The
War on Human Rights
in Colombia
By
Philip Cryan
CounterPunch.org
12 October, 2003
When
Colombian President Alvaro Uribe Velez accused human rights organizations
of "serving terrorism" in September 8 and 11 speeches, the
international response was, thankfully, strong. The United Nations,
European Union, various newspapers, NGOs and members of the U.S. Congress
made statements reproaching Uribe for the comments, pointing out that
within the logic of Colombia's conflict the President's words would
be understood by right-wing paramilitaries as a green light to execute
human rights defenders.
The
"terrorist" NGOs "hide cowardly in the flag of human
rights," said Uribe in the first speech. "When the terrorists
begin to feel weakened, they send out their spokespeople to talk about
human rights."
To
refute NGOs' claims of restrictions on democracy, he claimed, incredibly,
that "Colombia has the best freedom of press and opinion in the
entire world." Dozens of Colombian journalists and hundreds of
trade unionists (and others organizing to challenge government policies)
have been murdered in just the last few years. Hundreds more have been
forced by death-threats to leave their homes and work, going into exile
abroad or seeking anonymity in the country's large cities.
Many
political analysts in Colombia and abroad had expected an apology or
at least a toning-down from Uribe in response to widespread international
reproach--anything but what he delivered three days later, on the 11th
of September. Speaking to residents of Chita, a town where eight people
had just been killed by a "horse-bomb" probably planted by
FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) guerrillas, Uribe insisted:
"My commitment is to you, not to those people who make a living
defending, enabling the terrorists. Their honeymoon is ending. My commitment
is to you. It doesn't matter what the sponsors of terrorists' defenders
say."
Uribe
did not specify which NGOs he views as front-organizations for the Colombian
guerrilla groups--what he called, in a marvelous turn of phrase, "traffickers
of human rights"--but his first accusations came on the same day
a coalition of eighty Colombian NGOs released a book called "The
Authoritarian Curse" that evaluated Uribe's first year in office.
All eighty NGOs had to assume that he was referring to them--or in any
case that the anticipated consequences of his statements (a new wave
of death-threats and attempted assassinations of human rights defenders)
would apply to all of them equally. Many of the country's most prestigious
human rights organizations were among this group.
So
far--thank God--no one from these organizations has been killed as a
result of Uribe's statements. Death-threats against and government-initiated
legal prosecution of human rights defenders have, however, increased.
And the political space for criticism of the Uribe government--already
precarious, tightly limited by paramilitary violence against human rights
defenders--was reduced even further by Uribe's comments and, more so,
by the fact that ultimately he got away with them. Though initial outcry,
especially internationally, was surprisingly and hearteningly strong,
three weeks later, on a visit to New York to address the UN General
Assembly and to Washington for visits with his principal patrons and
champions (including Bush, Rumsfeld, Rice, Powell, Drug Czar John Walters
and Speaker of the House Hastert) he simply modified the tone of his
accusations--without retraction or apology--and found his U.S. backing
thoroughly intact. Secretary of State Powell reaffirmed faith in Uribe's
"commitment to the high standards of human rights." And that
was that.
U.S.
media coverage of Uribe's September 30 and October 1 U.S. trip to "try
to calm Washington" (as Reuters put it) was minimal and surely
left Uribe satisfied that he had fulfilled his mission--or perhaps just
reassured that there wasn't much calming needed after all. In a joint
press conference with Powell, Uribe referred to a recent Human Rights
Watch study on child combatants in the Colombian conflict as an example
of respectable NGO reporting, contrasting it, ominously and again without
specifying his targets, to "other reports by other NGOs."
No U.S. or Colombian paper pointed out, in stories on Uribe's visit,
that the single NGO effort he held up as respectable--the Human Rights
Watch report--criticized the guerrillas and paramilitaries, not his
government.
In
his address to the UN General Assembly, trying to justify his human
rights record and show moderation in his approach to NGOs, Uribe appealed
to his own democratic freedoms: "We reserve the right to express
dissent faced with slanted reports that distort our efforts." However,
in his September 8 and 11 speeches, he had not argued against NGOs'
criticisms of his policies. He had simply labeled the NGOs "terrorists"
and "traffickers of human rights." Again, no U.S. paper pointed
out the wonderful irony in Uribe appealing to his own "right to
express dissent" to defend generalized attacks on those critical
of his policies as "terrorists."
Even
the relatively good media coverage of Uribe's early September attacks
on human rights defenders overlooked two major stories related to the
September 8 speech.
II.
The
first missed story is simpler, quicker to relate. So let's start there.
There
were a number of ironies in Uribe's choice of audience for his first
frontal attack on human rights defenders.
First,
most newspapers reported the speech's setting as "a military ceremony."
This description in itself ought to have produced some serious reflection
on Uribe's "commitment to the high standards of human rights,"
as Powell put it. The Colombian military, as the State Department itself
acknowledges, needs constant reinforcement of an entirely different
message (namely, a ringing endorsement of defending human rights) after
years of documented collusion with rightwing paramilitaries responsible
for most of the nation's political killings.
Every
year the State Department's report on human rights in Colombia shows
that "extensive" military-paramilitary collusion continues.
In conflict regions like Putumayo, I've heard countless stories of what
goes well beyond collusion--"the Army is the paramilitary,"
explains one friend and community leader. That is, members of the Army
put on paramilitary armbands to carry out massacres and other extra-legal
counter-insurgency actions--often at night--then take off the armbands
and go back to their day jobs as regular soldiers. It's hard to find
a single resident of rural Colombia, in fact, who believes that the
military is no longer linked to the 'paras.' In a September 20 report,
the Washington Post's Scott Wilson quoted an unnamed "Western diplomat"
describing the paramilitary movement as, quite simply, "an adjunct
to the Colombian state."
Uribe
was not just taking advantage of a public-speaking opportunity to attack
human rights defenders; rather, he was sending a specific message to
a military audience. The military ceremony was held to swear in a new
commander of Colombia's Air Force, General Edgar Alfonso Lesmez. Near
the speech's end, Uribe addressed General Lesmez directly: "Assume
command of the Air Force, to defeat terrorism. May the traffickers of
human rights never stop you." A chilling message, when you look
at the Colombian military's history.
The
second irony was that Uribe delivered the speech during Colombia's annual
Week for Peace celebrations and on the eve of Colombian Human Rights
Day.
But
the principal irony, unmentioned by all Colombian and foreign media
coverage, was the thank-you Uribe offered at the beginning of the speech
to outgoing Air Force commander General Hector Fabio Velasco. Uribe
praised Velasco's "long, successful and patriotic run with the
Colombian air force." The general's service, he said, showed a
devotion to "giving back total peace to the nation." No one
seemed to recall the numerous media accounts, throughout 2003, of former
U.S. Ambassador Anne Patterson's repeated requests to Uribe for Velasco's
head. The U.S. Embassy held Velasco responsible for repeated obstruction
of investigations into a 1998 massacre in which the Colombian Air Force
intentionally dropped a <U.S.-made> cluster bomb on the northeastern
town of Santo Domingo, killing 18 civilians.
Occidental
Petroleum--the beneficiary since 2002 of over $100 million in U.S. military
aid specifically aimed at protecting a Colombian oil pipeline the Los
Angles-based company operates--provided their facilities in Arauca to
the Santo Domingo bombing's planners. AirScan, a U.S. contractor then
employed by Occidental to help protect the pipeline from guerrilla attacks,
reportedly provided the coordinates for the bombing. A family-member
of victims has filed suit against Occidental in U.S. courts for its
role in the massacre.
Earlier
this year, the U.S. disqualified the Air Force from receiving Plan Colombia
military aid--the first time an entire branch of the Colombian military
has been officially decertified--in response to Velasco's systematic
obfuscation of facts. Velasco initially blamed the bombing on the FARC.
After that claim was disproved, he changed his story again and again.
Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT) has pressured the State Department to get
to the bottom of the Santo Domingo case for years, eventually leading
to the decertification and to Patterson's request that Uribe dismiss
Velasco. "If justice is not done, the Congress should withhold
aid to the Colombian air force," said Leahy in October 2002. "There
has to be a consequence for killing 18 innocent people and lying about
it."
Four
years passed before two of the pilots responsible for the bombing were
sentenced. Their penalty? A three-month suspension from military duty.
On
August 26, the Los Angeles Times described the Santo Domingo investigation
as "the biggest obstacle in relations between the United States
and Colombia." When General Velasco's resignation was announced
in late August, many commentators saw it as proof that the U.S. was
indeed pressuring the Colombian military to comply with human rights
standards.
No
judicial process has been opened against Velasco, however. Colombian
authorities did not even describe his stepping-down as a dismissal.
Velasco claims that he had been requesting resignation for many months
and in August Uribe finally accepted. U.S. Embassy officials refused
to comment on this official version, claiming that it was an "internal"
Colombian matter.
And
then Uribe, at a ceremony where he thanks Velasco for his "patriotic
run" and issues what can fairly be described (particularly considering
the audience) as open death-threats to NGO workers, tells the new Air
Force commander "May the traffickers of human rights never stop
you." Three weeks later Colin Powell publicly applauds Uribe's
human rights record.
Maybe
the U.S. isn't the best place to look for leverage on human rights in
Colombia after all.
Uribe
closed the September 8 speech with these words: "General Velasco,
from the bottom of my heart, one word: gratitude."
How
will he repay the general for shielding the Santo Domingo murderers
from justice? Fittingly, twistedly, Velasco will be Colombia's new ambassador
to Israel.
III.
But
there's a bigger story--a story tied into another little-noticed moment
from Uribe's speech at General Lesmez's swearing-in.
The
Colombian paramilitaries call themselves "self-defense forces."
Frequently, the Colombian military and government use this same phrase
to describe them--a phrase that suggests, as both Colombian and U.S.
military strategists so often argue, that the paramilitaries are a natural
byproduct of guerrilla violence in Colombia and consequently can never
be done away with until the guerrillas are defeated. (An example from
RAND Corporation, a conservative U.S. think-tank, in their 2001 study
The Colombian Labyrinth: "Realistically, because the paramilitaries
are the product of an environment of insecurity, they will continue
to be a factor in Colombia's crisis as long as the conditions that gave
rise to them are not changed.") The notion of "self-defense
forces" literally turns the paramilitaries--who are responsible
for more than 2 out of every 3 political killings in Colombia over recent
years, many of them unspeakably gruesome--into an epiphenomenon of the
guerrilla war. Moreover, violent acts in "self-defense" are,
in other contexts, generally considered justified. So when Colombian
military and government officials use this euphemism, they help normalize
and justify the paramilitary project.
In
his September 8 speech, Uribe did not refer to them as self-defense
forces. Nor did he call them paramilitaries, nor "terrorists"
(which is what the U.S. State Department defines them as, and so Uribe
sometimes uses the term too). Instead, twice during the speech--the
same speech where he called human rights defenders "terrorists"--he
called the paramilitaries "private justice groups."
Once
again, his choice of phrase takes on special significance when you consider
the audience. Colombians are, in general, uniquely skilled at deciphering
subtexts, insinuations and suggestions, after nearly 40 years living
a conflict in which "giving away the papaya" (i.e., saying
any more than you need to) at any time could get you and your family
killed. Therefore: when they hear their President rail against guerrillas
as terrorists and--above all--against human rights defenders as cowards
who serve terrorists, the assembled military officers don't exactly
have to strain to grasp the significance of the contrast when he calls
paramilitaries "private justice groups." The message was loud
and clear--and particularly satisfying, surely, to the many officers
at the ceremony who have collaborated with the paramilitaries occasionally
or systematically over their careers.
Uribe
even turned the justification into self-congratulation for restraint
(with an implicit threat): "The politickers of human rights...talk
about raids by the Armed Forces. For God's sake. In other countries,
to beat terrorism, between the Armed Forces and death squads they eliminated
every one of terrorism's auxiliaries."
His
choice of the term "private justice groups" plays into an
unfolding story, the historical dimensions of which make his attacks
on NGOs look inconsequential. The Uribe administration proposed in August
a peace deal with the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC),
the country's largest federation of right-wing paramilitaries. If the
proposal passes Colombia's Congress, AUC troops would give up their
weapons and offer symbolic reparations (primarily in the form of cash
payments and social work); in exchange, they would receive amnesties
from the President and not be required to serve jail time. After ten
years, their criminal records would be clean and they would be eligible
to hold public office. Impunity would extend even to those leaders already
convicted on multiple counts of crimes against humanity.
The
proposal has been pilloried by the United Nations, Human Rights Watch,
European governments, dozens of NGOs, members of the U.S. Congress and
numerous newspapers. Reuters, for example, posed the question of whether
the government's "conditional freedom" offer for the paramilitaries
amounts to "allowing some of Colombia's most feared criminals to
literally get away with murder." The Chicago Tribune titled their
house editorial on the matter "Colombia's pact with the devils."
Human Rights Watch calls Uribe's proposal "the impunity law."
Colombian
Senator Rafael Pardo, one of Uribe's most devoted allies until the law
was proposed, commented to El Tiempo (Colombia's largest newspaper):
"You turn in a farm and that compensates for a massacre?"
The
Colombian weekly magazine Cambio published a political cartoon called
"Atrocious crimes" in its September 1 edition. Four military
officers have handcuffed a man and prod him with their guns. A man watching
the arrest comments to the woman next to him: "He's a demobilized
paramilitary. They proved that he participated in seven massacres."
The woman replies: "Oh, of course. So that's why they're jailing
him." The man: "No, it's because they caught him selling fruit
by the streetlight." (In Colombian cities, police throw street
vendors in paddy-wagons, confiscate their goods, and jail them for "invading
public space.")
Traveling
in southern Colombia's conflict regions, I have heard countless stories
of AUC massacres carried out with chainsaws and machetes--slow, public
decapitations designed for their spectacular effects: as lessons to
those watching. On two occasions I've been told of paramilitaries playing
soccer with decapitated heads. In some urban areas they institute a
"social control" system: miniskirts for women and long hair
for men are prohibited; adulterers are made to wear Scarlet Letter-like
marks of shame and homosexuals are run out of town or executed. Anyone
suspected of collaborating with guerrillas--anyone in a trade union,
doing human rights work, or trying to be a serious journalist or priest
or mayor would fall in this category--is murdered, often after prolonged
torture. The paramilitaries tell civilians not to move or bury the cadavers
of their victims: "leave the bodies to rot in public, so the dogs
can get at them," they instruct. On a trip to the southern province
of Putumayo--the region where U.S. military aid has been most focused
over the first three years of Plan Colombia--last December, I happened
to arrive in the city of Mocoa the same day that the bodies of Giovanni
and John, two brothers killed by the AUC, were discovered by their mother,
who was just returning from a vacation. There were no bullet-wounds.
The skin of their faces had been disintegrated by some kind of acid,
likely applied while they were still alive.
Though
of an entirely different culture and history, some of the AUC's tactics
resemble those of the Taliban.
Yet
"there is 98% impunity" for paramilitary actions, according
to a government human rights official from another Putumayo city. "The
police refuse to collaborate [with judicial investigations]." "The
military and paramilitaries play volleyball and soccer together,"
says another civilian government official. Within a day of arriving
in a Putumayo city, one can find out--even as an outsider--where the
paramilitaries live, their names and ranks, even their military specialties.
Whenever asked about collusion, however, military and police officers
provide an unvarying response: "Prove it." "We can't
act without evidence, without an official complaint being filed,"
a military commander recently told me. The military insists that civilians'
claims of regular paramilitary killings are greatly exaggerated and
deny outright the presence of paramilitaries in many cities they in
fact control. This just to take one region of Colombia as an example.
The
history of military-paramilitary collusion in Colombia is a long one--and
it is within this history, finally, that Uribe's amnesty proposal (and
other recent offensives against human rights and international humanitarian
law) must be understood. This history, in turn, cannot be understood
without analysis of the U.S. government's role in Colombia.
In
1962--two years before the formation of Colombia's two largest current
guerrilla groups, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC)
and National Liberation Army (ELN)--a U.S. Army mission to Colombia
suggested that the U.S. support a new Colombian strategy called Plan
Lazo ("The Noose Plan").[i] Through this plan, civilian and
military personnel would be chosen and trained to undertake "clandestine
execution of plans developed by the U.S. government toward defined objectives
in the political, economic, and military fields." The mission's
report further explained that "this civilian-military structure
... will be used to perform counter-agent and counter-propaganda functions
as necessary, execute paramilitary, sabotage and/or terrorist activities
against communist proponents. It should be backed by the United States."
(Quite remarkable to read something like that from our government, in
the current context where "terrorist" tends to denote not
a specific type of tactics nor even simply "our enemy" but
a host of other and inherent qualities--inscrutable, lacking reason,
evil, inhuman (in a recent interview with PBS, Uribe described his military
campaigns against terrorists as "killing the snake").) Also
in the early 1960s, the Colombian Army published a Spanish translation
of the U.S. Army's "Manual on Operations against Irregular Forces,"
which discussed civilian involvement in counter-insurgency war.
From
1965 to 1989, paramilitary groups--"civilian patrols" involved
in counter-insurgency actions--were legal in Colombia. In 1994, a new
breed of private, armed "surveillance and private security cooperatives"
(CONVIVIR) was legalized and operated throughout the country until 1997.
(The previously mentioned RAND Corporation study from 2001 essentially
proposes a return to the CONVIVIR model: "An alternative approach
could be to establish a network of government-supervised self-defense
organizations. Legalized self-defense units could at least give the
central government more control over their activities, and possibly
improve the prospects for peace by empowering local communities to provide
for their own security.")
According
to a 1999 article by Ivan Orozco in Foro, Office of the Advisor for
Peace statistics show that between 1990 and 1997 the Colombian armed
forces attacked guerrillas 3,873 times and the paramilitaries six times.
There's
a lot more history worth telling here, but the crucial part for understanding
today's developments is the period of 1995-1997 in Antioquia province--the
years Uribe was governor there.
Uraba,
a region of Antioquia, was effectively taken over by the AUC while Uribe
was the province's governor. Homicides in the region tripled from 1994
to 1996. The commander of the region's Army brigade during those years,
General Rito Alejo del Rio, was dismissed from service years later by
President Andres Pastrana (Uribe's predecessor) for collaborating with
the paramilitaries. According to Gloria Cuartas, former mayor of the
Antioquian town of Apartado, she is one of only two surviving plaintiffs
in a still-pending legal case against Rito Alejo del Rio for collaboration
with paramilitaries, a half-dozen other plaintiffs having been killed
by paramilitaries. The former general is currently a candidate for governor
in the province of Boyaca. Shortly after Rito Alejo del Rio was dismissed
by Pastrana, Uribe delivered a speech at a banquet to honor the former
general and another dismissed officer. Uribe and the general are frequently
credited with the "pacification" of Uraba.
In
the southwestern Colombian province of Cauca, paramilitaries began a
major offensive in 2000, after traffic along the Panamerican Highway
was stopped for nearly a month in 1999 by 60,000 farmers demanding government
investment in education, health, infrastructure and other social programs.
According to the mobilization's leaders, Uribe participated in a meeting
in the province's capital shortly after the mobilization ended, in which
business community leaders decided to request that the AUC move into
the region. Today, the AUC maintains control of all the towns and cities
in Cauca through which the Panamerican passes--and little if any control
of the rest of the province.
Semana,
the nation's largest newsweekly, reported July 14 of this year that
Uribe's counter-guerrilla initiatives have been most successful in those
regions of the country where the paramilitaries have simultaneously
advanced. (The article ran without a byline--it can be extremely dangerous
to point this sort of thing out publicly.)
In
short, as the Washington Post reporter's anonymous "Western diplomat"
stated, the paramilitaries are "an adjunct to the Colombian state."
(Drug traffickers, large landholders and businessmen have played crucial
roles in the paramilitary project alongside the military and government.)
Carlos Castano, political leader of the AUC, describes his organization
as "para-State." He and the AUC's current military leader,
Salvator Mancuso, have made it quite clear in recent press interviews
that they are entering a demobilization process only because they believe
Uribe is capable of doing through State actions what they have done
as a "para-State" force.
While
many U.S. newspapers have written strong house editorials opposing Uribe's
amnesty plan for the AUC, the Washington Post recently defended the
proposal, referring to El Salvador and South Africa as examples of previous
peace processes that have involved major amnesty concessions. These
historical precedents involved negotiations between adversaries. There
is no precedent for peace "negotiations" between long-time
allies. Even if the model provided by other countries could somehow
be adapted for demobilization of Colombia's paramilitaries--in itself
an unquestionably noble goal--the offer of amnesty would come after
negotiations, not at their inception (as is the case with Uribe's offer
to the AUC).
Minister
of Justice and the Interior Fernando Londono--the other main speaker,
with Uribe, at the 1999 banquet honoring Rito Alejo del Rio--presented
the amnesty proposal to Colombia's Congress in August. A brilliant orator,
Londono is perhaps one of the few people in power in the world today
who can rival his U.S. counterpart, John Ashcroft, for sheer scariness.
In the speech to Congress, Londono explained that "this legislative
proposal is oriented toward a restorative conception [of justice] that
goes beyond the identification of punishment with personal vengeance--a
discourse in which the principle thing is reaction against the criminal
with a pain similar to that which he produced in the victim. It is important
to keep in mind that in doing justice the law is directed at reparation,
not at revenge." An eloquent criticism of many countries' emphasis
on punitive, repressive actions in dealing with criminals--the U.S.
case being particularly extreme--but his words here served specifically
to justify pardoning those responsible for massacres, torture, medieval
"social control" regimes, gang-rape. There's got to be a certain
point at which we agree, internationally, that punitive action's required.
In fact we have determined that, internationally. Many crimes are pardonable
within a peace process, according to international law; crimes against
humanity are not.
In
the proposed legislation--including both the law's specific articles
and an "explanation of motives"--not a single reference is
made to Colombia's human rights obligations under international law.
On
Uribe's September 30 and October 1 trip to Washington to try to smooth
over any tensions created by his attacks on NGOs and his paramilitary
amnesty proposal, the White House did not formally announce support
for the proposal. However, after dozens of foreign governments, international
organizations and media outlets expressed contempt for it, Colombians
could only interpret Washington's silence as approval (particularly
since that silence on the proposal was combined with a very warm reception
of Uribe--Powell's statement about Uribe's "commitment to the high
standards of human rights"; celebration of supposed Drug War successes;
an offer of three new crop-dusters for the Plan Colombia herbicide-spraying
program; Bush's willingness to start bilateral free trade agreement
negotiations with Colombia before the end of this year; etc.).
Until
this past week, U.S. officials asked to comment on the amnesty proposal
stated that it is an internal Colombian affair in which they should
not be involved (though they also insist that they will not drop extradition
orders for three top AUC leaders who are wanted in U.S. courts for drug-trafficking)--a
curious assertion when the U.S. is involved in pretty much every aspect
of the design and implementation of Colombia's internal security policy.
Even more curious in that former Ambassador Patterson had already offered
over $2 million in new U.S. aid for the paramilitary demobilization
process when she left the post in July.
Curiouser
and curiouser--three U.S. officials held clandestine meetings with paramilitary
emissaries earlier this year. The Embassy has admitted that the meetings
took place, but, unsurprisingly, has not been very forthcoming about
their content. You'd think this story would have made a bit of a splash
back home ("U.S. officials negotiate with terrorists"; "Emergency
Congressional hearings called on meetings with Colombian terrorists";
etc.) but, rather chillingly, after a single Associated Press report
the story did not appear in U.S. media.
On
October 10 El Tiempo reported that the U.S. has presented Colombia's
Peace Commissioner with a series of concerns about and suggested improvements
to the amnesty proposal. The U.S.'s two principal concerns, according
to the El Tiempo story, are that Ashcroft's extradition orders against
paramilitary leaders for drug trafficking will not be affected by the
peace deal and that drug traffickers will be prevented from joining
the paramilitaries to clean their criminal records (The New York Times'
Andes correspondent Juan Forero, in a September 15 story, had quoted
yet another disgruntled, anonymous "Western diplomat" commenting
on the amnesty deal: "What is happening here is the biggest legal
money laundering and narco-profiting operation ever seen.")
Forero's
article made another interesting revelation: "Western diplomats
here and American officials who work on Colombia policy...say the United
States has not only offered support for Mr. Uribe but also has been
consulted as his administration drafted the [amnesty] legislation."
Unlike
the United Nations' concerns and suggestions, the U.S. wish-list submitted
to Peace Commissioner Restrepo reportedly focuses primarily on making
sure that drug traffickers aren't granted amnesty. Representative Tom
Lantos (D-CA), in an early October interview with PBS, explained his
view on the issue: "There are some things on which we cannot compromise.
The key drug lords cannot escape going to prison for long terms by paying
cash to their victims."
Funny
that the things we can't compromise on don't include the massacre of
thousands of Colombian civilians.
The
October 10 El Tiempo piece reported that "authors of atrocious
crimes who demobilize and take part in a peace process" can still
receive the benefits of "alternative penalties" (i.e., not
serving time in jail) according to the U.S.'s suggestions.
Undoubtedly,
Uribe will appear to give some ground in the coming weeks. The U.S.'s
proposals will be largely or entirely written into a new draft of the
law. He may make other concessions to Colombian Congressional critics.
He'll be praised for flexibility. Yet, because he started "making
compromises" from such an extreme position (a position of literally
and simply wiping the paramilitaries' criminal slate clean, allowing
within a few years for them to become--as they clearly aspire--a powerful,
legitimate political force), the ultimate agreement will likely still
achieve these overarching goals of legitimization and pardon. And the
U.S. will quietly assent, thanking Uribe for respecting their suggestions
(just as he's consented to their "proposals" that he grant
U.S. citizens in Colombia immunity before the International Criminal
Court and that Colombia support the Iraq War (making it the only country
in South America to do so)) and declining further comment since it's
an "internal Colombian matter." And our helicopters and chemicals,
military trainers and tax-dollars will keep on flowing into Colombia's
celebrated counter-insurgency forces, who know better than to let "the
traffickers of human rights" slow or stop them.
Conclusion
While
U.S. attention focuses, naturally, on the horrors in Iraq, the completely
embarrassing events in California, the prospects for getting the ugliest
regime in our nation's history out of Washington, etc., on another front
in the "War on Terror," with Alvaro Uribe's leadership and
the U.S.'s approval one of the most brutal forces of the right in our
confused and turbulent world looks like it might just get away with
mass murder.
In
remembrance of their thousands of civilian victims -- most of them community
leaders and activists, including hundreds of trade unionists, thousands
(literally) of politicians, Afro-Colombian leaders, indigenous leaders,
human rights defenders, local journalists, teachers......... -- I ask,
quietly, for prayer. And loudly, that we don't let the bastards get
away with it.
Phillip
Cryan lives in Bogota, Colombia. Portions of this essay have been adapted
from his biweekly columns in Colombia Week, a weekly report on events
in Colombia you can sign up for by e-mailing [email protected]
[i]
[i] The following five paragraphs draw heavily from the International
Crisis Group's excellent, brief review of paramilitary history in
"Colombia: Negotiating with the Paramilitaries" (September
16, 2003; Bogota/Brussels). I apologize for the lack of citations in
other parts of this essay--please feel free to contact me at for information
on other sources: [email protected]