everyone he sees, from friends to journalists to foreign leaders, telling CNN last week that ‘this is a book that … summarizes how I feel.’”

I haven’t read Sharansky’s book, but I’m intrigued by one of the ideas at its heart, what the author calls the “town square test” for democracy. Condoleezza Rice summed it up in her remarks at last week’s Senate confirmation hearing:

“The world should really apply what Natan Sharansky called the town square test. If a person cannot walk into the middle of the town square and express his or her views without fear of arrest, imprisonment and physical harm, then that person is living in a fear society. And we cannot rest until every person living in a fear society has finally won their freedom.”

This leads us to the obvious question: does Colombia pass the “town square test?”

Well, you can probably go into most of Colombia’s town squares and express your views, as long as they are not considered too pro-guerrilla (or too pro-government, if the town square is in a guerrilla-controlled zone). And you are unlikely to be arrested for what you say, though a member of the Uribe government’s informant network could consider your words evidence enough to have you arrested (you will probably be subsequently released for lack of evidence, though the local paramilitaries still might consider your arrest to be evidence enough to target you).

If you’re not a lone individual in a town square, but instead express your views as a member of an association or an author of a publication, your risks are much higher.

Speaking out in Colombia is very risky. So risky, in fact, that Colombia cannot be said to pass Sharansky’s “town square test.”

Sharansky does seem to offer an exception to his “test.” Again, I haven’t read the book, but the Publisher’s Weekly review indicates that the author disagrees with “liberals who he says fail to distinguish between flawed democracies that struggle to implement human rights and authoritarian or totalitarian states that flout human rights as a matter of course.”

Is Colombia, then, a flawed democracy struggling to implement human rights? The best way to measure whether a state is “struggling to implement human rights” is to determine how assiduously that state seeks to investigate and punish abuses.

Suffice it to say that there has been little or no progress on any of the abuses in the list above. Worse, as indicated in an earlier posting, State Department certification reports indicate a high level of impunity for abuses attributed to the military, with no improvement in recent years. As of September 2004, only 21 enlisted men and 10 officers were under indictment for any human rights-related crimes; of the officers, only two are above the rank of major. Meanwhile, the attorney-general’s office under Luis Camilo Osorio has come under constant fire from the human-rights community for dismissing effective human rights prosecutors and stalling cases against military officers.

Colombia fails Sharansky’s test. If the Bush administration is truly to take the “town square” precept seriously, then, it will have to make some significant adjustments to its policy toward Colombia. The State Department will have to be more forceful in its implementation of the human rights conditions in existing law that require Colombia to show real progress toward curbing impunity for abusers. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights’ recommendations for Colombia should move from the periphery to the core of our dealings with Colombia. U.S. policymakers must take a more critical distance from the Uribe regime where human rights are concerned. And those few who dare to speak out in Colombia’s town squares – the human-rights defenders and peace activists, the peaceful reformers, the labor advocates, the journalists and academics who express unpopular views – deserve the support and accompaniment of the U.S. government.

Posted by isacson at 3:30 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

January 7, 2005

No progress on impunity

It’s undeniable that Colombian military involvement in human rights abuses remains a problem. The Colombian Commission of Jurists estimates that of civilians killed by “sociopolitical violence” in 2003, over 7 percent were killed by members of the security forces, a higher percentage than in the previous few years. Meanwhile, indirect responsibility for paramilitary violations continues. Internationally-recognized human rights groups, the UN, the OAS and the State Department have all issued reports in the past year noting that, in the State Department’s words, “some members of the security forces cooperated with illegal paramilitaries.”

Violations and excesses inevitably happen in conflict situations. The best way to reduce their frequency is twofold. First, improve training, ensuring that respect for the laws of war is integrated in all instruction and doctrine. Second, ensure that all crimes are fully investigated and prosecuted; a credible likelihood of punishment is a strong disincentive to abuse.

Colombia, in part with U.S. assistance, has made much progress on human-rights training. But progress on the second measure – ending impunity – has been almost nonexistent. Colombian military personnel are very rarely investigated, tried or punished for violating human rights. And this has not improved.

Though most observers agree that impunity is rampant, it’s difficult to measure. The best source right now is probably the State Department’s series of regular human-rights certification reports to Congress. Twice every year, the foreign aid bill freezes up some military aid until the State Department certifies that Colombia is meeting several human-rights criteria, including the investigation and prosecution of military abuses. The certifications come with a memorandum justifying the decision to give the Colombian military a green light. While these memoranda are not posted to the State Department’s website, we usually (but not always) manage to get a copy and post it to our site.

The last three memoranda in our possession are from September 2004, July 2003 and September 2002. In these documents, State Department investigators try to compile the most comprehensive possible listing of military personnel under investigation or under indictment for human rights crimes. (They have a strong incentive to show the largest possible number of personnel under investigation, which would demonstrate that the Colombian authorities are making a good-faith effort to end impunity.)

The memoranda show, however, that criminal investigations and prosecutions for human rights crimes are exceedingly rare. Despite the documented frequency of abuses and collusion with paramilitaries, the number of military personnel under investigation or indictment is remarkably small.

The three reports list a cumulative total of 33 military personnel under investigation (24 enlisted men and nine officers), of which 17 (14 enlisted men and 3 officers) still had cases active in the September 2004 certification report. Of the officers, only one is above the rank of major, and his case is no longer active.

The three reports list 36 military personnel under indictment (24 enlisted men and twelve officers), of which 31 (21 enlisted men and 10 officers) still had cases active in the September 2004 certification report. Of the officers, only two are above the rank of major; one is a retired general (Humberto Uscátegui, tied to the 1997 Mapiripán massacre), and the other was a major promoted to lieutenant colonel while in preventive detention.

Most are army personnel; two of the enlisted men under investigation are marines (a branch of Colombia’s navy) and three of those under indictment (2 officers, 1 enlisted man) are members of the air force.

The three reports note a cumulative total of 96 military personnel facing disciplinary investigation or punishment (like being fined, suspended or fired) for involvement in human-rights abuses. These are not criminal investigations, they are “internal-affairs” cases investigated by the Colombian government’s inspector-general (Procuraduría). As the State memoranda do not name names in this category, this figure probably includes some double and triple-counting.

The unfortunate conclusion we can draw from the low numbers of criminal investigations and indictments is that Colombian military personnel have little to fear from their judicial system. For a variety of reasons – judicial inefficiency, intimidation of judges and witnesses, fear of denouncing crimes – impunity for military abusers is still virtually assured. The Colombian government can claim no progress here.

 

Data from the State Department memoranda follow.

Those in preventive detention pending investigation, not yet formally charged:

(If not listed in the September 2004 report, the date of the last report in which the name appears is in parentheses.)

Enlisted men:

  1. Army Soldier Marco Tulio Calderon Cegua
  2. Army Soldier Domingo Calderon Adan
  3. Army Soldier Jairo Humberto Gonzalez Cuellar
  4. Army Soldier Oscar Saúl Tuta Hernández Suárez
  5. Army Soldier Jhon Alejandro Hernández Suárez
  6. Army Soldier Uriel Olaya Grajales
  7. Army Soldier Willinton Romana Tello (7/03)
  8. Army Soldier Jose Misael Valero Santana
  9. Army Second Corporal Juan Alberto Diaz Lince (7/03)
  10. Army Second Sergeant Sandro Fernando Barrero (9/02)
  11. Army Second Sergeant Humberto Blandon Vargas (9/02)
  12. Marine Sergeant Euclides Bosa Mendoza (9/02)
  13. Army Sergeant John Fredy Cardenas Trejos Echeverria
  14. Army Sergeant Juan Carlos Castillo Rios
  15. Army Sergeant Wilson Gonzalez Echeverria
  16. Army Second Sergeant Roiber Humberto Gutierrez Montero
  17. Army Sergeant Martin Elias Humanez Silva
  18. Army First Sergeant Marciano Martinez Perdomo (7/03)
  19. Army Sergeant Manuel Antonio Mirando Mejia (7/03)
  20. Army Sergeant Gustavo Moreno Martinez
  21. Army Second Sergeant Waldo Quintero Cuervo (7/03)
  22. Army Sergeant Fredy Baldomero Rodriguez Cardenas
  23. Marine Sergeant Ruben Dario Rojas Bolivar (9/02)
  24. Army Sergeant Luis Reina Sanchez (7/03)

Officers:

  1. Army Lieutenant Jhon Fredy Cadavid Acevedo
  2. Army Lieutenant Oscar Yesid Cortes Martinez (9/02)
  3. Army Lieutenant Juan Pablo Ordoñez Cañon
  4. Army Captain Yoguin Pavon Martinez (7/03)
  5. Army Major Javier Alberto Carreno Vargas
  6. Army Major Alvaro Cortes Murillo (7/03)
  7. Army Major Jaime Esguerra Santos (9/02)
  8. Army Major Cesar Alonso Maldonado Vidales (7/03) (escaped)
  9. Army Lieutenant Colonel Silvio Augusto Vallego Vargas (7/03)

 

Those under indictment: 

(If not listed in the September 2004 report, the date of the last report in which the name appears is in parentheses.)

Enlisted men:

  1. Air Force Technician Mario Hernandez Acosta
  2. Army Soldier Luis Humberto Arteaga Garcia (escaped)
  3. Army Soldier Carlos Alberto Buila Bolaños
  4. Army Soldier Sergio Fernandez Romero
  5. Army Soldier Juan de Jesus Garcia Walteros
  6. Army Soldier Orbien Giraldo Sanabria
  7. Army Soldier Arnoldo Gutierrez Barrios
  8. Army Soldier Raul Emilio Lizcano Ortiz
  9. Army Soldier Carlos Alberto Perez Pallares
  10. Army Soldier Luis Salomon Puerto Acero
  11. Army Soldier Juan Carlos Vasquez
  12. Army Professional Soldier Fary Zuniga Otero
  13. Army First Corporal Floriberto Amado Celis (7/03)
  14. Army Second Corporal Pedro Barrera Cipagauta
  15. Army Second Corporal Jorge Bedoya Ayala
  16. Army Corporal Rodrigo Esteban Benavides Ospina
  17. Army Second Corporal Wilson Caviedes Saenz
  18. Army Corporal Edgar Enrique Marquez Martinez
  19. Army Corporal Arturo Alexander Pinedo Rivadeneira
  20. Army First Corporal Julio Hernando Rios (7/03)
  21. Army Sergeant Edgar Garcia Garzon
  22. Army Sergeant Hugo Moreno Pena
  23. Army Sergeant Juan Bautista Uribe Figueroa (7/03)
  24. Army Second Sergeant Arquimedes Vargas Coca

Officers:

  1. Army Sub-Lieutenant Nelson Jose Granados Gonzalez (7/03)
  2. Army Lieutenant Gustavo Adolfo Gutierrez Barragan
  3. Air Force Lieutenant Johan Jimenez Valencia
  4. Army Lieutenant Mihaly Istvan Jurko Vasquez
  5. Army Captain Edgar Mauricio Arbelaez Sanchez
  6. Army Captain Jaime Quintero Valencia
  7. Army Captain Gustavo Rengifo Moreno
  8. Air Force Captain Cesar Romero Pradilla
  9. Army Captain Jorge Alexander Sanchez Castro
  10. Army Major Jesus Mahecha Mahecha (7/03)
  11. Army Lieutenant Colonel Orlando Hernando Pulido Rojas (listed as a major in 7/03 report)
  12. Army General Jaime Humberto Uscategui (retired)

Posted by isacson at 9:23 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

November 5, 2004

Take down this web page now

Imagine a U.S. government agency, in a public document posted to its website, describing CIP as a pro-terrorist organization, even linking us to a particular terrorist group. Imagine that the document presents no evidence to back up this outrageous claim, and no effort is made to investigate or prosecute us - but the charge remains out there, in a widely distributed document bearing official government letterhead.

It sounds preposterous, of course. But not in Colombia.

Pay a visit to this page on the website of the Dirección Nacional de Estupefacientes (DNE), the office of the Colombian government’s drug czar. (The DNE, by the way, is a recipient of U.S. government assistance.) Scroll down to "Asuntos Jurídicos Relevantes," where you'll see the José Alvear Restrepo Lawyer's Collective – one of the country's most reputable human rights groups, which in this case had helped to file an injunction against herbicide fumigations – described in an offhand way as "traditional defenders of the FARC."

CIP knows and has worked alongside many members of the "Colectivo de Abogados" for years. Yes, it is a group that does not avoid controversy (what use is a human-rights group that avoids controversy?) and frequently pursues human-rights abusers in the Colombian government. But we can say unequivocally that its members have no sympathies whatsoever for guerrillas or any other generators of violence in Colombia.

As serious as it would be for a U.S. government agency to characterize domestic activists as terrorist sympathizers, it's even more dangerous in Colombia, where the mere suspicion of supporting guerrillas is often tantamount to a death sentence. Seeing such suspicions confirmed in an official document is a direct threat to the safety of the group's members.

We thank colleagues at the Washington Office on Latin America for pointing out this irresponsible and dangerous language. We join them in urgently calling on Colombia's DNE and its director, retired Col. Luis Alfonso Plazas Vega (who himself has faced past allegations of human-rights abuse), to remove this very offensive phrase from its website.

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October 24, 2004

An alarming report from the CCJ

The Colombian Commission of Jurists (CCJ), one of the country's oldest and most respected human-rights groups, has just released a very thorough report on how Colombia's human-rights situation has evolved since Álvaro Uribe assumed office in August 2002. "Colombia: Against International Human Rights Recommendations" represents the Colombian human rights community's best response yet to the Uribe government's barrage of official statistics trumpeting the success of its hard-line security policies.

The report begins with a long epigraph of excerpts from "The Emperor's New Clothes," the Hans Christian Andersen fable about a leader whose followers vigorously support his utter denial of easily observed reality. It then asks:

What would happen if the people in the government charged with analyzing the results of the current security policy, put into practice between 2002 and 2004, find that it has been a failure? Probably, nothing would happen. The President and his government's publicity specialists have transmitted, day after day, such a strong message of victory that it would be difficult for a simple low-level technocrat, basing himself on his humble observations of the facts of reality, to dare to contradict the avalanche of official, effective information.

The report goes on to do just that. It scores several direct hits on the Uribe government's claims of miraculous success in the fight against illegal armed groups and the protection of human rights. The Bogotá government has backed these claims by playing a rather one-sided "numbers game," with endless press releases and PowerPoint presentations showing declines in everything from murders to pipeline bombings. (Look no further than the website of the vice-president's human rights program - www.derechoshumanos.gov.co - which offers little about fighting impunity or breaking links with paramilitaries but offers an annoying Flash presentation and reams of statistics. The U.S. government, eager to sell Plan Colombia, happily repeats these statistics in PowerPoint slides distributed by the U.S. Southern Command (like this PDF file) and in officials' congressional hearing testimonies (like this one).) The CCJ's report now makes the numbers game a two-sided affair, casting serious doubt on many of the Colombian government's claims.

For those who don't read Spanish or are unwilling to wade through the report's 114 pages and 360 footnotes, here are what we consider to be its top ten findings.

  1. In 2003, 6,335 people – over 17 per day – were killed by what the CCJ calls "sociopolitical violence." (Corresponding numbers for past years were 6,639 in 2000, 6,641 in 2001, and 7,803 in 2002.) Of those, 3,905 were not killed in combat situations – they were killed "in their homes, in the street or in their workplaces." 2,430 were killed during combat, 115 of them civilians caught in the crossfire. 7.77 percent were killed directly by the security forces, 69.34 percent were killed by paramilitaries, and 22.89 percent were killed by guerrillas. Killings of civilians by the state security forces increased from an average of 120 between 1998 and 2002 to 184 in 2003.

  2. The CCJ claims to have "solid information" about recent military-paramilitary collaboration in the departments (provinces) of Antioquia, Arauca, Bolívar, Chocó, Córdoba, Cundinamarca, Meta, Norte de Santander, Santander, Sucre, Tolima and Valle del Cauca. These include "cases of joint actions between members of the security forces and paramilitary groups; cases in which members of the security forces present themselves before the civilian population as paramilitaries; [and] cases in which paramilitary groups circulate unbothered in showy vehicles (including stolen ones), carrying kidnap victims without the security forces doing anything to prevent it."

  3. The paramilitaries have failed to respect the cease-fire that Álvaro Uribe required of them as a pre-condition for holding peace talks. Between December 1, 2002 – when the AUC cease-fire was declared – and September 10, 2004, the paramilitaries killed or disappeared at least 1,895 civilians "in actions not directly related to the armed conflict."

  4. Killings and disappearances of human-rights defenders have increased. Thirty-three human-rights activists were murdered or disappeared between August 7, 2002 and August 7, 2004. This is more than the 29 victims between August 2000 and August 2002, the 21 victims between August 1998 and August 2000, and the 24 victims between August 1996 and August 1998.

  5. At least 340 people were tortured between July 2002 and June 2003, a significant increase over the 242 recorded during the previous twelve months. Of the 175 cases where those responsible could be identified, state actors tortured 52 people, paramilitaries tortured 123 people, and guerrillas tortured ten.

  6. About 207,607 people were displaced from their homes during 2003, a sharp drop from the
    more than 400,000 displaced the previous year. That downward trend appears to be proving short-lived, though; citing figures from the non-governmental organization CODHES, the CCJ notes that 130,346 people were displaced during the first half of 2004, a 33.5 percent increase over the last six months of 2003.

  7. As of August 2004, the Uribe government claims to have signed up 2.5 million Colombians (of a population of 44 million) as "cooperators" willing to provide intelligence about armed-group activity to the security forces. As of April 2003, 7,011 had signed up as "informants," individuals paid to provide intelligence on a regular basis. The CCJ report notes that "the current government forgets the principle according to which, under the democratic and social rule of law, the authorities exist to protect people (article 2 of the Colombian Constitution) and not the people to protect the state. … Programs like the networks of informants and cooperators, and that of the "peasant soldiers," lead to new forms of paramilitarism and ignore the fundamental principle of distinction between combatants and non-combatants."

  8. Arbitrary detentions have increased dramatically. The CCJ counted 4,362 cases of people rounded up without probable cause between July 2002 and June 2003. In the six previous years - from July 1996 to June 2002 combined – the CCJ only counted 2,869 arbitrary detentions. This sharp rise owes to the Uribe government's policy of carrying out mass arrests.

  9. The report notes a dramatic change in the performance of the Colombian attorney-general's office (Fiscalía) since the 2001 accession of Luis Camilo Osorio as the nation's head prosecutor. "First, the attorney-general has sought to diminish the importance of human rights violations committed by members of the security forces. Second, the attorney-general has unduly interfered, in detriment to the victims' rights, with ongoing investigations. Since the beginning of his term the attorney-general has criticized the fact that his office's Human Rights Unit focused on cases against members of the security forces. Finally, the attorney-general's office has participated directly, through acts of commission, in serious human-rights violations," particularly cases connected to the above-mentioned mass arrests. (The damage Osorio has done to his office's human-rights protection effort was the subject of a late 2002 Human Rights Watch report.)

  10. The CCJ repeats statistics about worsening poverty and inequality compiled by the government's comptroller-general's office (Contraloría), among others. 64.2 percent of Colombians now live below the poverty line of roughly $3 per day; 31 percent live below the extreme poverty line of roughly $2 per day. The rural poverty rate is an incredible 85.3 percent. 0.4 percent of landholders control 61.2 percent of registered land. Colombia's Gini coefficient (a number between 0 and 1, where 0 means everyone in the country has the same income and 1 means one person earns all the income and everyone else gets nothing) is 0.562, making Colombia one of the most unequal countries in the world.

The CCJ report takes into account some - though not all - of the observations about Colombian human rights groups' documentation methods raised by a well-publicized October 2003 (PDF format) cable from U.S. Embassy Bogotá (which criticized the Colombian groups' "selective emphasis on bad news"). While the CCJ provides ample clarity about its sources and methods, differing definitions of some terms – such as "sociopolitical violence" or "arbitrary detention" – do explain some of the divergence from the Colombian government's numbers.

In all, though, the CCJ report makes a strong contribution to the debate over the effectiveness of Álvaro Uribe's security policies. It is very highly recommended.

It's too bad, though, that the CCJ apparently hasn't mastered news cycles. The announcement of the new report arrived in our e-mail inboxes late on Friday afternoon. As anyone who follows the U.S. government's disclosures of inconvenient information knows, late Friday – after reporters' deadlines and before Saturday, the day in which newspapers gain their lowest circulation of the week – is the best time to avoid, not attract, publicity.

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October 17, 2004

When arbitrary arrests become death sentences

A Google search for English-language pages with the name "Alfredo Correa de Andreis" returned nothing from any media source, just a few alerts from international solidarity groups. That Correa's case has slipped below the international radar is good news for Alvaro Uribe and his government's controversial security policies, which deserve far more scrutiny than they are getting.

A month ago today, on September 17, two hitmen on a motorcycle killed Correa and his bodyguard, Edward Ochoa, in Barranquilla, Correa's hometown and Colombia's fourth-largest city. A sociologist, agronomist and a professor at Barranquilla's Simon Bolivar University, the 52-year-old Correa was known as an outspoken advocate of human rights, organized labor and improved conditions for the poor. One of his last works was a study, funded in part by USAID, of displaced populations in Barranquilla. He described himself a "militant of the democratic [that is, nonviolent] left."

Most observers suspect that the dominant paramilitary figure in the area, Rodrigo Tovar Pupo or "Jorge 40," ordered the killing. Right now, "Jorge 40" is in the Santa Fe de Ralito demilitarized zone, sitting at a table with government peace negotiators; while talks proceed, any outstanding orders for his arrest have been suspended.

The chain of events that led to Correa's death may in fact have been triggered by the Uribe government's policy of aggressively and often indiscriminately arresting suspected guerrilla collaborators. On June 17, dozens of heavily armed police arrested Correa on suspicion of serving clandestinely as a FARC ideologist named "Comandante Eulogio." Prof. Correa became one of thousands of academics, labor leaders, human-rights activists and other left-of-center figures across Colombia who have been arrested on similar charges since the Uribe government began implementing its "Democratic Security" policy in 2002.

In July, as has occurred in the majority of such cases, the attorney-general's office (Fiscalia) freed Correa for lack of evidence. The case against Correa depended on three informants, all of them former guerrillas, now part of the network of 1.9 million "eyes and ears" the Uribe government has put together with promises of payment for useful information. Their testimonies fell apart easily; El Espectador reported that several passages were in fact repeated verbatim in each of the witnesses' statements.

Though found innocent, Correa was far from safe. The professor's arrest had left him "señalado" (marked) in a country where hundreds of civilians are killed each year because someone suspects them of being guerilla auxiliaries. Though convicted of no crime, the mere suspicion – strongly ratified by the Colombian government's decision to arrest him – was proof enough for the paramilitaries. "They didn't kill Alfredo on Friday [September 17th]," Correa's sister, Magda, told El Espectador. "They really killed him when they arrested him. That was the day they placed the tombstone over him."

The case "reveals a perverse formula," wrote Daniel Samper, an El Tiempo columnist and the former president's brother. "The paid snitch denounces without proof, the prosecutor arrests in a frightening fashion, the justice system absolves and the hitman proceeds."

According to the Permanent Assembly of Civil Society for Peace and the Committee in Solidarity with Political Prisoners, two of Colombia's most outspoken non-governmental groups, 4,846 civilians were arrested on charges of "rebellion" in 2003; as of early this year, 3,750 had been found innocent and freed.

Some of the arrests have occurred massively, in roundups of citizens in conflictive zones like Arauca, eastern Antioquia, Cauca, Caquetá, and Sucre. In a November 2002 report from Saravena, Arauca (where U.S. troops have been training Colombian personnel to guard an oil pipeline), Miami Herald reporter Frances Robles described a mass detention.

[T]he Colombian army rounded up hundreds of people before dawn one recent morning. Those who didn't have any pending warrants or cloaked neighbors pointing an accusing finger went home with a black stamp. Of the 500 or so who waited hours in the Saravena town stadium, 85 went to jail. … [M]ore than half were later released.

Other arrests have taken place on a less massive, "case by case" basis, including the controversial jailings of several well-known local activists. Jose Luis Serna Alzate, the bishop of Líbano, Tolima, has faced a long struggle to clear his name. Luz Perly Córdoba of the Arauca Campesino Association has been imprisoned since February 2004. Barranquilla-based Presbyterian Church worker Mauricio Avilez has been imprisoned since June (he shared a cell with Correa). Barranquilla folksinger Yamil Cure was arrested in September and released late last week. Amaury Padilla, who served as a peace advisor to the government of Bolívar department, is now in exile after being detained and freed. Three prominent Cartagena residents – writer Rogelio España, union leader Román Torres and former local government official Rafael Palencia – have received threats after being arrested and freed. Most of those picked up in the Saravena mass arrests fear to return to their homes even though they have been found "innocent."

The Colombian newsmagazine Semana reported on many of these cases in a recent story. As this and other sources indicate, several former detainees, like Correa, have been subsequently murdered. Six people in Bolívar have been killed this year after being arrested and released, Semana reports, citing local Public Ministry authorities. Marco Antonio Rodríguez, picked up and freed after a mass arrest in Cajamarca, Tolima, was killed shortly afterward in November 2003. Ana Teresa Yarce, a local women's group leader, was arrested during an October 2002 government offensive against guerrilla militias in Medellín's Comuna 13 slum, only to be freed ten days later; suspected paramilitaries killed her earlier this month.

It is remarkable how little attention the mass arrest policy has received overseas, though the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights did express concerns in its last annual report on Colombia. (British EU diplomat Chris Patten also pointed out the mass arrests' counterproductive nature during an early 2004 trip to Colombia, recalling that “in Northern Ireland in the 1970s we committed one of our worst errors by massively detaining people suspected of ties to the IRA. The reaction to this abuse was greater support for the other side.”)

The lack of outside attention owes partly to the fact that it's all perfectly legal, according to Colombian law; technically, none of the detainees is denied due process. Most everyone is arrested and promptly charged with a crime – though often they are paraded before reporters, their pictures published in the media as suspected guerrilla collaborators.

If Colombia's guilty-until-proven-innocent system finds that no crime occurred, the accused is released. But common sense dictates that the practice should not be so widespread when the accusation is so serious, and the potential consequences so great for the accused. While Colombia's judicial system frequently frees those wrongly accused, it cannot protect them from some powerful figures on Colombia's right wing, who may see the arrest as evidence enough to target them. Even without this risk, the possibility is too great that an unscrupulous government or prosecutor can use such accusations to jail political enemies, who must then prove their innocence.

"This is a nightmare, incomparable as a violation of all my rights as a citizen," Correa wrote to President Uribe from jail last June. "I trust that you will not only read my letter but, from a humane perspective, will adopt a course of fairness so that nobody else in this country suffers similarly."

It is inexcusable that Professor Correa's circumstances, and the Uribe government's practice of rounding up suspected guerrilla collaborators on flimsy evidence, are so poorly known outside Colombia. We are certain that most members of the U.S. Congress who claim to support Alvaro Uribe's security policies have no idea this is happening. (Who can blame them; they are usually getting their information from a U.S. government that has proven reluctant to criticize President Uribe's policies, other than some aspects of the paramilitary peace talks).

Those of us outside Colombia need to be following this more closely. The practice of mass arrests threatens to close the political space on which Colombian democracy depends, and it should bear consequences for our governments' relations with Bogotá.

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