June 11, 2007

Semana: "Through the Eyes of the FARC"

Yesterday's edition of the Colombian newsweekly Semana ran a brilliant analysis by the magazine's political editor, María Alejandra Villamizar, of last week's guerrilla prisoner releases. It's the best attempt I've seen in a while to answer a question that Colombia analysts get asked all the time: "What can the FARC possibly be thinking?"

Here is an English translation.

Through the Eyes of the FARC

Maria Alejandra Villamizar, of Semana, takes the hypothetical exercise of imagining how the FARC sees the government's recent decisions.

The foreigners who came to the Caguán [demilitarized zone] at the time of the [1998-2002] peace process always asked the FARC about their ideological tendency: Are you Marxist? Leninist? Trotskyist? Guevarist? And to all these known leftist currents, the answer was negative. "What are you, then?" the curious visitors insisted. "We are Farianistas [FARC-ists]," replied the FARC.

This dialogue, which was repeated time and time again, was mentioned as a nice anecdote in their stories about these visits. Another aspect of "this very particular South American guerrilla group," commented the foreigners quite correctly. Neither they nor anyone in the world had registered the historical existence of Farianismo as an ideological tendency.

But that is the key to understanding how they see the world, and how the FARC see themselves. The country has very rarely stopped to examine that other eye watching us.

It is common for Colombians to ask themselves: "why don't the FARC do this or that?" There is nothing harder to understand. The FARC never do what, from the outside, it is believed that they they will do, much less what it is wanted that they do. It is not that they do not have a logic - they do have one. The logic of war. Ignore it if you wish, but doing so will neither change them nor cause them to disappear.

The Farianismo of which they speak is a very singular form of thinking and acting that they have built over the years, and it has to do mainly with the need to survive. In the physical, political and military sense. To survive as an organization and as a group of people who share a condition. To survive the world's changes, the nation's scorn, the military campaigns, the difficulties of life in the jungle.

Today, when it is not known what will result from the liberation of more than 180 prisoners said to be from the FARC - along with Rodrigo Granda, one of the highest-ranking guerrillas captured in recent years - the questions about the FARC's actions begin to gather. Are they going to release their kidnap victims? Are they going to start negotiating?

In the first place - they've already said so - they are not going to release the kidnap victims in response to Uribe's move.

Because they are obstinate, persistent and stubborn - but mainly because they are not going to give the President any triumph of their own accord. It is necessary to understand that the FARC see themselves as the counterbalance to the country's power center, as the "other" state, and therefore, they feel that the treatment that the President gives them is not the one that they deserve. "The FARC must be respected," they will say. As a result, they are not going to move immediately, unless they see a window to play the game their way.

In addition, in the ranks of the insurgents, moves like these [Uribe's prisoner release] are interpreted as extreme reactions that prove them right, showing that the FARC is the indispensable factor when making high policy decisions, and that without them it will not be possible to solve the country's problems. And that is why they insist on a demilitarized zone, that is what will satisfy them.

In their encampments, they listen to the news, they see television reports and they read magazines and newspapers. In addition, they have satellite Internet. They are up-to-date on what is happening, and everything in the news deserves their analysis. Some of these are long and interminable; others are quick and forceful. But they always have the same conclusion: that everything justifies "the continuation of their struggle."

The "para-politics" process, the corruption scandals, the U.S. refusals of the FTA and Plan Colombia, the marches against transfers [of education funds], the paramilitaries' confessions, the sentences against the government in international courts - these are not just news for them, they are justifications for their Farianismo. "We see from here, how the wolves tear each other apart," Manuel Marulanda once said about the country he saw in the media.

Kidnapping is cruel. They know it, but they don't see themselves as guilty. Even though they hold the keys to the chains with which they bind the hostages, the FARC insist on the idea of a prisoner exchange because they see it as a way to press to the state to recognize them, and that is why they believe that these people - through bad luck - are fated to emulate the FARC "martyrs" in the jails.

They are narcotics traffickers. They respond, "no." They are - and up to their necks - but they deny it because they do not believe they are in the same conditions as "pure," Pablo Escobar-style narcotraffickers. They believe they have the legitimate right to do it because they control the territories of coca cultivation, because coca allows the farmers to eat, and because, they say, if politicians and even presidents have benefitted from the narcos, why can't they take advantage of the gains from the business in order to finance their war? That is their logic.

They are in no hurry. Their plans have been long-term, and they have convinced themselves that while they will not win their war anytime soon, they are getting there. One day the country will rise, and with the revolt of the masses the revolution will prevail. And if they are to be defeated militarily, it will be in all-out combat. This is how the FARC thinks. If they - or at least their older leaders - did not, it would be easier to defeat them.

Marulanda knew that a period of political drought was coming when Uribe arrived. "The oligarchy does not learn," he told his men after hearing the announcements of bombings and military attacks. And immediately he predicted, "With Uribe there will be nothing, it will be necessary to wait four years." Almost five have gone, and there has been nothing. But the balance has begun to move. It is difficult to know how they are militarily, but it is evident that the Secretariat, which is like its heart, is intact and ready to play. They haven't won yet, and their future is uncertain. But they are old dogs who still know how to bark.

Posted by isacson at 8:55 AM | Comments (3)

June 1, 2007

4 possible explanations for Uribe's guerrilla-release proposal

About two weeks ago, Colombian President Álvaro Uribe announced his intention to free hundreds of FARC members from Colombian jails. This proposal is now moving very quickly.

Government representatives have met with dozens or hundreds of FARC members in jails throughout the country. Space is being cleared in the prison in Chiquinquirá, Boyacá, to concentrate guerrillas about to be freed. A presidential decree is forthcoming. It is strongly rumored that one of the first guerrillas to be freed will be Rodrigo Granda, the so-called "foreign minister of the FARC" whom Colombian authorities abducted from Caracas, Venezuela in late 2004. Uribe has set June 7 as the target date for starting the prisoner-release process.

Why is this happening? I wish I could provide an explanation, but I'm as confused as anyone. President Uribe merely cites "reasons of state" that will be revealed soon. "At an opportune moment, within not too many days, the country will know all of that," Uribe cryptically told reporters on Wednesday. "I'm only waiting for the right date and opportunity for the country to know everything."

After combing Colombia's press and having a number of conversations, I've heard four theories that might explain what is going on.

  1. Uribe is truly convinced that the mass prisoner release will help move forward a "prisoner exchange" deal in which the FARC releases some or all of the 55 hostages they are holding. The guerrillas have been demanding the demilitarization of two small municipalities (counties) in order to negotiate such an exchange. Uribe could be sending a message that he'd rather just let the prisoners go now than hand the FARC a political victory by agreeing to their troop pullout demand. The FARC has already rejected Uribe's move, and relatives of their hostages worry that the government may in fact be delaying their loved ones' release. So in this scenario, Uribe's initiative is guided mainly by wishful thinking.

    • An El Tiempo editorial Wednesday remarked, "It is worth being skeptical about the possibility that the FARC will respond to a unilateral liberation of guerrillas with a unilateral liberation of hostages. It is more likely that they would consider it to be a provocation, among other reasons because the freed guerrillas would not be able to return to the jungle, and would have to embark on a reinsertion process that the FARC has repeatedly rejected. ... Not to mention that taking guerrillas out of jail to carry out supposed "peace processes" could lead the security forces and the judicial system to ask themselves, "we captured and sentenced them for this?"
  1. The prisoner release is part of a secret deal in the works to release some or all of the FARC hostages, and we're all about to get a pleasant surprise. Liberal Party Senator Piedad Córdoba said yesterday that the release of the FARC's most prominent hostage, former presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt, is "imminent" - an assertion that the Colombian government quickly denied. Betancourt is a dual citizen of Colombia and France; Nicolas Sarkozy, France's new president, hinted yesterday that something may be happening, adding that all involved must be "patient, vigilant, and fast."

    • In a very lucid column in yesterday's El Tiempo, Liberal Party politician and former Defense Minister Rafael Pardo wrote, "Either this is part of a secret agreement that will deserve applause when it is known, or - if not that - it could be the biggest stupidity ever committed with the FARC."
    • "What is behind this proposal? I don't know," says Bishop Luis Augusto Castro, president of Colombia's Episcopal Conference. "But I would be pleased if it were part of an accord that had to do with the liberation of the 56 hostages, because the mere liberation of guerrillas, on its own, would be very frustrating for the [hostages'] families."

  2. The prisoner release is a cynical ploy; Uribe is trying to appear evenhanded as he seeks to win freedom for political allies who collaborated with paramilitaries. A week ago Thursday, President Uribe proposed waiving jail terms for politicians who worked with paramilitaries but weren't involved in serious crimes. Many Colombian observers see a linkage between this proposal and the accelerated FARC prisoner release. Some even think that Uribe, spooked by paramilitary leader Salvatore Mancuso's recent "confession" that high-ranking officials helped his organization for years, is in a hurry to find a way to put a lid on things before even more alarming revelations emerge.

    • FARC prisoners in several jails have employed this argument in public statements refusing to be released under these circumstances, calling Uribe's proposal a "smokescreen."
    • Writes center-left El Tiempo columnist Daniel Samper, "The general feeling is that in the best case, [Uribe's proposal] is a senseless chaos - but in the worst case, it is a chaos of distraction that seeks to hide even worse issues."

  3. President Uribe is simply losing his marbles. Unlikely, but Colombians are wondering.
    • The normally very pro-Uribe editorial board of Cali's El País newspaper wrote Wednesday, "Amid so much uncertainty, the country is asking for explanations about what is happening, both inside the head of the Chief of State and within the National Government."
    • Uribe's first "super-minister" of interior and justice, the ultra-conservative Fernando Londoño, published a column in Medellín's El Colombiano entitled "President: where are you?" He tosses off an analogy from Homer's Odyssey: "The president we elected with the certainty that he was the man for Peace through Law, today allows himself to hallucinate from the sirens' song, and none of his friends - like the ones Ulysses had - is keeping him tied to the mast of reason and duty."
    • José Obdulio Gaviria, a close advisor and ideologist to the president, certainly supported the "lost marbles" thesis when he told the Associated Press this week, "Though many haven't noticed, we have entered a second phase of [the Uribe government's signature] Democratic Security policy. ... The principal sign of the first stage was imprisonment, [now we are moving toward] processes of clemency."

Posted by isacson at 11:38 AM | Comments (8)

May 30, 2007

Ángela Giraldo: "U.S. accompaniment is important"

Ángela Giraldo was a dentist in Cali until April 2002, when the FARC kidnapped her brother Francisco and eleven other state legislators from Valle del Cauca department (of which Cali is the capital). The guerrillas have been holding them and about 45 other hostages - in some cases for ten years - in order to pressure for a prisoner-exchange agreement with the Colombian government. Three of the hostages are U.S. citizens.

Ángela has since become a leading voice among the hostages' family members, who have organized to pressure both sides to negotiate a "humanitarian exchange" of prisoners. The governor of Valle del Cauca, Angelino Garzón, named her to the post of departmental peace commissioner.

Ángela Giraldo was in Washington last week to attend events hosted by the U.S. Institute for Peace. I sat down with her to talk about obstacles to freeing the hostages, and the important role that the U.S. government could play. Here is a five-minute video.

Posted by isacson at 12:41 PM | Comments (2)

May 24, 2007

Para-politicians out of jail? Perhaps, but not yet

I'm rarely confused with José Miguel Vivanco, the Americas director for Human Rights Watch, but it happened today.

This morning's edition of Colombia's most-circulated newspaper, El Tiempo, led with the reaction to a controversial suggestion from President Álvaro Uribe. On Wednesday morning, Uribe said that politicians accused of helping paramilitaries, but not responsible for serious human-rights crimes, should not have to serve prison terms. El Tiempo reported:

[José Miguel] Vivanco said from Washington that the most important point is that the power of "narco-mafias and paramilitarism" be dismantled. "It could be that the best way to achieve this dismantlement might be to release the detained congresspeople, officials and military officers, once they reveal all that they know about the para-mafioso networks in which they participated, and the identities of their allies in the government," he explained.

José Miguel Vivanco didn't say that. He likely disagrees with it. I didn't talk to him today - I spent my day on Capitol Hill. (Incidentally, we ran into Vice President Francisco Santos there, in the basement of the Longworth House Office Building. He - along with DAS Director Andrés Peñate and Colombian embassy officials - were lobbying so vigorously that, even though it was 3:30 PM, they hadn't had lunch yet. They were forced to eat from vending machines.)

But I bet José Miguel is angry, because I said that, not him. El Tiempo ran a rectification later this morning. The article now reads, "President Uribe's proposal was not well-received by the opposition, but the director [of programs] of the Center for International Policy, Adam Isackson [sic.], did not dismiss it." Great.

Why, then, did I say that it would be all right to let paramilitary collaborators out of jail? Here is what I sent to El Tiempo yesterday after they requested a paragraph on the subject. Spanish first, then English.

Lo más importante no es cuántos años deben quedar en la cárcel los acusados. El tema de la cárcel también complicaría cualquier futuro diálogo con los grupos guerrilleros. Lo importante es que se desmonte el poder que los narco-mafias y el paramilitarismo han tenido, desde hace décadas, sobre el estado colombiano. Puede ser que la mejor manera de lograr ese desmonte sería excarcelar a los congresistas, oficiales y militares detenidos, una vez que revelen todo que saben - hasta el último detalle - sobre las redes para-mafiosas en que participaban, y la identidad de sus aliados en el estado.

La verdad tiene que revelarse, con nombres. Los implicados deben ser inhabilitados de ejercer cualquier posición estatal en el futuro. Y deben ceder todos sus bienes ilegalmente adquiridos y pagar generosas reparaciones a sus víctimas, aunque sean víctimas indirectas. Si todo esto se cumpla, el pago de una pena en la cárcel no importará tanto. (Al menos por el momento - la experiencia de países como Argentina muestra que el clamor para la justicia puede volver a escucharse.)

The most important thing is not how many years the accused should be imprisoned. The issue of jail time will also complicate any future dialogue with guerrilla groups. The important thing is the dismantlement of the power that narco-mafias and paramilitarism have had for decades over Colombia's state. It could be that the best way to achieve this dismantlement might be to release the detained congresspeople, officials and military officers, once they reveal all that they know - to the smallest detail - about the para-mafioso networks in which they participated, and the identities of their allies in the government.

They must reveal the truth, with names. Those implicated must be prohibited from holding any public office in the future. They should lose all of their illegally acquired assets and pay generous reparations to their victims, even if they are indirect victims. If all of this happens, jail time will not matter as much. (At least for now - the experience of countries like Argentina shows that the clamor for justice can come back and be heard again.)

I stand by this for three reasons.

1. Insisting on jail time will complicate talks with guerrillas. The ELN and FARC - and any people who supported them - do not intend to go to jail at the end of a future peace process. If this is expected of them, it will be impossible to bring the guerrillas to the negotiating table for anything but surrender terms. Since neither group is anywhere near surrender, to insist on jail time is to delay the start of a peace process and to prolong the fighting.

2. The issue of jail time is being used to distract from the more important issue of dismantling paramilitary groups. Uribe government officials - and, often, President Uribe himself - routinely caricature the critics of the paramilitary process as a bunch of zealots fixated on throwing paramilitaries and their supporters in jail. "How can they call us 'soft' on the paramilitaries," the refrain goes, "when almost the entire paramilitary leadership is in a maximum-security prison?"

This misses the point completely. The main thing that should worry us about the paramilitary process is that, if Colombia's judicial system proves unable to do its job, the AUC leadership and its supporters will come out of the process just as rich and powerful as they went into it. Perhaps more.

The process needs the threat of long, long jail terms for those who hide the truth, keep their stolen goods, fail to make amends to victims and continue to break the law. But for those who cooperate with the authorities, give them what they need to dismantle paramilitary networks, give back assets and pay reparations, jail time need not be a requirement.

3. Is six to eight years much of a punishment anyway? The paramilitaries and their supporters are implicated in gruesome, disgusting, evil crimes. Yet the Justice and Peace law only metes out a maximum of eight years in jail. Even the main alternative to the Justice and Peace law in 2005 - a bill proposed by Sen. Rafael Pardo and backed by most major human rights groups - foresaw a maximum of only ten years in jail.

This raises another question. Salvatore Mancuso planned and ordered the 1997 Mapiripán massacre, and will not be in jail for more than eight years. Gen. Jaime Uscátegui refused to act to stop the massacre, and he may be looking at forty years. Does this make sense?

Let's be clear: everyone who ends up in prison for "para-politics" should stay in jail until (a) it's determined that they were not planning or ordering serious crimes, and (b) they tell everything they know about their networks, give up their illegal assets and pay reparations. Once (a) and (b) are fulfilled, though, President Uribe's proposal makes some sense.

This is a thorny debate, and I'll be interested in reading any comments.

And just so that nobody confuses me with José Miguel Vivanco again: if you see us together, look closely - I'm a bit shorter than he is.

Posted by isacson at 10:30 PM | Comments (7)

León Valencia: ELN cease-fire likely by July

León Valencia is a former member of the ELN guerrilla group's Central Command. After demobilizing in 1994 along with 730 other ELN members, Valencia has been one of Colombia's most prominent analysts of the conflict and peace efforts. He heads a non-governmental organization called the New Rainbow Corporation, whose investigations of politicians' ties to paramilitary groups get partial credit for the emergence of the "para-politics" scandal.

I cornered León yesterday at a U.S. Institute of Peace conference on peace initiatives in Colombia. He has been to Havana twice in the past month to accompany the ELN's peace talks with the Colombian government, including a visit late last week. The message he brings is that a cessation of hostilities is imminent, and that the U.S. government should no longer keep its distance from the process.

(Valencia does not refer here to the ELN's additional demand, announced late Tuesday, that a cease-fire be contingent on Colombia dropping its free-trade agreement with the United States. If this is a consensus position within the ELN - and that is not clear - it could be an obstacle to short-term progress because Bogotá is unlikely to yield.)

Posted by isacson at 7:40 AM | Comments (0)

May 18, 2007

Black humor from Colombia

I got this in my email and had to share.

CANINE INTELLIGENCE

An engineer, an accountant, a chemist, an IT specialist and a Colombian senator were bragging about how smart their dogs were.

The engineer told his dog, “Protractor, show what you can do.” The dog gathered some bricks and boards, and built a small doghouse. All agreed that it was incredible.

The accountant said his dog could do better. “Cash Flow, show what you can do.” The dog went to the kitchen, returned with 12 cookies and divided them into 4 piles of three cookies each. That was pretty neat, all agreed.

The chemist said that his dog could do even better. “Oxide, show what you can do.” Oxide walked to the refrigerator, took exactly 500 milliliters of milk, peeled a banana, used the blender and made a smoothie. All agreed that it was impressive.

The IT specialist said he could beat them all. “Megabyte, do it!” Megabyte crossed the room, turned on the computer, checked it for viruses, upgraded the operating system, sent an e-mail and installed an excellent game. All knew that this would be very hard to beat.

They turned to the Colombian politician and asked, “And your dog, what can he do?”

The politician called his dog and said, “Paraco, show what you can do!”

Paraco jumped up, ate all the cookies, drank the smoothie, erased all the files from the computer, “disappeared” the other four dogs, declared himself to be an Uribe supporter, and took over the land title to the doghouse.

Afterward, the politician insisted that he had never met the dog, that he had never even seen it, and that a photograph showing them together was faked...

(OK, maybe it was funnier in Spanish.)

Posted by isacson at 12:26 PM | Comments (5)

May 17, 2007

An update from Cartagena

Frequent correspondent Chris Stubbert is just back from a visit to Cartagena, and sends this reflection on the stark social contrasts of a city that is both a top vacation destination for wealthy Colombians, and a prinicipal refuge for their internally displaced fellow citizens.

An update from Cartagena
 
If the misery of the poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin. - Charles Darwin, The Voyage of the Beagle (1839), Chapter XXI

Cartagena, a city with a population of around 895,000, is fast becoming the major tourist destination in a country where tourism has had a negative reputation for years. Cartagena is not your typical image of Colombia. There are no Andean mountains here, but a Caribbean coast. The weather is warm, but breezy, and the people - ‘Costeños’ - are distinct from those in other regions of Colombia.

Having just returned from a third visit to Cartagena, I think it’s about time to talk about the incredible social contrasts one finds in this city. Charles Darwin wrote the above quote in 1839, reflecting on slavery in South America, which brought millions of West Africans across the Atlantic from the 16th to 19th century. The legacy of that trade in modern Cartagena is still very strong. The contrasts of rich and poor, black and non-black are evident even when driving from the bus station to the center of the city.

Cartagena is currently constructing the tallest building in Colombia, named ‘La Torre de la Escollera’ at 58 floors. And as the skyline quickly fills with new apartment towers and hotels, and Donald Trump has even put his eye on the Caribbean city, one must wonder who is being left behind? With mayoral elections coming up on October 30th,  Colombian media have reported that some mayoral candidates are being supported and funded by narco-traffickers and paramilitary elements, who wish to get a hand in the building contracts expected to be handed out in the coming years.

The Attorney General’s office has made it a ‘top priority’ to investigate the pattern of corruption in the lead up to the election. But Cartagena is and has always been the epicenter of this type of activity.

As observers write about corruption and the political changes happening in Cartagena, what about the terrible social situation that persists? Bill Gates had also recently visited Cartagena, and at the Microsoft Government Leaders Forum, he expressed his excitement for technology in Latin America.

‘We're also starting something new, which is taking schools that are designed for how all schools will be within the next 10 years. We call these our Innovative Schools, and in these we go ahead and together with our partners make sure that every student has a laptop or tablet computer; rolling them out in 12 locations around the world, and three of those in this region, one in Brazil, one in Chile, one in Mexico, and we'll be adding to those.’

I wonder if Gates really could understand that people living in the squalor of Cartagena’s shanty towns first need better roofs over their heads, and secondly enough food to eat, before thinking about computers in their classrooms. It would be foolish to think of Cartagena as a city of progress and development, without recognizing the heavy burden that is placed on the poor, who are the majority of this city. Unfortunately after being here for my third time, I cannot imagine this city any different 30 years from now for the “have-nots”.

C.H. Stubbert
Bogotá, Colombia

Posted by isacson at 8:09 AM | Comments (1)

May 15, 2007

"What we do, we do with your permission"

Colombia's most-circulated newsweekly, Semana, published an explosive cover story Sunday. The magazine got its hands on recordings of some of the telephone conversations that mid-level paramilitary leaders in the Itagüí prison near Medellín have been having with their associates "on the outside." The recordings reveal that these individuals - the right-hand men of several of the top paramilitary leaders - are continuing to traffic drugs, order assassinations, and manage arms caches, even while supposedly in maximum-security confinement.

If this is true - and if the paramilitaries' maximum leaders know about these activities, as is likely - then the Colombian government's talks with the paramilitaries are in very serious trouble. It would mean:

  1. President Uribe's decision to send fifty paramilitaries to the Itagüí jail had no effect on their ability to continue their criminal activities.
  2. The mere fact that these criminal activities continue would mean that the paramilitary leaders are in clear violation of the "Justice and Peace" law, and thus subject to 40-year jail sentences.
  3. If they lose the protection of the "Justice and Peace" law, paramilitary leaders would likely face extradition to the United States.

Here are some translated excerpts from the Semana story (thanks to CIP intern Gareth Smail).

Semana has obtained dozens of recordings from the latest four months in which various paramilitaries held in the Itagüí prison's Cell Block 1 coordinate all kinds of illegal dealings over their cell phones and email. The voices identified in the conversations are the right-hand men of some of the principal leaders of the demobilized AUC, like Salvatore Mancuso; Ramiro Vanoy, aka “Cuco;” and Fredy Rendón, aka “El Alemán.”

…

There are some, like “El Flaco,” a member of the old Catatumbo Bloc commanded by Salvatore Mancuso, who order their men outside of jail to buy and sell large loads of cocaine. “Everybody knows that the guy that doesn’t sell the white merchandise at 22 (2,200,000 pesos, $950 USD) is in trouble. You know how it is, they are targets and targets understand each other.” Others, like “Goyo,” of the Elmer Cardenas Front lead by Fredy Rendón, aka “El Alemán,” order their men to uncover the guns they did not hand over when they demobilized, and tell them to continue dominating communities and towns that they do not wish to lose. “You know that we have some repeating shotguns there. I took a risk to put them there, and I have to have them guarded.” He also asked them to continue extorting wealthy people for financing. “We need to get back all the business in San Cristóbal so that they support us again, because we have to give something to the boys.” Most frightening is that using cell phones, they calmly speak of the murders and tortures they continue committing, like in the conversation of “El Mosco,” of the demobilized Bloque Mineros lead by Ramiro Vanoy, aka “Cuco,” with one of his men who reports his crime. “Let’s just say nobody missed this son of a bitch. You know sir that what we do, we do with your permission, and what you say, goes” says one of his lieutenants.

In the majority of the recordings obtained by Semana, the 17 highest bosses of the demobilized AUC chat about personal issues, legal proceedings, and the difficulties of the Peace and Justice process. On repeated occasions they have insisted that they cannot be held responsible for the illegal activities that their demobilized men continue carry out. Nevertheless, it is hard to believe that they are not informed of what the 25 men that accompany them in the cell block do. In the end, they are more than just their right-hand men of the past few years; they now spend 24 hours a day just a few meters from them.

…

In one of the most revealing recordings, everything that happens in the jail, the lack of control, disorganization, and above all corruption, reflects in the voice of who up until just a few weeks ago was the prison's director.

The testimony of Yolanda Rodríguez is the most impressive diagnosis of what happened there. “Every day this is getting worse. Here, they change my orders every day. When I say ‘no’ they call the general director [of prisons], the high commissioner [for peace], the minister [of interior], and if still no, the president himself.” This past April 10, this official's disappointment brought her to tell these and other grievances to her friend, the director of the Picota jail, Imelda López. Rodriguez was so disillusioned that she asked to be transferred to any other jail in the country.

Posted by isacson at 12:30 PM | Comments (5)

April 30, 2007

A complicated president en route to Washington

Colombia's president, Álvaro Uribe, arrives in Washington Tuesday evening. He will be staying until Friday. This will be the Colombian government's big offensive of the year in favor of the bilateral free-trade agreement and yet another 80-percent-military aid package.

Uribe's agenda is heavily weighted toward meetings with congressional Democrats, who hold the key to decisions on both of these priorities. Many of these legislators have opposed Plan Colombia's military focus in the past, and are skeptics of the free-trade agreement.

In many cases, these congressional Democrats will be meeting with Uribe for only the first or second time. Most will have only a passing familiarity with what is happening in Colombia.

The picture they have of Colombia's leader is probably confusing and contradictory. Some have likely heard glowing accounts of how much safer and prosperous Colombia has become under Uribe, and how he is one of the United States' only friends in a politically tumultuous region. Others, on the other hand, may have heard Uribe described as a monster who has tolerated - or even fostered - paramilitary groups, and who is bent on strengthening an abusive military in the name of free-market orthodoxy.

I've met Álvaro Uribe twice, seen him speak a few times, and have read dozens of his speeches in the 1,727 days since he became Colombia's president. After all that time, I think there is some truth to both of these impressions.

The congressional Democrats and others who receive Uribe this week will be meeting with a very complex, even contradictory character. Though I disagree with many of Uribe's positions, there are some things about him and his presidency that deserve admiration. But there is also a great deal that worries me greatly - and should worry those who meet with him this week. Here is a rundown.

The good. There are some things to praise about Álvaro Uribe.

- He is one of the most gifted politicians in the world, with an uncanny ability to connect with audiences on camera and over the airwaves. He knows how to put on a spectacle, and his speeches and public appearances routinely boost his poll numbers.

- Uribe - if he spoke English and was born here - would have no problem winning an election in the United States. He is clear about what he believes, whether you agree with him or not. Unlike too many prominent U.S. politicians, nobody could accuse him of being a panderer, a flip-flopper, or a slave to his consultants' advice.

- Uribe's work ethic is the stuff of legend. In a typical week he travels to three or four regions of Colombia, and perhaps a foreign country too. He is known for subsisting on five hours of sleep per night and rarely taking a day off.

- Uribe doesn't seek power merely for its own sake; he clearly has a genuine interest in the nuts and bolts of governing. He is familiar with the minutiae of every ministry's programs and budgets, and can recite statistics like a walking database.

- Though he has undeniably authoritarian tendencies, Uribe has not gone as far as his neighbor Hugo Chávez, who is ruling by decree and closing down opposition television stations.

- Uribe's overwhelming focus on security has had enormous appeal inside Colombia. It appears to go beyond the rich landowner who is thrilled that he can once again drive between the city and his country villa. It also includes poorer residents of this rapidly urbanized (now 70% urban) country, most of them relatively new arrivals to Colombia's cities, who can once again visit the rural towns where they (or their parents) came from.

- Unlike most right-wing politicians, Uribe doesn't reject a state role in providing services to the poor. Though his main focus has been defense, he has expanded the national health system, spent more on education, and even promoted a program that gives cash payments to poor families who keep their kids in school. He has not cut taxes for the wealthiest.

The bad. There is much about Álvaro Uribe that worries us.

- Uribe, as noted above, is overwhelmingly focused on security in the most narrow sense. He has said that Colombia's poverty and institutional weakness are a product of insecurity, and not the other way around. As a result, he has overseen a dramatic increase in Colombia's security forces' size and capabilities. He places a great deal of faith in the armed forces' ability to resolve problems, and has sought to enlist everyday citizens as informants and “cooperators” in the cause of national security. This has greatly increased the militarization of Colombian society.

- While Uribe has deployed the armed forces throughout the country, he has lacked a similarly forceful effort against poverty, inequality and the weakness of civilian institutions. This unbalanced approach may improve security in the short term, but ultimately seems short-sighted, superficial and even dangerous. It is sort of like making the wall around one's house a few feet higher, without changing conditions outside the wall.

- Uribe's enthusiastic embrace of Washington's punitive approach to drug supply-reduction - including a sharp escalation of aerial fumigation - has yielded no results. His popularity at home and good relations with the Bush administration make him uniquely well-positioned to push for a new anti-drug strategy, but Uribe has so far shown no inclination to do that.

- In a country with one of world's highest rates of economic inequality, Uribe shows little concern for Colombia's rich-poor divide. He appears to believe, against most countries' experience, that an unfettered free market will resolve the yawning gap between the wealthy few and the poor majority.

- Uribe's oldest, most passionate supporters - the core of his political base - are not the political mainstream but Colombia's hard right. As in much of Latin America, this sector includes large landholders and agribusinessmen, who pay few taxes and who gave paramilitarism its initial boost. It includes hard-line sectors of the security forces. It includes people so socially conservative that they think the Catholic Church lost its way once it stopped giving mass in Latin. For now, Uribe has managed to rope into his coalition the part of Colombia's elite that is more professional, enlightened and modernizing. But they are not his core supporters, and estrangement may increase as the “para-politics” scandal develops further.

- Uribe has shown little concern about his country's alarming human rights situation. He cites statistics about declining murders as evidence of human-rights progress, but is very silent on the subject of impunity for abuses, past or present. He has done little to offer political or financial backing for investigations into allegations of government human-rights abuse. To the contrary, Uribe has consistently defended military officers accused of violations, while issuing harsh verbal attacks on the country's community of non-governmental human-rights defenders.

- Some of Uribe's attacks on human-rights groups and the political opposition are tantamount to death threats. It is one thing to say that a human-rights group's work isn't credible, or that it is sloppy or politically biased. In Colombia's dangerous climate of constant threats and frequent assassinations, it is another thing entirely to call human-rights workers “terrorists” or allies of the guerrillas, as Uribe has done on many occasions.

- One reason the “para-politics” scandal has damaged Uribe's overseas image is a longstanding perception that the president is soft on paramilitary groups. The AUC grew substantially in Antioquia department, with much support and virtually no opposition from the government, while he was governor from 1995 to 1997. In 1999, Uribe angrily and publicly defended generals who were fired under a cloud of accusations of helping paramilitaries. The first version of the “Justice and Peace” law that his government sent to Congress, in 2003, gave the right-wing militias a laughable degree of impunity and ability to keep their power and assets. He remains unwilling to extradite paramilitary leaders to the United States on drug-trafficking charges.

- Uribe's style is often described as “micro-managing.” He does not delegate authority well, favors personalistic events like “town hall meetings” where he listens to individual citizens' complaints, and is known to bark out orders to ministers like the patrón of an hacienda. Three years before Colombia's next elections, Uribe has no heir apparent. The lack of a likely successor to such a popular president should lead us to wonder whether Uribe plans to stay in power for a long time.

Posted by isacson at 4:37 PM | Comments (1)

April 24, 2007

Updated "para-politics" list

Here is our latest list of Colombian government officials and congresspeople facing accusations of assisting or associating with paramilitary groups. Most are members or supporters of the government of President Álvaro Uribe.

As it grows in size and complexity, this list is getting harder to maintain. Corrections or additions are most welcome.

Sentenced and in prison:

Under investigation by Colombia’s Supreme Court, and currently in prison:

Charged by the attorney-general’s office, and in prison:

Arrest warrants issued, still fugitives:

Under investigation by Colombia’s Supreme Court:

Under investigation by Colombia’s attorney-general:

Forced to resign by allegations of paramilitary ties:

Named in a U.S. intelligence report cited by U.S. media:

Posted by isacson at 10:48 AM | Comments (0)

April 16, 2007

The FARC, in the shadows?

Here, thanks to CIP Intern Alessandra Miraglia, is a translation of a very interesting strategic analysis of the FARC. It appears in the monthly newsletter of the UN Development Program’s Colombia office. Text in brackets is added to provide context.

The FARC, in the shadows?

Actions in different parts of the country raise questions about how long this guerrilla group will continue its strategic “retreat,” and what can be expected before the next [October 2007 municipal and departmental] elections.

What is the meaning of the military actions the FARC carried out in March? Are they coming out of their strategic withdrawal? What is expected from them in view of the next elections? What implications will their Ninth National Conference have? According to the analysts and experts who know the history and evolution of this guerrilla group, a change is currently taking place, and it should be taken into account.

During the five years in which the [Uribe government’s] Democratic Security Policy has been implemented, FARC military actions – such as kidnapping, illegal detentions and attacks –decreased significantly.

“If during Samper’s government the FARC implemented a war of movements and, during Pastrana’s, a war of position, during Uribe’s administration it went back to mobile guerrilla warfare, in which very small groups cause skirmishes. That is, it got back to its origin, to Che’s thesis”, stated Carlos Lozano, director of the weekly [Communist Party] magazine Voz.

According to Teófilo Vásquez, a researcher at [the Jesuit-run NGO] CINEP, “although the traditional variables with which to measure the conflict have decreased in some regions, it would be a mistake to state that the conflict in Colombia is close to an end. What is happening is that armed groups are functioning differently. The fact that they are militarily inactive does not mean that they are not socially, politically and economically influential. They continue to control people.”

According to Alfredo Rangel, director of the Security and Democracy Foundation, the FARC is slowly coming out of the strategic withdrawal in which it found itself.”

[In] a document confiscated by the Army in the [south-central] Macarena region, dated May 2006, and disclosed as the main talking point in the FARC’s IX National Conference, the FARC states that it seeks to wage guerrilla warfare and organize a clandestine alliance with dissatisfied political sectors, making governance impossible and discouraging the armed forces through military actions.

According to the document, the FARC also seeks to create new fronts, to re-build guerrilla fronts “to place them at the same level at which they were before the beginning of Plan Patriota” and to grow by 50% in terms of manpower.

Campaign in the South

This past March was characterized by many actions initiated by the FARC, which reinforces the idea that this guerrilla movement is coming out of its strategic withdrawal. These types of actions indicate a FARC willingness to organize around the [October 2007] elections of mayors, town councils and governors, a setting in which it has always activated its military, social and political apparatus.

“Before the elections, it is expected that FARC will try to have a wide impact and prove itself militarily and politically, especially in those areas where it traditionally had influence”, explained Teófilo Vásquez.

Signs of this trend can already be seen in [the south-central department of] Huila, with the attacks on Neiva’s mayors; the attempt to kill Campoalegre councilman Milton Gerardo Cortés; the threats against Rivera’s mayor, Hernando Pinto Salazar, and against other local leaders and councilmen of the department. Moreover, the FARC has threatened the governors of Arauca, Casanare and Boyacá.

In March four oil workers in Boyacá [just to the northeast of Bogotá] were kidnapped, as were eight geologists of the Logistic Services Company of Colombia, a company that carries out studies for the exploitation of gold and silver in Chocó Department [near Panama]. In addition, an assault against the Army’s Special Forces in Meta Department caused the death of seven soldiers and continued pressure on the Nestlé Company located in Doncello, in Caquetá Department.

While the FARC’s southern and eastern blocs bear the brunt of “Plan Consolidación” – the extension of “Plan Patriota” – especially in Meta, Guaviare and Caquetá departments, in the southwest of the country the FARC is showing an intention to reorganize.

In this zone, where Florida and Pradera municipalities are located [the zone the FARC wants to be demobilized in order to negotiate a prisoner exchange], as well as the reservations of the Nasa people, the conflict seems to follow the plans set out in the document of the FARC’s IX National Conference.

Fighting has occurred in town centers, putting civilians’ life at risk. Feliciano Valencia, leader of the Nasa people, affirms that “in the past few days FARC has escalated its attacks on military forces. The guerrillas installed remote-controlled gas-cylinder bombs to prevent the entrance of the Army, even near the school,” but later they withdrew them in response to the community’s demand.

A recently received letter identifies as “military targets” the leaders of Cauca’s Regional Indigenous Council (CRIC) and Northern Cauca Indigenous Association (ACIN), as well as the leaders of the Committee for Integration of the Macizo Colombiano [southwestern highlands]. Although the letter displays the FARC logo, the indigenous authorities are still investigating its origin.

The regional situation

Several factors come into play in the present FARC scenario. On one hand, as Teófilo Vásquez explains, “the FARC has sought to occupy regions where paramilitary groups loosened control. And it has done so with its militias in some places, and in others with political and social actions, because the war is not only fought in the battlefield. For example, it has entered town centers in zones such as Nariño, Chocó, Putumayo and Caquetá departments. That, in part, explains the resurgence of paramilitary groups in those regions.”

It has also reached three places considered symbolic of this confrontation: Tierralta and Valencia, in Córdoba Department [northwestern Colombia]; Dabeiba, in Antioquia Department [northwestern Colombia]; and the Catatumbo zone [in the northeastern department of Norte de Santander], all crucial regions known for a high presence of paramilitary groups. At the same time, the FARC began to come down from the summits of the Sierra Nevada of Santa Marta, where paramilitary groups had isolated them, and to roam in Arauca Department after paramilitary groups had cornered it on the [Venezuelan] border”, stated Gerson Arias, a researcher for the Ideas for Peace Foundation.

According to Alfredo Rangel, “the FARC has not suffered a critical blow. Basically the effects of the Democratic Security Policy have been registered around Bogotá, where the seven fronts once present were obliged to withdraw to other regions. Additionally, urban logistical support networks were dismantled in small and large cities.”

Thanks to the Army’s actions, the FARC’s freedom of movement has been diminished, especially in the east of the country, in Meta, Guaviare, Putumayo and Caquetá departments. In that area, according to military forces, the FARC has reduced its own military capacity, faces obstacles to its mobility and has been seen its logistical activity pressured. This has complicated its provision of resources, especially of food, and the transportation of weapons and money, among other things.

This has contributed to the desertion of 6,098 guerrillas between 2002 and February of 2007, according to a report published by the Ministry of Defense. According to Gerson Arias, “the loss of manpower due to the high number of desertions leads us to think that the FARC has planned an important recruitment campaign. In fact, in 2006 they recruited 400 underage fighters in Arauca Department.”

According to the government, the guerrillas’ income deterioration over the last three years is evident. Its three main sources of financing – drug trafficking, kidnapping and theft – have diminished substantially, according to the Defense Ministry’s statistics.

Nevertheless, Alfredo Rangel argues that “if drug trafficking incomes were reduced in Caquetá and Putumayo departments, thanks to the Army’s control of coca crops, they have been replaced in Nariño, Meta and Guaviare departments. Although kidnappings have decreased, the same has not happened regarding the income they have produced. The FARC has diminished kidnappings for small funds, but it has increased those for large sums.”

To consolidate the results of “Plan Patriota” and to reinforce the Democratic Security Policy, the “Plan Consolidación” brought forward by the Ministry of Defense has emphasized both the improvement of police mobility and an increase in manpower, of nearly 38,000 men, for the army and police forces.

Humanitarian disagreement

Faced with this panorama, and the offer of U.S. congresspeople to serve as guarantors, the humanitarian [prisoner-for-hostage-exchange] agreement is again a topic of debate. Up to now, temporary advances have been achieved thanks to the role played by several actors, such as the Church, France, Spain and Switzerland, and mediators such as Álvaro Leyva and Carlos Lozano Guillén.

“Despite the fight between the government and the FARC, a significant advance on both sides has been achieved. At the outset of Uribe’s government, the FARC presented an impossible pre-condition: the demilitarization of both Cartagena del Chairá and San Vicente del Caguán [two large, strategic municipalities in southern Colombia]. The government, for its part, first proposed a peace process with the FARC and later a humanitarian agreement”, explains Carlos Lozano, director of the weekly magazine Voz and former mediator in this process.

The FARC rescinded its request in favor of the demilitarization of Pradera and Florida [two small municipalities near Cali], and the government agreed to talk about the humanitarian exchange before negotiating the peace, says Lozano. After many trips and discussions with both sides, the mediators managed to negotiate a concrete proposal for the exchange in Pradera and Florida, with neither Army nor guerrillas.

Under this proposal, continues Lozano, the guerrillas would not enter the city centers of these municipalities; they would only deploy few indispensable guerrilla fighters to protect their spokesmen, and a rigorous regulation would be established. Although there were proposals for the regulation, the initiative did not prosper.

“Both the government and the FARC have an interest in the exchange,” says Teófilo Vásquez. “The government is interested in alleviating the pressure put on it by the international community, where there has been little acceptance of the government’s tendency to negotiate with some [the paramilitaries] and not with others. This would also be helpful in the Latin American context, which is prone to leftist ideology. FARC interest is to continue resorting to the negotiation forum to accumulate political power.” According to Vásquez, “this country must get used to beginning every dialogue on the foundation that was left behind by the previous government.”

Before the powerlessness generated by the talks between the guerrillas and the government, which have at various times both increased and decreased the likelihood of bringing hostages home, today there is a new issue at stake. Lucy de Gechem – the wife of the former senator Jorge Eduardo Gechem, kidnapped by the FARC on February 20, 2002 while traveling in a commercial airplane – asked President Uribe for the authority to mediate between the parties, a request that was accepted a few days after the president ordered military forces to renew offensive actions against the FARC.

And although it was reported that the guerrilla leader Raúl Reyes rejected the relatives’ offer of mediation on March 17, Lucy de Gechem does not lose hope. “The most viable strategy – she affirms – is to bring the parties closer and to convince them with arguments.” To that end, “President Uribe must delegate a Government representative who can work full time on this. He accepted my suggestion. God permit he will communicate it to the country soon. The FARC, for its part, as a gesture of good will, should show hostages’ proof of life.”

For its part, civil society continues to press for the humanitarian agreement and for the constitutionally mandated right to peace. To this end, since the presentation of the Huila Development and Peace Program last February, when the fifth anniversary of the peace talks’ end was commemorated, they began collecting signatures to support a legislative bill for the humanitarian agreement.

The pronouncements of the United States, a country that has had three citizens in the hands of the FARC since February 13, 2003, have increased expectations. Besides the congressmen’s offer to be guarantors of the humanitarian agreement, during his visit to Colombia, President George Bush appeared “very concerned and [willing to accept] the request of the contractors’ families regarding the possibility of a humanitarian agreement”, stated Foreign Minister Fernando Araújo. Meanwhile, as the country wonders how long the FARC will continue its strategic withdrawal and the humanitarian exchange remains in the shadows, the civil population continues to be in the middle of the conflict.

Posted by isacson at 5:21 PM | Comments (0)

April 12, 2007

“More than complicated”

Here's a translation of a column by Alfredo Molano that appeared in Sunday's edition of El Espectador. I have no idea how he packed so much into 730 words. Text in brackets is our attempt to provide context.

More than Complicated

Looking ahead, the way that big businessmen do, the Pacific coast and the eastern plains are the country's most promising regions in terms of value and profitability, taking into account the FTA [free trade agreement] and the paramilitaries' “reinsertion.” Or as the youngsters in Planning [the presidency's Department of Planning] might say, in the future soybeans, oil palm, corn, and sugarcane should displace the obsolete extensive cattle-ranching, bananas and basic food crops. And this project has been underway for several years now.

The planners and investors have had to overcome three obstacles to make their dreams reality: the poor people who occupy lands and live in these regions, the illegal crops that give these people what the state doesn't, and the guerrillas, who fish in these turbid waters [profit from the chaos].

Behind the economic project is another, developed by who knows whom, which consists of: 1) Implanting paramilitary groups, carefully protected by the security forces and legitimized by the gamonales [local political bosses, wealthy landowners and businessmen]. 2) Fumigating with poisons to displace both the coca crops and the population. The resulting displacement of crops to new areas widens the theater of war to regions that are proposed to be included in the development package, and those displaced are treated as criminals who legally have no right to benefit from the government's [emergency humanitarian aid] programs. 3) When the hornet's nest is stirred up, the security forces enter to finish off the plan, and the minister in power solemnly declares that the issue “is very complicated.”

The model is repeated with severe regularity in the zones they have had their eyes on: the eastern plains, from the Arauca River [border with Venezuela] to [the southern department of] Guaviare; and the Pacific, from the Darién hills [on the Panama border] to the Mataje River [border with Ecuador]. It has been decided to fill [the eastern department of] Vichada to the [south-central department of] Meta with African oil palms, while the lands in Casanare and Arauca are prepared for genetically modified sorghum and corn. On the Pacific coast, in addition to the bananas for Chiquita Brands that extend from Urabá [near the Panama border] to the south, Urapalma [an African oil palm company widely believed to be tied to - or owned by - paramilitaries], with [local paramilitary leader] El Alemán in the lead, has established beachheads on the Juguamiandó and Curvaradó rivers to grow African oil palm and, in the short term, to produce biodiesel. In a few years, the entire Pacific region will look like Tumaco, Puerto Wilches, San Alberto and San Carlos de Guaroa [areas with extensive oil palm plantations] look today.

The playbook has been set into motion right now in El Charco, Nariño [in southwestern Colombia], a forgotten port that was erased from the map by a tsunami in 1906. Everything has been prepared with an astonishing amount of care. Last year, paramilitaries from a group called the New Generation Organization - whose initials are NGO and whose commander has called himself Armando Paz - took over El Charco. The population reacted and forced the “paras” out.

But in June there was a massacre of eleven people in Sanquianga. This provoked a large demonstration of indigenous people, afro-Colombians and mestizos to protest against these acts of violence. The dioceses of Tumaco, Guapi and Buenaventura warned of the danger they faced and issued a call to respect the civilian population.

Nonetheless, the plan continued apace: on January 16, 2007, the commanders of the New Generation Organization entered Playa Bazan, in El Charco, now backed by the Black Eagles [the largest of the rapidly growing “new” paramilitary groups]. At the beginning of February the glyphosate bombardment began near the Tapaje river. At the end of that month the Marines entered via the villages of Taija and El Hojal, and rapidly occupied La Tola and Sequihonda after fighting with the FARC.

The forced displacement increased with every armed confrontation, bombardment or operation. Monsignor Girón, of the Tumaco Diocese, denounced the threats made by the “NGO” paramilitaries “against members of social, indigenous, ecclesiastical, and humanitarian organizations defending human rights in Nariño, among them the Pastoral Social [Caritas] of our own diocese.” Days later, Santos, the defense minister, acknowledged that today there are 400 families displaced in El Charco; Bishops Héctor Fabio Henao and Gustavo Girón corrected him: there were more than 1,000.

The office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), which should know, cried: what is happening in El Charco is also happening in the municipalities of Barbacoas, Cumbitara, Policarpa, Magüí, Linares, La Llanada, Sotomayor, Iscuandé, Samaniego, Ipiales and Cumbal [all in Nariño], and it asked that the entire region be declared a humanitarian crisis zone.

More than “complicated,” Mr. Minister, is what is happening in Nariño, which by the way shares a border with Ecuador.

Posted by isacson at 6:29 AM | Comments (0)

April 9, 2007

ELN talks: is Luis Carlos Restrepo up to the task?

The slow-moving talks between the Colombian government and the ELN guerrillas have hit a crucial moment.

Negotiators are to meet again in Havana on Thursday for a sixth round of talks. Instead of another “exploratory” round, this time the goal is to achieve some sort of “base agreement” so that real negotiations can begin. Government spokesmen and analysts in Colombia's media are billing this as a “do or die” meeting: if the negotiators get up from the table empty-handed this time, political reality may make it difficult to continue the process.

The government wants this agreement to include a guerrilla cease of hostilities, including the release of all kidnap victims (could be dozens, could be hundreds) whom they are holding for ransom. The ELN wants the government first to agree to negotiate an agenda of political reforms.

It would seem that both sides should be able to accommodate each other on April 12, arriving at an agreement that exchanges a cease of hostilities for an agenda somewhat more ambitious than might be expected given the ELN's current military weakness.

This is certainly achievable. It will be a pleasant surprise, though, if it actually happens.

The main reason has more to do with personalities than issues. By all appearances, the Colombian government's peace negotiator or “High Commissioner for Peace,” Luis Carlos Restrepo, is actively pushing the ELN further from a cease-fire, rather than reeling them in.

Restrepo, a psychiatrist by training, has a hard job. Though it has been badly weakened on the battlefield, the ELN is a very difficult group with which to negotiate. It has a consensus-based decision-making model that makes it move very slowly. Its leadership continues to be relatively ideological, so it is important to them that their negotiation have some political content and that they can participate in politics afterward. All ELN leaders, though, are not yet convinced that a cease of hostilities is the right step for the group to take at this time.

A guerrilla group “playing Hamlet” about a cease-fire requires the government's negotiator to act with subtlety and empathy - with a full set of tools, not just a bludgeon. The high commissioner for peace should be encouraging ELN moderates who are willing to sign onto a cease of hostilities. Success will require that the ELN's cease-fire advocates win the group's internal debate. Any government actions that improve trust, create space for political discussion, and foster contact with civil society and the outside world will strengthen the ELN moderates' position.

The best way to do all of these would be to allow a negotiating agenda with political content. Of course this agenda is unlikely to include deep and sweeping reforms, such as a nationalization of the energy sector; the ELN is too weak to demand that. But as analyst León Valencia - a former ELN member - put it in an El Tiempo column on Saturday, “The agenda is the passport that the ELN needs to enter the cease-fire, it is the way to persuade all of the fronts and combatants that their negotiation has a political character and is not just a demobilization and turnover of weapons.”

At this moment, what the ELN needs is a graceful exit from the conflict. A cease of hostilities is a big decision for them, and they will not assent if it comes with a dose of humiliation. The ELN will walk away from the table if it looks like they are meekly giving in to a government ultimatum. And they can still do so. They can keep fighting at a low level, they can buy more weapons by allowing more drug money into their coffers, or much of the group can end up being swallowed by the FARC.

Does High Commissioner Restrepo understand that? On the surface, yes: he authored a column in Sunday's El Espectador indicating that the government will be flexible on the question of an agenda once a cease of hostilities is in place.

Behind the scenes, though, Restrepo has been more heavy-handed. The result since early March has been a very rough month for the peace talks.

This heavy-handed behavior is more appropriate for a negotiation of surrender terms. Perhaps that is how Restrepo views the ELN process. But the ELN has been clear that it would rather keep fighting, even in its weakened state, than end its 40-plus years with a whimper: a process widely seen as a capitulation to a right-wing government.

ELN negotiator Francisco Galán recently called Restrepo “arrogant.” Restrepo replied to an El Tiempo interviewer, “My negotiation style is not to make friends or to be intimate with the counterpart at the table. I represent the President and I have to speak clearly. And as he has said, maybe my personality isn't pleasing.”

It is important to speak clearly. And Restrepo has made it quite clear that “this is not a negotiation between equals, and the government wants you to say 'uncle.'” Saying this clearly, though, only ends up weakening the pro-peace elements within the ELN.

Of course the government is stronger than the ELN. But Restrepo must realize that it has not been strong enough (even with paramilitary scorched-earth tactics) to defeat the ELN, and that an opportunity exists to bring the ELN's fight to a peaceful close without further bloodshed.

If he wishes to seize this opportunity, Restrepo must stop doing things that make his own job harder. Allowing the ELN more face-saving - on the negotiating agenda, on the international role, on the general subject of “arrogance” - can speed the process. More public taunts and private pettiness, though, will only prolong it.

Issuing ultimatums is easy. Negotiating requires a lot more. Let's hope Dr. Restrepo figures that out, or gives someone else a try before the ELN opportunity is lost.

Posted by isacson at 8:52 PM | Comments (0)

March 14, 2007

Para-politics scandal update

Updating a post from November, here is our most current list of Colombian government officials and congresspeople facing accusations of assisting or associating with paramilitary groups.

Some are in prison, some are under investigation, and some are facing accusations from witnesses in formal investigations. All are members or supporters of the government of President Álvaro Uribe.

Corrections and additions are welcome. It's not easy to keep score.

Sentenced and in prison:

Charged by the attorney-general’s office, and in custody:

Charged by the attorney-general’s office, and suspended from duty:

Under investigation by Colombia’s Supreme Court, and currently in prison:

Arrest warrants issued, still fugitives:

Under investigation by Colombia’s Supreme Court:

Under investigation by Colombia’s attorney-general:

Forced to resign by allegations of paramilitary ties:

Fired by the Procuraduría (internal-affairs agency):

Posted by isacson at 3:41 PM | Comments (1)

January 26, 2007

Memorandum to Marulanda

Colombia must be the only country in the world where the guerrillas die of old age.

Paramount FARC guerrilla leader Pedro Antonio Marín ("Manuel Marulanda") is still kicking - but he will be eighty years old in May. Here is a translation of a concise but compelling memorandum to the near-octogenarian from Colombian journalist and general establishment-figure Miguel Silva, which appeared on the op-ed page of today's edition of El Tiempo.

Memorandum to "Marulanda"

To: "Manuel Marulanda Vélez"
Re: The moment to engage in politics

I write this memorandum with the belief that nothing said here will move you a single centimeter. If I thought that a few lines in EL TIEMPO would impress you, they would accuse me correctly of being ingenuous. But in order to say something to you that few would (nobody contradicts even an average rich person in this country, so I imagine that few dare to do so before you), now that you approach 80 years of age, this column is worth the trouble.

There are some who say that politics don't interest you. That the political FARC leader was Jacobo Arenas [who died in 1989]. That you are little more than a military leader. I, however, believe that you, an expert in military affairs, are passionate about politics. Since you turn 80 years old next May 13, it seems to me a good moment for ideas. After all, that is an age at which only a few years remain to arrange worldly affairs and to leave a last mark on this Earth.

The FARC blindly follows what you say, and although there is a Secretariat and those, like "Raúl Reyes," who have been assuming new functions and acquiring new powers, the power in the FARC is you, period.

The FARC never managed to begin what you might have wanted: a prolonged popular war resulting in victory for what you denominated the FARC-EP, Army of the People, with a clear reference to the organization's military nature. The FARC does not have the esteem of either the urban masses or the rural population. This does not mean that democratic government institutions have much favor among these groups - perhaps they don't - but anyone who tries to argue that the FARC enjoys popular support is simply blocking out the sun with his hands. The FARC is feared or hated, not admired.

Nevertheless, the FARC has managed to maintain an armed conflict for 40 years, and although 15,000 men in arms do not seem too many in a country of 40 million people the size of France, Spain and Portugal combined, it is enough to observe the growth of official military spending to understand how the FARC represents a challenge to the government and all Colombians.

But if everything remains the same, there will be no important changes in the balance of power. You and the Secretariat must know that, athough I suppose it isn't part of your afternoon chats in [the longtime guerrilla stronghold of] La Macarena. There will be attacks on populations that are successful, one or another kidnapping that makes income or headlines, but not much else. More and more, the FARC will see itself isolated in the international panorama. More and more, they will be called terrorists or narcotraffickers.

There is, however, another alternative. The regional moment demonstrates that an organized left can make progress through politics. Our own national experience indicates that too. The mere existence of Chávez would be a guarantee. The door toward politics is open.

The decision to open that door is in your hands. Three unexpected political gestures would be enough to recover the initiative and make the chessboard change completely: to release Íngrid [Betancourt] and the other kidnap victims; to speak of a unilateral cease-fire, in order to initiate a bilateral one; and to accept international intermediation, without which all dialogue with the government will be unfruitful.

I know that these are all prohibited subjects in the world of the FARC, but the day you take these steps, in terms of pure politics, you will have won more for your people and their ideas than what you have won with 40 years of armed warfare. And you will be able to turn 80 in a Colombia that would have to take into account - not because it would like to do so, but because those are the rules of democracy - what you think.

Miguel Silva

Posted by isacson at 4:03 PM | Comments (1)

January 23, 2007

Left Behind in Caquetá

Here is a new dispatch from contributor Chris Stubbert in Bogotá.

On January 17, a small truck packed with over 660 pounds of explosives brazenly entered a new Nestlé dairy refrigeration plant in the town of Doncello in the department of Caquetá, a zone of strong guerrilla influence more than 200 miles south of Bogotá. After parking the truck strategically next to the milk processing tanks, the driver ran away and screamed something about a bomb, while a motor bike waited to pick him up outside the main gates. Seconds later the truck exploded, destroying the entire factory. Fortunately no one was killed, but a contracted engineer was seriously injured, losing an arm in the explosion.

Caquetá
Doncello
Caquetá.
Doncello.

For over 32 years the Swiss multinational had never had serious problems with Colombia's violent groups. Everyone within the company was shocked to hear of this attack. Nestlé is the only multinational operating in this poor and neglected department (which USAID had recently abandoned due to the region's prevalent connection to narcoterrorism and insecurity), providing a buyer for the local farming community. The destroyed plant had collected 45,000 liters of milk (11,890 gallons) daily from local farmers. Nestlé has blamed the FARC and is now considering whether to pull its operations from Caquetá.

Why did Nestlé's relative calm in Colombia come to an end? Company officials to whom I've spoken claim that the FARC had been demanding "boleteo" - in plain English, extortion. Nestlé had not given in to their demands.

It has been common practice for companies operating in Colombia's conflict zones to pay protection or transportation taxes to AUC paramilitaries, ELN, and FARC guerrillas. Companies that refuse assume great risks. This unfortunate reality is rarely discussed outside Colombia. The business of "cooperation" with armed militias could be very damaging to corporate images.

Nestlé has consistently refused this type of demand in the past and I expect their strategy will remain in place. They will most likely not bow to the intimidation of the FARC since, once a precedent is set, it would be difficult to refuse a second time and so on. Despite this stubborn stance, I fear that simply moving operations out of Caquetá, a recent public contemplation, could send the message that extorting forces have defeated a large company. Not to mention the political-economic fallout that would further damage the image of Uribe's 'democratic security plan'.

After the attack, Colombian Vice-President Francisco Santos and National Police officials met with top Nestle officials at the company's Bogotá headquarters. Santos was pressed with questions about why an army post had recently been removed from the area - part of the zone where the U.S.-funded "Plan Patriota" military offensive had taken place between 2004 and 2006. Maybe his cousin, Defense Minister Juan Manuel Santos, will be the next to be peppered with questions about this decision.

As these damage control sessions were taking place in Bogotá, back at company HQ in Switzerland, the brass were livid. Maybe Nestlé will pressure the Swiss government into recognizing FARC as a terrorist group.

Why has FARC decided to act now against Nestlé? Recently they had been transmitting messages through local community members demanding that Nestlé pay up. Maybe the violent approach was their final warning. Intimidation has long been a tactic used by Colombian groups to gain power, territory and resources. On the other hand it could be a sign of outright desperation on the part of FARC.

The tragedy of this situation, which may play out in the coming weeks, will not be a serious detriment to a giant like Nestlé, but rather to the hundreds of farmers who have relied on this company to buy their milk and provide income to their families in Caquetá for over 32 years. This is yet another example of the true cost of Colombia's protracted armed conflict. The impoverished civilian population continues to be the real casualty.

C.H. Stubbert
Bogotá, Colombia

Posted by isacson at 2:18 PM | Comments (3)

January 15, 2007

A dirty war against the paramilitaries?

In early December, shortly after President Álvaro Uribe confined most of Colombia's paramilitary leadership in a maximum-security prison, an article in El Tiempo, the country's most-circulated newspaper, contended that the paramilitaries had one "secret weapon" left. If they felt they were getting a bad deal out of the negotiation process, they could always reveal the truth about who in Colombia's "legitimate" society - businessmen, landowners, military officers, politicians - had founded, financed and supported them.

During the past two months, however, persons unknown appear to have launched a concerted effort to keep them from playing that card and revealing what they know. The paramilitary leaders - for years, some of the most feared people in Colombia - are now themselves quite threatened.

December saw the murders of several mid-level paramilitary leaders, including some who appeared willing to talk about who had helped them. As one top paramilitary leader began his confession to prosecutors - required by law as a condition for a lighter jail sentence - his family was threatened and his right-hand-man was murdered.

It's still not clear who is ordering these killings. Is it the jailed paramilitary leaders themselves, in the midst of a mafia turf-war or "code of silence" enforcement? Or is it some "higher," even more powerful actor who, amid a growing scandal about politicians' ties to the illegal groups, has a strong interest in keeping the paramilitary leaders silent about their past relationships?

The answer, for now, is anyone's guess. But consider this recent timeline.

This grim chronology leads us to a recommendation that we never thought we'd have to make. But here it is: the Colombian government must provide necessary security to paramilitary leaders. They may be murderous, drug-dealing thugs, but they are also repositories of information that is desperately needed if Colombia is to know the truth about what happened during the past decades of violence, and if it is to turn back the creeping narco-right-wing-mafia influence over its own institutions.

Just as more must be done to protect the victims who dare to come forward and testify, more must also be done, ironically, to protect the victimizers.

Posted by isacson at 11:41 PM | Comments (3)

January 12, 2007

Taxation, Corruption, and Indifference

Here is the first of what I hope will be several posts from Chris Stubbert, a Canadian citizen and frequent correspondent living in Bogotá. Here, Chris notes that Colombia's government manages to collect lots of taxes - at least from the middle class - and wonders why people are not more outraged that they seem to get so little back.

Taxation, Corruption, and Indifference

The modern history of taxation in my country began during the First World War. During the war, the government introduced a temporary income tax to raise much-needed funds to fight the enemy in Europe. Yet after the war, the government could not give up this endless supply of finance. Canada today is one of the most taxed nations on Earth, but arguably holds some of the finest public schools, affordable universities, free universal health care of high quality, and an admirable national pension system.

This background weighs heavily when I think about the tax burden here in Colombia. Businesses in Colombia are taxed at about 38.5% of their profits, while middle-class citizens are taxed just under this amount. A 16% sales tax (IVA) raises further cash for the government.

And finally, the most bizarre taxes of them all: the financial transaction tax. All withdrawals from savings and checking accounts, credit card transactions, loan disbursements, and certain other transactions are charged 0.4%. It was originally imposed in 1998 as a temporary tax of 0.2%, but was made permanent in 2001, and today is 0.4%. The tax is an important source of revenue to the government, contributing revenues equal to about 0.8% of the GDP. It was originally enacted as a temporary measure to finance the bailout of bankrupt financial institutions. Yet today banks like Davivienda, Bancolombia, BBVA, and Banco de Bogotá have been making record profits while acquiring banks across Latin America. Many people to whom I’ve talked in Colombia claim that the real purpose of this tax is to finance the war and feed waste and corruption in the government.

One would expect all of these taxes to amount to some pretty decent public services - but the reality is very different. Bogotá, the capital city, is suffering from an inadequate road network. Every year thousands more cars come onto the capital’s streets, and the traffic gets worse. I have seen this change after living here for only 18 months.

Education is another casualty. Most of the middle and upper class here go to excellent private schools, while the majority working and poorer classes are left with low-quality and overcrowded public schools. There aren’t even enough schools to accommodate the demand, leaving many without a secondary education.

Healthcare, too, is in crisis. The private clinics patronized by the upper and middle classes are as high-quality as those of any developed nation, while the government-funded public hospitals are underfunded and overwhelmed.

I continually ask Colombians from all backgrounds the same question: if there is so much taxation in this country, why are government services so poor? The answer I commonly hear is that the politicians are simply funneling the tax money into their own interests or their own pockets.

That corruption is a chronic problem in this country is not news, but this perception of corruption is of greater concern to Colombia as a whole. Cynicism and lack of trust in the security services, legal system, and political environment are the real story here. Yet a sense of serious outrage and a desire for immediate change don’t exist in modern Colombia.

If dozens of villagers are massacred by the paramilitaries or guerrillas – as has been happening for decades here, the general reaction in the capital, Bogotá, is not protest but apathy. The millions of displaced people in the urban slums of Colombia’s biggest cities are virtually invisible. Even the May 2006 massacre of a police anti-drug unit at the hands of an army patrol in Jamundí had little impact on the public sphere. Sure, it made newspaper headlines… but after a few days, people focused on something else.

Why the desensitized reaction to corruption, violence, and political incompetence? The lack of outrage, the lack of a culture of change, allows issues like lost and wasted tax revenue to persist. But Colombian citizens themselves must also take the blindfold over their eyes and demand justice and transparency.

Someone told me recently, “The urban middle class think everything has gotten better here. The economy has improved, security is better from city to city, but people forget there is a still a war going on in the countryside.” Maybe people want to forget this dirty conflict – and that is the most dangerous thing of all.

C.H. Stubbert
Bogota, Colombia
January 9, 2007

Posted by isacson at 3:51 PM | Comments (7)

January 9, 2007

A miracle, but not a model

Fernando Araújo's escape from FARC custody is a remarkable story. The former minister of development, kidnapped by the guerrillas in December 2000, showed up exhausted and bone-thin in San Agustín, a village near Cartagena, on January 5. He had spent five days walking in the jungles and dry thickets of coastal Bolívar department, after escaping a guerrilla encampment under military attack.

Colombia has been transfixed by images of Araújo reunited with his jubilant family, after more than six years as one of the sixty hostages whom the FARC had been holding to pressure for a prisoner exchange. “The 21st century begins for me today,” he told reporters.

Colombia's military and defense establishment swarmed around Araujo, basking in the glow. But there is reason to fear that they are drawing the wrong conclusion from his liberation.

“We are going to continue with rescue operations, in order that some day there might not be a single kidnapped Colombian,” promised Defense Minister Juan Manuel Santos.

“These [kidnapped] people who have special connotations for the FARC, because they prize them for their political or economic importance, or in the case of soldiers, as a mechanism to pressure the government - it is difficult for them to be freed by the guerrillas. This is where it is more correct to call for a successful military operation,” added the head of the armed forces, Gen. Freddy Padilla.

Emboldened by Araújo's escape, are the Colombian security forces truly determined to attempt more armed rescues of guerrilla hostages? Let's hope not:

Fernando Araújo's escape should not embolden Colombia's security forces to attempt a series of high-risk hostage rescues. Nor should it lead decisionmakers to write off negotiations and view armed rescues as the best way to win all hostages' release.

As Araújo himself said last weekend, “I have faith in the military forces; however, the opportunity of a humanitarian [exchange] agreement is a solution that holds less risk for the kidnap victims.”

Posted by isacson at 1:04 PM | Comments (2)

January 2, 2007

Colombia in 2007: a look into the crystal ball

In a posting dated December 31, 2005, I made thirteen predictions for what would happen in Colombia in 2006. It is a year later now, and my record is not bad. Here is what I thought would happen a year ago.

All in all, not a terrible record - though several of these predictions were rather obvious.

The coming year is harder to predict. Levels of violence and coca cultivation could plausibly increase or decrease. It is utterly impossible to determine where the current “paramilitary politics” scandal is headed: will it consume military officers and other high government officials, or will Colombia's political class find a convenient way to make it go away? Meanwhile, will the power of paramilitary criminal networks continue to increase, or will those in Colombia's government and society with the will to curtail it be able to do so?

The crystal ball is far too cloudy on these questions. Probabilities seem higher, however, on the following predictions for 2007:

  1. The continuing scandals, persistent unemployment, and the security situation may erode President Uribe's popularity somewhat, though polls of urban areas will likely continue to show approval ratings over 50 percent.
  2. The left will continue to grow as a political force, and will do quite well in October 2007 municipal and gubernatorial elections.
  3. As their influence grows and paramilitary power mutates into something else, leaders of the leftist Polo Democrático party will face increasing threats to their own security.
  4. The new Democratic Congress in the United States will approve a similar amount of aid to Colombia in the 2008 foreign aid bill. A small but significant amount of military aid will be reduced and economic aid will be increased. Human-rights and other conditions on the aid may be strengthened.
  5. The U.S. Congress appears unlikely to approve the current free-trade treaty with Colombia. If CAFTA only passed by one vote in the last Republican-dominated Congress, with only fifteen Democratic votes in the House, it is unclear how the Colombian pact can pass in a House with more than thirty new Democratic members.
  6. Colombia's neighbors will continue to get more attention. As will other Latin American countries that do not neighbor Colombia - particularly Cuba and Mexico.

Posted by isacson at 6:22 PM | Comments (0)

December 20, 2006

“Where is Jorge Visbal?”

Paramilitary leader Salvatore Mancuso did not reveal too much during his first day of testimony before special investigators yesterday, but his declaration is expected to take several more days.

The “Justice and Peace” law does not require Mancuso to talk about who supported him and his men, but only the crimes in which he himself was involved. Nonetheless, many prominent people from the regions he dominated are worried that his testimony may finger them as supporters of paramilitarism, which could lead to possible criminal charges.

Landholders in the cattle-ranching sector, particularly in northern Colombia, are widely seen as loyal supporters of paramilitary groups. Indeed 10,000 people from Caucasia, a longtime paramilitary stronghold in the cattle country of northern Antioquia department, signed a document last week admitting their role in supporting Mancuso's and other groups, arguing that they had no choice in the face of guerrilla aggression and state abandonment.

But most ranchers still remain silent about their past ties. For instance, note this passage deep within El Tiempo's coverage Tuesday morning of Mancuso's imminent testimony.

And where is Jorge Visbal Martelo?

In spite of the statements made by the president of the National Cattlemen's Federation (FEDEGAN), José Félix Lafaurie - who yesterday not only repeated that they had supported the 'paras,' but also said that they did not regret having done so - nothing has been heard from Jorge Visbal Martelo, who presided over the federation during the self-defense groups' zenith and greatest period of growth.
Even open confessions from the cattlemen of Córdoba department and the bajo Cauca region of Antioquia [Caucasia and its environs] appear to have motivated him to break his silence. His closest friends have not been able to account for him.

This is a name I had not heard for a while. I first met Jorge Visbal in 1999, when we took a U.S. congressional delegation (one member and several staff) to the FEDEGAN headquarters in Bogotá. (We always try to ensure that all political perspectives are represented on trips like these.) Visbal spoke at length about the threats that cattlemen face at the hands of guerrillas, asked the delegates to support more aid for the Colombian military, and criticized President Andrés Pastrana for being too soft in his negotiations with the FARC guerrillas.

All of this standard for Colombia's right wing, but near the end of the meeting Visbal said something remarkable. The subject of military collaboration with paramilitary groups came up. After affirming that paramilitarism was illegal and must be combated, the FEDEGAN president not only denied that military-paramilitary collaboration was common, but went on to contend that the paramilitaries did not even abuse human rights very often.

I wasn't sure if I had heard him right. I asked how he explained the reports of massacres in the media, and the statistics from human-rights groups crediting the AUC with the majority of killings and disappearances. Visbal responded that while mistakes and excesses happened, most of the reports of massacres were false or exaggerated, and that the statistics were distorted by guerrilla misinformation. The paramilitaries, he argued, were usually careful not to harm innocent civilians.

Recall this was 1999, when Carlos Castaño's AUC was rapidly expanding its territorial reach by massacring people throughout the country - in Urabá, Catatumbo, Putumayo, southern Bolívar, and many more regions. That year, three generals were fired under heavy U.S. and international pressure for allowing the carnage to happen.

Hearing someone defend the paramilitaries' human rights record in this context was jarring. It soon became clear, though, that it was pointless even to try to argue with him on this subject - sort of like debating the Holocaust with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Visbal - need we say it? - was an ardent backer of President Uribe in the 2002 elections. He went on to serve as the Colombian government's ambassador in Canada from 2004 to 2006. He left for Ottawa, abandoning the FEDEGAN presidency, not long after a rocket-propelled grenade, likely fired by guerrillas, narrowly missed killing him outside the group's Bogotá headquarters in 2003.

(Footnote: Just to prove that everything in Colombia is more complicated than it seems, it's unfair to end this by caricaturing Jorge Visbal as a total villain. Though an extreme hard-liner, he did frequently represent the FEDEGAN in civil-society peace efforts. He was even among a group of civil-society leaders that met in Germany with the ELN in July 1998, signing an agreement laying out a proposed process for an ELN peace negotiation.

Visbal also traveled to Costa Rica in October 2000 for the remarkable (though inconclusive) “Paz Colombia” gathering, which brought ELN and Colombian government representatives together with NGOs and the “international community.”

At one point during this event, while I was talking on a pay-phone outside the meeting space, I noticed that Visbal was standing not far from me. Before long, ELN guerrilla leader Francisco Galán entered my field of view and briskly approached Visbal. “This will be interesting,” I thought to myself. But to my utter surprise - I even lost track of my phone conversation - the two men embraced like old friends. I think it was at that point that I gave up even trying to understand Colombia.)

Posted by isacson at 3:22 PM | Comments (2)

December 15, 2006

3 interesting links

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December 7, 2006

The end of the paramilitary negotiations?

Yesterday Colombia's top paramilitary leadership, from their new quarters in the Itagüí maximum-security prison south of Medellín, declared that they were pulling out of their talks with the Colombian government.

It's impossible right now to know if this is the final word, or what will happen next. Will there be an outbreak of violence? Will the Colombian government begin extraditing paramilitary leaders to the United States? Will the paramilitaries open up and identify everyone who ever helped them? All of the above? Or will they find a way to paper over this crisis and allow the process to continue limping along?

It's anyone's guess right now. Here is some of the coverage in this morning's news.

The most thorough of today's pieces was the "Durante tres horas" article in El Tiempo. Here is a translation.

December 7, 2006

For three hours, the "paras" did not allow Commissioner [government peace negotiator] Luis Carlos Restrepo to speak

He had not unloaded his papers in the dining area of cell block 1 in the Itagüí maximum-security prision, when the shouting of half a hundred paramilitaries stunned him.

They "fired" words of all calibers at him, reproaching him for a supposed treason against the agreements with the self-defense groups.

The walls spoke to him as well. They were papered with posters with messages like "The government will not be able to silence the truth" and "No more falsehoods."

Restrepo tried to impose his voice but, one by one, the ex-heads of the AUC exited, leaving him speaking by himself. "It was the tensest moment. Perhaps the most tense of the entire peace process," a person who has been close to the dialogues told EL TIEMPO.

Only four "ex-paras" remained, before the surprised eyes of the Commissioner, as well as those of the chief of the OAS mession, Sergio Caramagna, and Monsignor Julio César Vidal, the bishop of Montería, who accompanied him.

Little by little, seeing that the dialogue had begun with the four who stayed, the "rebels" approached again. But it was not the end of the high tension that had even alerted the guards.

"Ernesto Báez," the former head of the "Central Bolívar Bloc," who during the process was characterized as the most vehement of the paramilitaries, used all of his verbal artillery to express his anger with what they considered a breach of the agreements that led to their demobilization.

Over and over, in a tone that always sounded threatening, he shouted, "We are going to tell all of the truth, all of the truth, here or wherever." He said that the process was "formally broken off."

The ex-commanders of the "Central Bolívar" were the "para" hardliners at the meeting. "Macaco, without the verbal spewing of Báez, but with equal belligerence, said that they are not going to allow justice to punish only them for crimes that had the collaboration of important sectors of the establishment.

"Don Berna," who has been in Itagüí since October of last year, and Salvatore Mancuso tried to calm their infuriated prison companions.

But challenging words continued to be heard. Even that the possibility of extradition did not matter to them as much as telling the country about how far "para" infiltration has reached.

Others asked to be returned to Ralito [the site in rural Córdoba department where negotiations had occurred] and given five days to "return to the jungle."

What provoked them?

The conditions in the Itagüí jail, much different from those they had in the La Ceja recreation center, fed their anger. The situation of Ramón Isaza, a man they consider to be the symbol of self-defense groups, is one of their pretexts.

Isaza, head of the Magdalena Medio paramilitaries, is not only affected by Parkinson's disease, but by the cold of the jail. "And they didn't even let him have the poncho with which he covered himself in La Ceja," said a person close to him.

The relative freedom they had there to receive visitors, which they lost in Itagüí, where a penitentiary regime reigns, has also exasperated their spirits.

During the three hours that the heated encounter lasted, there was not a moment of calm. Restrepo, in the barely five minutes in which he could talk to them, insisted on President Álvaro Uribe's message: that the benefits for those who stay in the process will be respected.

But they argued that the government "believed in gossip" (rumors of escape plots) to order their confinement in a jail, something that they only expected after being judged by the Justice and Peace Law.

They waited for him in the Itagüí jail with a cacophony of shouts. "Báez" headed the verbal offensive, and repeated several times that they were going to tell all the truth wherever they are, in reference to the possibility of being extradited. Some requested time to return to the jungle.

Even before the meeting was finished, the rumor had circulated in the Capitol, in Bogotá, that the process had broken off.

The Commissioner, Caramagna and Monsignor Vidal, whom some saw in tears, left the jail with long faces. There remained, however, the possibility that the Church and the OAS might extend some bridge to keep the process alight.

Last night, while a security operation took place in former zones of "para" influence to avoid disorders like those caused by the jail transfers last weekend, the ex-AUC prepared a declaration. This newspaper knew that, despite the crisis, the government will not modify its position.

The truth: the paramilitaries' secret weapon?

The possibility of a rupture of the peace process with the paramilitaries, or at least of its suspension by the demobilized self-defense group leaders, raises a big question: with what can the AUC heads pressure at this point in the process?

The declaration of two weeks ago in which the same "paras" made a call to those who supported them from all sectors - businessmen, industrialists, political and economic bosses, government employees, regional and local leaders, and members of the security forces - can be a key clue. At this point in the process, the only weapon remaining for them is the threat of telling the truth.

Why? The negotiation with the government finished when all of the demobilizations were fulfilled and when the decree regulating the Justice and Peace Law was promulgated. And now, after President Álvaro Uribe's decision to move them from the La Ceja recreation center to the Itagüí maximum-security prison, the self-defense groups' heads are imprisoned, and the process, as several government spokespeople have said, is in the hands not of the executive branch, but of the attorney-general and the judges.

It is clear that at no moment during the process did the AUC ever consider the possibility that its leaders would be taken to a jail. Special centers like that in La Ceja were spoken of, and the "paras," then, interpreted Uribe's decision as a breach of the agreements and they fear, in some cases, that their extraditions are imminent.

On the other hand, the revelation of Senator Miguel de la Espriella, a few days after visiting the La Ceja center, about the [2001] meeting of Atlantic coast political bosses with Castaño and Mancuso, and their invitation to all politicians who attended this and other meetings to tell of their participation, was without a doubt a first taste of what might come and a first threat.

In addition, it does not seem certain that if the "paras" will lose their benefits under the Justice and Peace Law if they fail to ratify their willingness to abide by that law before February 13. At least that is the view of Luis González, director of the attorney-general's Unit for Justice and Peace, who assured that the Law does not establish terms for how people may begin the process, and that the second article says that this norm is for those who wish to collaborate (voluntarily) with justice.

This part of the Law gives them, then, certain room for maneuver so that they may use the weapons for pressure that they have left: the truth.

Posted by isacson at 1:52 PM | Comments (1)

December 6, 2006

An update on the ELN talks

The Colombian government’s talks with the ELN are moving slowly, but they are still moving. Here is an update on this very complex situation from CIP intern André Guzzi.

 

An update on the ELN talks

Andre Cavaller Guzzi

One month ago, the National Liberation Army (ELN) and the Government of Colombia concluded a fourth round of “exploratory” peace talks. The ELN is the second-largest guerrilla group in Colombia, with approximately 4,000 members. Many experts contend that this group has a somewhat more political vision than the FARC – the largest guerrilla group in the country with about 16,000 members.

The exploratory stage of talks between the government and the ELN began at the end of 2005. Representatives from several countries (Switzerland, Norway, Spain, Venezuela, Cuba, Italy, Canada and Japan) and members of Colombian civil society – politicians, activists and representatives of the Catholic Church, among others – were invited to observe the talks, which have occurred in Cuba.

Although neither a cease-fire nor an agenda is in place, both parties announced the launch of “formal” peace talks after the fourth round ended in Havana on October 26. The Colombian government’s high commissioner for peace (peace negotiator), Luis Carlos Restrepo, and the senior ELN representative, Antonio Garcia, classified the round of dialogue as “fruitful.” Among the gains, they mentioned the establishment of an environment conducive to peace and agreement on societal participation in the process.

Though the meeting inspired some optimism, observers believe that much remains to be done in order to make real advances. Still to be discussed is the government’s expectation that a cease-fire be established as a condition for talks to proceed. This cease-fire would include a halt to kidnapping for ransom, which is perhaps the main source of income for the ELN, as it participates far less in the drug trade than the FARC and AUC. According to Restrepo, the ELN kidnaps about one person each five days, and currently the group holds approximately 54 hostages.

Dialogues with the ELN took place during much of President Andrés Pastrana’s administration (1998-2002), but failed in May of 2002. A main reason for failure was the group’s demand for US$40 million to support themselves during a six-month-cease-fire, and the government’s request that the ELN, during a cease-fire, concentrate its forces in specific regions of the country. The break occurred shortly after the election that brought Álvaro Uribe to the presidency. Uribe, whose campaign took a combative “hard line” stance against guerrilla groups, declared that he would negotiate with any group that first accepted a cease-fire. The ELN refused.

For this reason, during the first years of Uribe’s administration (2002-2006), few contacts took place. However, at the end of this period, a dialogue with ELN began to gain momentum. This was spurred by the creation of a “House of Peace” (Casa de Paz) with civil-society guarantors, in which a jailed ELN leader, Francisco Galán, was given a space to meet with representatives of various sectors to discuss what an eventual negotiating agenda would look like.

Nevertheless, it is difficult to move a peace process between a government committed to energetically combating guerrilla groups and a guerrilla group committed to achieving power through an armed revolution. Why should a revolutionary group accept a peaceful negotiation if they have not achieved their main objectives?

This question can be answered based on two points of view: the ideological and the skeptical. The first one – the ideological – would probably state that due to changes in the dynamic of the conflict (for example, since the 1990s, ELN has lost power because it has lost much of its territorial control to paramilitary forces) and growing willingness on both sides to pursue talks, a peace process is likely. This perspective holds that the peace process with the ELN could offer a model for an eventual peace process with the FARC, even though both guerrilla groups have many differences not only in the in the number of members but also in the way they conduct their actions and, probably, the way they would negotiate.

On the other hand, a skeptic would first mention the issue of the cease-fire, and the inability to arrive at a truce after more than a year of dialogues. He or she would also point out that the government is taking coercive actions to pressure for a negotiation. One example is the possibility of FARC and ELN members being judged in the International Court of Justice in The Hague if they do not sign a peace agreement before Colombia’s full entry into the court in 2009. According to the president of the National Commission of Reparation and Reconciliation, Eduardo Pizarro, “an eventual ELN amnesty would be the object of great national debate, because under the creation of the International Court, war crime and crimes against humanity cannot be totally forgiven.”

In addition to these topics, and independent of the mentioned points of view, another question will require an answer. What is the final intention of a peace process between the Colombian government and the guerrillas?

In our view, the goal of such a process should be the peaceful, independently verified dismantling of the ELN’s structures and networks that engage in violent or illegal activity. In exchange for this dismantlement, the Colombian government will have to make concessions, which will likely include some degree of amnesty, an open door to former guerrillas’ peaceful participation in politics, and perhaps some commitments to social and political reforms.

It is not yet clear, though, whether the ELN is willing to dismantle these structures and networks. Some in the group (as well as in the FARC) may prefer to negotiate an armed but peaceful coexistence with the Colombian government. This outcome, however, will be unacceptable to the Colombian government, as well as to most outside observers.

ELN leader Antonio Garcia has argued that that the group’s decision whether to lay down or to keep its weapons will be complex and difficult. He has indicated that it will depend on security guarantees and a halt to the state’s military buildup. “We [the members of ELN] are interested in achieving a good climate for the entire country, not just for one sector of society,” he said recently. “We have to discuss the question of weapons as a whole, talk about everyone's weapons. The Colombian government has a war strategy and continues to seek economic resources to finance it. If that tendency continues, it won't be easy to build a peace strategy that includes the state.”

The ELN has yet to develop an internal consensus on this important question, and we can expect its dialogues with the Colombian government to continue moving slowly for some time.

Posted by isacson at 5:37 PM | Comments (1)

December 2, 2006

Gustavo Petro on the paramilitary scandal

Here are some great quotes from Colombian Senator Gustavo Petro, of the leftist Polo Democrático party, during Thursday's debate in the Colombian Congress about paramilitary ties to legislators. They're from the videos available here on El Tiempo's website.

The problem here is not who met with whom. The meetings aren’t the problem. The problem isn’t even that the meetings occurred between congresspeople and outlaws. The central problem is what was said at these meetings, what these congresspeople did after making a pact with paramilitarism. And what they did, nothing more and nothing less, was to subordinate their public power, which is given to them by the citizens, their power as public servants, to the worst criminals against humanity that have existed on this continent in recent decades. To subordinate their citizen power, their public power, to the drug trade. And the drug trade in its most savage form.

What we are discovering here is not just a series of meetings between politicians and criminals. What we are discovering, before the eyes of all citizens, is the building of a mafioso regime in Colombia. ... It is born from illegality, from conspiracy, from the sewers and the shadows. Many here know about it, and they kept it secret for many years, under the idea of associating to commit a crime, because they were criminals, complicit in crimes against humanity. They made laws in the morning, and in the afternoon ordered the murders of their own people. They negotiated with the paramilitaries above the mass graves. They knew of the mass graves’ existence.

...

Of course someone is responsible politically, and I must say that it isn’t the foreign minister, just because she is related to some of the accused. No, the responsible party is the President of the Republic, by his action and his omissions. This president, by his actions, because many of the political mafiosos who have sat in ths Congress were seated here thanks to his support. How can they hide the electoral meeting that took place in March 2006 in the city of Sincelejo? There is a historic photo, in the words of Dr. [Senator] Luis Guillermo Vélez, “historic.” [Accused politicians] Benito Muriel Rebollo, Merlano, Álvaro José García Romero, Salvador Arana, with the President of the Republic in the middle. Before the ingenuous citizens of Sincelejo, they said, “vote for us,” and there was the president, saying, “vote for them.”

Posted by isacson at 5:48 PM | Comments (1)

A list of new paramilitary groups

Here is a very interesting document from the Colombian think-tank INDEPAZ, which we’ve tried to make a bit more readable than the huge table on their website. Drawing on several sources that rarely overlap, INDEPAZ has created a list of sixty-two “new” paramilitary groups that have sprung up since the demobilization of the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC). Many of them bear the name “Aguilas Negras” (black eagles), which is the name of the best-known “new generation” paramilitary group. Here is the list, sorted by department.

1. Group name: Águilas Negras
Department: Antioquia
Municipality(ies): Medellín, Amagá, Angelópolis, Venecia
Number of members: 100
Commander’s name: Jesús Orlando Galvis
Information source: BACRIM – Army; MAPP/OEA (OAS observer mission) – 6th and 7th reports

2. Group name: Cacique Pipintá criminal gang
Department: Antioquia
Municipality(ies): Pacora, Salamina, Aguadas
Number of members: 160
Commander’s name: Pablo Hernán Sierra Guerrero (“Alberto” - alias)
Information source: Police

3. Group name: “La Oficina de Envigado” group of hitmen (sicarios)
Department: Antioquia
Municipality(ies): Medellín y Envigado
Number of members: 100
Commander’s name: Sicarios al servicio del desmovilizado “Daniel” (alias)
Information source: Police

4. Group name: Águilas
Department: Arauca
Municipality(ies): Tame
Number of members:
Commander’s name: “El sicario” (alias)
Information source: BACRIM - Army

5. Group name: Banda Sicarios de Barranquilla
Department: Atlántico
Municipality(ies): Barranquilla
Number of members: 15
Commander’s name: Carlos Arturo Posada Flórez
Information source: BACRIM - Army

6. Group name: Emerging criminal group of “Guerrero y Salomón” (replaced “Jorge 40”)
Department: Atlántico
Municipality(ies):
Number of members: 200
Commander’s name: Miguel Villarreal Archila (“Salomón - alias), Wilmer Ignacio Guerrero (”Nacho Guerrero“ – alias), Yuri Rodríguez (”La Araña - alias)
Information source: Press (National and regional)
7. Group name: Bloque Anti-subversivo del Sur
Department: Caquetá
Municipality(ies): Doncello, Puerto Rico, San José de Fragua, Albania, Curillo
Number of members: 28
Commander’s name: Juan Carlos Monje Alvarado
Information source: Police

8. Group name: Centauros
Department: Casanare
Municipality(ies): Paz de Ariporo, Hato Corozal, Nunchía, San Luis de Palenque, Orocué
Number of members: 40
Commander’s name: Orlando Mesa (“Diego” - alias)
Information source: BACRIM - Army

9. Group name: Disidentes del Bloque Vencedores de Arauca
Department: Casanare
Municipality(ies): Yopal, Aguazul, Tauramena
Number of members: 70
Commander’s name: “Acevedo” (alias)
Information source: BACRIM - Army

10. Group name: Bloque Llaneros del Casanare
Department: Casanare
Municipality(ies): Paz de Ariporo, Hato Corozal, Nunchía, San Luís de Palenque, San Rafael de Guanapalo, Orocué
Number of members: 50
Commander’s name: Orlando Mesa (“Diego” or “Cero tres” - alias)
Information source: Police

11. Group name: Org. Nueva Generación, Bloque Central Cauca
Department: Cauca
Municipality(ies): Balboa, El Bordo, Santander de Quilichao, Pto Tejada, Popayán
Number of members: 150
Commander’s name: “Cinco cinco” (alias)
Information source: MAPP/OEA (OAS observer mission) – 6th and 7th reports

12. Group name: Bloque Catatumbo
Department: Cesar
Municipality(ies): Curumani
Number of members: 50
Commander’s name: Disidente
Information source: MAPP/OEA (OAS observer mission) – 6th and 7th reports

13. Group name: Banda criminal del Cesar
Department: Cesar
Municipality(ies): Valledupar, San Martín
Number of members: 70
Commander’s name: “Corizo” (alias)
Information source: BACRIM - Army

14. Group name: “Emergent criminal group”
Department: Cesar
Municipality(ies): Aguachica, El Cedro, Guaduas, San Martín, Aguas Blancas, Puerto Ocultuo, San José
Number of members: 120
Commander’s name: Alfonso Solano Gallardo (“Gallardo” - alias), “Pulpo” (alias), “Megateo” (alias)
Information source: Police

15. Group name: Auto-defensas Campesinas Unidas del Norte del Valle - ACUN
Department: Chocó
Municipality(ies): San José del Palmar, Itsmina, Medio San Juan, Medio y Bajo Baudó, Condoto, Tadó, Unión Panamericana, Nóvita, Sipó, Tadó
Number of members: 300
Commander’s name: “Doble Cero” (alias), “Cuñado” (alias)
Information source: Police; BACRIM – Army; MAPP/OEA (OAS observer mission) – 6th and 7th reports

16. Group name: Héroes de Montes de María
Department: Bolívar
Municipality(ies): Córdoba
Number of members: 15
Commander’s name:
Information source: MAPP/OEA (OAS observer mission) – 6th and 7th reports

17. Group name: Los Traquetos
Department: Córdoba
Municipality(ies): Montería, Tierralta, Monte Líbano, Puerto Libertador, Valencia, Callejas, Pueblo Nuevo
Number of members: 100
Commander’s name: “Jerry” (alias), Alberto Manuel Gómez Martínez (“Cobra” - alias)
Information source: BACRIM – Army; MAPP/OEA (OAS observer mission) – 6th and 7th reports; Press (National and regional)

18. Group name: Bloque Heroes de Tolová
Department: Córdoba
Municipality(ies): Tierralta, Valencia
Number of members: 80
Commander’s name:
Information source: MAPP/OEA (OAS observer mission) – 6th and 7th reports

19. Group name: Vencedores de San Jorge
Department: Córdoba
Municipality(ies): Montería, Monte Líbano, Playa Rica, Puerto Anchica, El Bongo, El Tambo, Puerto Libertador
Number of members: 30
Commander’s name: Juan María Lezcano Rodríguez (“Pollo Lezcano” - alias), “Chino Molina” (alias), “Roso” (alias)
Information source: Police

20. Group name: (none)
Department: Cundinamarca
Municipality(ies): Guaduas
Number of members:
Commander’s name:
Information source: MAPP/OEA (OAS observer mission) – 6th and 7th reports

21. Group name: Bloque Central Santander and Bloque Guaviare
Department: Cundinamarca
Municipality(ies): Altos de Cazucá (a very poor district of Bogotá)
Number of members: 50
Commander’s name:
Information source: BACRIM - Army

22. Group name: Coordinadora Colombiana de Auto-Defensas del Guainía
Department: Guainía
Municipality(ies): Puerto Inirida
Number of members:
Commander’s name:
Information source: BACRIM - Army

23. Group name: Contra-insurgencia Wayuú
Department: Guajira
Municipality(ies): Bahía Portete, Uribia, Alta Guajira
Number of members: 40
Commander’s name: Disidente
Information source: MAPP/OEA (OAS observer mission) – 6th and 7th reports

24. Group name: Banda Alta Guajira
Department: Guajira
Municipality(ies): Bahía Portete, Bahía Honda, Tres Bocas
Number of members: 15
Commander’s name: “Pablo” (alias)
Information source: Police

25. Group name: Águilas Negras por siempre
Department: Guajira
Municipality(ies): Maicao, Fonseca y Barrancas
Number of members:
Commander’s name: “Samario” (alias) and “Samuel” (alias)
Information source: Police

26. Group name: Nueva Ola or Mingueo
Department: Guajira
Municipality(ies): Palomino, Río Ancho, Mingueo y Dibulla
Number of members:
Commander’s name: “Jaime” (alias)
Information source: Police

27. Group name: “Emergent criminal group”
Department: Magdalena
Municipality(ies): El Difícil
Number of members: 18
Commander’s name: “Molla” (alias)
Information source: BACRIM - Army

28. Group name: “Emergent criminal group”
Department: Magdalena
Municipality(ies): El Difícil, Pueblo Nuevo, Carmen de Ariguani
Number of members:
Commander’s name: “Moña” (alias), José Luis Paredes (“Danilo” - alias), Gustavo José Mejía Mendoza
Information source: Police

29. Group name: Chivolo criminal gang
Department: Magdalena
Municipality(ies): Tenerife, Pivijai, Chivolo
Number of members:
Commander’s name: Jesús Alberto Toncel Pabón, “Codazzi” (alias)
Information source: Police

30. Group name: Águilas Negras (Cienaga)
Department: Magdalena
Municipality(ies): Cienaga, Liberia, San Pedro de la Sierra
Number of members:
Commander’s name: Edgar Córdoba Trujillo (“Samuel” or “Comando 57” - alias)
Information source: Police

31. Group name: Águilas negras (Fundación)
Department: Magdalena
Municipality(ies): Fundación Aracataca, Bella Vista, Loma del Balsamo en Algarrobo
Number of members:
Commander’s name: Alberto Padilla Sarmiento (“Brayan” - alias)
Information source: Police

32. Group name: Frente Vichada BCB (Bloque Central Bolívar)
Department: Meta
Municipality(ies): Puerto Gaitán, Cumaribo
Number of members:
Commander’s name:
Information source: MAPP/OEA (OAS observer mission) – 6th and 7th reports

33. Group name: Centauros
Department: Meta
Municipality(ies):
Number of members: 300
Commander’s name: Disidente
Information source: MAPP/OEA (OAS observer mission) – 6th and 7th reports

34. Group name: Auto-defensas Campesinas de Meta y Vichada - ACVM
Department: Meta
Municipality(ies):
Number of members: 200
Commander’s name:
Information source: MAPP/OEA (OAS observer mission) – 6th and 7th reports

35. Group name: Por Colombia Presente
Department: Meta
Municipality(ies): Granada
Number of members:
Commander’s name: “Camilo” (alias)
Information source: BACRIM - Army

36. Group name: Banda criminal de “Care pollo”
Department: Meta
Municipality(ies): Granada
Number of members: 200
Commander’s name: Hernán Velosa García (“H.H.” or “Care pollo” - alias)
Information source: Police

37. Group name: Nueva Generación
Department: Nariño
Municipality(ies): Leyva, El Rosario, Policarpo, Cumbitara y Los Andes
Number of members:
Commander’s name:
Information source: MAPP/OEA (OAS observer mission) – 6th and 7th reports

38. Group name: Mano Negra or Águilas Negras
Department: Nariño
Municipality(ies): Leyva, El Rosario, Balboa, Taminango, Mercaderes
Number of members: 150
Commander’s name:
Information source: MAPP/OEA (OAS observer mission) – 6th and 7th reports

39. Group name: Rastrojos
Department: Nariño
Municipality(ies): Tumaco, Barbacoas, Llorente, Guayacana
Number of members: 50
Commander’s name: Wilber Varela (“Jabón” - alias)
Information source: BACRIM – Army; Police

40. Group name: ONG
Department: Nariño
Municipality(ies): Leiva, El Palmar, Rosario, Policarpa, Taminango
Number of members: 120
Commander’s name: Carlos Mario Jimenes Naranjo (“Macaco” - alias), Johny Jader (“Johny 20” - alias), Pedro
Information source: Police

41. Group name: Los Rastrojos
Department: Nariño
Municipality(ies): Policarpo, El Rosario
Number of members: 30
Commander’s name: “El sarco” (alias)
Information source: Police

42. Group name: Águilas Negras or Águilas Azules
Department: Norte de Santander
Municipality(ies): Cúcuta, Puerto Santander, El Zulia, Los Patios, Villa del Rosario, El Tarra, Ocaña, Tibú
Number of members: 120-150
Commander’s name: Juan Carlos Rojas Mora (“Jorge” – alias), Jorge Alirio Trujillo Sánchez (“Chorizo” - alias), “Jairo” (alias), “Sinaí” (alias)
Information source: Police; BACRIM – Army; MAPP/OEA (OAS observer mission) – 6th and 7th reports

43. Group name: Bloque Catatumbo
Department: Norte de Santander
Municipality(ies): Puerto Santander, Sardinata, Tibú, Cúcuta, El Tarra
Number of members:
Commander’s name: Disidente
Information source: MAPP/OEA (OAS observer mission) – 6th and 7th reports

44. Group name: Nueva Generación
Department: Norte de Santander
Municipality(ies): Cúcuta
Number of members:
Commander’s name:
Information source: Press (National and regional)

45. Group name: Águilas doradas
Department: Norte de Santander
Municipality(ies): Ocaña
Number of members:
Commander’s name:
Information source: Press (National and regional)

46. Group name: Macheteros and Rastrojos
Department: Putumayo
Municipality(ies): Puerto Asís, La Hormiga
Number of members: 320
Commander’s name: “El Ruso” (alias), “Asprilla” (alias)
Information source: Police, BACRIM (Army)

47. Group name: Grupo Cordillera
Department: Risaralda
Municipality(ies): Pereira, Dos quebradas, Piedras de Moler, Cartago (Valle)
Number of members: 15
Commander’s name: Carlos Alberto Herrera (“Conejo” - alias), reportedly under the influence of demobilized leader “Macaco”
Information source: BACRIM – Army; Police

48. Group name: Heroes de Montes de María
Department: Sucre
Municipality(ies): Ovejas, San Onofre
Number of members: 30
Commander’s name:
Information source: Police, MAPP/OEA (OAS observer mission) – 6th and 7th reports

49. Group name: Criminal gang
Department: Sucre
Municipality(ies):
Number of members:
Commander’s name: “Guerrero y Salomón” - alias
Information source: Police

50. Group name: Los Hombres de Azul
Department: Tolima
Municipality(ies): Purificación
Number of members: 80
Commander’s name:
Information source: BACRIM - Army

51. Group name: Conquistadores criminal gang
Department: Tolima
Municipality(ies): Southern Tolima
Number of members:
Commander’s name:
Information source: Police

52. Group name: Auto-defensas Unidas del Valle-AUV
Department: Valle del Cauca
Municipality(ies): Norte del Valle
Number of members:
Commander’s name:
Information source: MAPP/OEA (OAS observer mission) – 6th and 7th reports

53. Group name: Rondas Campesinas Populares
Department: Valle del Cauca
Municipality(ies): Norte del Valle
Number of members:
Commander’s name:
Information source: MAPP/OEA (OAS observer mission) – 6th and 7th reports

54. Group name: Bloque Central
Department: Valle del Cauca
Municipality(ies): Riofrío
Number of members:
Commander’s name:
Information source: MAPP/OEA (OAS observer mission) – 6th and 7th reports

55. Group name: Frente Social Común por la Paz
Department: Valle del Cauca
Municipality(ies): Tulúa
Number of members:
Commander’s name:
Information source: MAPP/OEA (OAS observer mission) – 6th and 7th reports

56. Group name: Machos and Rastrojos
Department: Valle del Cauca
Municipality(ies): Buenaventura, El Dovio, El Aguila, Anserma Nuevo
Number of members: 300
Commander’s name: Don Diego, Varela (“Doble cero” - alias)
Information source: BACRIM - Army

57. Group name: Grupo Autodefensas Urbanos - GRAU
Department: Valle del Cauca
Municipality(ies): Jamundí
Number of members:
Commander’s name: Indio William
Information source: Press (National and regional)

58. Group name: “Emerging criminal group”
Department: Valle del Cauca
Municipality(ies): Buenaventura, San Luis, El Progreso, Las Palmas, R9, El Cristal, Pampa Linda, Rockefeller
Number of members:
Commander’s name: Wilber Alirio Varela (“Jabón - alias), ”Irra“ (alias)
Information source: Police

59. Group name: Stronghold of Pedro Oliverio Guerrero Castillo (”Cuchillo“ – alias)’s group
Department: Vichada and Guaviare
Municipality(ies): San José, Calamar, Guaviare, and Vichada
Number of members: 300-700 (to be confirmed)
Commander’s name: Juan Pablo Hernández Sanabria
Information source: Press (National and regional)

60. Group name: Unknown
Department: Vichada
Municipality(ies): Cumaribo, Santa Rosalía, La primavera
Number of members: 200
Commander’s name: Jonathan Steven Tavera Jaramillo
Information source: BARCRIM - Army

61. Group name: Grupo Central Llanero
Department: Vichada
Municipality(ies): Cumaribo, Santa Rosalía, La Primavera, La San Teodoro, La Venturosa
Number of members: 72
Commander’s name: ”Cuchillo“ (alias), ”Yaner, Pijao, or Arbey“ (alias)
Information source: Police

62. Group name: Cooperativa de Seguridad del Meta y Vichada
Department: Vichada
Municipality(ies): Cumaribo, Santa Rosalía, La Primavera
Number of members: 60
Commander’s name: Carlos Mario Jimenez Naranjo (”Macaco“ - alias), Carlos Alberto Quiñones Mosquera (”Mosquera“ - alias)
Information source: Police

Posted by isacson at 1:08 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 21, 2006

“Para-Politics:” the snowballing scandal

In the middle of last week, Colombia's Supreme Court ordered the arrest of four members of Colombia's Congress, a former governor, and other local officials on suspicion of collusion with paramilitary groups. At the same time, the government's internal-affairs branch brought charges against the former head of President Uribe's intelligence service, alleging that he essentially placed the agency at the service of paramilitary leaders. The arrests and charges, and the likelihood that more are to come, have sent a major shock wave through Colombia's political system.

Much - very, very much - remains to be revealed. Nonetheless, the events of the past week have, to an unprecedented degree, lifted the lid on one of Colombia's most shameful, most widely recognized - but also most widely denied - secrets. In many regions of the country, new revelations are rapidly emerging about years of close collusion and collaboration between high government officials, the security forces, wealthy landowners, businesspeople, and murderous, drug-dealing paramilitary groups.

These revelations and arrests are good news, for many reasons. First, people responsible for some of the most horrible crimes in recent Colombian history may not get away with it simply because they didn't wear paramilitary uniforms - or at least, they will not remain happily anonymous. Second, Colombia's institutions appear to be working: in a justice system with a severe record of impunity and failure to confront the powerful, the Supreme Court and prosecutors appear to be determined to do their jobs. Third, if this initial step goes well, it may embolden other witnesses - including the paramilitary leaders themselves - to come forward with more information about what happened. Many analysts see this process as Colombia's best chance to avoid a future of de facto rule by mafias and warlords.

The scandal is growing quickly - analysts keep using the metaphor of a snowball rolling downhill. There is too much happening, and too quickly, to process into a coherent narrative. Just consider these thirty-two quotes from Colombia's media - taken from just three days (Saturday, Sunday and Monday). This is a very big deal.

As the crisis grows, more people close to the president, such as the former director of the DAS, a former diplomat in Chile and several of his congressional supporters are being accused of the worst crimes. If this snowball keeps growing, it is almost inevitable that his government will end up stained. - Semana magazine

The question is: how many more of the President's friends have to go down before the situation becomes unsustainable? - Patricia Lara Salive, El País (Cali)

It is indispensable that there be a large mobilization, of the government and all the parties, to prevent the tentacles of armed narcodemocracy from drowning the state. Let's hope it's not too late. - Humberto de la Calle, El Espectador

Fear stalks the Congress

The general rule these days in Congress is worry and uncertainty. There is no shortage of long faces in the halls of the National Capitol. While so far only a small number of legislators have been called before the justice system to clarify their suspected ties to paramilitary groups, the fear is that many more may get the call. - Colprensa, El País (Cali)

The Congress has ended up like the ham in a sandwich, between a President who does not want to see himself affected by this scandal and a Supreme Court that, as the days go by, may become the toughest judge. - El Tiempo

In “the regions,” everyone supported paramilitaries

The paramilitaries have not been groups of bandits isolated from their environment, but rather armed groups firmly and deeply rooted in the social and political dynamic of the regions where they were born, grew and consolidated themselves. - Alfredo Rangel, Cambio magazine

In some regions of the country, to be a paramilitary became a status symbol. And nobody put any limits on it. Many wealthy “lords of society” grew fond of the camouflage, the well-embroidered armbands and the private armies. And nobody ever said anything. They also grew fond of winning votes thanks to collective fear in a country starved for order. That is how the “para” monster, which is now beginning to be decapitated, came into being. In the end, if the easy money from coca no longer conferred power, it could be had from the freedom to kill in the name of the principle of self-defense. - Jorge Leyva, El Espectador

Your political spokesman at the time [Iván Roberto Duque or “Ernesto Báez,” in an interview with researchers León Valencia and Mauricio Romero] told us that in 1999, a large number of political bosses, businessmen and narcotraffickers came to speak with the AUC leadership to urge them to take an offensive posture and to occupy new regions. To make this possible they provided them with money and arms, and put them in contact with political and social leaders in these regions. - León Valencia, El Tiempo

We have lived in a society permeated by the self-defense groups. How can we say that we have not had contact with them? If that is a crime, half the country will have to go to jail. In Córdoba, where the self-defense groups were born, the Army and the Police always knew where they were. - Former Córdoba department Rep. Eleonora Pineda, El Espectador

Now, the case of Córdoba is unique because of the power that the paramilitaries had, which required the politicians, on some occasions, to have to talk with them in order to campaign [in areas they controlled]. There can't be a single politician here who can say that he has not met with them. But there was not complicity. The paramilitary phenomenon in Córdoba was one of collective defense against the guerrillas and it involved everyone: politicians, cattlemen, industrialists, police, soldiers, the church and the community in general. - Córdoba Sen. Miguel de la Espriella, El Espectador

How are criminal responsibilities gauged, and how far should they go, taking into account that they range from serious crimes like masterminding massacres, to arranging financing, to the simple act of knowing paramilitaries personally (something hardly unusual in the Atlantic coast) and practicing politics in zones under their control? - Santiago Castro Gómez, El País (Cali)

The problems of corruption, violence and paramilitarism in our country are not entirely attributable to narcotrafficking, as they also originate - maybe more than anything else - from the persistence of very antidemocratic practices in Colombian politics. These antidemocratic practices, for their part, appear to be very closely tied to the concentration of agricultural property and the continuity of large landowners' power in Colombia. - Rodrigo Uprimny of the NGO DeJuSticia, Semana magazine

The paramilitaries and the security forces

The paramilitaries went to their contacts in the DAS [the presidential intelligence service, or secret police] with a list of names of people who, according to them, were guerrilla collaborators and should be assassinated. Along with the victim's name, the agency's functionaries then gave the “paras” all possible information: addresses, telephone numbers, physical descriptions, family members' details and locations, etc. Once the paramilitaries had this information, they went to their “friends” in the police to carry out the crimes. The collaboration of that institution's uniformed members is discussed by the paramilitaries themselves in what they called “operation reports.” In these reports they tell “Jorge 40” whom they killed, and where. At the end they provide annotations in which they say that the assassinations “counted with the collaboration of members of the SIJIN [Judicial Police] or SIPOL [Police Intelligence].”... But while some police carried out hitman duties for the paramilitaries, other members of the Army also carried out the same activities, though according to the “paras'” own documents, the main aid they received [from the Army] was alerts about the security forces' upcoming operations against paramilitaries. - Semana magazine

According to the charges of the Procurator-General [the Colombian government's internal-affairs branch, which can hand out administrative punishments but not jail time], [former presidential intelligence (DAS) director Jorge] Noguera helped avoid judicial actions against paramilitary members, gave classified information to self-defense groups and never managed to explain why he had multiple meetings with paramilitary leaders. According to the procurator, Noguera helped to erase and change paramilitaries' criminal records and, as if that weren't enough, ordered his personnel to collaborate with, and to refrain from attacking, the self-defense groups. - Semana magazine

Sucre department, home to most of the arrested congressmen

This alliance goes back to 1996. Joaquín García came up to meet the paramilitaries, and he met with “El Profe” Vicente Castaño and [Salvatore] Mancuso. He came with Miguel Nule Amín, Eduardo Chaui and Javier Piedrahita, a hard-core narco from the region. They began to form the groups. And then the “cleansing plan” began, and the people began to be afraid. In Sincelejo [the capital of Sucre department], every night there was one dead, two dead. That is how they grew stronger. I was Joaquín's bodyguard, via the Army, and I carried a B-2 [military intelligence] identity card.“ - Sucre-based paramilitary informant Jairo Castillo, in Semana magazine

A few days before he died [in early April 2004], the mayor of Roble, Sucre, had warned his family: if something happens to me, the person responsible would be the political boss Salvador Arana, the former governor of Sucre and [the Uribe government's] former ambassador in Chile. ... Later, in a public meeting before the president of the republic, Álvaro Uribe, he repeated his fears: ”Mr. President, they are going to kill me,“ the mayor, a member of the [left-of-center] Polo Democrático party, said to the head of state, who ordered his staff to take note. Shortly afterward, the fears of this Sucre town's leader were realized. His lifeless body appeared on one of the roads leading to the capital, Sincelejo. - Colprensa, El País (Cali)

Where was the attorney-general?

Within ex-attorney-general Osorio's [2004 order to drop an investigation into Sucre governor Salvador Arana's alleged paramilitary ties and responsibility for murder], the real gem is a paragraph that says that the witnesses' allegations ”appear unlikely, since it cannot be believed that a person with the career and education of Dr. Salvador Arana Sus (a doctor, a surgeon, with long experience in the public sector and without a criminal or disciplinary record) could participate in conduct as horrible as the charges being gratuitously tossed at him.“ - Semana magazine

Some of the evidence against the politicians accused of collusion with paramilitaries has been in the possession of the attorney-general's office for years. Why did the former attorney-general [Luis Camilo Osorio] fail to move forward with investigations that could have saved so many lives? - María Teresa Ronderos, Semana magazine

The case of Cesar department Senator Álvaro Araújo

In 2002, a year after the killing of my Aunt Consuelo [Araújo, murdered in a botched FARC kidnapping attempt], a security summit [Consejo de Seguridad] was held in Valledupar. I denounced that the paramilitaries' ”Comandante 39“ practically held all local governments captive. A week later there was a military operation and the Army killed 19 paramilitaries. As a result I began to feel persecution from the self-defense groups, because ”39“ accused me of being responsible for the military operation. The scene became horrible, I practically couldn't leave Valledupar, my town councilmember friends did not want to talk to me, I was like a leper, until I said to myself: I can't go on like this. At that time the official talks between the government and the paramilitaries began, and I decided to seek an interview with Jorge 40 to clear up the threats. - Cesar department Sen. Álvaro Araújo, El Espectador

”Alvarito [Cesar department Senator Álvaro Araújo] is my personal friend and a friend of [top AUC leader] Jorge 40, and right now he is the leader from the Atlantic Coast with the best political chances of becoming president.“ - ”Gonzalo,“ political advisor to AUC Northern Bloc leader ”Jorge 40,“ in a taped telephone conversation cited in Cambio magazine

Senator Álvaro Araújo, with no compunction, in a meeting in the presidential palace to discuss the issue of the Uribista coalition's relations with paramilitarism, called for his colleagues' solidarity by uttering a sentence that sounded delirious in the mouth of a congressman. He said that if the Supreme Court were to investigate him, it would bring down the foreign minister [his sister], the procurator-general [his uncle] and even the president himself. The sentence is not just a direct threat to the Supreme Court, which by itself would be more than worthy of reproach. It is also a threat to President Uribe, because it sounds like a warning: something like, if you don't do something so that they don't investigate me, I won't be responsible for what might happen. - María Jimena Duzán, El Tiempo

Sucre is just the tip of the iceberg. The rudeness of Sen. Araújo's words reveals that the immediate future will bring much more serious things. The turbid marriage between politics and criminality, a fundamental component of elite domination in Colombia for the last seventy years, has reached Frankenstein-esque levels. - Daniel García-Peña, El Espectador

This is going to get bigger

The snowball has begun to roll downhill and nobody can stop it. The media will keep contributing information and let's hope that society helps. And after what the paramilitary leaders have said from [their current detention center in] La Ceja, it seems that they too will tell their part. I believe that they should do so not just because the law says they should for the good of their fatherland, but because it would be unfair for them to be the only ones to pay for what the entire monster did. They, more than anyone, know that they are only one part of the hydra and that without the other heads, some active and others retired, this never would have come so far. - Salud Hernández-Mora, El Tiempo

The ”para“ leaders know how the entire apparatus works, and they are wiling to say who helped them and helps them, who financed them and how they finance themselves, what lands and assets they have, who sold them weapons, who trained them and gave them intelligence. The truth that the government wanted was the truth of the crime reports: ”who did you kill?“ But not, never, ”who helped you?“ ... What could be coming if they don't make arrangements with the ”paras,“ giving them what was promised, is simply that from La Ceja [the paramilitary leaders] could lay bare much of our ruling class. Total chaos. Everyone stepping on each others' garden hoses. It could even be fun to watch. The government does not appear willing to give don Vicente Castaño what he wants and sign [the promises of leniency] agreed in Ralito, because then the gringos would jump on them. This could be called ”checkmate.“ - Alfredo Molano, El Espectador

The complete confessions that the [paramilitary leaders] detained in La Ceja have promised should not scare anyone, other than those who collaborated with them. ... In addition to the investigative work that the [Supreme] Court is doing, one must prepare for the spattering that will come from the ”para“ leaders' confessions. And what will come from the accused politicians over the next several months, as they seek lowered sentences in exchange for giving evidence. - Rafael Nieto, Semana magazine

Now, the attorney-general's office and the Supreme Court have begun to blow the whistle on the Sucre politicians, but we await information from other departments - Córdoba, Cesar, Magdalena, Atlántico, Guajira, Bolívar, Antioquia, the Santanders... - where the local authorities in many municipalities are pieces on the paramilitary chessboard. - María Elvira Samper, Cambio magazine

Now the authorities must judge all who participated in paramilitarism, regardless of who falls. ... The investigations have hardly begun and there are many criminal acts to uncover, among them, whether or not paramilitaries altered electoral results to favor the president or members of his coalition, whether public funds were used to strengthen paramilitarism, or who has illegally taken land from displaced people. - former DAS (presidential intelligence / secret police) director Ramiro Bejarano Guzmán, El Espectador

What about President Uribe?

The President's image is at stake. In particular, his credibility as an alternative promising to renew politics, a promoter of a new way of practicing it, a break with the past. All of the politicians implicated so far supported his re-election and are members of uribista parties. Uribe's own speech on Friday morning sought to defend himself with the argument that there was also paramilitary influence and a tepid response to such crimes in the past, but this tends to muddy the waters for everyone. Including the current government, which doesn't look much different amid the generalized muddiness. - Semana magazine

If any of the 30,000 paramilitaries can say that the President of the Republic has been complicit, let them say so. - President Álvaro Uribe

Many of the guerrillas' defenders, the only recourse they have to criticize Uribe for fighting the guerrillas is to call him a ”paramilitary.“ - President Álvaro Uribe

During the [2006] campaign, I asked the President to say that he did not want any type of support from sectors tied to paramilitarism. I said it many times. Unfortunately, I failed to get a response. This is not an accusation against the President; it is simply that the President has yet to say expressly that he does not want paramilitary support ... and he and his government have remained silent. - Former President César Gaviria, El Tiempo

Amid this panorama, the obvious question is for the man at the summit [President Uribe]. How can someone be a successful politician and a prosperous landowner in two cradles of paramilitarism - Antioquia and Córdoba - and arrive twice in a row to the presidency with the support of all the accused politicians (and many, many others), while having nothing to do with the paramilitaries? - Álvaro Sierra, Cambio magazine

Posted by isacson at 1:46 AM | Comments (6)

November 20, 2006

Catatumbo's crisis

Before leaving for my recent trip, I asked CIP Intern Mariam Khokhar to look into what has been going on in the region of Catatumbo, Colombia. In Norte de Santander department near the Venezuelan border, this ungoverned jungle zone manages to combine many of Colombia's various plagues in a single territory.

Three armed groups (FARC, ELN and paramilitaries - both former and re-armed) are present. In recent years, predominance seems to have shifted from the ELN to the paramilitaries who, with open military collaboration, carried out a series of horrific massacres in 1999. Today, the FARC appear to be growing in numbers and momentum, and are clearly on the offensive, putting local leaders and non-governmental organizations under heavy threat. Catatumbo is a coca-growing region, and has been subject to U.S.-funded herbicide fumigation. It also hosted one of the biggest paramilitary demobilizations, in 2004, though former leaders of the AUC's Catatumbo Bloc remain powerful, and reports of paramilitary re-armament are frequent. Its proximity to Venezuela makes many of Catatumbo's problems international - and makes smuggling a big business.

Many reports over the past few months - including an article in El Tiempo on Friday - indicate that things are rapidly getting worse in Catatumbo, and a serious humanitarian crisis is developing. Here is Mariam Khokhar's summary of reports from Colombian media and NGOs.

 

Although the murder rate is reportedly falling in Catatumbo, narco-trafficking continues. A new type of armed confrontation has arisen in which the guerillas and emerging violent groups are the central actors, thanks to the economic power that narco-trafficking generates. Massacres of past years are only starting to be uncovered, and it is feared that the process will be slow, with criminals not getting their full due and with victims not receiving proper reparations. Moreover, in recent months, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has been growing increasingly concerned about the deteriorating humanitarian situation in Catatumbo. Form the beginning of 2006, violence has increased, leading to yet another wave of mass displacement. Crime and violence are now crossing over the border into Venezuela, bringing yet another element into Colombia’s long-running war.

The region of Catatumbo covers an area of 6,644 square kilometers and consists of the municipalities of Tibú, El Tarra, Teorama, Convención, and El Carmen. Its territory is organized in thirty administrative units, thirteen indigenous settlements, and 432 rural districts. Historically, Catatumbo has been an object of dispute for various illegal, armed organizations like the ELN – who dominated the area from the 1970’s; the FARC – from the second half of the 1990’s; and the AUC – from 1999 to 2004. Despite many rounds of fumigation, it is believed that as many as 12,000 hectares of coca remain, which serve to finance these armed groups.

In the recent past, clandestine strategies of “political cleansing” were put in action in this border area between Colombia and Venezuela by narco-paramilitaries belonging to the AUC. These actions resulted in a bi-national series of massacres, with more than 11,000 people dying in five years, according to investigators and military sources in Bogotá and Caracas. Just now has the magnitude of this recent history begun to be understood.

The beginnings can be traced to the morning of May 29, 1999, when a group of paramilitary forces installed a roadblock on the road that links La Gabarra with the municipal center of Tibú. More than 60 vehicles were forced to stop. It is estimated that about 100 people – including farmers, businessmen, and other residents of the area – were harassed by the paramilitaries, who asked them for their documents of identity. The paramilitaries were carrying a list of names, and those people who appeared on the list were immediately executed; among them Jorge Camilo González Prada, Gerardo Berbesí, and Rafael Claros. In total, eight individuals were assassinated and another 16 were kidnapped (their whereabouts remain a mystery.)

This is how, in 1999, Carlos Castaño – a paramilitary leader – began his take-over of La Gabarra in an attempt to eradicate the guerillas’ influence in the town. This operation led to well-documented massacres, which left hundreds of individuals dead. All this occurred within earshot of the area’s military base. These actions allowed the cultivation of coca in Catatumbo and the laboratories to produce cocaine to remain in the hands of the narco-traffickers that commanded the AUC, including Salvatore Mancuso.

The paramilitary stronghold in La Gabarra led to the bleeding of Colombia’s war across the border into Venezuela. Now, more than 60% of the kidnappings that occur in Venezuela occur near the border with Colombia. In San Cristóbal, Venezuela – a city close to Cúcuta, Colombia (the capital of Norte de Santander, where Catatumbo is located) – about 95% of the homicides are carried out with illegal weapons. In just the past three months, Venezuelan officials confirm that twenty-eight homicides have occurred in El Nula alone associated with the penetration of paramilitarism. There is growing uneasiness between Colombian and Venezuelan officials over this issue.

Despite the apparent spread of paramilitarism in the area, official rates of homicide in Catatumbo have fallen over the past years from 180 per 100,000 citizens from 1999 to 2004 – the time during which the paramilitaries were in control – to between 60 and 80 per 100,000 in 2005. The most affected populations have been Tibú, Convención, El Zulia, El Tarra, Sardinata, Hacarí, and Teorama. From 1999, there have been at least 3000 violent deaths, more than 200 disappearances, and 40,000 people have been displaced.

In the border town of La Gabarra, the houses are once occupied again after two-thirds of the town was made to flee for their lives, trying to escape the paramilitaries' threats. Still, every house narrates a story of violence. “People are beginning to come forward,” said Wifredo Cañizares, director of a human rights center in Cucuta, in The Baltimore Sun . “They've told us where there are more than 35 clandestine cemeteries, 19 of them in the countryside around La Gabarra.” After a regional paramilitary unit demobilized in December 2005, peasant farmers from the Department began contacting authorities, Cañizares reports. They began leading investigators to graves all across the countryside, asking for help to dig up the bodies of their loved ones.

Still, many of these stories remain hidden for fear of reprisals. Dionaida Delgado, whose brother has been missing for several years, told The Miami Herald , “We haven’t told the authorities, because we’re afraid.” This is true for many other victims as well. There are whispers of continuing torture, allegations rapes, and rumors of mass graves that could hold as many as 1500 victims. Many residents of the area know where these occurrences, but many say nothing. They do not trust the authorities will help them, or protect them once they speak.

The demobilization of the AUC Catatumbo Bloc in December 2004 has favored the guerrillas, particularly the FARC, who have benefited from the vacuum left by the paramilitaries. The dismembering of the AUC has also allowed for the emergence of new armed structures linked to narco-trafficking since 2005. One of these new groups is the Aguilas Negras (The Black Eagles), who have substantial power in Ocaña and municipalities in the south of Cesar. The expansion of these groups is closely linked to the cultivation of coca, to the existence of nearby narco-trafficking routes, and the fact that the area borders Venezuela.

According to military intelligence, this group consists of about 300 demobilized paramilitaries that have opted to continue fighting. An OAS document attests that although these new paramilitaries “now do not use uniforms but they maintain control over the civilian population of the region."

The emergence of these new, clandestine networks is a terrifying development for citizens of this area who have already lived the violence of Colombia’s war. It now appears that justice is still distant and that victims will not be compensated. Still, the government insists that it is actively working to serve justice and offer reparations. The head of the government’s reparations commission, Eduardo Pizarro, says that the process will be long and hard. “Reparation isn’t just writing a check,” he stated. “Reparation is justice. Reparation is returning a missing body. Reparation is a monument to the victims; it’s returning someone’s belongings.”

Though denunciations of large mass graves are widespread, uncovering them will be difficult. Further complicating the already slow investigations is the fact that thousands of landmines are scattered throughout Catatumbo. Also, frequent combat between guerillas, paramilitaries, and Army soldiers also makes forensic work difficult. This may give paramilitaries the opportunity to destroy mass graves, doing away with evidence that could be used by victims to gain reparations.

The reparations process has barely begun; between underfunding, bureaucracy, and fear to come forward, almost nobody has been compensted. José Quintero, an electrician who lost his father and his brother in a massacre, told The Miami Herald, “We’re not waiting for anything. Only an idiot sits and waits for someone else to help them.” This sense of despair is shared by many in Catatumbo, whose reality continues to be shaped by Colombia’s ongoing conflict.

Posted by isacson at 8:46 AM | Comments (0)

November 19, 2006

President Uribe digs in deeper

After a week in which several pro-Uribe members of Colombia's congress were arrested for paramilitary ties, how did President Álvaro Uribe respond yesterday? By accusing his critics of being guerrilla supporters.

When I ask that the total truth be known, it is because one can see their prejudices. Many of those who attack the government saying that the president is a paramilitary, basically what they are is enraged that the president attacks the guerrillas. They are not able to say that they defend the guerrillas, and that they are very bothered because the government is fighting them. They should be more authentic, more sincere.

That has been the pretext to which they have appealed historically. When a government fights against the guerrillas, immediately they call it "human rights violator, paramilitary." Forty years ago, when they wanted to discredit someone, they called him "homosexual." Fifteen, twenty years ago, when they wanted to discredit someone, they called him "mafioso." And today, when they want to discredit an honest government, the call it "paramilitary."

This is not only offensive, it's positively unhinged.

First, nobody beyond a radical fringe is accusing Uribe of having direct paramilitary ties. No proof exists, so it would be irresponsible to do so.

Second, shouldn't Uribe be profoundly disturbed that many of his supporters appear to have close ties to illegal warlords who have killed thousands and sent hundreds of tons of cocaine to the rest of the world? Instead of attacking his critics, shouldn't he be condemning this energetically and taking all possible measures to ease the work of investigators and prosecutors? Isn't that what an "honest government" would do?

One of Uribe's advisors should tell him that he is not helping himself. In the face of such serious charges against his legislative supporters, he should be demanding a thorough investigation and offering to help reveal the truth. If instead he chooses to attack a set of straw-man critics and accuse them of supporting guerrillas, it only arouses suspicions about the president's own relationship to paramilitarism.

Posted by isacson at 8:56 AM | Comments (2)

November 16, 2006

Land of Bosses

Here, thanks to CIP Intern Mariam Khokhar, is a translation of Alfredo Molano's brilliant column from last Sunday's edition of Colombia's weekly El Espectador. Molano paid a visit to the municipalities of Caucasia and Tarazá in northern Antioquia department, a zone that has long been under the control of paramilitary groups. (The towns are not far from Tierradentro, Córdoba, where the FARC launched a large attack on a police post two weeks ago, surprising many who thought that this zone was under solid paramilitary control.)

Today, the paramilitaries who control the zone have officially demobilized. But the reality, Molano reports, is quite different.

Land of Bosses (Tierra de Patrones) 

Alfredo Molano Bravo

It’s enough to land in the airport to know where you’ve arrived: Welcome to Caucasia. National Police, District 1. We feel proud because you are our reason for being. Cattle auctions Thursdays and Saturdays. Signed: Subagauca; Colombia is passion.

At the exit of the terminal, another sign: let’s make a nation, let’s make cows. Signed: Hacienda San X, a big estate adjacent to the Hacienda XL that, they say, is owned by Macaco [a leader of the paramilitaries’ former Central Bolívar Bloc].

Bajo Cauca is a region full of cattle raising: improved pastures, water widely available, cement corrals, electric fences, country houses with pools, bodyguards, hot tubs. Everything one could ask for. The campesinos who first made these jungles habitable and founded farms are today crammed together in the “highway zones” or in the squatter slums (barrios de invasion). Or in the mountains cultivating coca, living in holes in the ground. Defeated.

The Colombian state could never get started with land redistribution, it didn’t even manage to impose timid regulations on this brutal land concentration. It had to give up and leave it in the hands of the big landowners’ armed groups to basically legislate and impose labor standards. The big landowners are on the most fertile land, close to the roads and around the towns; the campesinos and the tenant farmers are in the mountainous areas and they cultivate coca. Many landowners own shares, to say the least, in the coca plantations that the paramilitaries watch over. Not, of course, in those controlled by the guerrillas. With that money the bosses not only “dress up” their haciendas, but also pay the AUC for their security services.

Today, Caucasia and Tarazá are the kingdoms of Don Cuco Vanoy [head of the AUC’s former Miners’ Bloc] and Don Macaco. The negotiation has meant nothing. They continue giving orders like lords of the noose and the knife. Not a leaf moves on a tree without them allowing or ordering it from [their current detention site in] La Ceja. The people of the town point to the haciendas which, by the way, were acquired not long ago; the politicians know where their owners came from and, as is customary, the government stays quiet.

The famous computer of Don Jorge 40 has shown what everyone knew: that a few weapons were turned in and the clientele managed by the landowners was recruited to be passed off as combatants, in order for the state – with our own money – to finance their activities, which are two: theft and local politicking. Almost the same as before, but with different accents and modalities. Because as it has been said and shown – and even acknowledged by the same government – the armed reserve of the AUC is still intact.

There is a pathetic case that illustrates how far things have come. It’s that of the Nueva Luz Clinic, in Tarazá. It wasn’t a little field hospital. It was a private clinic with everything done by law, and with the technical and professional setup necessary for the most sophisticated procedures, but limited exclusively to injured or sick AUC cadres. To any regular person this would have shown the intimate complicity of the security forces, of the authorities – and even local public opinion – with paramilitarism. They turned it over, this is true, but that does not hide the complicity that existed and that exists between these forces that prop up the large landholding system and increase misery.

Tarazá and Caucasia, zones of coca cultivation and processing, are also areas of recruitment of military cadres. The anti-narcotics Police is in the habit of fumigating the small farms of the campesinos without touching the large coca plantations that are in the hands of the “self-defense groups.” The uniformed officials land at the airport, stay in the hotels, look around, do their rounds, and analyze their data. The narcos simply avoid them. The official information is accepted as uncontestable evidence of the government’s war against the so-called illegal armed actors, but the police have barely left before the business starts up again. It is now routine.

So much regional prosperity, of course, has its secret, and it is far from the economic policies dictated by the National Planning Department. It depends more on Luis Carlos Restrepo [the government’s negotiator with the paramilitaries] than on Carrasquilla [the finance minister]. In this region of the Bajo Cauca, coca, cows, and weapons go hand in hand; they are just one, single business. For the country, the price of so much prosperity and security is high: hundreds of campesinos and tenant farmers have been seized and taken out through the black door – that is, they have been murdered.

Posted by isacson at 10:34 PM | Comments (0)

November 5, 2006

Interesting poll numbers

Invamer-Gallup in Colombia put out a new poll last week of 1,000 Colombians in 4 cities. (See a summary of its findings on Semana magazine's website.) It has several interesting results, such as a 6-point drop in Álvaro Uribe's popularity in the last month.

One new development is that those polled now view Colombia's human-rights NGOs almost as favorably as the armed forces, 69 to 71 percent, respectively:

Favorability ratings of various institutions

This is new, as of a few months ago. Since Gallup started asking opinions of human rights NGOs in October 2003, the military was usually about ten percentage points more popular. That ended in the middle of this year, with the two now running almost equal. The armed forces' unfavorability ratings, meanwhile, exceeded those of human-rights NGOs for the first time in June, and have stayed that way.

Favorability ratings of various institutions
(I constructed this chart using Gallup's detailed poll results, which don't appear to be available online.)

While both are very popular among those polled, the drop in the military's ratings no doubt results from the series of scandals that have hit the army this year (torture of recruits, the Jamundí massacre, dressing up murdered civilians as guerrillas killed in combat, false car bombings). It is interesting, meanwhile, to see that Colombia's much-maligned human-rights groups are now one of the most favorably viewed entities in the country.

Posted by isacson at 11:34 PM | Comments (0)

October 31, 2006

New CIP report: "Plan Colombia - Six Years Later"

We have just released a new twenty-page "International Policy Report" on Colombia.

Plan Colombia - Six Years Later (1.3MB PDF file) gives a look at conditions in Putumayo and Medellín, Colombia, as we saw them last July, six years almost to the date after President Clinton signed into law the first "Plan Colombia" aid package.

Regular visitors to this weblog may recognize some of the report's pictures and prose. Four different blog entries in July and August served more or less as "beta versions" for this final product.

Here is the text of the release summarizing and announcing the new report.

October 31, 2006

Plan Colombia - Six Years Later: The Center for International Policy releases a new report on Putumayo and Medellín, Colombia

In July 2000, President Clinton signed into law a big aid package called "Plan Colombia," with the ambitious goal of helping Colombia to resolve its related problems of drug trafficking and violence. Since then, the United States has given Colombia $4.7 billion. No other country outside the Middle East comes close. Of that aid, 4 out of every 5 dollars - $1.5 million per day - has gone to Colombia's police and military.

Since 2002, meanwhile, Colombia's government has been led by a president, Álvaro Uribe, whose governance strategy - called "Democratic Security" - heavily favors military force.

Has this combination of two largely military strategies worked? After so much investment in weapons and offensives, is the country more secure, better governed, and out from under the illegal drug economy?

No, mostly not, finds Plan Colombia - Six Years Later, a new report from the Center for International Policy.

In July, exactly six years after Plan Colombia's inception, CIP Colombia Program Director Adam Isacson visited Putumayo, the southern jungle department where U.S.-funded Plan Colombia operations began. He also went to Medellín, Colombia's second-largest city which, due to its sharply reduced rates of violence, is often viewed as a showcase of the Uribe government's U.S.-backed security policies.

In Putumayo, where the United States has invested hundreds of millions, CIP found that conditions had improved only slightly. While massacres are less frequent and road travel is easier, guerrillas remain strong and active in the countryside, and supposedly demobilized paramilitaries continue to dominate the main towns. Cultivation of coca, which was reduced by an initial blitz of fumigation, is rebounding as the spray planes have followed the plant elsewhere in Colombia. And alternative-development programs have yielded mostly disappointing results. Putumayo, where Plan Colombia began, is still in crisis, and distrust of the Colombian government remains very strong.

In Medellín, the "miracle" of declining crime rates owes only partially to Uribe's "Democratic Security" strategy. Increased military and police presence have made some difference, but two other factors have been at least as important.

First, "the paramilitaries won." Though officially demobilized, local paramilitary leader "Don Berna" and his men now control much of Medellín's organized crime. Their dominion over the city's vast, historically conflictive slums is no longer disputed with guerrilla militias or other criminal gangs. As a result, they are killing far fewer people.

Second, Medellín's city government is investing its own resources in poor neighborhoods' governance, and in the reintegration of former rank-and-file paramilitary fighters and gang members. Medellín's government has filled much of the vacuum left by the central government's lack of a well-thought-out, well-financed strategy for assisting former combatants. In most Colombian cities and towns, though, this vacuum remains in place, leaving few options for thousands of unemployed men whose main skill is killing.

With twenty pages of narrative, graphics and photos, Plan Colombia - Six Years Later offers a rare, unvarnished view of conditions "on the ground" in Colombia and the impact of the United States' high-profile, high-cost strategy. The report is available free of charge, as a PDF file in English, at http://www.ciponline.org/colombia/0611ipr.pdf.

Posted by isacson at 12:43 PM | Comments (2)

October 20, 2006

Was it the FARC?

Yesterday morning, someone wearing a military uniform set off a car bomb near the Colombian military's Nueva Granada War College in Bogotá. The explosion wounded twenty-three people. The head of Colombia's army, Gen. Mario Montoya, was attending an event at the facility, but was unharmed.

"I imagine this has to be the FARC. I don't see any other alternative," Colombian Vice-President Francisco Santos told reporters shortly afterward. This morning, President Álvaro Uribe went still further. In response to the bombing, Uribe suspended contacts with the FARC, initiated weeks earlier, that were to lay the groundwork for a prisoner-exchange negotiation. The negotiations were to seek the release of sixty prominent individuals whom the guerrillas have held captive for several years. "The only way that now remains is to rescue the kidnapped people militarily," the president said.

But was the bomb truly the work of the FARC? It is certainly possible, but it doesn't make sense for the guerrillas to carry out such a high-profile act at this particular time. In fact, there are good arguments to back up either hypothesis:

The FARC are responsible for the car bomb:
The FARC are not responsible for the car bomb:
  • President Uribe claims that the government intercepted a telephone call from a FARC militia member, who left a message for top guerrilla leader Jorge Briceño ("Mono Jojoy") indicating that his orders had been carried out.
  • The FARC leadership may have reasoned (poorly) that the bombing might bring prisoner-exchange negotiations closer by weakening public confidence in President Uribe's "Democratic Security" policy.
  • Several weeks ago, the army was shaken by accusations that army officers conspired to plant car bombs in Bogotá, pin the blame on the FARC, and get credit for discovering them. So soon after these revelations, it is unlikely that elements in the army would repeat the same type of stunt. Even if they were to plant a new car bomb, such elements would be unlikely to do it on the grounds of a military base, within close proximity of the army's own commander.
  • The U.S. and British governments have been warning for weeks that they had intelligence indicating an imminent attack in northern Bogotá. While neither government indicated who may have been plotting such an attack, it is safe to assume that the bulk of both governments' intelligence effort is aimed at the FARC.
  • The FARC leadership is anxious to free up to 500 of its veteran fighters from Colombian jails via a prisoner-exchange negotiation with the Colombian government. President Uribe had recently taken steps toward meeting some of the guerrillas' pre-conditions for such a negotiation; the FARC was closer than it had been in years to securing the release of its jailed comrades. Why would the FARC jeopardize that now with a terrorist act in the heart of Bogotá?
  • The Scandinavian-based website ANNCOL, which posts FARC communiqués, interviews with FARC leaders, and sympathetic portrayals of the group, has posted an article denying that the guerrillas played a role. "Could this be a new case of auto-atentados to clean up the 'deteriorated image' of the security forces?" the article asks. "Is this a new obstacle thrown in the way of the exchange of prisoners of war?"
  • Colombia's Army is currently weathering a scandal for planting and setting off car bombs, and trying to pin the blame on the FARC.
  • The bombing killed nobody, and failed to harm Army chief Gen. Mario Montoya, who was in a meeting nearby. This may have been luck - or it could be that the intention was to terrorize while minimizing military casualties, a hypothesis that would point away from the FARC.
  • Bomb experts tell the Colombian press that the explosive used in the attack, R-1, is highly sophisticated, difficult to use, and has not been employed before in an attack in Colombia.
  • In a debate about paramilitary power on Wednesday night in Colombia's congress, evidence was revealed that a past attack blamed on the FARC - a 2005 car-bomb that nearly killed rightist Senator Germán Vargas Lleras - may in fact have been carried out by paramilitaries and army personnel.

Though either hypothesis is plausible at this point, the Colombian government is apparently certain that the FARC set off yesterday's bomb. It is so certain that President Uribe quickly ended this month's halting move toward dialogue, and used some of the strongest rhetoric we have heard from him in many months.

Did the FARC - against any possible conception of its own self-interest - set off yesterday's bomb? Or are the guerrillas being falsely accused, as happened in May 2000 when the government suspended peace talks after extortionists with no guerrilla ties killed a woman by placing a bomb around her neck?

It is imperative that an investigation of yesterday's incident move quickly to determine what really happened. It would be tragic to see hopes for dialogue dim for the wrong reasons.

Posted by isacson at 2:30 PM | Comments (13)

October 16, 2006

Next steps for talks with the FARC

Over the past few days, following my return to Washington, I've gathered and read through more than 130 articles that have appeared so far this month in Colombia's press about the current movement toward dialogue between the Colombian government and the FARC. As mentioned before, Álvaro Leyva, one of the talks' main facilitators, has publicly proposed a confidence-building role for the Center for International Policy in the process. The memo below, based on my reading of the situation, should be viewed as part of that role.

October 16, 2006

To: Interested colleagues
From: Adam Isacson, Colombia Program, Center for International Policy
Re: Next steps for talks with the FARC

In late September and early October, we saw a flurry of activity around the possibility of talks between the Colombian government and the FARC guerrillas. This activity raised hopes for a prisoner-exchange deal that might free about sixty politicians, military officers, and other prominent individuals whom the guerrillas have been holding in captivity for several years. While the FARC has kidnapped many more individuals for ransom, it has made clear that these sixty will only be released if Colombia frees about 500 guerrilla prisoners (and, perhaps, two guerrillas awaiting trial in the United States).

On September 26, the FARC released a proof-of-life video showing twelve provincial legislators whom it has been holding since April 2002. Soon afterward, President Álvaro Uribe expressed his willingness to declare an "encounter zone," leading most observers to believe that he had surprisingly acceded to a guerrilla pre-condition for talks: that the military pull out of two municipalities near Cali so that prisoner-exchange negotiations could take place there.

Both sides then released communiqués indicating that talks about an exchange could become a first step toward a larger peace process. The FARC laid out conditions for a cease-fire, while Uribe spoke of meeting personally with the guerrilla leadership and supporting an assembly to modify the country's constitution once talks progressed to that point.

This was nearly two weeks ago. Since then, little has happened. The government appears to be backpedaling from full acceptance of the guerrillas' terms for talks, amid signs of internal disputes. Both sides have voiced clear differences about what the "encounter zone" might look like. Meanwhile, the government's designated negotiator, High Commissioner for Peace Luis Carlos Restrepo, is occupied for the next two weeks with a round of talks in Havana with the ELN guerrillas.

It would be inaccurate to say that this new effort to initiate talks with the FARC has been derailed. The train is still on the track, but it is clearly not moving forward. How can it be made to move again? Here are five suggestions.

1. Supporters, both within and outside the government, must build consensus for the prisoner-exchange talks as the "least bad" option. The whole idea of exchanging prisoners for kidnap victims faces strong criticism, much - though not all - from the right wing. Critics argue that to do so will reward hostage-taking and kidnapping. They note that it does nothing to free those kidnap victims - most of them less-prominent citizens - who are being held for ransom. They worry that freed FARC prisoners will re-join the guerrillas and kill Colombians, and that the FARC will be encouraged to kidnap again to free more of its cadres. They argue that a demilitarized zone for talks raises ghosts of the Pastrana government's failed 1998-2002 peace effort, that it will confer a degree of political status on the guerrillas, and that the FARC could get some strategic advantage out of the zone, even if its duration is limited to 45 days.

(These arguments have been laid out in recent columns in Colombia's press by, among others, Saúl Hernández, Fernando Londoño, Rafael Nieto, Eduardo Plata, Álvaro Valencia, and Mauricio Vargas.)

These arguments are strong and hard to refute. They express very real concerns, though the government and outside monitors should be able to address some of them as part of the process.

The critics, however, share a common weakness: none offers any proposal for what to do instead. They offer no other options for freeing these sixty people who have been in FARC custody for as many as nine years. The frustrating reality is that few other options do exist.

If an armed rescue could be carried out without the guerrillas killing their captives, it would have happened by now. (One was in fact attempted in May 2003, with tragic results.) To maintain the status quo is a poor option as well: the captives are no closer to freedom, as even the past several years' military buildup has proven unable to force the guerrillas to sue for peace.

An effort to secure a prisoner exchange, then, is the least bad option, and little else. As the critics remind us, such an agreement carries grave disadvantages. Success would offer little to celebrate, other than the return of several dozen people to their loved ones.

However, talks about an exchange do offer at least a slim hope that broader peace talks might follow, or at least that government and guerrilla representatives can build a measure of trust and establish lines of communication. These could in turn ease future dialogues.

2. For now, stick to the prisoner exchange. Leave larger peace proposals for later. The atmosphere quickly became confused in early October when the FARC and President Uribe began discussing conditions and possibilities for broader peace talks. While it is encouraging to hear speculation about cease-fires, meetings between Uribe and the FARC Secretariat, or constitutional reforms, it is very premature to be considering such questions.

By offering a series of hard-to-meet pre-conditions for any larger peace process (such as demilitarizing two coca-producing departments that together are larger than the state of Pennsylvania), the FARC has made clear that for now, it prefers to keep on fighting. Right now, the only viable way to dialogue is to discuss a prisoner exchange. Focus on that, and leave for later the speculation about a larger peace process. To do otherwise is to create a distraction that unnecessarily raises the public's hopes.

3. For now, stick to the question of how to get to the table. The details of the prisoner exchange can wait until the start of negotiations. Observers have asked many good questions about whether an exchange agreement is even viable. After they leave Colombian jails, they ask, will FARC prisoners re-join the guerrillas? If they agree not to re-join the FARC, how can their demobilization be verified? Will the FARC abstain from future kidnappings to pressure for exchanges? Even if they make such a commitment, can it be trusted, or is Colombia condemned to a continued cycle of kidnappings and prisoner exchanges? How many from each side are to be released? Can the exchanges happen bit by bit, rather than all at once? What about FARC prisoners accused of crimes against humanity, who by law cannot be amnestied? What about FARC prisoners, especially "Simón Trinidad" and "Sonia," who are currently in the U.S. criminal justice system, which has no legal mechanism for prisoner exchanges? What of the hundreds - perhaps thousands - of kidnap victims whom the FARC is holding for ransom? Can the prisoner-exchange talks be a step toward a real peace process?

These are all good questions. Taken together, they certainly dampen one's optimism about the negotiations. With such challenges, it is very possible that 45 days of negotiations - even 90 days - may pass in a demilitarized zone, and no prisoner exchange may be reached. The dialogues could fail completely, returning the captives' situation to the status quo.

It is important to remember, though, that these questions don't have to be answered now. Reaching compromise on these issues is the exact purpose of the formal 45-day negotiations. The talks themselves, once they start, are where both sides will determine what is negotiable and what isn't, what kind of prisoner exchange is achievable in the short term, and what kind may have to wait for a later opportunity.

The negotiations may fail due to substantive disagreements - though hopefully efforts to build confidence and trust will help overcome them. This is a risk of every negotiation process. But they should at least be allowed to get that far. The talks should not be allowed to fail because (a) the questions to be addressed are perceived beforehand as too difficult, or (b) neither side can agree on procedural issues like "the rules of the game" to govern the talks themselves.

4. Right now, it is necessary to focus almost entirely on procedural issues, because establishing "the rules of the game" promises to be hard enough. The process gained its current momentum when President Uribe agreed to the formation of an "encounter zone" for talks to take place. This was widely viewed in Colombia's media - and was explicitly described by facilitator Álvaro Leyva, who has been meeting often with Uribe - as an agreement to meet the FARC's demand to pull the security forces out of two municipalities (counties) so that talks could go ahead there.

The municipalities in question are Florida and Pradera, two rural counties in the southeast corner of Valle del Cauca department, not far from Cali. The guerrillas have asked for a pullout of security forces for 45 days, a period that many expect would be renewed at least once.

Though the Uribe government is widely believed to be willing to pull the security forces from Florida and Pradera, and has not contradicted Leyva's assurances, none of its representatives has specifically mentioned the two counties. The government is strongly reluctant to declare a demilitarized zone; President Uribe was one of Colombia's strongest critics of the 42,000 square-kilometer, five-county zone that President Pastrana granted the guerrillas during the failed 1998-2002 peace talks. Though Florida and Pradera are about one-fiftieth the size of Pastrana's zone, while the time period is shorter and the talks' purpose is more specific, there is much trepidation about repeating the experience of the Pastrana years.

The zone vacated by the security forces for peace talks with the FARC in 1998-2002.
The proposed zone for prisoner-exchange talks with the FARC.
1998-2002 zoneProposed zone

Conventional wisdom in Colombia holds that the "original sin" of Pastrana's peace process was to have granted the demilitarized zone to the FARC in the first place. Negotiations about substantive issues remained on hold while both sides wrangled endlessly about conditions in the zone - the absence of independent observers, the presence of troops on the periphery, the presence of non-military government institutions, its use as a base for attacking neighboring populations, reports of increased coca-growing, and several others.

In fact, the real "original sin" of the Pastrana process was to have agreed to a demilitarized zone without conditions. The idea of pulling soldiers out of a zone that had little state control anyway, in order to address the security concerns of a highly distrustful adversary, was not enormously controversial at the time. The problem arose when President-elect Pastrana, on a July 1998 visit to FARC leaders at their jungle encampment, apparently promised them - without consulting anyone - that he would demilitarize the five counties unconditionally. That, at least, is what the FARC understood: the rules of the game for the demilitarized zone were, basically, "no rules." The guerrillas stuck to that position, resisting efforts to establish rules - such as the presence of unarmed soldiers or international monitors - after the fact.

The Uribe government is taking a far more cautious approach, insisting on clearer rules for the zone before agreeing to launch talks. Several issues must be addressed, among them the presence of non-military government institutions (judges, mayors, ombudsmen and the like); the presence and duties of international or civil-society observers; the transportation of negotiators to the zone; and the identity of each side's negotiators (the FARC has already nominated its own).

However, the biggest topic remaining to be resolved - and on which discussions may right now be stuck - is the question of security within the zone. The FARC wants to be able to maintain an armed presence in the zone in order to protect its negotiators, but it rejects the presence of armed government representatives. (This was the arrangment during the 1998-2002 talks, in which the FARC was the only group in the demilitarized zone that carried weapons.)

The guerrillas want armed bodyguards and rings of security. This is not merely because they don't trust the government to resist the temptation to launch a sneak attack. The scenario that more likely worries the FARC is that ex-paramilitaries or similar elements, perhaps aided by rogue members of the security forces, could gain entry into the small zone and carry out an act of sabotage, such as an attempt on the lives of the guerrilla negotiators. High-level FARC leader Raúl Reyes told an interviewer recently, "We cannot trust our security to members of the executive branch, when they don't even have their own security guaranteed."

The dispute over security in the zone is far from intractable; several potential solutions exist. Here are a few:

None of these proposals is mutually exclusive; it would be possible to choose a combination of some or all of them, or some other mechanism entirely. The priority for now, though, should be on developing this solution so that the process can move forward.

Moving forward will also require progress on several intangible points. President Uribe, for instance, needs to develop a clearer consensus in support of the talks, both among his conservative base and among elements of his own government - especially the military. This support need not be enthusiastic; it may even be grudging. But active opposition to the process must be minimized within the Uribista ranks. Offensive military operations in the zone should cease as progress toward talks continues.

The United States - whose position on "negotiating with terrorists" is well-known - should avoid public criticism of the process; a single disparaging comment from a U.S. official could be enough to torpedo this fragile effort. At this moment, meanwhile, the FARC could help President Uribe make progress on these "intangibles" with a single goodwill gesture: another proof of life, or perhaps an offer to declare a geographically limited cease-fire while talks take place (such as no offensive operations in Valle del Cauca department during the 45-day period).

Both sides would also do well to drop some proposed pre-conditions for talks. The FARC has indicated, for instance, that the government must first "define whether its interlocution is occurring with an organization that has taken up arms against the state, or with terrorists." For years, President Uribe has called the FARC terrorists, and has encouraged foreign governments to consider them as such. Requiring him to go back on this long record of rhetoric is too big a condition to require; it is best to leave this unsaid for now, and accept that, in agreeing to negotiate, President Uribe has made some tacit alteration to the "definition of his interlocution."

The Uribe government, meanwhile, said in a statement that it expects the FARC to declare a cease-fire while prisoner-exchange talks take place. That proposal is a deal-breaker - the government has not put anywhere near enough military pressure on the guerrillas to expect a cease fire - and the government must know it. This demand, like the FARC's requirement for specificity on the "terrorist" label, should be quietly dropped.

5. There is no shame in "talking about talking." It may take a while to establish the ground rules for talks. The only negotiating agenda that matters right now is the dialogue over procedural matters, particularly conditions for the zone where prisoner-exchange talks might take place. This dialogue should be allowed to take as long as is necessary, but it should not be allowed to break off.

Most of these procedural points - what Leyva and others have called the "carpentry" behind the eventual process - can be resolved with relative ease, as long as both sides remain focused on them. In order to move ahead on them, however, these "talks about talking" should not be happening through public communiqués and statements to the media. It is imperative that lines of communication be made more fluid and direct. It is also important that discussions occur out of the public eye, so that both sides can make badly needed concessions and proposals without losing face in the court of public opinion.

The dialogue's outside facilitators can help through continued, vigorous performance of their "good offices" role. Direct discussions between guerrilla and government representatives may also be necessary, though - given security concerns - they may be logistically difficult. However, if agreement on a demilitarized zone requires face-to-face talks in some other forum - a third country, perhaps - the FARC should be open to the possibility.

Finally, all involved should avoid raising the public's hopes. It is reasonable to expect this process to move with excruciating slowness, and to have several ups and downs. Recall that even in 1998, when public support for negotiations was much stronger and President Pastrana had given a green light to an unconditional demilitarized zone, there was a five-month lag between Pastrana's initial acquiescence (July 1998) and the pullout of troops (December 1998).

Things may go similarly slowly now. What is important, though, is that they do not stop.

Posted by isacson at 3:27 PM | Comments (6)

October 9, 2006

Regarding reports of CIP involvement in possible "humanitarian exchange" talks

Greetings from Buenos Aires. From here, I see that CIP has been showing up in the news in Colombia, in the context of our possible involvement in support of a possible "humanitarian exchange" dialogue between the Colombian government and the FARC.

Note that I used the word "possible" twice in the last sentence. It remains far from clear whether talks will actually take place, and regarding CIP's role, if any - well, at this point, there's not much to discuss. This is not because we're being secretive, but because at this very early stage we haven't taken part in any detailed discussions about what we might do, other than build support and urge patience.

Here is a statement we're releasing today.

...

Álvaro Leyva, a former Colombian senator and minister who has been involved in his country's peace processes since the 1980s, is serving as a facilitator for what might become a round of talks with the FARC guerrillas. These talks, if they occur, would aim to secure a "humanitarian exchange:" the release of 62 individuals whom the insurgents have been holding, in some cases for as long as eight years, in exchange for the release of FARC prisoners in Colombian jails.

We note that, in recent declarations before the Colombian press, Mr. Leyva has been mentioning a potential role for the Center for International Policy in this effort. For instance, the following is a translated excerpt from an interview with Mr. Leyva published in Sunday's edition of the Colombian daily El Tiempo.

El Tiempo reporter Yamid Amat: Do you think that an encounter is far off?

Álvaro Leyva: I do not. Trust must be established. How? Through the media, through the presence of friendly countries. For example, I am of the opinion that there is an American NGO that understands the issue.

El Tiempo: To do what?

Álvaro Leyva: To be present and to encourage this to turn out well. That NGO is called Center for International Policy, and it played an important role in Central America.

El Tiempo: Have you consulted with them?

Álvaro Leyva: Yes, of course. And they have told me that they are willing to come, to do what is required. This mission would be headed by the president of this NGO, Mr. Robert White, and he would be accompanied by another expert in Colombian affairs, Mr. Adam Isacson. This NGO will give confidence to some as well as to others.

El Tiempo: Will the FARC have reservations about the fact that they are Americans?

Álvaro Leyva: But we are not in an armed conflict with the United States, it is a bad thing to mix geopolitical situations and local circumstances that make the Colombian phenomenon a problem for American security. I also consulted the Community of Sant'Egidio and they are willing to come.

El Tiempo: Who are they?

Álvaro Leyva: This is an NGO of the Vatican, legally established within the Vatican state. They helped to achieve peace in Mozambique.

The Center for International Policy ratifies Mr. Leyva's comments about our willingness to assist the current movement toward dialogue. We see such assistance as well within one of the main goals of CIP's Colombia Program: to build support in the United States for a negotiated solution to Colombia's violent conflict.

This work has brought CIP President Robert White and CIP Colombia Program Director Adam Isacson into regular contact with Álvaro Leyva over the past several years. We share his belief that building communication and relations of trust are central to the success of any future process, even though doing so will be slow and often politically difficult.

At this point, no effort has been made to define in any detail what role CIP - a U.S.-based non-governmental organization - would play. We have not discussed it in detail with Mr. Leyva or anyone else, and we feel that it makes little sense to do so at this early stage, while the process has yet to take shape. No date has been set for a mission led by CIP President Robert White. While our knowledge of the U.S. context as it relates to the talks might make us a useful resource, it is premature to speculate any further.

If a process does develop, and a role for CIP along with it, we will try to be as transparent about our activities as circumstances allow. Our expectation, though, would be to stay in the background and focus on the objective of winning freedom for those in captivity, with the longer-term goal of building the confidence and communication necessary for further movement toward a negotiated solution.

Posted by isacson at 2:35 AM | Comments (2)

September 30, 2006

How to report on politics in Sucre

Álvaro García Romero is a Colombian senator widely alleged to have strong ties to the paramilitaries who dominate much of his home department of Sucre, on the Caribbean coast. Four Sucre provincial legislators tied to Sen. García were recently arrested on charges of working with paramilitaries.

Note how Thursday's El Tiempo describes Sen. García:

García, a mysterious senator

Álvaro García is one of the most enigmatic senators in the Congress. He rarely speaks on the floor, his attendance is scarce, and he has no relations with the press.

A political boss in Sucre, during the last twelve years he has influenced in the election of the governor of that department, one of the most backward and most affected by the paramilitary phenomenon.

García is considered an unpredictable senator. "It's never known how he is going to vote or if he is going to change his mind," says one of his colleagues, who prefers that his name not be published.

In the last Congress he is remembered as the target of a tough debate promoted by Gustavo Petro. [Petro, a former M-19 guerrilla, was a congressman - and now a senator - from the left-of-center Polo Democrático party.] In Sucre, the paramilitaries committed some of the most serious massacres that the country remembers, such as those in Chengue and Macayepo, and the Polo legislator questioned García for collaborating with those responsible for these massacres.

In the last elections he had difficulty finding a political party to align with, but he was elected.

In addition to having power in his department, his brother "Juancho" García was a senator with votes from Bolívar department. Now, this seat is occupied by his sister-in-law, Piedad Zuccardi.

This is a shining example of the "please read between the lines, we don't want to be killed" writing style one sees very often in the Colombian press. Even to report this much, the author had to rely heavily on evidence that was already announced in a public forum by one very brave member of Colombia's Congress.

Posted by isacson at 8:32 PM | Comments (1)

September 28, 2006

Testimony from an "older brother"

The text below is a translated transcription of a recent interview with a governor of a Kogi indigenous cabildo in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, a beautiful but highly conflictive region on Colombia's Caribbean coast. There, four indigenous ethnicities, incorporating thousands of people, have been struggling to defend their way of life - which places a strong value on protection of the ecology - amid a steady onslaught from armed groups, narco-traffickers, and misguided anti-drug strategies.

This text was sent to us by a European colleague who travels often to this zone. The translation is ours.

I recall that in 2003 there was a fumigation (the government planes dumped chemical products) in the high part of the Sierra Nevada of Santa Marta. It is there that we indigenous people - the Kogis, Arhuacos, Wiwas, and Kankuamos of the Sierra - live, where we share natural resources, fauna and flora, and animals. We live like this, because this is how our Mother Earth and our ancestral fathers ordered us to live. We have a law of origin that does not allow us to mistreat the Earth, the Sierra Nevada; it does not allow us to knock down trees, burn them; we should protect everything, because the lives of human beings depend on nature. We sustain the equilibrium of the world; this is part of our responsibility as older brothers. When the younger brothers, the "civilized" as they call themselves, mistreat the earth like this, it hurts us not just because it damages the crops, but also because it harms the lives of all types of animals, of plants. Afterward we must make a greater effort, do more work to make payments, to "pay" for all this mistreatment by our younger brothers.

But despite the fact that the Colombian government began to act badly, without respecting things, killing people, we the human beings - the Kogis as well as the younger brothers - began to carve out land to plant coffee, or products that are not original products like marijuana, coca, or poppy. Today people begin to see that these products are very important, they make it possible to earn money, but this is not an important development. They bring problems, deaths, violence, as much for human beings as for the animals, the forests. These are problems that affect all the levels of the Sierra Nevada - the crops, the animals that live in the mountains, the sources of water, the land and air, health. Today for the indigenous people of the Sierra, those crops bring problems, the fumigations too, it's not good.

They contaminate everything. These bad people are contaminating Mother Earth and the fathers of nature. The crops are destroyed now, the animals, there are diseases everywhere, the trees, the birds, the streams, are starting to dry up, to burn up. We think: what is the Colombian government doing, what is it thinking? Could it be that foreign governments are trying to finish off the Sierra? Or are we going to continue resisting? We - the farmers as much as the indigenous people that inhabit the Sierra or those that live in the cities now - have to eat contaminated products, contaminated water, why?

When the government began to fumigate the coca in the Sierra, they thought this problem was going to be solved, but this is not the solution. For us, the indigenous people of the Sierra Nevada, coca is a very important sacred plant. It represents a woman, the thought of all classes of plants; it is like the spirit of all plants. Because of this, we the indigenous people of the Sierra use coca in order to be able to think, to reflect, in order to know where and how to make spiritual payments, and to advise the children in special places where the spiritual fathers of the Sierra are. In order to become a man before getting married, every one of the Kogis has to receive this coca at the age of 18. That is part of our worldview, but the government does not think about these things, it doesn't know what this bush represents, and that does a lot of damage. So, why did they plant these crops? To make money - but now you see that is a problem because it brings the fumigation of illicit crops.

For us, it isn't just fumigating one plant, coca, but fumigating Mother Earth and all that lives on the land, the animals, the birds in the trees, the people, the water, the fish, the atmosphere, and human beings and animals. Now everything is contaminated. Because of this, a lot of unknown sicknesses have surfaced, problems, a lot of disequilibrium that we don't know how to cure, because their spirits are not known. The government has to take measures to sustain the balance of the world so that it creates spiritual forces. So the governments - both international and national - have to look at the future, they have to change their thinking to live better, to manage the country well. Also, so that the younger generations learn that this will be the main road on which to walk together. If the government keeps thinking like this, new chemicals will be invented; the spiritual fathers will come to collect with earthquakes, storms and other damage because they will think that we are managing things badly.

To the government we are nothing; the spiritual fathers don't exist. They are blind. But we are seeing the situation that is coming, you can feel the change in climate already and it may do away with the whole world. The ecosystems are dying because we have stomped all over them, also the snow and the water are beginning to run out. The younger brother invents many technologies to take everything out of Mother Earth, like coal, oil, which are like the blood and the liver of our body. That is how Mother Earth loses her strength and all the scientists know it, but it doesn't matter to them. Nothing is done. We, the four ethnicities of the Sierra - the Kankuamos, the Wiwas, the Arhuacos, and the Kogis - are suffering a lot. We have formed the four indigenous councils of the Sierra; we are sending out messages about our concerns and our problems so that governments and other entities understand a bit about what is happening. That they must protect human rights and understand what is happening in the Sierra (which is the heart of the whole world), because it is necessary to protect it, not only for us, but for all of life.

Sacred sites are very important for us - the lakes, the mountains. They are needed to protect the black line [their traditional territorial boundary].

Mother Earth and the human body are the same thing. When we are missing an element like a mineral, what happens? We get sick. The little brothers take everything form the land: gas, carbon, etc…so Mother Earth gets sick, too.

The little brothers of the lowlands drink the water from the Sierra contaminated with chemicals and from the guerrillas throwing dead bodies, and they and the whole world are going to suffer.

The chemicals from the coca laboratories also hurt nature a lot - the forests the animals. How much longer can it go on?

I know an old campesino who told me that the gringos arrived in the highlands of the Sierra in the sixties and they said that they had a new class of the tomato plant, bigger and prettier. We planted them, and after a few weeks, someone told us that they were marijuana plants that the gringos needed for the soldiers in Vietnam. Later, the guerrillas began to invest also in the high lands of the indigenous people and the campesinos in order to plant more coca.

Who is this government full of weapons? In the north of the Sierra are the paramilitaries, to the south are the FARC, we have no one to protect us, what can we think if the army's High Mountain Battalion also robs us of all our food, our animals. Who can we believe in?

There are a lot of places where there isn't coca, but they keep fumigating. Why? So that the people are removed from the lands, and so that they can rob them. The land has stays very bad for years and nothing can grow.

And with the violence there are kidnappings, murders, and disappearances. There are times when you don't even know where the bodies are. For us indigenous people, the body is like a treasure, because we say that the body represents the elements of the living. This body cannot be lost by being baptized and going on to heaven.

The Sierra Nevada of Santa Marta is the heart of the world; it is also like a small planet. Everything that occurs here will happen in the rest of the world. The diseases, the violence… The younger brother doesn't listen, doesn't understand anything. He is destroying everything; he doesn't respect the laws of nature. When he runs out of gas, of petroleum, and all the things that he takes from Mother Earth, the younger brother will take notice, and he is going to suffer a lot. Today, disease and imbalance are found everywhere... the younger brothers don't want to see, they don't want to understand, they don't realize. But the laws of nature are the same for everyone. We try to maintain the balance, this is our responsibility, but what do the younger brothers do?

Posted by isacson at 6:28 PM | Comments (2)

September 17, 2006

An optimistic look at the ELN talks

Here is a translation (thanks to CIP Intern Mariam Khokhar) of a column published over a week ago in Medellín's El Colombiano. The author is Moritz Akerman, one of the five "civil society guarantors" of the Casa de Paz, a space on the outskirts of Medellín where an ELN guerrilla representative has been allowed to meet with people to discuss an eventual agenda for negotiations.

The ELN dialogue process has received little attention, which is a good thing. Outside the impatient gaze of the media and the general public, relations are being forged, consensuses are being built, and progress is slowly being made. Akerman's column provides a useful, concise view of the risks and opportunities the process currently faces.

September 8, 2006
Window of Opportunity for Negotiation
Moritz Akerman
El Colombiano (Medellín, Colombia)

In my last column I emphasized the opportunities and the risks - as seen from "this side" - for the political negotiation of peace with the guerillas. But, just as it takes two to dance, I believe that an analysis should be done of the guerillas' level of commitment, focusing this analysis for now on the ELN. The methodology of opportunities and risks will again be useful.

Let's start with the opportunities.

1. The ELN maintains, so far, levels of political ethics that have allowed it a distance or separation from narco-trafficking. [Note: some recent evidence points to greater ELN involvement in the drug trade.] This condition eases favorable communication with society and with the international community, although the ELN continues to gravely harm citizens with kidnappings and landmines. Another aspect of this opportunity is the fact that the ELN, in this recent stage of movement toward dialogue with society and negotiations, seems to have broken with the logic of military strength and force as a means of gaining bargaining power. Its thesis is that the logic of negotiation should coincide with the logic of deepening democracy and preparing society. If this logic develops, consequently, it should lead them toward eliminating all forms of hostilities against citizens.

2. It has a collective decision-making process recognized by its fronts and its fighters. It would seem to have consolidated itself more fully in this stage of communication with society, the government, and the international community. This communication has permitted the ELN to take into account citizens' aspirations and demands as it decidedly moves toward politics and away from participation in the war. And it will offer political and social accompaniment of its negotiations with the government, which today are demanding new and more meaningful levels and definitions. It would seem that within the ELN, and with this direction in mind, the leadership of Antonio García has been reinforced [García, viewed as one of the ELN's hardest-line members, is playing a leading role in talks with the government]. This leadership is pushing him increasingly toward politics and distancing him from acts of war. Antonio García is a categorical man whom none can accuse of being weak in the negotiations. For this reason he can pull the peace policy forward, along with the rest of the ELN.

3. Recent internal events within the ELN seem to have ratified willingness to continue negotiations, such as launching the "Political Campaign for Peace" as a prologue to the National Convention, and within the country's political and electoral calendar.

4. The ELN, in its communication with society at the Casa de Paz, has received assurances from business and opinion leaders of their full commitment to see its participation in politics shielded against acts of right-wing terrorism, which in the case of the UP submitted that organization - and that unequaled political opportunity for peace - to an extermination not just of its men, but of the insurgents' trust in the state and even in democracy. [The UP was a political party begun by the FARC during a 1980s peace process; thousands of its members were systematically assassinated.]

5. While it has not disappeared, paramilitarism has been delegitimized and somewhat disarticulated, and no social sector sees it today as a resource to stop the left's political influence, or as an anti-subversive instrument. Today, no elite sees the paramilitaries as an instrument to protect itself. If the guerillas make advances in political negotiations, the objective fact - of having silenced and paralyzed thousands of undemocratic gunmen - will become irreversible: all gangs of assassins will be revealed to be nothing but the military shields of narco-trafficking.

Now, let's look at some risks.

1. In all human processes and more so in a political negotiation, there is always a subjective risk: that leaders will not be capable of perceiving the opportunity and will lack the political skill to take advantage of junctures that may not be repeated. The FARC failed to take advantage of Pastrana's opportunity and the Caguan. As García Lorca said, "a coin that will not be minted again." A future negotiation with the FARC will never have the level of influence and opportunity that it could have had with Pastrana.

2. The possibility exists that the ELN might prefer to negotiate in a process simultaneous to, or together with, a process with the FARC. The risk would be that they could end up marginalizing themseves while waiting for a stronger negotiating position. On the other hand, the ELN negotiations could be a stimulus for negotiation with FARC, with the ELN serving as a "trailblazer" for the entire insurgency.

3. The risk exists that the FARC might not understand the ELN's political decision to negotiate. This would translate into major confrontations between these two guerilla groups. It is impossible to eliminate this risk completely. But the government, society, and the international community can minimize it by effectively demonstrating an attitude of high commitment. The security forces must respond with reciprocity to an eventual cease of military actions by the ELN, and the international community and society should be alowed not only to verify it, but to accompany it - politically and financially - so that ELN members can move toward politics while maintaining their zones of influence, the base of their social-political-military structure.

4. If the ELN gets a good start, negotiations with them will become a general test of the entire negotiation process with insurgents. It would be the laboratory for a negotiated political solution of Colombia's conflict. While this in itself is an opportunity, it is at the same time the biggest of the risks. Some in the ELN and many of the negotiation's "social companions" could be tempted to assume the childish attitude of "let's be realists and ask the impossible": instead of becoming a stimulus for an eventual negotiation with the FARC, the ELN process could become an almost insuperable obstacle. The success of negotiations with all insurgents is not measured in unattainable demands, but in the grand prize that society is willing to offer guerillas who initiate and make possible a negotiated solution to the conflict.

Posted by isacson at 11:40 PM | Comments (3)

September 14, 2006

A quick look at the last OAS report on the AUC demobilization

Thanks to CIP Intern Mariam Khokhar for this quick summary of the latest (seventh) quarterly report from the OAS mission (MAPP-OEA) that is observing and verifying the paramilitary demobilization process in Colombia. The full report is available here as a Microsoft Word (.doc) file in Spanish.

International support for MAPP-OEA has increased. Governments that have contributed, or may soon contribute, financial or in-kind support to the OAS mission now include Argentina, the Bahamas, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Guatemala, Ireland, Mexico, the Netherlands, Norway, Peru, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Thailand, and the United States. The mission now has a total staff of eighty-five people.

Number of demobilized paramilitaries and weapons turned in. Since the initiation of dialogue with AUC in 2003, there have been 37 collective demobilizations involving 30,915 members of the group. From February to May 2006, there were 8 collective demobilizations which included 8,625 members. Groups that have yet to demobilize formally include parts of the Élmer Cárdenas bloc (Urabá) and the Cacique Pipintá bloc (Antioquia and Risaralda), and the entire Casanare Self-Defense Forces. The demobilized groups have turned in about one weapon for every two combatants. Sixty percent of the demobilized are concentrated in four northern Colombian departments: Antioquia (29%), Córdoba (14%), Cesar (9%) and Magdalena (8%).

Problems with the demobilization process. The OAS mission noted institutional shortcomings in the government's attention to ex-combatants. The Colombian government's Program for Reincorporation into Civilian Life (PRVC) contemplates a period of two years in which ex-combatants may access certain benefits. Yet 35% of ex-combatants have not accessed these institutional offers. The pace of demobilization has exhausted the PRVC's response capacity. ("The PRVC is still in crisis, which puts at risk the long-term viability of the peace process.") The Mission finds shortcomings in the provision of health benefits to ex-members of the AUC and their immediate families. Only 47% of ex-combatants who have been in the system for more than 6 months have been entered into the government's social security system. Psychosocial attention continues to be one of the PRVC's weakest points, with only 12 percent of ex-combatants participating in workshops during the second quarter of 2006. The Mission also found that the focus on education was insufficient.

Employment of ex-paramilitaries. Many ex-paramilitaries have found short-term work as "Civic Auxiliaries" of the police (3,700) and coca-eradicators in Urabá and Córdoba (1,500). Unemployment remains a widespread problem.

Re-formation of paramilitary groups. The Mission has noted the appearance of new groups in the areas where demobilized ones operated. "Specific zones have seen possible rearmament and the appearance of armed groups who seek to present themselves as the so-called 'new generation of paramilitarism.'" This phenomenon is not homogenous across the country, so one cannot adopt one sole interpretation of them. It appears to be taking the form of (a) re-grouping into criminal gangs that control communities and illicit activity; (b) segments of paramilitary blocs that have refused to demobilize; and (c) formation of new armed groups or strengthening of existing groups. A few examples:

Arms caches. The Mission is also in the process of verifying information about arms not turned in during the demobilization of some AUC blocs. The army has found several clandestine arms caches belonging to demobilized AUC blocs.

Conclusion: This is a useful document, but it is ultimately just a brief, partial summary. The three months it covers have been some of the most tumultuous in the process so far, thanks in large part to a Constitutional Court decision striking down key parts of the "Justice and Peace" law - but one gets little sense from the report that the process has been passing through critical moments. In particular, we regret that the report did not include more information about:

Posted by isacson at 12:55 PM | Comments (4)

September 13, 2006

"Longing for Home"

The Latin America Working Group has just released an important report on a critical but often overlooked facet of the paramilitary demobilization process. "Longing for Home" (PDF in English and Spanish) explores the many difficulties facing people who lost lands after being displaced by violence - even after those who took their property demobilize and re-enter society.

The sheer scale of the problem is shocking - estimates of stolen land run from 2.6 million hectares (the size of Massachusetts) to 6.8 million hectares (bigger than West Virginia). The complexity of determining what belonged to whom is daunting. "Former" paramilitaries can be expected to resist efforts to recover all that was taken. The "Justice and Peace" law will make victims jump through difficult hoops to reclaim their land.

Meanwhile, Colombian government agencies responsible for returning victims' property, such as the new Reparations and Reconciliation Commission, have barely begun to function, will be starved for resources, and may run up against a lack of political backing. The international community's role will be crucial, as a source of both funding and pressure.

The report explains this complex problem in plain language, includes many vivid pictures, and presents a detailed set of recommendations. It is very much worth making time to read.

While visiting the LAWG website, we also recommend their new page about the U.S. government's regular certifications of Colombia's human-rights performance. It gathers, in one single place, all official and non-governmental documents about the past six years' certifications. Note the wide chasm between how the State Department and the human-rights community perceive Colombia's human rights situation - it's almost as though they are discussing different countries. The page tells the definitive story of what has been a difficult, often contentious, but ultimately very necessary process. (Incidentally, on Friday, the State Department will be holding its next quarterly certification consultation meeting with U.S. human-rights groups in Washington. These meetings are required by law - they don't necessarily mean that frozen military aid is about to be given the green light. Though some in the past have preceded certification decisions by a few weeks.)

Posted by isacson at 11:43 AM | Comments (4)

September 10, 2006

Car bombs and credibility

In a war, credibility before the public is an asset that is hard to measure, but victory is impossible without it. For the Colombian military, this has been a tough year credibility-wise, as several cases of abuse and corruption have shaken the public trust. And it suffered another severe blow with Friday's revelation that soldiers - not guerrillas - were behind a Bogotá car-bombing days before Uribe's re-election.

On July 31, a military convoy was passing through a west-central Bogotá neighborhood when a car bomb went off, killing a civilian bystander and wounding several soldiers. As it turns out, the Defense Ministry announced Friday, this was the work of four officers in an elite army intelligence unit, as were other bombs in the capital that the authorities deactivated in the weeks before President Álvaro Uribe's August 7 re-inauguration.

Until Friday, authorities had attributed these attacks to the FARC guerrillas. This seemed like a safe guess, given that the FARC accompanied Uribe's first inauguration in 2002 with a series of mortars launched at the presidential palace. The guerrillas never denied responsibility for that attack, even though they succeeded only in killing more than a dozen people in a poor neighborhood blocks away.

But the FARC has denied responsibility for other Bogotá bombings that have shocked and stunned Colombians in the past few years. These include:

The guerrillas' denials usually appear in communiqués issued weeks after an attack. Colombian authorities and analysts brush these off as fabrications, lies from FARC leaders seeking belatedly to defend themselves against the public backlash that their attacks inspire. This interpretation ends up being widely accepted, since the FARC has nearly zero credibility with the average Colombian.

The revelations about the July bombs, however, give the guerrillas' credibility a boost, however slight. At least they require us to view their past denials in a new light.

That doesn't mean that we have to believe the FARC every time they insist that they are innocent of a terror attack. Nor does it mean that elements in the Colombian military must be the "real" culprits. (For instance, Sen. Vargas Lleras, a leading proponent of extraditing drug criminals to the United States, no doubt has many powerful enemies in Colombia's narco underworld who could plausibly have set off the October 2005 bomb.) But it does cast strong doubt on the Colombian authorities' snap judgments that the guerrillas are to blame.

Worse, it undermines one of the Colombian government's main narratives: that only an iron-fisted security strategy can keep a vicious, nihilistic and powerful enemy from wreaking havoc in Colombia's big cities. The next time a car bomb slaughters innocents in an urban area, it is less likely that Colombians will immediately and unanimously blame the guerrillas - and the security forces may find themselves uncomfortably under the same cloud of suspicion.

While these revelations are very damaging, the Colombian Army's top leadership does deserve praise for allowing investigators to do their job and for announcing publicly that officers were to blame. A cover-up and stonewall would have done far more damage to the institution's credibility, which has suffered some grave blows this year. Damage control will be further eased if the armed forces allow Colombia's civilian judicial system to conduct a swift, transparent investigation and judgment of all those responsible.

Posted by isacson at 2:10 AM | Comments (3)

September 4, 2006

Love those Semana columnists

In yesterday's edition of the Colombian newsmagazine Semana, Daniel Coronell notes that the coca crop has been largely unaffected by fumigation in areas under paramilitary control. He refers to a map that appeared in last month's New York Times article documenting Plan Colombia's failure to reduced drugs.

The map, based on the U.S. government's satellite measures, indicates three types of zones. The first are the areas in which illicit cultivations have been abandoned. The second are the places where coca-planting has stayed stable, and the third are the regions where existing crops have increased and new cultivations have appeared.

When one compares this map with the map of FARC, ELN and AUC zones of action, one immediately notices that coca has stayed stable or incerased in regions controlled by paramilitary groups. ...

According to the Department of State and the [White House] Office for National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP), southern Colombia [where guerrillas predominate] is now not the largest zone of illicit crops. Today, the largest coca-growing area extends across the [paramilitary-heavy] departments of Bolívar, Sucre, Córdoba, and northern Antioquia. ...

The map seems to contradict those who believe that the fumigations haven't done anything. The areas of Putumayo and Caquetá, which have been under FARC control, show the largest amount of abandoned cultivations. Eradication has also been successful in Norte de Santander, where the ELN has had influence.

Meanwhile, Antonio Caballero, whom El Tiempo called "an icon of criticizing power" upon his recent return from 20 years in exile, minces no words in a column about the longstanding but unacknowledged relationship between Colombia's elite and the paramilitaries.

If today the narcoparamilitaries are not being punished for their crimes - political or economic - or for their massacres or for their illicit businesses, this is not just for the obvious reason that they have not been defeated by the State. But because they are, and continue to be as they have been from the start, allies of the state security forces (military and police), and friends of the State's masters. ... The Colombian political and economic establishment has never had disgust for the paras, to the contrary. Not for their armed actions, whose spirit and goals it has always supported, though at times it may have been disgusted by the excessive roughness of their actions - those chainsaws. Nor for their legal or illegal businesses, in many of which the establishment has participated or wanted to participate, from cattle-ranching to narcotrafficking and including numbers rackets and siphoning off public funds.

Posted by isacson at 8:45 AM | Comments (1)

August 23, 2006

Doing yard work for the cameras

Whenever you see pictures of powerful, widely feared, millionaire paramilitary leaders being forced to do yard work, you know you're not getting the entire story.

After months of reports of top paramilitaries - men wanted for murder and narcotrafficking - driving armored SUVs, going to discos and swanky restaurants, and shopping in upscale malls, President Uribe ordered last week that they be "conducted" to a facility in La Ceja, south of Medellín. There, they are to await investigation and sentencing to terms of up to eight years in confinement under the "Justice and Peace" law.

By posting these pictures to its website yesterday, the Colombian government's High Commissioner for Peace clearly intends to demonstrate that the eighteen paramilitary leaders so far assembled there are not living in the lap of luxury. Instead of the splendor that Pablo Escobar enjoyed (briefly) in his personal "La Catedral" prison in 1992-93, and instead of the very comfortable conditions that most narcotraffickers in Colombian jails have come to expect, we see pictures of weedy patios, lumpy beds, and unadorned walls. Warlords who have long decided who lives and dies in vast territories, we are told, must now share one computer, and must help to clean up the grounds.

Apparently, we're meant to think that the paramilitary leadership is truly going to spend the next several years in these conditions, doing penance for the thousands of murders that they ordered or committed. This should shake our certainty that the AUC leaders are in fact going to enjoy near-impunity, and should cause us to doubt that they still command powerful criminal networks and have extensive political clout in key regions of the country. In particular, it is no doubt hoped, pictures of paramilitaries roughing it in a penal colony might reduce U.S. pressure to extradite them for drug-trafficking.

Of course, these pictures are probably not accurate representations of the AUC leaders' daily routine. And we can expect their material conditions to improve rapidly, if they haven't already done so since these photos were taken. Nonetheless, let's enjoy these few images. Look at them and imagine what it would be like if some of Colombia's most ruthless and brutal criminals really did have to spend many long years wearing rubber boots, doing chores, sleeping in twin beds and jockeying for a few minutes of computer time...

Salvatore Mancuso of the Córdoba and Urabá paramilitary bloc (ACCU) hoists a log.

Hernán Giraldo of the Tayrona Resistance Bloc (right, posing with High Commissioner for Peace Luis Carlos Restrepo) in his assigned bedroom. Note the stylish Spider-Man sheets.

Pedro Iván Laverde ("Pedro Frontera"), former head of the Catatumbo Bloc, in his bedroom.

Iván Roberto Duque ("Ernesto Baez"), outspoken leader of the Central Bolívar Bloc, in the "library" / computer room.

Carlos Mario Jiménez ("Macaco") and Rodrigo Pérez Alzate ("Julián Bolívar") of the Central Bolívar Bloc work a power-washer and broom.

Posted by isacson at 5:25 PM | Comments (2)

August 3, 2006

Notes from Medellín

Last year, Medellín's murder rate totaled 37 killings for every 100,000 inhabitants. Suddenly this city - long considered one of the world's most violent - has come to suffer fewer homicides than U.S. cities like Washington (45), Detroit (42) and Baltimore (42). Medellín today is about as violent as Atlanta.

Medellín's dropping crime rate.

Everyone I spoke with during my few days in the city - right, left and center - was thrilled with the change. Being able to walk the streets without fear of kidnappers, the disappearance of hitmen on motorcycles, and the ability to enter any neighborhood without aggression from territorial gangs have given residents a greater sense of civic pride and has won high approval ratings for both President Uribe and Medellín's jeans-wearing, left-of-center mayor, Sergio Fajardo.

People I interviewed were less in agreement, though, about why Medellín has become so much safer. Many credited President Uribe's tough security policies, which have brought a greater police and military presence in the vast, lawless slums that surround the city. Many said that Medellín is more peaceful because "the paramilitaries won" - the right-wing groups ejected guerrilla militias, dominate criminal activity in the city, and are presently on their best behavior as their demobilization and reintegration process proceeds. Many also gave credit to Medellín's city government, which has heavily invested its own resources in projects in poor neighborhoods and in programs to reintegrate demobilized paramilitaries.

As far as I could tell, all three hypotheses are correct. "Democratic Security," the paramilitaries' victory, and the mayor's office's programs combine into a series of factors - some encouraging, some very sinister - that explain Medellín's "renaissance." Here is a closer look.

1. Democratic Security. The Uribe government deserves credit for establishing a government presence - even if a largely military-police presence - in the poor barrios that ring Medellín. That presence simply didn't exist before.

Starting in the 1960s and 1970s, new arrivals to Medellín - many of them displaced by violence elsewhere - built their homes on the steep mountainsides that overlook the city to the east and west. What started out as squatter settlements and land invasions grew - often with the help of guerrilla groups - into labyrinthine warrens of handmade brick homes, steep stairways and pirated water and electricity. They kept growing, and today they make up at least half of Medellín's population of about 4 million.

It is hard to explain to a non-Colombian audience that even though these neighborhoods are easily visible from just about everywhere in central Medellín, they were, until very recently, just as completely ungoverned as far-flung, isolated zones like lower Putumayo or the Caguán river valley. Police and soldiers dared not enter them except in very large numbers, while most other central and municipal government agencies stayed away.

Residents grew accustomed to living under the control of street gangs made up largely of young people. Some were involved in organized crime and others (known as combos) were mainly territorial. In the absence of police, gangs carried out brutal "social cleansing" campaigns, ejecting or killing common criminals and other non-conformist elements.

During the 1990s, the gang structure was taken over by guerrilla militias, who freely roamed neighborhoods carrying arms and wearing ski masks, spray-painting political slogans and holding indoctrination meetings. The militias too were mostly young people, including many minors. They also carried out social cleansing, and they facilitated rural guerrillas' supply and transit in and out of the city.

Starting around 2000, the AUC paramilitaries began to challenge the militias' domination of Medellín's slums. The paramilitaries' Metro Bloc, under the command of a man calling himself Rodrigo 00, and Cacique Nutibara Bloc (BCN), under the command of longtime drug-underworld figure Diego Fernando Murillo or "Don Berna," steadily increased their presence in the lawless barrios. The city's murder rate soared as the paramilitaries and militias waged ever more intense firefights in the neighborhoods' streets. Hundreds of civilians were caught in the crossfire, and many more were executed on suspicion of collaborating with the other side.

Wealthy with drug money and unchallenged by the security forces, Medellín's paramilitaries gained ground quickly. By mid-2002 they had ejected militias and taken over gangs in many neighborhoods. The guerrilla militias, however, continued to maintain strongholds in many neighborhoods, such as those in Comuna (Ward) 13 on the city's western fringe.

In May 2002, just as Colombians were about to hand Álvaro Uribe a first-round presidential election victory, the Colombian government made its first real foray into Comuna 13, a one-day military offensive called Operation Mariscal. A day of house-to-house urban warfare killed about a dozen civilians and failed to dislodge the militias.

Álvaro Uribe was in office for just over two months, in October 2002, when thousands of Colombia's military, police and judicial police launched Operation Orión in Comuna 13. The offensive went on for weeks - this time with a lower civilian death toll, but with over 400 people arrested, most of them later released for lack of evidence. After Operation Orión and a few other efforts in 2003, the guerrilla militias were gone from Medellín's neighborhoods.

At the same time, the soldiers and police who entered Comuna 13 and other neighborhoods stayed there. The Uribe government built police posts and increased the number of soldiers and officers assigned to Medellín. To date, there have been few complaints about the police's treatment of the population; responses to crime events have been relatively rapid and cases of abuse or corruption have been infrequent, though still rarely punished when they happen.

(This is not the case with the 4th Brigade, the Colombian Army unit responsible for Medellín and much of surrounding Antioquia department. The brigade is accused of killing dozens of civilians in the past two years, dressing their bodies in camouflage and presenting them as guerrillas killed in combat. Nearly all of these cases, though, have occurred outside of Medellín.)

There is now at least some state presence in all of Medellín's neighborhoods, allowing Medellín to participate in a nationwide downturn in violence that has accompanied President Uribe's deployment of soldiers and police to population centers and main roads throughout the country.

2. The paramilitaries won. In many neighborhoods, however, state presence has not become state control. The paramilitaries were not ejected by Operation Orión and other military efforts; by some accounts they even assisted in the assault. Their presence in many neighborhoods remains strong. "Operation Orión was the beginning of the installation of a new power in Comuna 13, the same one that had ruled over other comunas in the city: that of the paramilitaries," wrote Ricardo Aricapa, the author of a 2005 book on Comuna 13, in a recent UNDP newsletter [PDF].

Following the guerrilla militias' expulsion, a period of fighting ensued throughout the city between the paramilitaries' Metro Bloc and Cacique Nutibara Bloc; by the end of 2003, Don Berna's BCN had won exclusive control. In a highly staged ceremony in November 2003, 868 members of the Nutibara Bloc turned in weapons; it would be the first of a long series of paramilitary demobilization ceremonies throughout Colombia over the next two and a half years.

Don Berna's men - some of them officially demobilized, some not - are a powerful force in Medellín today. They continue to control nearly all gang activity in Medellín's slums. Killings of opponents continue, though at a much lower level; use of knives or other instruments, instead of guns, is increasingly common. Young men in plainclothes can still be seen keeping quiet watch over many barrios, though they no longer install roadblocks or prevent outsiders from entering.

Don Berna's near-monopoly on criminal control of Medellín's neighborhoods is a major reason for the downturn in violence. Relative peace often results when a territory finds itself under a single group's uncontested dominion. The civilian population, tired of being caught in the crossfire, welcomes the change in its security, even if it is not quite the result of government control. It is a relief to have to pay extortion money to only one group, or to be free of threatened retribution for helping the "other side."

By several accounts, Don Berna has helped bring down violent crime rates by ordering his followers to desist from committing large-scale murder, displacement, and other harassment of the civilian population. The feared paramilitary leader is currently in the Itagüí prison south of Medellín, accused of ordering the killing of a state legislator last year. Nonetheless, he continues to maintain a strong "pyramidal structure" of control over the Cacique Nutibara Bloc muchachos, according to leaders I interviewed at the office of the Corporación Democracia, a non-governmental organization founded by ex-BCN paramilitary leaders.

The BCN leaders professed their continued loyalty to their "maximum leader, Adolfo Paz" (Don Berna's preferred nom de guerre), crediting him with having "humanized the war" and brought an end to the violence. "Adolfo Paz is the pacifier of Medellín," they assured me.

While acknowledging that Don Berna's order to behave has been a factor, Medellín city government officials insist that it is not the main factor. They recall that violence indicators have declined in much of the country, including many areas outside of Don Berna's influence."Don Berna does not control Medellín. He only controls criminality in Medellín," said the city's secretary of government, Alonso Salazar.

That is probably quite accurate. And Don Berna's consolidation of that control is an undeniable factor in Medellín's recent decline in criminality.

3. Medellín's city government is investing in peace. The Uribe government oversaw an increase in the security forces' presence and activities in Medellín and elsewhere in Colombia. It has done far less, however, to cement gains in security with investments in infrastructure, education, health, and other basic needs.

In Medellín, which has more resources than most municipalities, the local government has picked up much of the slack. The introduction of a police presence has been accompanied by investment in a "community policing" model focusing on improved response times, building community members' trust, and a less adversarial approach.

Rendering of a library under construction at the entrance to Comuna 13 in San Javier.

The mayor's office has launched numerous infrastructure projects in the poor hillside barrios, building transportation, parks, libraries, museums and schools. In many cases, these buildings are not being constructed on the cheap: designed by architects, they stand out sharply from the ragged hollow-brick houses that surround them. Taking a page from former Bogotá mayor Antanas Mockus, Mayor Sergio Fajardo hopes that quality facilities, along with efforts to inspire a culture of citizenship, will encourage community members to take a more active role in maintaining tranquility and prosperity.

Where is the money coming from? Fajardo says that "tax collection in Medellín has increased by 20 percent since my administration began." He told me that he has broadened the tax base, convincing the business community and others to pay more through transparent management of the city's finances. "Nobody is going to call me 'Sergio 15,' someone who takes a 15 percent cut from every contract," he said. "We aren't stealing ... way too much money was stolen in the past."

Medellín needs a particularly full treasury because it has become a principal haven for former paramilitaries. Over 4,000 of the 30,000 who took part in collective demobilizations since 2003 now live in Medellín. The city government has spent much of its own money - about 23 billion pesos (US$10 million) so far - on attention to the demobilized population.

When the Cacique Nutibara Bloc demobilized in November 2003, many saw the process as a joke. 868 young men lined up before the cameras to turn in a smaller number of weapons. No law was in place for dealing with them. Many of those who demobilized, it was widely alleged, had no paramilitary past - they were gang members or common criminals who had been rounded up in the days or weeks before the ceremony. After a couple of weeks in an orientation center outside Medellín, those young men who did not have outstanding arrest warrants were returned to their own neighborhoods with vague promises of subsidies, education and job opportunities. Nothing was foreseen for their victims.

Colombia's national government distanced itself from the BCN demobilization; Peace Commissioner Luis Carlos Restrepo even called it an "embarrassment." The central government did not even offer a monthly stipend to the 868 ex-paramiliaries, though participants in all subsequent demobilizations are getting 400,000 pesos per month for eighteen months.

The Medellín city government made the best of it. Led by Secretary of Government Alonso Salazar, an expert in Medellín's urban violence, the mayor's office chose not to distinguish between "real" paramilitaries and gang members. There is simply no difference in too many cases, they argued, and the city government did not want to miss an opportunity to get troubled youth off the street and into the system.

The designers of the city's reintegration programs have clearly studied lessons learned from past cases. In addition to subsidies, former fighters are getting education and job training well beyond what the central government offers. "We found that, in most cases, a few months of education was not enough for them to get a real job," said Jorge Gaviria, who works on the city's reintegration effort. "They didn't speak well or present themselves right. They just weren't ready."

The city invested in psychological attention to the former fighters, including workshops in socialization and relationships with their communities. In some cases, this has included efforts at reconciliation with victims, including asking for forgiveness. Victims are also receiving increasing attention, as the city government has more recently launched a series of programs to provide psychological attention, offer employment assistance and "recover memory."

Can it last? Medellín's gains are remarkable. But since they depend on the current local government's policies and the goodwill of a feared criminal group, they may be fragile and easily reversible. Here are four factors that could put Medellín's recovery at risk.

  1. The transition from paramilitary domination to state control is far from complete, and it is unclear when it might be so. Though there is now a government presence in Medellín's barrios, the police alone do not appear to be enough to prevent the guerrillas from re-entering. At a July 24 security meeting, Mayor Fajardo repeated a longtime request that President Uribe send another 2,000 police to the city. This may not be forthcoming, and the ex-paramilitaries continue to play a de facto security role in too many neighborhoods. This is both unacceptable and unstable.

  2. Don Berna could be extradited. At any time, the DEA might discover new evidence that the "Pacifier of Medellín" is still conspiring to send drugs to the United States, in violation of the Justice and Peace law. This would bring renewed U.S. pressure to extradite him, which Colombia's government might find impossible to resist. Should "Don Berna" be put on a plane to Miami, his muchachos could revolt and re-arm, plunging the city into violence. Even if that outbreak of violence proves to be shortlived, the absence of a "maximum leader," combined with the absence of a sufficient state presence, could touch off a renewed power struggle for control of Medellín's organized crime and gang activity. Neighborhoods could once again become contested territory, and crime rates would rise.

  3. A future Medellín government might invest less in reintegration, attention to victims, and projects in poor neighborhoods. Mayor Fajardo's term ends at the end of next year. Mayors are not allowed to run for re-election in Colombia, and there is always a chance that Alonso Salazar, his likely successor, might not win (neither Fajardo nor Salazar, for example, is considered a supporter of President Uribe, who is quite popular in Medellín). Continuity of the city government's current programs, then, is never assured. However, even a civic-minded government could see its costly programs threatened by either an economic downturn or by the arrival of still more demobilized paramilitaries. Attracted by its generous reintegration efforts, which contrast sharply with what is available elsewhere, ex-paramilitaries are believed to be pouring into the city; the Corporación Democracia estimates that their numbers could grow from the current 4,000 to as much as 10,000 by the end of 2007. If that happens, the current system will not be able to sustain demand for its services.

  4. The national government's mismanagement could contribute to the reintegration effort's collapse - though this is an even greater risk outside Medellín. One of the most disturbing aspects of my visit to Medellín was that everyone I interviewed - from the local government to the ex-paramilitaries to non-governmental human rights advocates - was frustrated with the national government's handling of the paramilitary reintegration process. Every single interviewee cited the "lack of a national strategy" for dealing with the former fighters. The words "improvisation" and "neglect" were frequently invoked to describe Bogotá's approach to the challenge of helping more than 30,000 former combatants become citizens and participants in the legal economy. The central government has done little more than provide stipends and vocational training, leaving Medellín to fill in a lot of blanks.

    The problem is even more serious and alarming beyond Medellín, where municipalities hosting former combatants are poorer, weakened by corruption, or simply unwilling to spend scarce resources on reintegration. In these cases, the lack of a more coherent central government strategy may bring disaster.

Posted by isacson at 6:40 PM | Comments (6)

July 26, 2006

The Casa de Paz

Greetings from Medellín, where I'm in the midst of a few days of research, running from interview to interview. The trip is going well so far.

On Monday evening I had an opportunity to visit the "Casa de Paz," a large old house on Medellín's northern outskirts, set way back from the highway. At the gates, a smiling policeman tried a few English words with me as he took down my information in a notebook.

Police are all around the perimeter of the estate, partly to provide security and partly to keep its occupant from escaping.

The sole resident of the Casa de Paz is Francisco Galán, an ELN guerrilla leader whom the government captured in the mid-1990s. Galán is very unlikely to attempt an escape: from his previous jail cell in Itagüí, south of Medellín, and elsewhere, he has long served as the main conduit between the ELN and the outside world - including the Colombian government.

Galán has played a very central role as the Uribe government and the ELN have slowly moved closer to dialogue. His position is a difficult one. On one side, he must deal with a government that would like to conclude a peace agreement as soon as possible. On the other side is the rest of the ELN, "in the mountains," whose members not only lack a detailed agenda for talks, but have achieved only the most minimal consensus about whether the talks are indeed desirable.

The ELN, much more than the FARC, has sought contact with, and even participation of, Colombia's "civil society" in the elaboration of an agenda. A group of five (now seven) social movement leaders has tried to help them do that by serving as the "guarantors" of the house where Galán is today.

Since last September, the "Casa" has served as a space for Galán to receive outside visitors, and thus to help the ELN develop proposals for future peace talks. It has ample meeting spaces, well-tended gardens and a panoramic view of Medellín. Its upkeep is funded by the Colombian government and by the three international "friends" of the ELN process, Spain, Norway and Switzerland. 2,000 visitors and 10 international delegations have passed through.

The paramilitaries, who have already "demobilized," have now started their own "Casa de Paz." In mid-July they opened "Villa Esperanza" on land they bought elsewhere north of Medellín, with its own set of outside guarantors. There, the groups' leaders also expect to receive visits from civil society - though in this case the purpose seems to be more to establish contacts, since there is no need to develop a negotiation agenda.

While the paramilitaries' "Casa" has been widely viewed as a cynical move, it too is worth support. Contact between armed groups and the rest of Colombian (and international) society should be fostered (though regulated of course) - not banned. To keep groups hermetically sealed, isolated in the jungle, is to make them more out of touch with contemporary realities, more paranoid, more extremist. There should be a space where their members have to answer to critics, consider other viewpoints, listen to their past victims, and learn about their country's current political reality.

This is a very de-radicalizing experience. In my view, even in the absence of peace talks, the FARC should also be given the opportunity to have a "Casa." It can only be positive if someone like Rodrigo Granda or Simón Trinidad finds himself spending his days talking to a broad spectrum of public opinion, and communicating what he learns with the rest of his group's isolated, ideologically hidebound leadership.

The FARC are no doubt observing the ELN's process closely. This process, said Galán, is presently "on standby" - not an acrimonious impasse or freeze, but a slowdown of the dialogues' pace. Talks occurred in Cuba late last year and early this year, though these served mainly as an exchange of views and a means to get acquainted. Colombia's election campaign then slowed things down, as has the ELN's decision-making model which, unlike the FARC's very hierarchical structure, seeks the maximum possible consensus among fighters and commanders of all ranks.

The government, of course, wants a cease-fire - including a halt to kidnappings and a release of those whom the ELN is cruelly holding for ransom - as a pre-condition for substantive dialogues. Galán said that the ELN would first prefer to have more agreement on the talks' agenda, and a "humanitarian accord" guaranteeing more support to the conflict's victims, especially displaced people.

For now, though - and probably for some time to come - the talks are in a trust-building phase, as both sides develop relationships and measure each other's will and ability to deliver on promises and commitments. This is one of the most difficult and delicate phases, in which progress is hard to measure and patience is badly needed as both sides test each other and try to convince their constituencies that the process is worth pursuing.

It is a phase in which irrational or disrespectful behavior - a perception that one is "playing games" - can do a lot of damage, even if the offense appears on the surface to be small. Unfortunately, some of that is going on right now.

In a bizarre bit of government behavior, Colombia's Interior Ministry is seeking to evict Galán from the Casa de Paz by the end of August so that it can begin construction of a prison on the property. This was what the ministry planned to do with the house and grounds before last year's agreement establishing the "Casa," and it is determined to go ahead with the plan to raze the house and start construction.

This would seem to be an easily resolvable issue, but it has become an unhelpful test of wills as both sides play "hardball." The ministry refuses to find another site for the jail, while Galán refuses to move to another Casa de Paz. He told Colombia's press, "They're not going to just dump us in some other place. It is here or not at all, period," likening the government's plan to taking away a demilitarized zone in order to build a barracks. (This position has put the guerrilla leader in an odd alliance with nearby landowners, who do not want to be neighbors of a jail, and who want to preserve the nearly 200-year-old house.)

Of course this argument, which is growing ever more bitter, is about much more than the location of the talks. The ELN clearly views the government's handling of the episode as a measure of its seriousness about the process. Galán, who is trying to convince the ELN's hard-liners that the process is worthwhile, is going to have a much harder time doing that if the government sends a message that its desire to build a jail on exactly this property is greater than its desire to pursue dialogues.

What is motivating the government to move ahead with the plan? Is it a lack of coordination - or poor relations - between the Interior Ministry and the presidency's peace office (the High Commissioner for Peace)? It is a deliberate effort from elements in the Uribe government who do not want the talks to prosper? Or is it an indirect attempt to get the ELN to move faster by setting a sort of deadline?

Whatever the reason, it is a mistake. The talks are in a delicate trust-building phase, and the plan to evict Galán to build a jail is poisoning the atmosphere. It brings back bad memories of the Pastrana government's dialogues with the FARC, which lurched from crisis to crisis while the two sides argued over procedural minutiae; the talks' substantive agenda never got started, while both sides argued endlessly about the demilitarized zone and other conditions for dialogues. And again, the FARC is watching this process.

At this phase, the Colombian government should be seeking to convince the ELN - especially the group's hardliners - that politics, not violence, is a viable option. But this should be "politics" in the sense of an exchange of ideas and proposals - not in the sense of backstabbing and petty squabbles. Why do unnecessary damage to this early goal of the process? Just let Galán stay in the house for a while.

Posted by isacson at 8:13 AM | Comments (2)

July 3, 2006

Has the FARC rediscovered politics? Does it matter?

The FARC are often described as “hermetic” or even “autistic.” Analysts are generally unable to explain why, where politics and the fight for public support are concerned, the guerrillas have not only lost the battle, but have largely failed to show up.

It could be that the guerrillas lost most of their best political cadres when the Patriotic Union party was systematically exterminated in the late 1980s and early 1990s, leaving behind a rump army that – while well-armed and trained – is unable to express itself convincingly or win supporters for its cause. Also to blame could be the FARC’s income from the drug trade: their wealth made it less necessary to seek the population’s support, while the struggle for control of drug money caused them to act with great cruelty toward the same poor citizens whom a more ideologically disciplined insurgency would pledge to protect.

Whatever the reason, the FARC have become known not as Marxist visionaries or as defenders of the dispossessed, but as hostage-takers, attackers of poor rural towns, rigid and unyielding negotiators, and “hermits” who neither explain their actions nor respond to criticism. Politically, the FARC has consistently appeared to act against its own interest; President Uribe and the designers of the United States’ heavily military policy toward Colombia could hardly ask for a better “badguy” against whom to rally support.

It may be possible that Colombia’s 2006 elections may finally have given the FARC a long overdue jolt. The right-wing president who promised to fight them harder was re-elected in a landslide. The number-two candidate, making a historically strong showing, was a leftist who took every opportunity to distance himself from the insurgents.

Faced with overwhelming evidence of their lack of political influence, the guerrillas have taken a few steps since mid-May that might indicate greater concern for their public image and their political message.

  1. About two weeks before the May 28 presidential election, two FARC leaders said that, for the first time in about sixteen years, the guerrillas would not interfere with the voting. They in fact urged voters to participate and elect a candidate other than Uribe (without specifying whom). This contrasts with the guerrillas’ actions before the March legislative elections: blockading roads in three departments, killing nine passengers in a micro-bus in Caquetá, and murdering nine councilmembers as they met in Huila. “The FARC aren’t anti-election,” said guerrilla leader Raúl Reyes. “What happens is that the FARC analyze the moment in which to participate in elections, under what conditions and concrete purposes.”

  2. Following the elections, the FARC backed off of its stated refusal to hold any talks with Álvaro Uribe’s government. Guerrilla leaders said that they would be willing to hold peace talks, or at least to engage in negotiations to free over fifty prominent hostages in exchange for guerrillas in government prisons. This announcement, while important, was not a major step, since the FARC continues to insist on pre-conditions that the Uribe government has not been willing to accept. In order to talk about a prisoner exchange, the guerrillas demand a thirty-day pullout of armed forces from two municipalities (counties) near Cali. In order to hold real peace talks, the FARC demands a total military pullout from Putumayo and Caquetá departments, an area about the size of Pennsylvania and Maryland combined.

  3. FARC leaders appear to be making more public declarations and statements. They have granted interviews to reporters – or at least reporters from news services of a leftist bent, such as Venezuela’s TeleSUR and the Scandinavian solidarity website ANNCOL. Notably, they have revamped their own website to include far more frequent posting of statements, essays and analyses; new information is being posted several times per week, as opposed to the earlier pace of once every week or two. While the tenor of this content is little changed from the tone-deaf speechmaking we have come to expect, it is significant that they are making more of an effort to get their message out, such as it is.

If the FARC are indeed showing renewed interest in playing the political game, why might that be?

Some analysts, like those interviewed in a mid-May Boston Globe story, think that the Uribe government has so badly battered the FARC on the battlefield that the guerrillas, unable to launch a military campaign, are choosing politics and peace talks instead.

Others argue that the FARC remain quite strong militarily, but have begun to realize that their violence, instead of serving as a show of strength or a blow to Uribe’s policies, has been counter-productive. Its attacks and blockades have served only to increase public exasperation with the guerrillas and to strengthen the Uribista line. Leftist presidential candidate Carlos Gaviria said it well: “I believe that any FARC attempt to benefit a candidate would end up damaging exactly that candidacy.”

It is also possible that the FARC were caught off guard by Gaviria’s relative electoral success. It was a grave blow to the guerrillas that a peaceful leftist political party, the Alternative Democratic Pole (PDA), won 22 percent of the vote, finishing ahead of the long-dominant Liberal Party. As analyst León Valencia put it, “The banners that the guerrillas have waved for many years are now in the hands of the PDA, which is fighting a battle in the heart of democracy to win change through peaceful means.” The success of the non-guerrilla left made the FARC’s political marginalization humiliatingly evident.

Whatever the reason for it, any increase in the guerrillas’ concern for their image and message would be good news for Colombia. It would likely mean somewhat less abuse of civilian populations, more flexibility about negotiations, and more clarity about political demands. More contact with the outside world would likely moderate some of the FARC’s more extreme positions and strengthen the hand of less-radical leaders within the group’s internal power struggles.

However, it would not mean peace anytime soon. Even a more politically astute FARC would still attack military targets and target civilians whom it regards to be class enemies. Even a FARC that is campaigning for public support would still draw much of its income from the drug trade, use landmines freely, and recruit child soldiers. While a less autistic FARC would be more open to dialogue and maintain channels of communication with the government, real negotiations would still be very far off.

But even this would be an improvement over the FARC that Colombia has known – or in fact known little about – during the past several years.

Posted by isacson at 10:52 PM | Comments (2)

June 20, 2006

Demobilizations: troubling official data about a troubled process

The Colombian government’s independent internal-affairs agency (Procuraduría) last week released a very important evaluation of Colombia’s programs to demobilize and reintegrate former combatants, especially ex-paramilitaries.

The report presents several alarming statistics about the challenges that Colombia now faces. The Procurador General, Edgardo Maya, is on very solid ground when he criticizes “the lack of a systemic vision of government responsibilities for attending to the demobilized population.”

Thanks to CIP Colombia Program Intern Christina Sanabria for pulling these out of the Procurador’s speech and PowerPoint presentation.

Land:

Reparations:

Status of the demobilized:

Funds budgeted by the Colombian government for humanitarian aid to the demobilized and the displaced populations:

Posted by isacson at 2:53 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

June 5, 2006

Tying up loose ends

Blogging is a medium with a short attention span. As one “issue of the moment” succeeds another with dizzying speed, unfinished narratives from past posts begin to pile up. This post seeks to tie up some loose ends from the year so far.

Posted by isacson at 11:19 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 29, 2006

How Uribe's first term will complicate his second term

There were no surprises in yesterday’s electoral results. Álvaro Uribe’s 62.2 percent majority was higher than any U.S. president has won in the past 200 years, but it was right in the middle of what the last few polls of Colombian opinion had been predicting (they ranged from 57 percent to 67 percent). Any speculation that Uribe would be hit by low turnout and forced into a second round of voting was done away with very quickly.

The only interesting twist was the performance of leftist candidate Carlos Gaviria, who tripled his standing in the polls since March, ran a brilliant campaign, and ended up in second place with 22 percent of the vote. Colombia’s long-standing two-party system, which has pitted Liberals against Conservatives (at the ballot box and on the battlefield) for over 150 years, is nearly dead: Liberal Party candidate Horacio Serpa finished a distant third, and the Conservatives backed Uribe and ran no candidate.

So now Colombia looks forward to four years with an even stronger Uribe government. The president has a huge mandate for his policies and a congressional majority in the vicinity of 70 percent.

But that doesn’t mean Uribe’s second term will be easier than his first. To the contrary: between now and 2010, Colombians will discover whether their president has set the country on a permanent course toward security and development, or whether he has merely swept some of its worst problems under the rug for a little while, only to see them re-emerge – perhaps during the president’s second term.

Many of Uribe’s most serious challenges could be results of his own first-term policies. Like many second-term presidents worldwide, Uribe could find himself reaping a harvest of trouble from the very seeds that he planted (or failed to plant). Here are some examples.

Security: Improvements in security are the principal reason why Uribe was re-elected. Now we will find out whether they can be sustained. The FARC is far from defeated, and in fact has seen little disruption to its leadership, its structure of fronts and blocs, or its income stream. Analysts like Alfredo Rangel of the Security and Democracy Foundation predict that the guerrillas’ current strategy seeks to draw the Colombian military into more remote areas [PDF format]. They are doing so with attacks on bases and populations in sparsely populated zones beyond the reach of Uribe’s security policies. Sending more troops to those zones, Rangel says, will leave towns and main roads less protected, opening them up to a renewal of FARC bombings, attacks and kidnappings.

In areas considered “re-taken” from the FARC, meanwhile, Uribe’s strategy has been incomplete. While military and police presence has been beefed up in zones like Cundinamarca, eastern Antioquia, or parts of the “Plan Patriota” zone, investment in civilian government presence has been scarce. The troops will eventually have to be drawn down or sent elsewhere; when that happens, the failure to consolidate a real government presence could negate all of the Uribe strategy’s gains. The president must complete his partial approach by devoting far more resources to civilian governance in territories being wrested from guerrilla control.

Paramilitaries: The aftermath of Uribe’s demobilization of paramilitary groups could be the re-elected president’s true Achilles’ heel. The negotiations were the easy part. Now Uribe’s government must ensure that paramilitary organizations are really being dismantled. It must act if “former” paramilitary leaders are found to be ordering killings or sending drugs overseas. If they are sending drugs overseas, it must respond to U.S. extradition requests or risk a souring of relations with Washington. It must work assiduously to reduce the “demobilized” organizations’ grip on political and economic power in many parts of the country. In areas where the paramilitary rank-and-file has truly demobilized, it must provide security to prevent a guerrilla re-entry. It must help the paramilitaries’ many victims to achieve reparations, especially the return of millions of acres of stolen land. And it must have a well-financed, well-planned program to re-integrate former fighters into civilian life – and not merely as a parallel army of coca-eradicators, “unarmed” police auxiliaries, informants and private security guards.

Drugs: Uribe’s U.S.-supported “spray and spray” strategy has been an utter failure. There is just as much coca being grown in Colombia today as there was when the president’s term began in 2002. This means that a large cohort of narco-criminals continues to enjoy great wealth and power, and that armed groups (probably including “former” paramilitaries) continue to see little reduction in their ability to buy weapons and pay recruits. A dramatic change in strategy, with less fumigation and more basic civilian governance to make a legal economy possible in neglected rural areas, is badly needed – and not foreseen in Uribe’s campaign promises.

Scandals within the security forces: In April, Colombia was shaken – but Uribe’s approval ratings unaffected – by revelations that the chief of the presidency’s security and intelligence service (the DAS) may have been doing favors for paramilitaries and narcos, while drawing up lists of activists to be murdered. A military patrol last week massacred a ten-man elite police counter-drug unit, raising strong suspicions of foul play. In February, charges of widespread torture of recruits forced the Army chief’s resignation. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights’ last report documented an increase in complaints of troops dressing murdered civilians in camouflage uniforms and passing them off as guerrillas killed in combat.

Investigations into scandals in the security forces will occupy a lot of space in Colombia’s newspapers during Uribe’s next term. However, the rapidity of these revelations – all of them emerging within the past few months – leads one to wonder whether more is on the way. By demanding ever-increasing results from the security forces and showing a reluctance to investigate or prosecute wrongdoing, Uribe may be creating an environment that incubates politically damaging scandals, which could proliferate in his second term.

Impunity: A key reason why security indicators have improved is that Uribe has deployed soldiers and police throughout populated areas. As a result, citizens have been more protected, and – so far at least – they have only occasionally complained of being victims of abuse or corruption at the hands of soldiers and police. However, the Uribe government has been notably reluctant to pursue claims of human rights abuses committed by members of the security forces. If such behavior goes unpunished when it occurs, there is a danger that Colombians could experience negative changes in their relationship with the soldiers and police charged with protecting them. Security forces who benefit from impunity can easily shift from being protectors to being a burden on the population. Uribe’s government must avoid this outcome by ensuring that charges of military abuse of civilians are investigated and punished.

Poverty: Elsewhere in Latin America, where security is less prominently on voters’ minds, economic concerns have catapulted leftist presidents into office. In particular, citizens have voiced frustration that some of the strongest economic growth in thirty years has failed to affect poverty rates significantly: under the so-called “neoliberal” economic model, new wealth is not trickling down. (See this recent article on the subject in The Economist.) Colombia is not immune to this high-growth / low-distribution phenomenon, but voters’ preoccupation with security has eclipsed economic concerns. If it persists, however, Colombia’s over-fifty-percent (perhaps over sixty percent) poverty rate could benefit the left in the 2010 presidential elections.

These are some very daunting challenges, and Uribe's second term could easily run aground on any one of them. The re-elected president must be prepared to change course when the policies that made him popular during his first term begin to drag down his second term.

Posted by isacson at 11:18 AM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

May 25, 2006

Colombia's candidates and the United States

Here is where Colombia’s four principal presidential candidates stand on Colombia’s relations with the United States, especially issues like Plan Colombia, drug policy, and free trade.

Álvaro Uribe, Primero Colombia

Drug policy: (September 24, 2002) “Colombia has to destroy narcotics. This is the only way for us to take terror away from our country. I have supported Plan Colombia, because this is the first time we go from rhetoric to practical procedures, to practical actions. However, when Plan Colombia was put in place, the goal was to destroy 50 percent of Colombia’s production of cocaine. Our goal is to destroy 100 percent. … We will not stop. We will spray and spray. We will intercept. We will seize. We will do all the best every day and every night to destroy narcotics in Colombia. … We have to maintain Plan Colombia and to expand it.”

Plan Colombia: (April 25, 2006) “We will maintain the international community’s support for the Democratic Security policy and the continuation of Plan Colombia.”
(September 15, 2005) “The results and the effort Colombia needs is what is called the second phase or consolidation phase of Plan Colombia.”

Free trade: (February 27, 2006) “Colombia is a noble brother in solidarity with Latin America and a loyal ally of the United Status. This treaty that we have now agreed with the United States, and which enters into the signing, ratification and constitutional revision phase, gives us access to the largest market in the world. Many formerly socialist countries, now capitalist, yearn to enter those markets. It is Colombia’s good fortune to be able to begin to access the U.S. market.”

Carlos Gaviria, Polo Democrático Alternativo

Relations with the United States: (April 9, 2006) “I’m not anti-United States. We should have very good relations. But that is different from alienating our sovereignty.”

Plan Colombia: (April 25, 2006) “I think that aid from foreign countries is welcome, especially when it is directed toward a country’s economic and social development. Plan Colombia has a strong military element and, from that perspective, it is undesirable.”
(April 9, 2006) “Semana magazine: And Plan Colombia?
Gaviria: It has a strongly military ingredient that helps intensify the war. I don’t like the presence of foreign troops in the country.”
Semana: Would you revise it or end it?
Gaviria: I would revise it, we’d figure out later how much to do so, but I would no doubt revise it.”

Drug policy: (May 22, 2006) “We are enemies of the fumigations that have done away with biodiversity while proving to be inept at eradicating drugs.”
(April 17, 2006) “In the short term there needs to be a substitution of illicit crops for legal, but profitable, crops. Colombia must begin to propose the need to discuss the decriminalization of drug distribution and consumption.”
(April 9, 2006) “Semana magazine: Would you maintain extradition?
Gaviria: It is a very useful instrument in the fight against globalized crime and against impunity, but Colombia’s extradition policy is not a serious one. … A serious policy would prioritize the national justice system when the crimes are committed here. We are extraditing anybody whom the United States requests, even though they may have committed their crimes in Colombia.”

Free trade: (April 9, 2006) “The idea of a free-trade agreement cannot be discarded, but the one that Colombia negotiated with the United States is not good for the country. President Uribe owes favors to Bush, and they are being paid back in the free-trade agreement.”

Horacio Serpa, Partido Liberal

Relations with the United States: (April 25, 2006) “We must modify the image Colombia has in the region of being subordinated to the United States.”

Plan Colombia: (2000) “The plan is a reality, it is a fact and it is going to happen.”

Drug policy: (April 17, 2006) “We must build consensus around an international strategy of co-responsibility, apply social criteria against cultivation (the cultivators of coca do not traffick coca), and come closer to debating decriminalization.”
(May 22, 2006) “We will gradually diminish the use of glyphosate; now, I know that this requires international consensus, and I will take the lead.”
(February 2, 2006) “Suspend aerial fumigations in national parks. We will come to agreement with communities on the eradication of illicit crops; only in exceptional, extreme cases will we authorize fumigation by aerial spraying, and when we do we will take necessary measures to mitigate its impact.”

Free trade: (March 8, 2006) “I don’t like this free-trade agreement that has been discussed with the United States because it isn’t really a free-trade agreement. The term ‘free trade’ can’t be used when it has internal aid and subsidies for U.S. agricultural products mixed in, when it maintains the protection of its sugar markets and other agricultural goods, as well as the other non-tariff barriers that impede access for our exports.”

Antanas Mockus, Alianza Social Indígena

Relations with the United States: (April 25, 2006) “I will maintain a good relationship with the United States.”

Drug Policy: (April 23, 2006) “We have to explore other scenarios: what would Colombians do if the narcotrafficking problem were entirely in their hands? Without narcotrafficking in Colombia, peace with the FARC could happen in less than four years. Many think that if it were not for U.S. pressure, we would all enrich ourselves with narcotrafficking. Today the equation is narcotrafficking against fumigtion, eradication, environmental impact. But that doesn’t matter to the United States.”
(April 17, 2006) “We have to discuss what we would do if the problem were entirely up to us, to exercise social pressure as a mechanism of partially subsituting technical and military actions, and to evaluate policies together with other countries.”
(April 23, 2006) “Without ignoring international agreements, we want to re-open the issue. That does not mean legalizing drugs. Anti-narcotics policy is being carried out without education, only with repression.”

Free trade: (Undated but recent press release from the Mockus campaign): “The candidate is convinced that the signing of the free-trade agreement is good for the country, but not just with the United States; ‘We must seek these kinds of agreements and consolidate economic relations with Venezuela, with MERCOSUR, with Europe and with the rest of the world in general.’”

Posted by isacson at 4:36 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

May 24, 2006

Friendly fire or foul play?

Many questions and suspicions surround Monday’s tragic “friendly fire” incident between units of Colombia’s army and police. Members of the 3rd Brigade’s Farallones High Mountain Battalion killed ten members of an elite Judicial Police counter-drug unit, plus a civilian informant, in a 30-minute firefight near the town of Jamundí, just south of Cali.

The policemen – a ten-man unit that had captured hundreds of drug suspects, including twenty-three wanted by the United States – were acting on a tip indicating that 200 kilograms of cocaine were stashed in a nearby safe house. The cocaine reportedly belonged to North Valle Cartel leader Diego Montoya, one of the FBI’s ten most-wanted fugitives.

They were met by about twenty-eight soldiers, who opened fire and tossed grenades. A confidential source told Cali’s El País that only one of the policemen’s weapons showed signs of having been fired.

The incident took place in broad daylight (about 6:00 PM) in an open, flat, populated area. “The zone where the events happened is not forested, it is not jungle, it is a suburban area with country inns [casas de recreo], which it seems would not present difficulties for an identification process,” the chief of Colombia’s Judicial Police (DIJIN), Gen. Óscar Naranjo, told El Tiempo.

The police were wearing Judicial Police caps and jackets, and identified themselves to their attackers, but to no avail. Witnesses say that they heard men shouting, “We’re from the Judicial Police… don’t shoot… we have families, we have children.”

Colombia’s Army insists that it was a case of mistaken identity, and that the soldiers were on edge in the face of possible guerrilla pre-election attacks. “We are not going to wait for a group to arrive before opening fire,” said Army chief Gen. Mario Montoya. “The men were simply deployed in response to a suspicious situation that presented itself in the zone.”

The question that many Colombians are asking – and which Colombian reporters’ coverage hints at – is a tough one: Was this really a case of accidental “friendly fire,” or was it something more sinister?

In the worst case, the Army battalion’s members might have been protecting drug traffickers, and trying to stop the police operation. It is also possible that they were fooled by local narcos who, upon learning of the police operation, set a trap by warning the Army that guerrillas were in the immediate area. Either way, as is often the case, the police unit did not inform the military about the operation beforehand, largely for fear that the information could end up in the wrong hands.

Disputes between military and police units over drugs have happened before. In Guaitarilla, Nariño in March 2004, a clash between soldiers and police killed six police and four civilians; while what exactly happened remains murky, it has been widely alleged that the firefight stemmed from a police attempt to rob a cache of cocaine. Unlike Guaitarilla, however, this police operation came all the way from the top, approved by Gen. Naranjo, the DIJIN chief.

The zone where Monday’s killing took place is no stranger to drug-mafia activity; Valle del Cauca department was home to both the defunct Cali cartel and the still-active Northern Valle Cartel, many of whose members are some of Colombia’s most-wanted drug traffickers. An El Tiempo editorial describes the zone of the firefight as “free of guerrilla presence, but one where narcos and ‘paras’ proliferate, and where more than fifteen ranches have been seized by authorities confiscating drug traffickers’ assets.”

Colombia’s attorney-general’s office is investigating this incident, as is the government internal-affairs branch (Procuraduría), and a commission of generals will perform its own internal inquiry. In order to figure out what exactly happened, to determine whether drug corruption played a role, and to ensure that any wrongdoing is punished, all of the above bodies must find answers to tough questions like the following.

Though it involves no violations of human rights or international humanitarian law (with the possible exception of the civilian informant’s murder), this case can tell us much about the current state of accountability in Colombia’s security forces. The U.S. Embassy in Bogotá should follow the resulting investigations very closely, and to respond promptly to any requests from investigators for technical assistance.

Posted by isacson at 2:16 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

April 24, 2006

"He Knows Too Much"

In a March 31 entry to his blog, El Espectador columnist Felipe Zuleta referred to the case of Gabriel Puerta Parra (alias “The Doctor”), a longtime narcotrafficker and paramilitary associate arrested in late 2004. The U.S. government requested Puerta’s extradition in early 2004, and Colombian President Álvaro Uribe gave his final approval over two months ago. The extradition policy, notes Zuleta,

is the one that is going to put our ruling class into a jam. That is why they haven’t wanted to extradite Gabriel Puerta Parra, whose extradition has been ready since February 20, despite the rapidity with which this government extradites. Could it be that Puerta Parra knows too many things about our president? What could it be?

“He Knows Too Much” is the title of an article about Puerta that appeared a few days later on the website of Colombia’s Semana newsmagazine. It includes an overview of his background as an important behind-the-scenes figure in the twin rise of narcotrafficking and paramilitarism in Colombia during the last fifteen years.

Puerta served as head of the DAS ,the government security agency currently riven by scandal, in Boyacá department during the 1960s. A major cattle rancher in northern Colombia, he was an early supporter and organizer of paramilitary groups in the Magdalena Medio region. He has served as an intermediary between paramilitaries and narcotraffickers (inlcuding as a bagman bringing narcos’ money to top paramilitary leaders), and between feuding drug lords. His U.S. extradition request calls Puerta one of the leaders of the Northern Valle cartel, the largest single drug-trafficking organization (other than armed groups) in Colombia today.

According to an October 2004 article in El Tiempo (see Google’s cache of it here), in August of that year, two months before his arrest, Puerta had written to an unnamed top AUC leader asking permission to join the ranks of the paramilitary leadership in the demilitarized zone where demobilization talks were taking place. By becoming "Comandante Agamez," the name he chose for himself, Puerta Parra hoped not only to evade arrest, but to negotiate a possible amnesty and a way to avoid extradition to the United States. However, the article that appeared in Semana this month contains a different version of this episode; it says that the paramilitaries offered to make Puerta a comandante to avoid extradition, but that he turned them down.

Alongside its profile of Puerta, Semana published the text of an interview it secured with the jailed narcotrafficker, who remains unextradited. The interview, conducted by phone, offers a disturbing and revealing look at Colombia’s criminal underworld and its intersection with both paramilitaries and politics. Here it is in English.

Semana.com, April 3, 2006

“As soon as they get me on the plane, I’ll plead guilty”

Semana: What do you think about the paramilitary process?

Gabriel Puerta: That it is a farce. I don’t see any future for it. There are many internal problems. With an army that has grown so much, it is impossible for this process to work. This story about how “if you behave we won’t turn you over” is a very pretty thing, but there is no secure legal guarantee behind that promise, and the United States doesn’t pardon.

S: You were a witness of how narcotraffickers took over paramilitarism.

G.P.: Look, in the Magdalena Medio all of the cattlemen supported the AUC, absolutely all of them. There were sugar-cane farmers, industrialists, businessmen, politicians and soldiers. Along with the business leaders, we did a lot of lobbying in Montería [the capital of Córdoba department, where AUC leaders Salvatore Mancuso and Carlos Castaño spent much of their time]. I didn’t have an army, but the campesinos were the biggest intelligence service in the country. But the cost of war was immense, and they would keep asking us for more money for guns and ammunition. Everyone who wanted help gave them 25 men, who cost at least 25 million pesos per month to sustain. The oil-palm growers put up the money, and the military trained them. Afterward, the soldiers got skittish and only sergeants, majors and captains remained. And when the businessmen realized that they weren’t able to sustain this, each armed comandante became a loose cannon. By now they were very powerful and they fell under the sway of narcotraffickers.

S: What was your big sin in this process?

G.P.: To bring money from the narcos to Carlos Castaño.

S: And why did you offer this service, if you weren’t involved in the drug business?

G.P.: Because I was a friend of the self-defense groups and because I am a man of peace. [Note: Puerta’s irony here is purely unintentional.] We had to stop the extortions, free the kidnapped people and stop the war. The narcos collaborated with money. Or do you think I could show up before Castaño with only five centavos? I had to perform certain services so that they would pay attention to me and to save lives.

S: How much money did you end up bringing them?

G.P.: A lot. All of the narcos took up collections.

S: But you also met at your ranch with narcos like Diego Montoya, “Don Diego,” Hernando Gómez, “Rasguño,” and Wílber Varela [“Jabón.” All three are top leaders of the Northern Valle cartel whose frequent feuds have left hundreds of people dead].

G.P.: My great sin was to meet with them to talk about peace. So that they might stop shooting at each other, and now I’m going to be extradited. Like an idiot I got involved in the solution to problems that weren’t mine. But I’m not anybody’s right hand or left hand. “Don Diego” wanted to end the problem of the war within the Northern Valle cartel and I sat him down with his enemy to talk peace. And I accompanied Hernando Gómez to a meeting with Monsignor Giraldo, the bishop of Buga, to ask for his help in arranging narcos’ eventual surrender to the authorities. I knew that he spoke to his brother in Medellín, but this all ended up being just an aspiration.

S: How much do you know about the “baby cartels” that Gen. Óscar Naranjo [the head of SIJIN, or police intelligence] talks about?

G.P.: They are very professional and more educated. They are rich. They have bank accounts in Paraguay, Argentina, Switzerland and Spain.

S: Will this business [the drug business] ever be eliminated?

G.P.: Nobody will ever eliminate narcotrafficking.

S: Why did you refuse to enter the paramilitary peace process?

G.P.: Because they offered to hide me and I didn’t agree. I didn’t want to cause problems for the government.

S: You’ve got one foot on a DEA plane [for his imminent extradition].

G.P.: That’s right. I go full of fear. As soon as they get me on the DEA plane, I’ll plead guilty. I’m not willing to go to trial. I wasn’t trafficking in drugs, but I know the heart of the business, as well as that of the self-defense groups and paramilitarism.

S: If U.S. justice asks you what you know about accusations that President Álvaro Uribe’s government has ties to paramilitaries, what are you going to say to them?

G.P.: I’m not going to shake up the government, even though Álvaro Uribe is not a saint whom I worship. The public [la sociedad] is who is being deceived. Those who peacefully walk down Carrera Séptima in Bogotá and know nothing about the critical situation in the countryside.

S: And if they ask you about the ties between politicians and paramilitaries?

G.P.: The only thing I’ll say is that the political class and ruling class flirt with narcotraffickers in private, and reject them in public. Double morality rules in Colombia.

Posted by isacson at 5:43 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

April 21, 2006

A deteriorating situation in the heart of "Plan Patriota"

Here is the translated text of a very disturbing letter that made its way into my e-mail two weeks ago, thanks to the Fundación Nuevo Arco Iris in Bogotá. Addressed to President Uribe, it discusses rapidly deteriorating conditions in San Vicente del Caguán, Caquetá.

You may recall that San Vicente was the largest town in the "demilitarized zone" that was ceded to the FARC during 1998-2002 peace talks. Since 2004, it has been at the heart of the zone where the Colombian government's U.S.-supported "Plan Patriota" military offensive has been taking place.

The letter makes clear that "Plan Patriota" has not made San Vicente any safer. It indicates that the FARC are heavily present throughout San Vicente, and that as of early March a guerrilla "armed stoppage" had confined this large town's population to the city limits. The signers are concerned that the guerrillas may soon launch a bloody attack in the town center.

The letter, which denounces both FARC hostilities and government human-rights abuses within the "Plan Patriota" framework, is also remarkable because of the range of signers: business, church and political leaders appear alongside indigenous, union and leftist party leaders.

 

San Vicente del Caguán, March 2, 2006

Doctor
ALVARO URIBE VELEZ
President
Republic of Colombia 

Respected Doctor Uribe;

We, the active forces [fuerzas vivas] of the Municipality of San Vicente del Caguán Caquetá, write to inform you of the difficult situation that our population is currently suffering.

Since February 14 of this year, the FARC EP declared an “armed stoppage” [a ban on all road travel] in this zone of the country, which has gradually generated multiple problems that gravely affect our FREEDOM, SECURITY and economic, political and social STABILITY, putting the people who inhabit this region at high risk. 

Our concern extends to the inhabitants of the municipality’s rural zone, since possibilities of communication with nearby hamlets [veredas] do not exist. This leads us to believe that due to the duration of armed stoppage, there is a basic shortage of badly needed supplies, medicines and items needed for health emergencies. 

The following is our view of the human rights situation for the population of San Vicente del Caguán: 

Situation of Human rights:

Security:

1. Constant and numerous presence of guerrilla units near the town center, which threaten to take over our population. This is a worrisome situation, since it is public knowledge that in other regions of the country (Bojayá, Mitú, recently Rivera etc.), the FARC announced violent takeovers of populations ahead of time yet opportune and pertinent measures were not taken. Hundreds were killed, wounded and kidnapped as a result of these "Chronicles of a death foretold."

2. Intimidation and insecurity of public servants [local elected leaders], becoming more frequent every day, to such a degree that the security forces advise these state representatives not to frequent places outside the security perimeter, which itself is reduced to an area smaller than a manzana [about 1.7 acres]. 

3. Optimal security conditions do not exist for the caravans [armed vehicle escorts] organized by the security forces. Proof of that is the lamentable event of February 25, when a public transportation van was attacked on the route that leads from Puerto Rico to Doncello, and 9 people were killed. As of today, these caravans continue to be harassed constantly.

Right to free movement:

1. We feel that our right to travel (enshrined in the 1991 Constitution) is harmed, as no Colombian citizen who is a resident of San Vicente del Caguán may move freely within the department [of Caquetá], not even to obtain basic supplies needed for survival. when not allowing to it to no resident Colombian citizen in San Vicente del Caguán to move freely by the department, not even to supply itself of basic products for its survival. Living in this reality are more than 280 hamlets whose population is around 28,000 inhabitants. The same happens in the municipality’s urban sector, whose population of around 22,000 inhabitants can neither travel nor carry foodstuffs. 

Right to work:

1. Due to the immobilization of our main products, 400 daily head of cattle, 120,000 liters of milk per day for NESTLÉ, 160 weekly tons of cheese and 300 pigs among others, which represent 90% of the economy of the municipality; the remaining 10% are agricultural products represented in fruits and vegetables for local consumption and to supply other departments. 

2. The municipality’s critical situation has had an especially damaging effect on informal-sector employment, which involves a significant amount of the population, which has seen its ability to gain needed resources badly affected. 

3. The productive sector of the municipality has trimmed its personnel considerably since it lacks the economic guarantees sufficient to ensure payment for its employees’ services.  

4. Transportation between hamlets is paralyzed 100 percent, while transit between municipalities has been considerably limited, so this source of employment is also functioning abnormally. 

Right to health:

1. The shortage of essential medicines and supplies for the protection of rural and urban health. 

2. The impossibility of quickly transporting sick and injured people from the rural zone to the local urban hospital.

3. The difficulty of transferring to the country’s central cities, due to the lack of local specialists, any gravely ill people or women with high-risk pregnancies.

Right to Free Expression:

1. The population feels intimidated in the current environment, which limits citizens’ guarantees of free expression of opinion.

2. Sufficient state guarantees do not exist for the free denunciation of human rights violations or international humanitarian law infractions. 

Others:

1. The fuel and food shortage has generated price speculation, which is justified by the risk that transporters face of losing their lives and their vehicles at the hands of the insurgency. This food shortage thus affects the poorest and the informally employed.

2. Levels of hunger among the poorest and most vulnerable are affecting all of us, as it is generating increased vandalism and crime, as well as malnutrition among children and the elderly.

3. The concentration of counterinsurgency war in the region, via the so-called Plan Patriota, has generated forced displacements and serious threats to human life. This situation is lamentable since the community has already denounced the security forces for violations of human rights and the insurgency for international humanitarian law infractions. The excesses committed by the parties to the conflict mainly affect the civilian population.

Due to the arguments enumerated above, we consider that special and urgent attention must be paid to these problems: 

1. We demand that the Colombian state generate political space for a negotiation with the insurgency, to seek mechanisms of national reconciliation, thus avoiding to the greatest extent possible further armed confrontation between Colombians.

2. We ask international human rights organizations to maintain a permanent presence in this zone of the country, as guarantors of the respect and protection of life, as well as other rights consecrated in the Constitution, in conditions of dignity.

3. We ask for humanitarian food aid, for the nutrition of children, elderly adults and those who do not have economic resources to buy food.

4. We ask for greater security guarantees for the transport of foods and fuels; if it is not possible for public transportation companies, this should be done by vehicles provided by the state.

5. We request greater controls on the price of products and fuels that do arrive, as well as on public transportation rates, to avoid the speculation that generates greater conditions of inequality.

6. We demand of the ColombianState effective guarantees so that public servants (Council members) may exercise their duties in service of the community under normal conditions.

7. We demand that assistance programs for the vulnerable population, for example,

- Families in action.
- Economic support for the elderly.
- Hot lunches for the elderly under the "Juan Londoño de la cuesta" program.
- Remittances for the rural elderly.
- Integral attention to the displaced population.
- Economic and food support for the sustainment of "The Good Samaritan" nursing home, which is about to close for lack of resources.

comply with their obligations quickly, to eliminate the conditions of inequality to which the vulnerable population is a victim. 

Due to the situation explained above, we request that an early warning alert be submitted for the municipality of San Vicente del Caguán, with the possibility of extending it to the entire department. 

Sincerely,

Civil populace of San Vicente del Caguán.

Annexed: Listing of signers 

LISTING OF SIGNERS 

JOSE EDUARDO MANJARES
President, Municipal Council

LUIS BALLEN
First Vice President, Municipal Council  

EDUARDO CEDEÑO
Second Vice President, Municipal Council

ORDUBEY TEJADA
Councilman

VIRIGINIA LLANOS
Councilman

LUIS FERNANDO OSORIO G.
President, Municipal Committee of Cattle Dealers of San Vicente of Caguán - COMGASANVI

SANTIAGO BORDA
LUIS EDUARDO LOPEZ
Cooperativa Multiactiva e Industrial de San Vicente del Caguán

JUAN DIEGO GARCIA 
Liberal Party President, San Vicente del Caguán                                  

FREDY ARMING RODRIGUEZ P.
Movimiento Popular Unido

OLIVIA TOVAR
Coordinadora Unidad Democrática

DAVID MOTATO
Secretario Ejecutivo
Polo Alternativo Democrático

P. LUIS ALFONSO MOLINA DUQUE 
Párroco
Parroquia Nuestra Señora de las Mercedes
Representing Catholic Church 

HNO JOSE GREGORIO HERNANDEZ
Rector 
Colegio Nacional Dante Alighieri  

MARCO TULIO PORTELA 
Representative of Educators 

CLARA LIGIA MEJIA
Manager, Banco Agrario 

YESID OLAYA
Asociación Vida Digna y Solidaria, Manos Unidas 

HERIBERTO RAMIREZ 
Iglesia Alianza Cristiana Colombiana 

CONSUELO CARDONA TOBON
Representante Gremio Comerciantes 

CARLOS MORENO
Representante Gremio Comerciantes 

MANUEL QUIMBAY
Manager, Cooperative COOTRANSCAGUAN 

HUGO NARVAEZ
Transportes Yarí  

RAMON PULGARIN
Spokesman, Public Services

GUSTAVO TOLEDO 
Cheesemakers’ Association representative  

OFFIR CARDONA
President, Good Samaritan Association 

HENRY VALENCIA LEON
ASOTIP Representative  

VICENTE CAMAYO 
Governor of Indigenous Reserve

CARLOS BURBANO
President, San RafaelHospital Workers’ Union

RUSBEL CHAVARRO
Representative, Mechanics’ Association

URSULINA CUELLAR
Representative, Timber Association

OMAIRA VALENCIA
Asociación Mujeres 2000

MARIA MERCEDES PADILLA
Providers of Food for the Elderly 

GLORIA RODRÍGUEZ
Leader, Barrio La Pradera

IVAN DARIO TOWERS
ASODESCA Displaced Population

JAMED VALDERRAMA
Representante Ornamentadores

Posted by isacson at 6:32 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

April 18, 2006

Uribe's opponents' security problem

The main reason Álvaro Uribe dominates the polling for the May elections is security, as one of his opponents, the leftist former supreme-court judge Carlos Gaviria, explained recently.

A public-opinion study carried out by the University of the Andes at the end of last year and released at the beginning of this year indicates that the President is way off course in the fight against poverty, inequality and unemployment. But when people are asked if they will vote for Uribe again, they say yes. Why? Because the great deceiver of the people is "Democratic Security."

President Uribe’s opponents are clearly frustrated to see him coasting toward a second term on Colombia’s lowered violence indicators, particularly when his Democratic Security policy’s flaws appear so evident.

They point to the danger posed by networks of paid informants, mass arrests on flimsy evidence, and reluctance to prosecute human-rights abusers or paramilitary collaborators. They point to continued insecurity beyond cities and main roads, likening Uribe’s policies to sweeping the worst of Colombia’s violence under the rug. They point to the lack of an economic development and nation-building strategy to go along with military “recovery” of territory. They point to a deeply flawed paramilitary re-integration process, and even speculate about the President’s real relationship to paramilitarism.

“This government’s policy has failed in its fundamental objectives, related to the defeat of the guerrillas and advances against narcotrafficking,” says perennial Liberal Party candidate Horacio Serpa. “The strategy of avoiding reality consists of making a rather superficial promise, in the sense that the illegal armed groups will be defeated by military means,” says Gaviria. Adds independent candidate and two-time Bogotá mayor Antanas Mockus, “I think that all of Colombia would like to have optimism about President Uribe. However, [the unfolding DAS scandal] shows that behind Uribe’s power is the enormous power of paramilitarism.”

Many Colombians, including many Uribe supporters, probably share these concerns and criticisms. But Uribe still owns the security issue, and his opponents’ attacks have had zero impact.

Uribe’s main advantage is that people know what he plans to do about security: more soldiers and police, more offensives in guerrilla-held zones, more special powers for the security forces. Voters may be uncomfortable about aspects of Democratic Security, but if they live in populated areas they’ve probably seen somewhat less violence in their communities. These results may be slowing, as Uribe’s policies reach the limits of what an almost entirely military strategy can do. However, voters still lean toward Uribe on security because he has a clear, easily explainable platform.

The same can’t be said about Uribe’s opponents. To the question of “how will the Colombian government protect its citizens if you are elected,” the candidates' plans are much less clear. Some do not differ greatly from the answer Uribe would give, while others have simply failed to articulate any answer that makes sense to voters.

El Tiempo: What is your proposal with regard to security?

Gaviria: When security is spoken of, we associate it with the presence of the security forces. The presence of the state should not take this form, but instead should take the form of the presence of hospitals, schools, and all of the institutions that are lacking in the least protected sectors. When this presence exists in all of the country, under the institutions of the rule of law, the security forces can play a relatively small role.

This is true, and we agree with it 100 percent. But this answer is unlikely to resonate with most Colombian voters.

First, most voters do not live in “the least protected sectors.” In fact, residents of cities and town centers – at least 70 percent of Colombia’s population – are those who have benefited most from recent drops in rates of murder, kidnapping and sabotage under Uribe. Second, those who live in Colombia’s vast ungoverned spaces do need schools and hospitals, but they also need their government to protect them from more immediate threats.

Just as Uribe’s security strategy in ungoverned zones has favored a military response and neglected other government functions, Gaviria’s security proposal – on the rare occasions when he articulates it – seems to commit the opposite error. Quotes like the one above easily leave voters with the impression that a Gaviria administration would seek to build hospitals and carry out antipoverty programs in a security vacuum.

Political scientist and El Tiempo columnist Eduardo Posada Carbó – whose opinions CIP rarely shares – said it well when critiquing Gaviria in a recent column.

The security issue – Mauricio García has observed in these pages – ‘has always been a hot potato for the left… They believe that to talk about security is to make a concession to the right wing. That is why they go silent.’ Going silent about the issue is what the platform of Polo Democrático Alternativo candidate Carlos Gaviria does. Except for a mistaken reference to “sovereign security,” the word only appears in reference to job or food security – integral social security. These are noble and fair efforts. But there is not even a single word about the rates of murder or kidnapping. 

Gaviria is right when he calls for an active government role in addressing the root causes of Colombia’s violence, such as poverty, inequality, state neglect and resentment of past injustice. But Colombian voters also want to hear answers about addressing the proximate causes of Colombia’s violence. How can the government reduce citizens’ likelihood of being the victims of a robbery, kidnapping or terror attack right now?

There is no reason why a leftist candidate cannot propose to use the security forces more efficiently to address proximate causes. Gaviria or another opponent could be talking about community policing and efforts to earn the local population’s trust; swiftly punishing abusive or predatory behavior toward civilians, improving response times; managing budgets transparently; improving management and accountability; rewarding exceptional performance; investing in anticrime technologies; and coordinating closely with a reforming judiciary. A leftist candidate could be the only one explaining how to bring the state into neglected zones through a balanced combination of military security and civilian alleviation of “root causes.” (Of, course, to do so would require acknowledging that a military role exists.)

Álvaro Uribe has little to say about proposals like these. Unfortunately, neither do his opponents.

Unless they begin to answer the security question more articulately and distinctively, Carlos Gaviria and the other opposition candidates will have ceded the security issue to Uribe. In Colombia, this is a fundamental concession to make. Any candidate who allows that to happen is guaranteed a first-round defeat.

Posted by isacson at 11:32 PM | Comments (15) | TrackBack

April 13, 2006

The DAS scandals

If you’ve ever traveled to Colombia, then you’ve seen the DAS, the government’s Administrative Department for Security. As soon as you get off the plane, DAS employees are there to stamp your passport and, perhaps, to ask why you’re visiting.

The DAS does much more than stamp passports, though. It is a powerful agency, a sort of “secret police” institution founded in 1960. Its principal purpose is intelligence and counterintelligence, both domestic and international. However, it is also a law enforcement body whose agents have judicial police powers – they investigate crimes and can arrest and interrogate people. The DAS also provides bodyguards and security services for high government officials and other people at risk.

To someone familiar with the U.S. government, the DAS is a strange beast. It incorporates aspects of the FBI, the CIA, and the ICE (immigration). Plus, it is not part of any cabinet ministry like Defense or Interior – it is a part of the Colombian president’s office.

If you think this arrangement seems like a recipe for disaster, you’re right. Disaster has struck with a vengeance during Álvaro Uribe’s administration. According to recent reports in Colombia’s media and testimony from former officials, between 2002 and 2005 the DAS was essentially at the service of paramilitaries and major narcotraffickers. It drew up hitlists of union members and leftist activists, and even plotted to destabilize Venezuela.
Jorge Noguera

All of this happened under the tenure of Jorge Noguera, Uribe’s DAS director from August 2002 until he left under a major storm cloud of scandal in October 2005. According to Rafael García, the agency’s former chief of information systems who has made a series of explosive allegations, “Jorge Noguera became the Vladimiro Montesinos of Alvaro Uribe’s government. He conspired against the governments of neighboring countries, he did away with leftist leaders, he participated in narcotrafficking operations, he maintained relations with paramilitary groups, etc. etc.”

A witness in jail

García is making his charges against Noguera from the La Picota prison in southern Bogotá. As the official in charge of the DAS computer networks, he was arrested in January 2005 for taking bribes to erase and change the files of paramilitaries and narcotraffickers.
Rafael García

The disgraced DAS director and his defenders argue that García is not credible, that he feels betrayed by his former friend Noguera and has an axe to grind. However, Colombia’s Semana and Cambio magazines claim to have corroborated many of García’s claims with other sources. Other former officials who have provided similar information include Carlos Moreno, a DAS agent who was fired in September, and José Miguel Narváez, the DAS sub-director who split very publicly with Noguera in October 2005, and was fired along with him.

In the end, if even half of what García says is true, it’s more than frightening enough. Since the DAS scandals have received very little attention in the English-language press so far, here is an attempt to summarize these very serious allegations in eight pages or less.

Links with paramilitaries
"Jorge 40"

García contends that Noguera maintained a close relationship with Rodrigo Tovar Pupo or “Jorge 40,” the leader of the AUC paramilitaries’ powerful Northern Bloc who controlled (and probably still controls) much of the narcotics transshipment from the eastern half of Colombia’s Caribbean coast. García says that Noguera met several times with “Jorge 40” to talk about local politics, including support for candidates in the 2003 municipal and gubernatorial elections, among them Magdalena department governor Trino Luna.

“On various occasions Jorge Noguera told me that Jorge 40 was very grateful for the collaboration that he had offered him,” said García. A key point of contact between Noguera and “Jorge 40,” according to García, was the paramilitary leader’s cousin, Álvaro Pupo.

José Miguel Narváez, who as subdirector was Noguera’s second-in-command at the DAS, has told Colombian government investigators that Noguera’s relationships with paramilitaries went beyond “Jorge 40” alone. Other paramilitaries who got help from the DAS included Luis Eduardo Cifuentes (“El Águila”), the paramilitary chief in Cundinamarca (the department around Bogotá); Carlos Mario Jiménez or “Macaco” of the powerful Central Bolivar Bloc; and Miguel Arroyave, who headed the “Centauros” bloc in Bogotá and in the southern llanos (the savannahs of Meta, Casanare, Guaviare and Vichada) until his own men killed him in September 2004.

In his defense, Noguera has admitted that he met with “Jorge 40” and other paramilitary leaders, but only in the context of the AUC’s demobilization talks with the Colombian government.

Helping “Don Diego” and other narcos
Diego Montoya

Diego Montoya (“Don Diego”), the most powerful leader of Colombia’s most powerful drug cartel, the Norte del Valle organization, is on the FBI’s ten most-wanted fugitives’ list alongside Osama bin Laden. That, says García, didn’t stop the DAS from helping Montoya to avoid capture. “Giancarlo [Auqué, who served as DAS intelligence director before Ariza] and Jorge Noguera passed secret information to Diego Montoya, and the idea was not just to help him avoid capture, but to let him know that an informant in his own organization was revealing his location.”

There is more. According to Semana, “Carlos Robayo, alias ‘Guacamayo,’ was for years the right hand of the Norte de Valle boss. Two years ago, Semana witnessed ‘Guacamayo’ calling one of his contacts in the DAS and asking him to remove [from DAS archives] arrest orders, background information, photographs and fingerprint data for a dozen people. He also demanded that these materials be brought to where he was. Less than two hours after ‘Guacamayo’ made his call, a DAS detective arrived with the package.”

The DAS also appears to have helped Montoya’s archrival in the Norte del Valle organization, Wilber Varela, alias “Jabón.” Carlos Moreno, the fired DAS agent, said that he was once sent to the attorney-general’s office (Fiscalía) to steal files about a case tying unnamed individuals to Varela.

García also alleges that Noguera helped to facilitate narcotraffickers’ contributions to Álvaro Uribe’s 2002 presidential election campaign. He mentions relatively unknown figures like Néstor Ramón Caro, a Casanare-based narcotrafficker whose extradition to the United States was requested in 2001; Raúl Montoya from Magdalena department, and Ramón Crespo from Barranquilla.

Uribe's 2002 campaign: voter fraud and paramilitary ties 

In the runup to the 2002 presidential election, García says, the Uribe campaign did “things that were more serious than what happened in the Samper campaign” [in 1994, when winning candidate Ernesto Samper allegedly took contributions from the Cali drug cartel].

Magdalena

Before Uribe named him to the directorship of the DAS, Noguera managed the Uribe campaign in the Caribbean coast department of Magdalena. This province was (and probably still is) under the heavy influence of two paramilitary groups, both deeply involved in the drug trade: the Northern Bloc headed by “Jorge 40,” and the Tayrona Resistance Front led by Hernán Giraldo. The paramilitaries’ influence on politics in Magdalena is demonstrable: in 2003, mayoral candidates actually ran unopposed in 14 of the department’s 30 municipalities.

According to Rafael García, the imprisoned former DAS official, Noguera and Juan Carlos Vives (who is now the Uribe government’s “drug czar”) campaigned in Magdalena municipalities where it was impossible to do so without paramilitary permission, and they were in contact at the time with “Jorge 40.”

But García’s charges go further. “What I said was that an electoral fraud was organized [for the March 2002 legislative elections] to carry to the Congress the candidates preferred by the AUC’s Northern Bloc. I mentioned three senators from Magdalena, three candidates for the House of Representatives for Magdalena, two Senate candidates for Cesar and two for the House, two House candidates for La Guajira and a Senate candidate for Bolívar.”

In Cesar, Magdalena, La Guajira and Bolívar, García described in detail how Noguera used a computer program and illegally obtained electoral-census data to ensure that, in several districts, those who did not show up at the polls still “voted” for the paramilitaries’ candidates. The same fraud was repeated two months later, said García, to benefit President Uribe. Indeed, while Uribe’s challenger Horacio Serpa did rather well in northern Colombia thanks to the strength of the Liberal Party machinery, Uribe won overwhelmingly in the districts where García alleges that the fraud took place.

García also contends that in 2002, candidate Uribe met with José Gelves, a leader of Hernán Giraldo’s paramilitary group, the Tayrona Resistance Front. Gelves, an AUC member since 2000, told Semana that he did meet with Uribe in 2002 and actively campaigned for him. 
Gen. Rito Alejo

In 2003, García says, Noguera met with “Jorge 40” to discuss the October gubernatorial election in Magdalena. “Jorge Noguera went to see ‘Jorge 40’ and asked him to support his friend José Fernández de Castro, but ‘Jorge 40’ said no because they were supporting Trino Luna [who won unopposed]. Everyone had to vote for him. Jorge [Noguera] went to the meeting with ‘40’ one Saturday, accompanied by retired Gen. Rito Alejo.”

Gen. Rito Alejo de Río is widely viewed as a paramilitary supporter; he ran the Colombian Army’s 17th Brigade in the northwestern region of Urabá at a time when the paramilitaries carried out a campaign of near-daily massacres (and at a time when Álvaro Uribe was governor of Antioquia department, which incorporates much of Urabá). Alejo was recently defeated in his bid to win a seat in Colombia’s Senate.

Ordering assassinations of unionists and activists 

One of García’s most frightening claims is that the DAS drew up a list of union leaders, leftist activists and academics, and passed it along to the AUC’s Northern Bloc. According to Semana, several of those on the list were later killed, most have received death threats, and others have been detained by the authorities.

“The detectives who told me about it showed me part of the list,” García says. “I wrote down some of the names. It drew my attention because it included the name of Zullty Cotina, who had already been killed, and that of [Barranquilla professor Alfredo] Correa de Andreis, who was murdered after I saw the list.”

García offers new information about what happened to professor Correa, whom the DAS arrested in 2004 on charges of "rebellion." Correa was held in prison for months, then released for lack of evidence, only to be murdered weeks later. Though the DAS arrested Correa in Barranquilla, in Atlántico department, García says that the DAS unit that carried out the arrest came from neighboring Bolívar department, whose DAS section chief at the time, Rómulo Betancourt, is now under investigation for links to paramilitaries. (García says he in fact witnessed Noguera, when hiring Betancourt for the Bolívar post, actually asking “Jorge 40” for permission to do so.)

When Semana asked whether assassinations of those on the DAS list were carried out by the DAS or paramilitaries, García responded, “They were carried out by self-defense groups [paramilitaries]. But they told me that the killing of Alfredo Correa de Andreis had been carried out by people from the DAS. I also told the prosecutor that I had heard mention of a Cartagena union organizer who was killed while holding his child’s hand.”

Three unions with members on the DAS list that have been hit particularly hard are the Association of Health and Social Security Workers (ANTHOC) and two agricultural workers’ unions, Sintragrícola and Fensuagro. Since 2001, two ANTHOC leaders have been killed and 40 have received death threats. The union’s vice-president, Gilberto Martínez, said he began receiving threats in 2001, and they intensified in 2003. He told Semana, “Since that moment we have denounced, in many places, the conspiracy between the DAS and the paramilitaries in Atlántico to follow, threaten and murder members of our union. These denunciations have not prospered in the justice system, but now Mr. García has ratified them.”

A hit on Chávez? 

Though he offers few details, citing concerns about his security, García has told Colombia’s press that “there existed a destabilization plan against the Venezuelan government, and there are many Colombian government people involved.”
Danilo Anderson

García contends that Noguera and others were drawing up plans to kill high officials in the Venezuelan government, including leftist President Hugo Chávez. His allegations recall the 2004 arrest of 114 Colombian men at a compound near Caracas, a combination of young campesinos from Norte de Santander department and paramilitaries from the Jorge 40'sNorthern Bloc. At the time, Chávez described the Colombians’ presence as part of a plot to kill him.

Six months after that episode, Venezuela was shaken by the assassination of prosecutor Danilo Anderson, the first such attack the country had seen in over thirty years. Last November a Colombian man, identifying himself as a demobilized paramilitary member who served the DAS as an intelligence source, told Venezuelan authorities that Noguera had advance knowledge of a plan to kill high-ranking Venezuelan officials like Anderson and President Chávez. García’s testimony lends credibility to this witness’s story. Venezuelan authorities also claim that “Jorge 40” paid a visit to Maracaibo, Venezuela, to meet with anti-Chávez figures.

Murdering informants 

According to Cambio, in his recorded statement Moreno, the fired DAS agent, talks about extrajudicial executions of DAS informants “who were no longer useful or who posed a danger because they knew too much information.”
Fernando Pisciotti

The magazine discusses the case of Fernando Pisciotti, the mayor of El Banco municipality in Magdalena department. In October 2003, Noguera and Juan Carlos Vives (at the time a vice-minister of interior, now Colombia’s “drug czar” as head of the national drugs directorate or DNE) visited Pisciotti’s town. The mayor told them that the paramilitaries were pressuring for their candidate to run unopposed in the upcoming mayoral elections, that they had plans to do the same in the congressional elections, and that he and other local political figures feared for their security.

Noguera and Vives told Pisciotti to meet them at the DAS in Bogotá on November 15, 2003 and to bring a written report of his accusations. When the mayor reported at Noguera’s office, Noguera was unable to meet with him. On December 9, Pisciotti was kidnapped from a taxi outside El Banco, and his body was found hours later with shots to the head and signs of torture. Cambio reports, “Based on testimonies in the casefile, Julio César Pisciotti, a lawyer and the victim’s brother, said that before killing him, the murderers tied his feet together with his shoelaces, beat him, and read to him excerpts from the document that he gave to the DAS.”

A nice apartment

The most shocking allegations against Noguera are those having to do with serious human rights crimes and electoral fraud. However, even the more petty offenses paint a picture of a severely morally challenged individual. According to Cambio, shortly after President Uribe appointed him in August 2002, Noguera asked the Colombian drug czar’s office – the DNE, whose duties include managing properties seized from narcotraffickers – to assign him a penthouse apartment, complete with a private elevator, in a wealthy Bogotá neighborhood. He and his family soon moved into what had been a drug trafficker's luxurious flat near the corner of Carrera 7 and Calle 98 in northern Bogotá. “It is now known that the DAS paid condo fees and all utilities during the time that Noguera lived there,” reports Cambio.

Noguera resigns

The present scandal over Noguera’s paramilitary ties first exploded in October 2005, when Narváez, Noguera's number-two as DAS subdirector, presented the attorney-general’s office (Fiscalía) with some of the information gained from his discussion with Carlos Moreno, the fired DAS agent. Noguera, Narváez, and Ariza, the DAS intelligence director, were all fired amid a crossfire of accusations.

Within a month, the new DAS director, former Vice-Minister of Defense Andrés Peñate, had fired the DAS section chiefs in six departments with a significant paramilitary presence: Boyacá, Bolívar (Rómulo Betancourt, named in the case of Professor Alfredo Correa above), La Guajira, Tolima, Cesar and Meta.

Though Noguera remains under investigation for several of the charges listed above, he faces no formal accusation. In fact, President Uribe did Noguera the great favor of naming him to the post of Colombia’s consul in Milan, Italy, where he remains today.

Where is President Uribe? 

Citing concerns about his family’s security, Noguera has said little about what Álvaro Uribe knew about his intelligence agency’s paramilitary ties, and when he knew it. He also says that he doubts that Uribe knew anything about the alleged 2002 electoral fraud. But he did have this to say.

SEMANA: You accompanied Noguera on various visits to the Palacio de Nariño (the Colombian president’s “White House” in Bogotá). How much did President Álvaro Uribe know about this?

R.G.: I can’t answer that for you. I will tell the attorney-general’s office (Fiscalía) or a foreign government what I know after my family is protected. What I will say to public opinion is: Could it be that Fujimori didn’t know what Vladimiro Montesinos was doing? I don’t know how a person could have done so many things without his superior knowing about it.

Miami’s El Nuevo Herald tells us that Uribe was informed about problems in the DAS back in January of 2004, when Enrique Benítez, the head of the DAS bodyguard division, denounced evidence of corruption in a major purchase of arms supposedly destined for those assigned to protect union members. (Not only did Benítez's whistleblowing fail to get the case properly investigated, but Noguera demoted him and transferred him to the distant, poor and conflictive department of Chocó near the Panama border.)

Benítez met to discuss his situation with José Roberto Arango, at the time an advisor to Uribe in the Palacio de Nariño. According to Benítez, Arango told him, “President Uribe is already aware of all the corruption in the DAS, but I don’t understand why he doesn’t want to get this [expletive] out of the DAS director’s position.” 

Who is in power?

For commentary on what these allegations mean about the current moment in Colombia, we defer to Semana, the Colombian newsmagazine that has been doggedly investigating the DAS scandals.

These episodes cannot now be reduced to a few functionaries with axes to grind, or to a few “bad apples.” There are abundant indicators of a criminal takeover of Colombia’s most important intelligence agency.

How did it come to these extremes? How did Jorge Noguera come to be the director of the DAS? Who recommended him? How is it possible that Noguera could have lasted for three years in charge of the agency, when the excesses that were being committed were being spoken of during the past two years? And, even worse, how is it possible that Noguera, after leaving the DAS in the wake of revelations of paramilitary penetration, could have been named consul in Milan?

… The president has a great responsibility for this. Perhaps the commander in chief was not aware of what happened. That in itself would be serious enough. But the DAS is the intelligence body of the President, and its director must have the President’s absolute trust. What happened, then?

… What is certain is that these accusations have worsened an atmosphere already charged with suspicions and fears surrounding the demobilization and negotiation process with the paramilitaries, at a moment when some of the government’s critics are already speaking of the formation of a “mafioso” state.

Finally, we second a recommendation made by El Espectador columnist Ramiro Bejarano.

If the government is toying with the possibility of reducing the valuable work of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights’ office in Colombia, as has been insinuated, they had better abandon that proposal. Now more than ever, the country needs the vigorous work of independent organizations. Only these can guarantee for us that the dirty war which appears to have been unleashed within the framework of this government’s security policy does not grow worse, as has happened in the past.

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April 9, 2006

Uribe's campaign managers

“Colombia needs and deserves peace, but Uribe represents the exact opposite,” reads a February communiqué from the FARC. “What is at stake in these elections is the future of Colombia.”

If the FARC leadership really wishes to prevent Álvaro Uribe from being re-elected in May, though, it has a strange way of showing it. If anything, the FARC are making Uribe’s job easier.

Look at some of the guerrillas’ actions just over the past week or so. They seem tailor-made to benefit Uribe, even though he is the candidate who promises to hit the FARC the hardest.

This wave of violence against some of Colombia’s most vulnerable citizens earned the FARC three condemnations in four days from the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, and a strong statement from the OAS Inter-American Human Rights Commission.

The incidents of the last four weeks have involved bombings and armed attacks on vehicles transporting people and food; bomb attacks on campesino homes; the massacre of municipal councilmen; and the murder of a former indigenous governor and his wife, among others. These acts have left a death toll of dozens of men, women and children.

What purpose could this campaign of violence against the weak possibly serve? How can the FARC possibly view these attacks as benefiting its self interest?

One common response is that the guerrillas intend to hurt Uribe at the polls by discrediting him on his signature issue, security. By this reasoning, the guerrillas seek to sow doubt about Uribe’s security strategy by creating a situation of generalized violence in which citizens do not feel that their government can protect them. If they feel unprotected, Colombians will vote against the president-candidate who promises war, and turn to those who back negotiations.

If this was the FARC’s intent, they have mostly failed. The very nature of the guerrilla offensive makes that clear. It is true that the pace and scale of guerrilla activity has risen over the past year or so, including in zones central to Plan Colombia and “Plan Patriota.” And this has certainly damaged Uribe’s claims that his “Democratic Security” strategy is weakening the guerrillas.

However, the FARC has failed to create an atmosphere of generalized insecurity. The guerrillas’ actions are mainly affecting only Colombia’s poorest, least powerful citizens. The attacks of the past week are perfect examples.

While the headlines in Colombia tell of assaults on indigenous people and poor kids on buses, the rising guerrilla violence has hardly touched more prosperous citizens. With kidnappings way down, travel on principal roads safer and urban violence lower, wealthy and middle-class Colombians are more secure than they’ve been in years. The FARC resurgence has not made a dent in that sense of security.

“Democratic Security” is failing in the country’s vast rural areas where 25 percent of the population lives. But if a shopkeeper in Medellín is less afraid of being kidnapped, he is unlikely to vote against Uribe just because things are getting worse in Chocó or Putumayo.

Could it be, then, that perhaps the FARC actually wants Uribe to win? Could their goal be to, in Marxist terminology, “sharpen the contradictions” by ensuring that the regime is ruled by the most nakedly plutocratic, militaristic president possible? Do the FARC secretly prefer a president who will concentrate wealth while turning a blind eye to human rights abuses, thus (they hope) winning new converts to the guerrilla cause?

Whatever the reason, to most Colombian voters the guerrilla strategy looks like mindless nihilism, likely fueled by the imperatives of the drug economy. Worse, it distracts from several very real issues that work strongly against Uribe in this election: the growing power of supposedly demobilized paramilitaries, the disastrous results of demobilizations so far, a big and growing narco-paramilitary-corruption scandal in the presidency’s secret police (DAS), the persistence of the drug trade, an unpopular free-trade agreement, and perceived government neglect of non-military needs.

These issues, among others, should be at the heart of Colombia’s national debate as the presidential elections draw nearer. Instead, the voting public is being distracted by the FARC, who have bizarrely chosen to affect voter preferences by repeatedly attacking some of the poorest, most marginalized Colombians.

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April 7, 2006

Uribe's non-military budget

Álvaro Uribe’s critics in Colombia often charge that his strategy is too heavily weighted toward the military. They argue that his “Democratic Security” plan has neglected the social and economic dimension, and that sharp increases in military spending have come at the expense of essential non-military services, including aid to the poorest. For his part, Uribe responds to these critics with statistics showing that, in fact, social expenditure has increased since he took office in 2002.

The Colombian government’s comptroller, Antonio Hernández Gamarra, has strongly questioned the Uribe administration’s claims. Speaking before Colombia’s Restrepo Barco Foundation in Bogotá on Tuesday, Hernández acknowledged that government social expenditure has indeed risen, both in peso terms and as a percentage of the national budget. However, he cautioned, this increase owes mainly to one type of spending: the rising cost of pensions for retirees. Worse, Hernández added, when one defines “social expenditure” more strictly as funding for poverty reduction, income redistribution or “human capital formation,” the amount spent each year is up to 20 percent less than the official government estimate.

(The PowerPoint slideshow Hernández used for his presentation, which mainly provides aggregate figures with little explanation of how they were derived, is available on the Comptroller’s website.)

If the comptroller is correct, then, Uribe has done little or nothing to increase the sort of social investment most necessary to improve the country’s security situation. In the parts of Colombia where armed groups and coca thrive – beyond the relatively prosperous cities, where at least a threadbare social safety net exists – there is still a severe unmet need for the basic governance on which a legal economy depends. This means roads, clean water, a functioning judiciary, guarantees of property rights, and much more, including the physical presence of government representatives.

If most of the recent increase in social expenditure owes to pensions, then we can safely conclude that Uribe’s military effort is far, far ahead of any attempt to consolidate a real government presence in zones said to be “re-taken” by the armed forces’ recent offensives. If the soldiers are still on their own because there is no money to bring in the rest of the government, the guerrillas and paramilitaries need only wait until the soldiers move on, as they inevitably do, and re-establish themselves.

In one of a series of interviews in Medellín’s daily El Colombiano that resemble fawning campaign ads more than journalism, President Uribe responded to the comptroller’s critique. His words were disheartening:

“I haven’t included investment in Democratic Security as social investment, but it is, because security attracts resources.”

Wrong, wrong, wrong. That may be true on the most macro level: if there is greater security, then private investment flows likely increase. But even then, we have to ask for whom security attracts the most resources. While Colombia’s stock market index has enriched investors by increasing almost ninefold since Uribe took office, incomes remain stagnant in poor, violent departments like Chocó, Guaviare or Caquetá (and of course, where coca has been eradicated with insufficient attention to alternatives, incomes are depressed).

Colombia’s conflict will be won or lost (or stalemated) on the micro level. As we’ve seen over and over again, sending the troops into a zone with a history of government absence does nothing to “attract resources” to that zone. To do that, you need to establish at least the rudiments of a functioning civilian government. But if the comptroller is correct, the Uribe government’s budgets have not made that a priority.

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April 5, 2006

Notes from last week in Colombia

The José Alvear Restrepo Lawyers’ Collective (the “Colectivo”) is a non-governmental group based in the Avianca building in downtown Bogotá. It represents many of the victims of military and paramilitary abuses in Colombian courts and in international bodies. Its lawyers work closely with civil-society groups in some of Colombia’s most conflictive areas. Its lawyers are some of the most threatened human-rights defenders in Colombia.

Last week, the Colectivo invited me to participate in a very impressive conference-workshop attended by civil-society representatives from several zones hit hardest by violence and drug trafficking. Present at the two-day event were campesino, labor, indigenous, Afro-Colombian, human-rights and women’s group representatives from Chocó, Norte de Santander, Arauca, the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, Bolívar, Cauca, Nariño, Putumayo, Guaviare, and Caquetá. Many had traveled by bus for an entire day to attend, in some cases defying guerrilla orders to halt all road traffic. Also in attendance were representatives of many Bogotá-based groups, as well as experts from Peru and Ecuador.

They had come to discuss conditions in their home regions, including the impact of Plan Colombia and shifts in the security situation, as well as to learn what U.S. policy currently looks like (that’s where I came in), to share proposals and to figure out how to coordinate their work despite being divided by Colombia’s far-flung geography.

For me, this was a great opportunity to get a sense of what is happening in a wide variety of regions of Colombia. Though I’ll respect the off-the-record nature of those discussions, here are a few things I learned. Note that what follows is based on anecdotal evidence from the event’s participants, not statistics or exhaustive data-gathering. In some cases I may not be successfully separating rumor from fact. But here, in summary, is what they were saying that was new to me.

1.      The security situation in rural zones has grown worse in the past year or so, in fact worse than I had thought. In most zones, particularly in southern Colombia, Arauca and Norte de Santander, guerrilla activity has increased notably, particularly extortion, control of roads and rivers, and threats against local leaders (especially elected leaders). In others, the paramilitary presence has not changed at all despite the groups’ presumed “demobilization.” Even after going through demobilizations, paramilitaries continue to mount roadblocks, carry out selective killings, demand extortion payments, and participate in the coca trade.

2.      Some alleged that the post-demobilization “neo-paramilitaries” include a lot of new faces; nobody could say where they’ve come from. Several also voiced a belief that most of the rank-and-file fighters who did demobilize appear to be truly out of the picture, at least for now.

3.      Meanwhile, in several regions military-paramilitary collaboration is still taken for granted as an everyday phenomenon. This is the case even in places, like Nariño and Putumayo, where the paramilitaries exist basically for the drug trade, suggesting that most military-paramilitary collaboration today is more a consequence of corruption than a counter-insurgency strategy.

4.      Those from Caquetá and Guaviare have experienced “Plan Patriota” more or less as follows. In its first phase, the Colombian military swept into FARC-held territory, while the guerrillas, fleeing ahead of them, forced several entire populations to displace and become “ghost towns.” They mostly fled to the larger towns, whose centers have come under solid military control. In a second phase fumigations increased, causing populations in former coca boomtowns to plummet, while dozens of political, campesino and human-rights leaders were rounded up, imprisoned for several months on charges of “rebellion,” then freed for lack of evidence. (Some of those in attendance had spent time in jail in 2004 and 2005.) In a third phase that continues today, the military presence is confined largely to a few specific populations or checkpoints, from which soldiers carry out periodic sweeps, while the guerrillas have increased their activity elsewhere within the “Plan Patriota” zone.

For instance, while the military may have control over most towns and segments of key rivers, the FARC continue to control coca fields and have increased their attacks on local leaders. Several of those in attendance claimed that paramilitary elements have increased their presence in Plan Patriota’s wake, especially in Guaviare and central Meta, though the FARC has prevented them from getting a solid foothold in other areas (like most of the towns in the zone that was demilitarized for 1998-2002 peace talks). Social or economic investment in the zone, meanwhile, is almost totally invisible.

5.      In the “Plan Patriota” zone and elsewhere, the most common complaint about soldiers’ behavior has been rough and disrespectful treatment. Interactions with military personnel frequently appear to involve abusive language, veiled threats, long detentions and searches, and an overall sense that one must prove that one is not a guerrilla. This adversarial attitude only serves to increase the distrust of the local population, depriving the security forces of their best potential source of intelligence. (Without such intelligence, too many of the FARC’s large-scale, thoroughly premeditated attacks on military targets end up being “surprise” attacks.)

6.      Beyond rough treatment, participants from several areas cited examples of military personnel killing campesinos, then dressing the bodies up in camouflage fatigues and presenting them as dead guerrillas. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights’ last report on Colombia mentions this practice, which appears to be becoming more common as the Uribe government pressures the military to show ever more results against guerrilla groups.

7.      Despite complaints about security, though, some displaced communities are debating whether to attempt a return to their zones of origin. Some are considering sending small groups to re-occupy abandoned properties, even though they know they will be unprotected.

8.      Coca production is exploding, and dispersing. Nariño may have the most in the country now; though fumigation in that department is said to be massive, participants said, it cannot keep up with cultivation, while re-planting proceeds and campesinos find new ways to protect the plants. Cauca and Meta also increasing rapidly. Some cited an increase in coca-growing in central highland departments that had seen almost no coca before, like Cundinamarca and Boyacá. (“You can find coca less than an hour’s drive from Bogotá,” I was told.)

Several people alleged that fumigation is devastating the crops on which people depend for food, but only causing coca-growers to lose one or two harvests (coca leaves, unlike most food crops, can be harvested four or more times per year). For some coca-growers, fumigation has become little more than a nuisance, a cost of doing business. The reaction in coca-growing zones is to plant still more coca, take whatever partial loss fumigation brings, and hope that food can be bought with coca money.

9.      Some evidence that fumigation isn’t reducing coca is that the price of coca paste isn’t rising in local markets (in Colombia, coca-growers rarely sell the leaves, they first extract a cocaine paste through a simple process using gasoline, cement and a few other chemicals). This may not be the most reliable indicator of supply and demand, however, since the FARC and paramilitaries are now buying it directly nearly everywhere, cutting out middlemen, so that the local coca-paste market is less “free.”

10.  In several areas, particularly in smaller cities, wealthy newcomers are buying up property at rapid rates. People often refer to the newcomers as “Paisas,” the term for people who come from the paramilitary-heavy department of Antioquia in northern Colombia (including Medellín) and its environs. Several believe that these rich individuals’ arrival and the demobilization of paramilitaries are related, that a new narco-paramilitary class is putting down roots.

I want to thank the brave people at the Colectivo for their important work and for giving me a chance to participate in last week’s excellent event.

Posted by isacson at 11:48 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

March 13, 2006

Legislative elections: 8 observations

The lead story from yesterday’s legislative elections in Colombia was the strong showing of the approximately nine pro-Uribe parties, who will dominate the Congress with a roughly 70 percent majority for the next four years. Beyond this further shift to the right, here are a few other interesting things about yesterday’s vote results. 

1. With a few notable exceptions, candidates believed to have paramilitary ties did quite well. One of the biggest issues in this election was the growing political power of paramilitary groups, and the belief that in many parts of the country, only candidates with explicit paramilitary approval would be able to run for office. Indeed, the results for the House of Representatives, where people vote for candidates according to their own geographical district, show seven of the eleven candidates with the highest vote count – indicating that they ran with little or no opposition – coming from northern Colombian departments known for significant paramilitary influence.

The country’s major media speculated openly about which candidates were most likely to have links to the right-wing armed groups, and several of the more mainstream parties made a show of expelling nine candidates from their lists for suspected paramilitary support. Of these nine, four won seats as members of other parties which were happy to accept them: Habib Merheg, Jorge Caballero, Luis Eduardo Vives, and Dieb Maloof, who was profiled in a March 5 New York Times story about the paramilitary-infiltration phenomenon.

Three non-mainstream, pro-Uribe parties believed to have a relationship with paramilitaries (Convergencia Ciudadana, Alas Equipo Colombia and Colombia Viva) survived the 2 percent cutoff and will send members to Congress. Meanwhile, the son of Enilce López or “La Gata,” a northern Colombian gambling boss arrested in February and accused of collaboration with paramilitaries, got more votes than any other candidate for Colombia’s lower house.

However, a few other legislators believed to be in the paramilitaries’ pocket – notably Rocío Arias and Eleonora Pineda, who had arranged to have three AUC leaders address Congress in July 2004 – were defeated.

In a piece posted today to the website of Semana magazine, reporter Claudia López explains what happened.

The paramilitaries and the mafia increased their influence, but they changed their profile. The “paras” threw their women overboard. Rocío Arias, Eleonora Pineda and Muriel Benito, their most visible figures, were defeated. In this new phase, the paramilitaries chose to go with traditional politicians, who have a lower profile and existing regional power bases that are harder to characterize as a result of paramilitarism, but who will continue to channel the groups’ economic, territorial and political interests. …

As always, judicial and political impunity keeps us from having sufficient proof. We only have suspicions and hypotheses. It would seem that [Córdoba-based paramilitary leaders Salvatore] Mancuso and Vicente Castaño, after the approval of the Justice and Peace Law, left politics aside and dedicated themselves to business. Without Mancuso’s support, Eleonora Pineda was sunk. The attempt to continue in the Magdalena Medio electoral district created for Carlos Arturo Clavijo failed. Neither Clavijo’s successor, Carlos Higuera, nor Rocío Arias were elected to the Senate, nor was Carlos Moreno. A clear defeat for [Medellín-based paramilitary boss] Don Berna. But this defeat was compensated by increases in Santander. To the House seat for José Manuel Herrera were added two more, plus four senators, in what could have been a successful alliance between [Central Bolívar Bloc leader] Ernesto Báez and Convergencia Ciudadana to insure both political power and their national and international business. …

In the zone dominated by [Northern Bloc commander] Jorge 40, the strategy of delaying demobilizations until territorial control and political influence solidified appears to have worked. In Cesar Mauricio Pimiento was re-elected in the “U” party, and the Alas party re-elected Álvaro Araújo and elected Jorge Ballesteros in La Guajira. Three of those expelled from other parties were re-elected [in this zone].

2. It was a bad day for “outsiders” of all stripes. Colombian voters appeared to prefer career politicians and party bosses over candidates from other walks of life. People whose resumes included experience in the real world generally didn’t do very well.

- Former military officers performed poorly: those who failed to win seats included former Gen. Jaime Canal, who ran the Cali-based 3rd Brigade at a time when paramilitary groups began to form in that region; Luis Alfonso Plazas Vega, a former “drug czar” accused of several past human-rights violations; former secret police (DAS) chief Luis Enrique Montenegro; and Rito Alejo del Río, who can’t get a U.S. visa and is widely accused of encouraging the spread of paramilitarism in the northwestern Colombian region of Urabá.

- Candidates from labor unions or human rights organizations lost. These included labor leader Hernán Hernández, former Apartadó mayor and activist Gloria Cuartas, Jorge Rojas from CODHES, and Daniel García-Peña from Planeta Paz. Juan Carlos Lecompte, the husband of kidnapped politician Ingrid Betancourt and a leading proponent of a prisoner-exchange agreement, also failed to win a House seat.

- Well-known columnists and analysts Hernando Gómez Buendía and Alfredo Rangel both failed to win Senate seats.

- Candidates from protestant/evangelical religious movements mostly lost. Perhaps most surprising was the loss of Jorge Enrique Gómez, a televangelist whose preaching fills football stadiums with the faithful. Gómez had headed the Senate candidate list of Colombia Viva, a party viewed as closely tied to paramilitary groups.

- Several other notable losing candidates are not exactly outsiders – they have experience in elite political circles – but are generally considered loners or mavericks. In several cases, even though these individuals received many votes, their small political parties’ candidates failed to combine for 2 percent or more of the total vote, thus disqualifying them according to Colombia’s new political reform, which favors big parties. “Insiders” whose defeats were surprising included pro-Uribe former Bogotá mayor Enrique Peñalosa; former central banker Salomón Kalmanovitz (and a few other intellectuals in the party led by another former Bogotá mayor, Antanas Mockus); former attorney-general Alfonso Valdivieso; cattlemen’s federation president Jorge Visbal; and colorful, ardently pro-Uribe (and, most believe, pro-paramilitary) senator Carlos Moreno de Caro.

3. The three-year-old leftist opposition party, Polo Democrático Alternativo, gained seats in both houses of Congress (from 9 to 10 or 11 in the Senate, depending on final results; and from 4 to 9 in the House). Three of its Senate candidates were among the top ten vote-getters in the country. The Polo appeared to have made a strong showing in urban areas.

4. In the Polo Democrático Alternativo primary, Carlos Gaviria ran a great campaign and bested Antonio Navarro, a former M-19 guerrilla leader and one of the most prominent figures on Colombia’s left. Gaviria, a former supreme-court justice thought by many to be too ideological and intellectual to beat the better-known and more centrist Navarro, turned out to be a tireless campaigner who spoke in terms of detailed proposals, but did it coherently.

5. In the Liberal Party’s primary, Horacio Serpa ran a lackluster campaign and won, but by a surprisingly small margin. The older and larger of Colombia’s two opposition political parties, the Liberals – directed by former President and OAS Secretary-General César Gaviria – had a very bad day. They finished third in the voting and won only a handful of seats more than the Polo Democrático Alternativo.

In their primary, the losing candidate in the 1998 and 2002 presidential elections, Horacio Serpa, once more won the right to run against Álvaro Uribe, whom nobody thinks Serpa can beat. Though Serpa, a skilled political machine boss, was the odds-on favorite to win the primary, he embarrassingly failed to win even 50 percent of his own party’s vote. He faced a strong challenge from Rafael Pardo, a senator and former defense minister who went from being a leading supporter to a leading critic of Álvaro Uribe. Serpa, however, will go on to continue playing the role of Colombia’s Adlai Stevenson.

6. In general, it was a bad day for moderates. The Liberals, who promise a less radical brand of opposition to Uribe than the Polo, failed to capture the public’s imagination. Meanwhile two former Bogotá mayors who claim the centrist mantle, Enrique Peñalosa and Antanas Mockus (who is running for president but whose party sought to send candidates to Congress), were wiped out. Within the Polo Democrático, center-left candidates fared poorly compared to more traditional leftists like Jorge Enrique Robledo, Gustavo Petro, and Wilson Borja. The results were seen as a setback for the Polo’s more centrist, “pragmatic” leaders like Navarro and Bogotá Mayor Luis Eduardo Garzón. With the center hollowed out, Colombian politics will be more polarized during the next four years.

7. An unusually high number of ballots were declared invalid or thrown out. The number of blank or “nullified” ballots exceeded 1.3 million, which exceeds the number who voted for all but the three top vote-getting parties, and is about three times more than in 2002. Add this to a 40 percent turnout, and only a small minority of eligible Colombians had their votes counted yesterday. The Colombian press blamed the high number of invalid ballots less on foul play than on confusion about the new balloting procedure instituted by a “political reform” passed in 2004. For instance, many voters marked the logo of their preferred political party on their ballots, when they should have chosen candidates.

8. How much stronger is Uribe and Colombia’s right wing in general? It’s not clear. To paraphrase George W. Bush, yesterday’s vote was an “accountability moment” that gave President Uribe “political capital” to spend. Indeed, like Bush and Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, Uribe now faces a docile legislature dominated by his supporters, who can make his agenda their own.

This could lead to the passage of legislation limiting civil liberties, increasing the military’s role in everyday security, legalizing landholdings for their present occupants, and watering down some of the reforms enshrined in Colombia’s 1991 constitution. Reforms like these are controversial, however, and could backfire if – as is likely – Colombia’s electorate is not as conservative as the leaders it chose.

Bush and Chávez have both found a legislative majority insufficient to prevent their popularity from dropping at home, while Bush has found that the ruling party’s own divisions make it difficult to turn his priorities into laws. Yeserday’s results indicate that Uribe is likely to win May’s presidential election easily, in the first round. But a pro-Uribe Congress doesn’t guarantee that he will have an easier time governing.

Posted by isacson at 11:40 PM | Comments (7) | TrackBack

March 10, 2006

Sunday's congressional elections

Colombians go to the polls on Sunday to elect a new Congress. Pro-Uribe parties are expected to do quite well, as are candidates supported by the paramilitaries (there is some overlap between these two categories). Candidates from the Polo Democrático Alternativo, a unified leftist third-party, are expected to make a stronger showing than the left has ever done before. However, they will still be far behind the pro-Uribe parties and the Liberals, a “traditional” party opposed to Uribe from a more centrist perspective. 

Here is an excellent overview of who is who, focused on Colombia’s Senate elections, put together by Gabriel Bustamante Peña, an analyst for the Bogotá-based INDEPAZ think-tank. I found it to be so useful that I’ve translated it into English.  

The political parties in the Senate race 

By Gabriel Bustamante Peña, advisor to the Institute for Study of Development and Peace, INDEPAZ 
Much information obtained from http://www.terra.com.co/elecciones_2006/partidos/, web pages of political parties, and interviews with the parties’ leaders. 
March 6, 2006 

original document in Spanish

Party

 

Political tendency

 

Candidate heading the party’s Senate list

Main positions

 

Alas Equipo Colombia (“Wings Colombia Team”)

 

A pro-Uribe party in the government’s coalition. It is a fusion of Alas, a faction of the Liberal Party, with Equipo Colombia, a faction of the Conservative Party. It claims to be independent and centrist.

Álvaro Araújo Castro

 

Support for re-election and for the “Justice and Peace” law with the AUC. Support for Uribe’s “Democratic Security” policy. Proposes the country’s federalization. Support for the free-trade agreement with the United States. Against the de-penalization of abortion or the legal recognition of gay couples.

Questioned for ties to paramilitaries in Cesar and Sucre, and for clientelistic behavior with the current government. Its internal democratic procedures are very precarious, with decisions in the hands of a few regional leaders.

Alianza Social Indígena (Indigenous Social Alliance)

 

A party originating within the process of ethnic minorities’ campaign for seats reserved for them. It has lately encouraged participation of campesino and afro-Colombian communities, as well as social organizations.

 

Jesús Piñacue, Eulalia Yagari

 

Opposition to immediate reelection. Does not support the free-trade agreement with the United States. Does not support Uribe’s “Democratic Security” policy, as it considers it to be against indigenous and campesino communities. Against the “Justice and Peace” law because it generates impunity. Supports recognition of gay couples and the de-penalization of abortion in special cases. Its internal democratic procedures are “regular.”

Autoridades Indígenas de Colombia (Colombian Indigenous Authorities)

 

A party originating within the process of ethnic minorities’ demands for representation.

 

Lorenzo Almendra, Ramiro Estancio

Against the Uribe government’s “Democratic Security” policy and the inequalities inherent in immediate re-election. Against the free-trade agreement with the United States. Does not support the “Justice and Peace” law, viewing it as going against the rights to truth and reparations. Against abortion in any circumstance. Supports gay rights. Its internal democratic procedures rely on traditional customs.

Radical Change (Cambio Radical)

 

An openly pro-Uribe party representing a breakaway faction of the Liberal Party.

Germán Vargas Lleras

Supports “Democratic Security” and Uribe’s re-election. Supports the free trade agreement with reservations. Supports the “Justice and Peace” law but with some criticisms. Rejects the de-penalization of abortion and rights for gay couples. Its internal democratic procedures are very weak.

Colombia Democrática (Democratic Colombia)

 

An eminently pro-Uribe party, configured around President Uribe.

 

Mario Uribe Escobar

 

Promotes President Uribe’s re-election. Supports “Democratic Security” and the free-trade agreement with the United States. Totally supports the “Justice and Peace” law and negotiations with the AUC. Supports abortion in special cases. Not in agreement with rights for gay couples. Has no internal democratic system; decisions are made by the party’s chief, Mario Uribe, and mainly influenced by President Uribe’s government.

Colombia Viva (Colombia Alive)

 

Pro-Uribe party created by the union of legislators from the Caribbean coast and, currently, protestant evangelical groups.

 

Jorge Enrique Gómez Montealegre

 

Supports President Uribe’s re-election and his “Democratic Security” policy. Supports the free-trade agreement. Supports the “Justice and Peace” law and the AUC process. Does not support the de-penalization of abortion and considers gays to be their enemies. The party has been criticized for accepting candidates expelled from other parties for ties to paramilitaries. Has a weak system of internal democratic procedures and its organizational positions are exclusionary.

Convergencia Ciudadana (Citizen Convergence)

 

Party created by former M-19 members and labor unions. At first, it was meant to be in opposition to traditional parties. Today, it is allied with several former military officers and has declared itself to be pro-Uribe.

 

Gabriel Acosta Bendek

Supports President Uribe’s re-election. Supports the free-trade agreement. Supports the “Justice and Peace” law and negotiations with the AUC. Supports abortion in special cases and the rights of gay couples. It has been criticized for clientelistic practices, and for accepting candidates expelled from other parties for ties to paramilitaries. Its system of internal democratic procedures is disorganized; its relations are more electoral than political.

Partido de la U (“U” Party)

 

A party created around the figure of President Uribe. It is one of several parties that claim to be “the” party of Uribe.

Gina María Parody

 

Supports President Uribe’s re-election. Totally supports all of the Uribe government’s policies. The majority of its members say that they do not support the rights of gay couples. With regard to abortion, they have no clear position, and they consider the “Justice and Peace” law to be a contribution to peace. Its system of internal democratic procedures is incipient, and decisions are generally left up to its chief, Juan Manuel Santos, according to the government’s indications.

Partido Dejen Jugar al Moreno (“Let Moreno Play” Party)

 

A party configured as a project of Senator Moreno de Caro. An unconditional ally of the Uribe government.

 

Carlos Moreno de Caro

A force behind President Uribe’s re-election and an author of the “Justice and Peace” law. Supports the free-trade agreement. Has no position on either abortion or the rights of gay couples. The party has been criticized for accepting candidates expelled from other parties for ties to paramilitaries. It has no system of internal democratic procedures, as it is a personal project of Sen. Moreno de Caro.

Movimiento Independiente de Renovación Absoluta (MIRA) (Independent Movement for Absolute Renovation)

Began as a political organization of the International Church of Christ (Iglesia de Jesucristo Internacional). The churches of “Dios Ministerial de Jesucristo,” which have been opened in various cities in Colombia, are the backbone of its political structure. Its policy is to make no alliances with other parties or movements.

 

Alexandra Moreno Piraquive

 

Critical of the immediate re-election of the president. Does not agree with the proposed free-trade agreement with the United States. Supports the “Justice and Peace” law but with reservations due to its generation of impunity. Not in agreement with abortion under any circumstance, and openly opposes gay rights. Does not have a system of internal democratic procedures, it makes unilateral decisions and excludes sexual minorities from participating.

Conservatismo Independiente (Independent Conservatism)

 

Originated as a dissident faction of the Conservative party configured around the thought of Álvaro Gómez Hurtado [a powerful right-wing politician assassinated over a decade ago]. Declared to be in opposition to the Uribe government.

 

Hugo Artundaga Salas

 

Critical of the immediate re-election of the president and of the free-trade negotiations with the United States. Supports the “Justice and Peace” law and privileges dialogue with illegal armed groups. Rejects abortion and the granting of rights to gay couples. Its system of internal democratic procedures is very weak.

Partido Conservador Colombiano (Conservative Party)

 

One of Colombia’s traditional parties. Its origins are found in the centralization movement originating in the independence era, and promoted by Simón Bolívar after the second war of independence. It consolidated through relations between large landowners and the Catholic church hierarchy. It has been a main participant in presidential elections, with several of its members elected president during its history. Today it is absent from the presidential race and has become a party unconditionally allied to President Álvaro Uribe.

Ivan Díaz Mateus

 

Supports the president’s immediate re-election. Totally supports the free-trade agreement with the United States and the “Justice and Peace” law. In total disagreement with the de-penalization of abortion regardless of motive. Rejects the legalization of the rights of gay couples. Has an internal, regional system of democratic participation for the integration of its leaders.

 

Partido Liberal (Liberal Party)

 

The party that has historically confronted the conservatives. Originated in the federalist currents during the independence period and consolidated from a base among artisans and merchants during the 19th century. A principal participant in the country’s political history. Today, after a strong division, it has officially declared itself to be in frank opposition to President Uribe.

Cecilia López Montaño

 

Opponents of the president’s immediate re-election, the party punished with expulsion those members who disagreed with this position. Opposed to the contents of the free-trade agreement and to its signature and approval, and opposed to the “Justice and Peace” law and the AUC negotiations. Officially supports the rights of gay couples and the de-penalization of abortion in special cases, though some of its members disagree. It has developed a system of internal democratic procedures that reserves spaces for women, young people and ethnic minorities, not just in party leadership but on the ballot.

Polo Democrático Alternativo (Alternative Democratic Pole)

 

This party originated in 2002 with the convergence of different independent parties and movements on Colombia’s “democratic left.” Among these were Alternativa Política Colectiva (APC) and the Frente Social, which initially presented Luis Eduardo Garzón’s 2002 presidential candidacy. Afterward [in 2003], he was formally elected mayor of Bogotá as the PDI [Polo Democrático Independiente] candidate. In its consolidation process it has managed to unite with many important movements, such as “Visionarios,” ANAPO, Vía Alterna, unions, NGOs, indigenous sectors, regional movements, sexual minorities’ movements, and the congressional bloc of Alternativa Democrática, with which it united to form the Polo Democrático Alternativo. This is its first congressional election as a political party. It officially opposes the political principles of Alvaro Uribe’s government.

Gustavo Petro Urrego

 

Strong opponents of the immediate re-election of the president. Critics of the “Justice and Peace” law and the AUC negotiations. It has denounced AUC relations with various political and business sectors in Colombia, especially pro-Uribe sectors. It opposes a free-trade agreement with the United States and proposes Latin American integration as an alternative. It approves of the de-penalization of abortion and rights for gay couples. It has developed a democratization process within its structures to give space to women, young people, regions, and ethnic and sexual minorities, as well as the institutionalization of spaces for collective decision-making. However, for important decisions it has been criticized for the strong influence wielded by its members who are in the Congress.

Movimiento Político Comunal y Comunitario (Communal and Community-based Political Movement)

 

A party originated from the confederation of Juntas de Acción Comunal (JAC), quasi-official community or neighborhood advisory bodies present throughout Colombia. It organized as a party after the 1991 constitution’s enactment, and was formally recognized in 1997. Though a communal initiative, only 10 percent of the JACs are active in this movement.

Salvador Rincón Santos

 

Opposed to the immediate re-election of the president. Rejects the free-trade agreement with the United States. Does not accept the “Justice and Peace” law or the negotiations with the AUC, due to the victims’ weak position in the process. With regard to de-penalization of abortion and the rights of gay couples, it has no positions. Its system of internal democratic procedures is clouded by the dominance of electoral alliances.

 

Por el País que Soñamos (For the Country We Dream Of)

 

The political grouping of former Bogotá Mayor Enrique Peñalosa, who decided not to run as a Liberal Party presidential candidate this year. Instead, Peñalosa first briefly ran for president against Uribe, then quit and now heads the Senate candidate list for this political movement, which declares itself to be 100 percent pro-Uribe.

Enrique Peñalosa Londoño

 

Supports the president’s immediate re-election and the “Justice and Peace” law. Supports the implementation of the free-trade agreement with the United States. Supports the de-penalization of abortion in special cases and is ambiguous about the rights of gay couples. Does not have a system of internal democratic procedures and decisions are made by Enrique Peñalosa himself.

 

Visionarios con Antanas (Visionaries with Antanas)

The political project of former Bogotá Mayor Antanas Mockus, who is running for president as the candidate of the Alianza Social Indígena (which has its own lists of congressional candidates), and brings his own list of senate candidates called “Visionarios con Antanas” because most members of the Visionario political movement have joined the Polo Democrático. The candidate list is made up intellectuals and technocrats known for their personal qualities, but with low political profiles and poor name recognition.