Purpose

By act of Congress, renewal of United Sates aid to Colombia ($700 million per year to the Colombian government, mostly in military aid) depends on their meeting conditions on human rights. This report presents the information we have gathered and the basis for our recommendations, which appear at the end of this report.

Apartado, in northeastern Colombia (map), is the sister community of Dane County, Wisconsin, our home. Our delegation from the Colombia Support Network (John Gibson, Eunice Gibson, Norman Stockwell, Conrad Weiffenbach, and Cecilia Zarate Laun) visited Colombia from April 16 to 26, 2005.The visit was supported with letters from Wisconsin Senators Russ Feingold and Herb Kohl, Dane County Executive Kathleen Falk, and Wisconsin Secretary of State Douglas LaFollette, sent in advance to people in the agencies with which we wished to meet. We met with people in Apartado, in the Peace Community of San Jose de Apartado, and in the offices of a large number of government and non-government organizations in Medellin and Bogota.

We offer this information to the United States Congress, Department of State, and other concerned groups and individuals wishing for information to guide their discussions on human rights in Colombia.

This electronic report contains significant parts that are accessed via hyperlinks to the CSN website, where they are hidden files. The linked documents contain essential information from our investigation, supporting the conclusions and recommendations presented at the end of these pages.

To recap events briefly, On February 21, 2005, Luis Eduardo Guerra-Guerra, one of the founders and leaders of the Peace Community of San Jose de Apartado, was murdered in an area near the Mulatos River. Three children and four other adults were also murdered in this massacre Paramilitary checkpoints present in prior years on the road between San Jose and Apartado have been removed, but there are now checkpoints of the Colombian Police and Army. A police station (link to photo) was put within the village of San Jose, against the wishes of the peace community, which observes a non-violent resistance to the armed conflict. In response to the placing of the Police station in the village of San Jose, the Peace Community has abandoned their village, moving to a new site a few km away, where they are living in a new settlement, for which construction has begun

The background of events in this region of Colombia is comprehensively summarized in a Background section of this report. A list (spreadsheet from the community) of 500 violations of human rights, including other massacres that the people of San Jose de Apartado have suffered, is also presented. San Jose’s website (in Spanish) offers more recent information. San Jose represents the experience (website with comprehensive listing of human rights violations in Colombia, in Spanish) of many rural communities in Colombia: the aggression toward them is systematic.

The culpability of the armed forces in the most serious of human rights violations has been acknowledged by the Colombian Procuraduria, which in May 2005 issued a decision (document in Spanish) that disciplinary action will be taken against units of the Army and Police that were in command of the region in which San Jose de Apartado is located in the years 2000 to 2002, for their responsibility in the same types of violations of human rights then in San Jose, including massacres. Please see the Background document and list of violations from the community for details on those violations.

US aid must not support the Colombian Police and Army in such behavior.

We expect that similar action from the Procuraduria will result in due time following the massacre of February 2005, which they are now investigating.

But whether the sanctions against those responsible in the military will be effective remains to be seen. Often in the past such sanctions have not been so.

Information we gathered during our visit:

We met April 18th and 19th with the people of San Jose, who told us among other important things that when they travel through the check- points along the road to Apartado they still suffer personal harassment and confiscation of purchases and other belongings. A group of leaders summarized their concerns (notes of interviews with community leaders) about the police station placed in the village after the massacre, inability to get justice from the government, their stigmatization in the media by government officials, and the history of recent abuses.In private meetings, witnesses shared information on the massacre of February 21 and related events with us. Some were able to identify forces in that area during the massacre as Army, and one said soldiers there told them the Army did it. Please see our summary notes on this point, and our notes from interviewing witness1, witness2, witness3, witness4 and witness5. For their protection, information that could lead to the identification of these witnesses has been expunged. Witnesses were assassinated after giving testimony following a massacre in San Jose a few years ago.
We had supper on the evening of May 19 with five members of the Apartado Municipal Council, and met with the mayor (Alcalde of Apartado) in his office on April 20. Please see our notes regarding their hostile attitudes toward San Jose.
We met with General Hector Jaime Fandino-Rincon, Commander of the 17^th Brigade of the Colombian Army stationed in Carepa, near Apartado (link to photo) in his office at the Brigade Headquarters for an hour on April 20. Our notes on the discussion there outline how he argued that his troops were not involved in the massacre of February 21, and his ideas implying it was due to an internal dispute within the Peace Community or an action of the FARC guerrillas.
The historical context regarding some persons mentioned in these notes is in the section, Peculiar Characters for Application of Democratic Security in Apartado, beginning on page 19 of the Background document.
We met with Colonel Yamik Armando Moreno of the National Police, in charge of the region in which San Jose and Apartado are located, in his headquarters for two and a half hours on April 20. As indicated in our notes from that meeting, he presented a version of events surrounding the massacre, and a theory of who did it, that was nearly identical to that of General Fandino. He expressed a very hostile attitude toward the Peace Community, while maintaining a friendly one toward us.
We met with the Procurador of the Nation, Edgardo Jose Maya-Villazon, who told us that the investigation by his office of the February 2005 massacre in San Jose and related events there was in an advanced state. He arranged for us to meet with his staff to discuss our findings. He said the Police station should be in the place where the Peace Community wants it, which would be consistent with the ruling of the Inter- American Court, a ruling which he said the Colombian government should follow.
We met with Carlos Franco, Director of the President of Colombia’s Human Rights Program, on Monday April 25, 2005. He strongly defended the principle of a police station in San Jose, and listed a large number of events (such as hand grenades exploding in the village) that he felt discredited the community. Please see our notes of the meeting
The representative at the office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Luis Carlos Monge with whom we met, as well as Procurador Maya and his staff, told us that the location of the police station within San Jose does not meet conditions imposed by the Inter-American Court for Human Rights, nor with Colombian law.
The members of the Procurador’s staff who met with us told us that:

“Unfortunately the public forces also violate human rights and the law.”
“High Army powers have recently trained people who historically do not respect Human Rights.”
“Current negotiations re. demobilization could intensify paramilitary presence, making the situation like the massacre more common.” With regard to a perception that the Peace Community is “taken ideologically by the guerillas,” and similar statements from the Police, some Apartado council members and the Mayor, and some other Colombians with whom our delegation met:

We would not expect members of the Peace Community of San Jose de Apartado not to know guerillas personally. Members of the Peace Community have grown up with and been friends with a wide variety of local people, some of whom wound up with the guerillas.
San Jose presents non-violent resistance in a country that only knows violent resistance. That is why they are important and why FARC guerillas have killed nineteen residents since the community declared itself a Peace Community.
We would expect some residents of San Jose, as neutrals, to be in touch with friends in the guerillas, just as they would be in touch with friends in Apartado who may have been, for example, trained by the Army to act as paramilitaries. Their lives are in Apartado.
So when, as Colonel Moreno of the national police reported, a cell-phone call from a woman in San Jose to a friend in the guerillas was intercepted, with the essence of the conversation being: “did you do that “ (referring to some guerilla action), this does not mean that San Jose is violating neutrality. When members of the community encounter guerillas out in the countryside and talk with them (as Col. Moreno reports the Police have observed), this does not mean that San Jose is violating neutrality. We would expect friends to keep in touch for a variety of social reasons (including births, deaths, personal support), and that conversation would flow at those encounters. Officers and others who grew up in privileged circumstances may not personally know any guerillas or campesinos, and may not appreciate the above points.
Colonel Moreno told our delegation that another reason he believes the leaders of the community are overtly against the government is that their website billboards the word “RESIST”. One’s perceptions are often influenced by one’s peer group. The authors of the website more likely intend an exhortation to resist the kind of population displacement that has already been forced on several million Colombian campesinos.
San Jose is caught in a Civil War. The most principled stance is to be neutral, not contributing to the killing of friends, in-laws, brothers and sisters who may be guerillas, paramilitaries and armed forces of the nation. The position of the Peace Community is one that we recognize and respect, and you may very well respect it too.

San Jose de Apartado is a good community that can develop the country

Contrary to views expressed by members of the Apartado Council, police, army, and some government officials, we found in visiting and talking with people in San Jose that the members of the community are properly and exceptionally well motivated. San Jose de Apartado provides an alternative model for peaceful rural development of the traditional agricultural sector in Colombia.

We visited with work teams taking care of children, constructing sidewalks and housing; cutting trees into lumber across the river and up a hill from the camp, carrying the cut lumber from where the trees had been felled, and carrying rocks and gravel from the river for the walkways, all without gasoline powered vehicles. We saw no gasoline-powered vehicles on site, - only a gasoline chain saw, human labor and a very few draft animals. No bulldozers, shovels or trucks. The road from Apartado goes by outside the barbed wire fence behind which the new camp is located, and no road goes into the new site.

The fact that their community works as a collective could be seen as an asset to the nation, not a threat. We believe that San Jose de Apartado is a highly respectable, indeed admirable community, especially because they have maintained their ideology and resisted displacement while 150 members have been murdered and massacred over the past fifteen years.

Our Conclusions:

We believe the following conclusions are well based on the information we have gathered:

The Army was responsible for the massacre of members of the Peace Community on February 21, 2005

The Peace Community has developed a highly respectable and principled stance toward the war in Colombia: an active peaceful resistance. We found no credible evidence of willingly participation of the Community in the armed conflict or of Community support for the FARC guerrillas or any other armed actor.

The Peace Community of San Jose de Apartado is an experiment of non-violence which is unique in the world. One of its most remarkable features is the truly democratic form in which decisions are made with the whole Community deciding on every important measure.

The Colombian Government made a mockery of the Inter American Court when it chose not to follow the Court’s recommendation which specifically says to negotiate decisions with the Community. The location of the Police station was agreed to tentatively in the discussion between Luis Eduardo Guerra representing the desires of the Community and Vice President Santos. The Community’s request was to locate the Police on the outskirts of the town, not inside .The Colombian government used the massacre as an excuse to impose the authoritarian decision of locating the Police station inside the town.

We believe the Community’s decision to oppose the placement of a Police station within the Community to be eminently reasonable for the following reasons:

a) it is consistent with the Community’s principled opposition to having arms in their midst; and b) the Community would leave itself open to becoming engaged in the armed conflict, as the guerrillas might carry out an armed attack against the Police station which might injure or kill Peace Community residents and damage their homes, as happened to the indigenous community of Toribio in Cauca province while our CSN delegation was in Colombia.

We found credible evidence of extensive cooperation and coordination between the Army and the paramilitaries in the massacre of February 21, 2005 and other events involving the Peace Community of San Jose. It is clear to us that the Colombian Government has failed to curtail these paramilitaries, whose activities are illegal under Colombian law. Under these circumstances the Peace Community’s rejection of Army presence in the Community appears sensible and reasonable.

We believe on the basis of the evidence we received during our visit to San Jose, Apartado, Medellin and Bogota that the Colombian Government has failed to take measures to protect the Peace Community as ordered by the Inter-American Court and by Colombia’s Constitutional Court.

In one sense the Peace Community of San Jose is a representative of rural communities throughout Colombia which have organized as civil society and in constituent assemblies to oppose the armed conflict, but have experienced aggression by the Colombian state, rather than protection, with their institutions and lands subjected to attack by paramilitary forces acting in concert with the Colombian Armed Forces

We ask that you incorporate the above information regarding human rights in Colombia, including information in linked documents, in your reports and deliberations, in so far as you recognize it to be useful.

Our Recommendations:

We recommend, based on our information in this report:

That United States aid to Colombia’s armed forces be cut off until Colombian armed forces collaboration with paramilitaries and until changes are made by the Colombian government in its policies toward rural agrarian communities like San Jose de Apartado.

That the United States require investigation by the respective Colombian authorities of all military and police commanders of the region encompassing Apartado since 1997, when San Jose declared itself a Peace Community

That the United States deny visas for Colonel Duque, General Fandino and other Army and Police officers responsible for the soldiers and policemen who have abused the residents of the Peace Community of San Jose de Apartado since 1997.

That the United States withhold aid from Colombia unless the Colombian authorities:

Respect the desire of the Peace Community to have no armed actors within their borders and demonstrate that Army and Police collaboration with paramilitaries has ended, and also develop a just alternative to the proposed government plan for demobilizing and “reinserting” paramilitary into civilian society.
Respond effectively to conditions required for Colombia by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and by Colombia’s own constitution.
Cease using military (including National Police) professionals in civilian functions such as teachers and doctors that the government is obliged to provide in rural communities.
Remove the local offices of the Judiciary (Fiscalia) from military bases, to enable their impartiality

The United States can help to end the continuing, severe violations of rights of peasants like those of San Jose de Apartado, who hold and embody the highest moral position consistent with the conditions forced upon them.

Millions of Colombians have already become internally displaced. The toleration and (yes) support by US aid of ongoing massacres and harassment of the populations of San Jose and many other rural communities can be halted.

We hope that the information gathered by our delegation will help lead to a foreign policy towards Colombia based upon the principles upon which our nation was founded.

Note of Gratitude for Assistance to CSN