CSN Central NY Chapter

http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/opinion/la-ed-chiquita29mar29,1,417
7424.story
(Tags -> Colombia : U.S. Policy: Chiquita Case, U.S. Policy: : English)

The cast of villains in Latin American politics always seems to
feature the same players: left-wing guerrillas, right-wing death
squads and Chiquita Brands International. The leftist rebels want to
take from the rich and give to the poor, the right-wing death squads
want a political system that favors a wealthy elite, and Chiquita
wants bananas. And in pursuit of an endless supply of tropical gold,
it is even willing to placate Colombian terrorists.

Although the U.S. State Department placed the left-wing Revolutionary
Armed Forces of Colombia, known as FARC, on the list of terrorist
organizations in 1997, and added the right-wing United Self Defense
Forces in 2001, Chiquita did business with both, making "protection
payments" it said were necessary to safeguard the lives of its
employees. U.S. law prohibits such deals with terrorists, but when the
government caught Chiquita in violation, it graciously agreed to fine
the company $25 million -- the precise amount the company had
suggested. None of that money, however, will reach the victims of the
terrorists that Chiquita's money helped arm.

That's why a lawsuit filed this month by the widows of five men killed
by the FARC gives such grim satisfaction. It joins several others,
also in federal district court in Miami, accusing Chiquita of
complicity in the deaths of Colombians killed by the two paramilitary
groups. This most recent suit seeks unspecified damages, but we can
only hope the company is punished severely for a business strategy
that enabled terrorists in order to protect Chiquita's people and
profits.

While the FARC was dragging three American military contractors off to
the jungle -- where, five years later, they are still being held,
along with hundreds of other hostages -- Chiquita was doing business
with their captors. And while American taxpayers were sending Colombia
billions of dollars in military aid to fight drug trafficking -- the
primary source of funding for the terrorists -- Chiquita was
countering that effort by providing revenue to the thugs.

Maybe it's true that Chiquita couldn't have done business in rebel
territory without negotiating with the rebels, but that was its
choice. And if dealing with terrorists is a legitimate business
expense, then so is compensation for terrorists' victims. Having made
a deal with the devil, it's time for Faust to pay up.

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Sunday, March 30, 2008
Colombian Troops Kill Farmers, Pass Off Bodies as Rebels'
Juan Forero
The Washington Post

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/29/AR2008032901
118.html?hpid=sec-world
(Tags -> Colombia : U.S. Policy: Human Rights Cases, U.S. Policy: : English)

SAN FRANCISCO, Colombia -- All Cruz Elena González saw when the
soldiers came past her house was a corpse, wrapped in a tarp and
strapped to a mule. A guerrilla killed in combat, soldiers muttered,
as they trudged past her meek home in this town in northwestern
Colombia.

She soon learned that the body belonged to her 16-year-old son,
Robeiro Valencia, and that soldiers had classified him as a guerrilla
killed in combat, a claim later discredited by the local government
human rights ombudsman. "Imagine what I felt when my other son told me
it was Robeiro," González said in recounting the August killing. "He
was my boy."

Funded in part by the Bush administration, a six-year military
offensive has helped the government here wrest back territory once
controlled by guerrillas and kill hundreds of rebels in recent months,
including two top commanders of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of
Colombia, or FARC.

But under intense pressure from Colombian military commanders to
register combat kills, the army has in recent years also increasingly
been killing poor farmers and passing them off as rebels slain in
combat, government officials and human rights groups say. The tactic
has touched off a fierce debate in the Defense Ministry between
tradition-bound generals who favor an aggressive campaign that centers
on body counts and reformers who say the army needs to develop other
yardsticks to measure battlefield success.

The killings, carried out by combat units under the orders of regional
commanders, have always been a problem in the shadowy, 44-year-old
conflict here -- one that pits the army against a peasant-based rebel
movement.

But with the recent demobilization of thousands of paramilitary
fighters, many of whom operated death squads to wipe out rebels, army
killings of civilians have grown markedly since 2004, according to
rights groups, U.N. investigators and the government's internal
affairs agency. The spike has come during a military buildup that has
seen the armed forces nearly double to 270,000 members in the last six
years, becoming the second-largest military in Latin America.

There are varying accounts on the number of registered extrajudicial
killings, as the civilian deaths are called. But a report by a
coalition of 187 human rights groups said there are allegations that
between mid-2002 and mid-2007, 955 civilians were killed and
classified as guerrillas fallen in combat -- a 65 percent increase
over the previous five years, when 577 civilians were reported killed
by troops.

"We used to see this as isolated, as a military patrol that lost
control," said Bayron Gongora of the Judicial Freedom Corp., a
Medellin lawyers group representing the families of 110 people killed
in murky circumstances. "But what we're now seeing is systematic."

The victims are the marginalized in Colombia's highly stratified
society. Most, like Robeiro Valencia, are subsistence farmers. Others
are poor Colombians kidnapped off the streets of bustling Medellin,
the capital of this state, Antioquia, which has registered the most
killings.

Amparo Bermudez Dávila said her son, Diego Castañeda, 27, disappeared
from Medellin in January 2006. Two months later, authorities called to
say he had been killed, another battlefield death. They showed her a
photograph of his body, dressed in camouflage.

"I said, 'Guerrilla?' " she recalled. "My son was not a guerrilla. And
they told me if I didn't think he was a guerrilla, then I should file
a complaint."

Military prosecutors ordinarily initiate investigations when the army
kills someone. In cases that appear criminal, civilian prosecutors
take over, as they did in the slayings of Valencia and Castañeda in
San Francisco. But human rights groups and government prosecutors say
the initial probes have usually been perfunctory, and investigators
have been under intense pressure from high-ranking military officers
to rule in the army's favor.

Such challenges have made tabulating the exact number of dead
civilians impossible, though officials at the attorney general's
office and the inspector general's office revealed recent estimates in
interviews.

The attorney general's office is investigating 525 killings of
civilians, all but a handful of which occurred since 2002 and in which
706 soldiers and officers are implicated. The office has another 500
cases, involving hundreds more victims, yet to be opened. The
inspector general's office, meanwhile, is investigating 650 cases from
2003 to mid-2007 that could involve as many as 1,000 victims, said
Carlos Arturo Gomez, the vice inspector general.

"Last year, the number of complaints shot up," Gomez said. "Some have
said the cause could be unscrupulous military members who want to show
results from false operations. Others say it's the product of pressure
from the high command, the push for results."

The trend has prompted concern among some members of the U.S.
Congress. Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.), chairman of the Senate
Appropriations foreign operations subcommittee, said he is holding up
$23 million in military aid until he sees progress in the fight
against impunity and state-sponsored violence.

"We've had six years, $5 billion in U.S. aid. More than half of it has
gone to the Colombian military, and we find the army is killing more
civilians, not less," Leahy said in an interview. "And by all
accounts, all independent accounts, we find that civilians are just
being taken out, executed and then dressed up in uniforms so they can
claim body counts of guerrillas killed."

President Álvaro Uribe's government, which has had a string of recent
successes against the FARC, has defended itself against the
accusations and contends they are part of an international campaign
designed to discredit the armed forces. Indeed, some officials say the
FARC is prodding the families of rebels killed in combat to claim the
dead were civilians.

Still, Defense Minister Juan Manuel Santos acknowledges civilian
deaths and has initiated steps that include new rules of engagement,
assigning inspectors to combat units to advise commanders on the use
of force and improving human rights training for soldiers.

The military has also been streamlining its justice system and
transferring more cases to the attorney general's office, which the
United Nations says must have a greater role if extrajudicial
executions are to be eradicated. The attorney general's office said
more than 200 members of the military have been detained as
prosecutors investigate their involvement in the killings of
civilians, with 13 convicted last year.

"I have said this very clearly: The soldier who commits a crime
becomes a criminal, and he will be treated as a criminal," Santos
said.

Santos also has stressed, in speeches and directives, that the army's
anti-guerrilla policy should be more focused on generating desertions
than accumulating combat kills, the traditional method of measuring
success. "I've told all my soldiers and policemen that I prefer a
demobilized guerrilla, or a captured guerrilla, to a dead guerrilla,"
Santos said.

But the Defense Ministry's reformers have been met by influential
generals who have defended officers accused of slayings and favor a
more traditional strategy for defeating the rebels.

That approach means giving field commanders autonomy and instilling a
philosophy that stresses swift engagement with the rebels.

"What's the result of offensives? Combat," Gen. Mario Montoya, head of
Colombia's army, said in an interview. "And if there's combat, there
are dead in combat."

Human rights groups see a disturbing trend, saying the tactics used by
some army units are similar to those that death squads used to
terrorize civilians. A top U.N. investigator said some army units went
as far as to carry "kits," which included grenades and pistols that
could be planted next to bodies.

"The method of killing people perceived as guerrilla collaborators is
still seen as legitimate by too many members of the army," said Lisa
Haugaard, director of Latin America Working Group, a Washington-based
coalition of humanitarian groups.

After she interviewed a number of families of victims, she determined
that in many of the cases soldiers "appeared to be going on missions,
not accidentally detaining and killing people," she said.

The highest-ranking officer implicated in extrajudicial killings is
Col. Hernan Mejía.

A former army sergeant who was under Mejía's command, Edwin Guzman,
recounted in an interview how Mejía's unit would kill peasant
farmers, dress them in combat fatigues and call in local newspaper
reporters to write about the supposed combat that had taken place.

Guzman, now a government witness against Mejía, said soldiers
participated because they knew the army gave incentives -- from extra
pay to days off -- for amassing kills in combat. "This is because the
army gives prizes for kills, not for control of territory," he said.

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Sunday, March 30, 2008
Files Released by Colombia Point to Venezuelan Bid to Arm Rebels
Simon Romero
The New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/30/world/americas/30colombia.html?em&ex=12069
36000&en=72c763715099333c&ei=5087%0A
(Tags -> Colombia, Venezuela : Venezuelan Foreign Policy: Relations
with Venezuela: : English)

BOGOTÁ, Colombia &lsqauo; Files provided by Colombian officials from
computers they say were captured in a cross-border raid in Ecuador
this month appear to tie Venezuela's government to efforts to secure
arms for Colombia's largest insurgency.

Officials taking part in Colombia's investigation of the computers
provided The New York Times with copies of more than 20 files, some of
which also showed contributions from the rebels to the 2006 campaign
of Ecuador's leftist president, Rafael Correa.

If verified, the files would offer rare insight into the
cloak-and-dagger nature of Latin America's longest-running guerrilla
conflict, including what appeared to be the killing of a Colombian
government spy with microchips implanted in her body, a crime
apparently carried out by the rebels in their jungle redoubt.

The files would also potentially link the governments of Venezuela and
Ecuador to the leftist guerrillas of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of
Colombia, or FARC, which the United States says is a terrorist group
and has fought to overthrow Colombia's government for four decades.

Though it was impossible to authenticate the files independently, the
Colombian officials said their government had invited Interpol to
verify the files. The officials did not want to be identified while
any Interpol inquiry was under way.

Both the United States and Colombia, Washington's staunchest ally in
the region, have a strong interest in undercutting President Hugo
Chávez of Venezuela, who has sought to counter United States influence
by forming his own leftist bloc in the region. But the Colombian
officials who provided the computer files adamantly vouched for them.

The files contained touches that suggested authenticity: they were
filled with revolutionary jargon, passages in numerical code, missives
about American policy in Latin America and even brief personal
reflections like one by a senior rebel commander on the joy of
becoming a grandfather.

Other senior Colombian officials said the files made public so far
only scratched the surface of the captured archives, risking new
friction with Venezuela and Ecuador, both of whom have dismissed the
files as fakes.

Vice President Francisco Santos said Colombia's stability was at risk
if explicit support from its neighbors for the FARC, the country's
largest armed insurgency, was proved true. "The idea that using
weapons to topple a democratic government has not been censured," Mr.
Santos said in an interview, "is not only stupid &lsqauo; it is frankly
frightening."

Colombia's relations with its two Andean neighbors veered suddenly
toward armed conflict after Colombian forces raided a FARC camp inside
Ecuador on March 1, killing 26 people, including a top FARC commander,
and capturing the computers, according to the Colombians.

Though tensions ebbed after a summit meeting of Latin American nations
in the Dominican Republic this month, the matter of the computer files
has threatened to reignite the diplomatic crisis caused by the raid.

Shortly after the crisis erupted, Colombian officials began releasing
a small portion of the computer files, some of which they said showed
efforts by Mr. Chavez's government to provide financial support for
the FARC.

Defense Minister Juan Manuel Santos said in an interview that
officials had obtained more than 16,000 files from three computers
belonging to Luis Édgar Devia Silva, a commander known by his nom de
guerre, Raúl Reyes, who was killed in the raid. Two other hard drives
were also captured, he said.

"Everything has been accessed and everything is being validated by
Interpol," Mr. Santos said, adding that he expected the work on the
validation to be completed by the end of April. "It is a great deal of
information that is extremely valuable and important."

Mr. Santos, who said the computers survived the raid because they were
in metal casing, strongly defended Colombia's military foray into
Ecuador, which drew condemnation in other parts of Latin America as a
violation of Ecuador's sovereignty.

"Personally I do not regret a thing, absolutely nothing, but I am a
minister of a government that has agreed this type of action would not
be repeated," he said. "Of course, this depends on our neighbors
collaborating on the fight against terrorism."

For his part, Mr. Chávez, in a meeting with foreign journalists last
week in Caracas, lashed out at Colombia's government and mocked the
files.

"The main weapon they have now is the computer, the supposed computer
of Raúl Reyes," Mr. Chávez said. "This computer is like à la carte
service, giving you whatever you want. You want steak? Or fried fish?
How would you like it prepared? You'll get it however the empire
decides."

The correspondence also pointed to warm relations between Venezuela's
government and the FARC.

One letter, dated Jan. 25, 2007, by Iván Márquez, a member of the
FARC's seven-member secretariat, discussed a meeting with a Venezuelan
official called Carvajal. "Carvajal," Mr. Márquez wrote, "left with
the pledge of bringing an arms dealer from Panama."

Officials here said they believed that the official in question was
Gen. Hugo Carvajal, the director of military intelligence in
Venezuela, a confidant of Mr. Chávez and perhaps Venezuela's most
powerful intelligence official.

In other correspondence from September 2004 after the killing by the
FARC of six Venezuelan soldiers and one Venezuelan engineer on
Venezuelan soil that month, General Carvajal's longstanding ties to
the guerrillas also come into focus. In those letters, the guerrillas
describe talks with General Carvajal, Mr. Chávez's emissary to deal
with the issue.

"Today I met with General Hugo Carvajal," a FARC commander wrote in on
letter dated Sept. 23, 2004. "He said he guarded the secret hope that
what happened in Apure," the rebel wrote in reference to the
Venezuelan border state where the killings took place, "was the work
of a force different from our own."

Officials in General Carvajal's office at the General Directorate of
Military Intelligence in Caracas did not respond to requests for
comment on the letters. Mr. Chávez responded to a report earlier this
year in Colombia claiming that General Carvajal provided logistical
assistance to the FARC by calling it an "attack on the revolution" he
has led in Venezuela.

Another file recovered from Mr. Devia's computers, dated a week
earlier on Jan. 18, 2007, described efforts by the FARC's secretariat
to secure Mr. Chávez's assistance for buying arms and obtaining a $250
million loan, "to be paid when we take power."

The FARC, a Marxist-inspired insurgency that has persisted for four
decades, finances itself largely through cocaine trafficking and
kidnappings for ransom. But other files from the computers suggested
that Colombia's counterinsurgency effort, financed in large part by
$600 million a year in aid from Washington, was making those
activities less lucrative for the FARC, forcing it to consider options
like selling Venezuelan gasoline at a profit in Colombia.

The release of the files comes at a delicate time when some lawmakers
in Washington are pressing for Venezuela to be included on a list of
countries that are state sponsors of terrorism. But with Venezuela
remaining a leading supplier of oil to the United States, such a move
is considered unlikely because of the limits on trade it would entail.

Moreover, interpretations of the files from Mr. Devia's computers have
already led to some mistakes.

For instance, El Tiempo, Colombia's leading daily newspaper, issued an
apology this month to Gustavo Larrea, Ecuador's security minister,
after publishing a photograph obtained from the computers in which the
newspaper claimed Mr. Larrea was shown meeting with Mr. Devia at a
FARC camp. In fact, the photograph was of Patricio Etchegaray, an
official with the Communist Party in Argentina.

Still, the files from Mr. Devia's computers are expected to haunt
relations between Colombia, Ecuador and Venezuela for some time.

For instance, one piece of correspondence dated Nov. 21, 2006, and
circulated among the FARC's secretariat, describes a $100,000 donation
to the campaign of Mr. Correa, Ecuador's president.

Of that amount, $50,000 came from the FARC's "Eastern bloc," a
militarily strong faction that operates in eastern Colombia, and
$20,000 from the group's "Southern bloc," according to the document.

President Álvaro Uribe of Colombia referred this month to files from
Mr. Devia's computers showing financing of Mr. Correa's campaign by
the FARC, but he stopped short of releasing them after tensions eased
at the summit meeting in the Dominican Republic.

"Any archive is not valid until it is verified," said Pedro Artieda, a
spokesman at the Ecuadorean Foreign Ministry, when asked for comment.
"Therefore, the government cannot comment on something that is not
confirmed." Mr. Correa had previously disputed the campaign-finance
claims based on the computers files, saying they lacked "technical and
legal" validity.

Other files offer insight into the methods employed both by the FARC
and Colombia's government in their four-decade war. In one letter by
Mr. Devia dated Jan. 5, 2007, to Manuel Marulanda, the most senior
member of the FARC's secretariat, he described a woman in their ranks
who was discovered to be a government spy.

"The new thing here," Mr. Devia wrote, "was that she had two
microchips, one under her breast and the other beneath her jaw."

Mr. Devia went on to describe the reaction to this discovery,
explaining in the rebels' slang that she was given "a course."

"Yesterday they threw her into the hole after proving what she was,"
he wrote, "and giving her the counsel of war."

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