By Sheldon Rampton
On October 10, 1993, the Bogota newspaper El Tiempo reported with satisfaction on President Clinton's remarks at a ceremony for Colombia's new ambassador to the United States. The President praised Colombia as a "valued trading partner" and "one of our strongest allies, not only in the effort to free the world of the scourge of narcotics trafficking, but also in our common desire to see democracy flourish and the rule of law prevail throughout the region."
"More than any nation in this hemisphere, Colombia has suffered at the hands of the drug traffickers," Clinton observed. "The courage your people have demonstrated at all levels, from the President to the prosecutor, to the policeman on the street and the soldier in the field, merits our respect and thanks."
The following day, a group of "soldiers in the field" killed three peasants - two men and one woman - and dumped their bodies in front of the Catholic bishop's residence in Tibu in Colombia's Santander region. The bishop, Monsignor Luis Madrid Merlano, condemned the killings and the fact that soldiers displayed the bodies in the street for three hours before allowing them to be removed. In response to the Colombian army's accusation that the peasants had been guerrilla subversives, Madrid Merlano noted that "the owner of the farm where they worked told me that they had been employed there for more than 20 months, and the woman who was killed was the trusted cook of the household."
Madrid Merlano added that the killings were a "horrendous public spectacle because one of the cadavers had been shot repeatedly in the face." Three weeks later the Vanguardia Liberal of Bucaramanga reported that Madrid Merlano had received death threats from persons accusing him of "guerrilla connections."
Of course, these killings had no direct connection to Clinton's remarks other than the coincidence of their timing. Similar abuses by "police in the street" and "soldiers in the field" occur in Colombia on a daily basis. But human rights groups active in Colombia find nothing surprising in Clinton`s kind words of "respect and thanks" expressed to the intellectual authors and physical perpetrators of these crimes. It is not even surprising that Clinton's words came packaged in a speech in which he also declared, "All who abuse human rights, regardless of their ideology or position, must be punished severely and swiftly."
Colombians are accustomed to U.S. politicians distorting the reality of their country's epidemic of violence. Since at least the days of the Reagan administration, everything that occurs in Colombia has been portrayed as either a cause or a consequence of the "war on drugs," which is exactly the context in which the Colombian government seeks to justify its behavior. "They present themselves as victims and say, `Things are very difficult for us, we are confronting the drug traffickers, and sometimes there are problems'," explains Marcela Salazar of the Andean Commission of Jurists, a human rights organization with offices in Bogota. "They have presented a good image for themselves, and they even say that they are in the vanguard of the struggle for human rights, but we have to look at their actual practice."
The Andean Commission of Jurists has compiled data showing that Colombia had an average of 12 political murders per day during 1993, 70 percent of which were attributed to the police, armed forces, and their paramilitary clients. Human rights groups estimate that there are at least 300,000 internal refugees in Colombia today and about 50,000 more who have fled to Ecuador. The country's homicide rate of 90 per 100,000 is the highest in the world. Of 264 unionists assassinated worldwide from January 1990 to March 1991, over half were Colombian, according to the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions in Brussels.
The fact that Colombian politicians and military officials frequently collaborate with drug traffickers is common knowledge in Colombia, but rarely mentioned here. A discreet silence also protects the public from any awareness that Colombia has risen during the past three years to become the largest recipient of U.S. military aid in the Western hemisphere. When U.S. aid is discussed, the focus on the "drug war" conveniently shifts attention away from the fact that almost all military activity by Colombian "soldiers in the field" is aimed at rural counter- insurgency against leftist guerrillas. In urban Colombia, meanwhile, "policemen in the street" repress labor unions, student activists, leftist politicians and journalists, while the drug cartels recruit their couriers and killers from the country`s large mass of unemployed, disorganized youth.
The Real War
Contrary to the popular myth, drug cartels are only one of several factors underlying human rights violations in Colombia. The region of Uraba, for example, has one of the highest levels of political violence in the country, despite the absence of drug cartel activity in that region. A much more important factor is the military's hostility to members of the two leftist political parties that have won several elections in the region and are now viewed as a threat by Colombia's traditional Liberal and Conservative parties.
Under a peace agreement aimed at ending the war, many ex- guerrillas accepted a government amnesty, surrendering their arms in exchange for government promises that they would be allowed to peacefully reintegrate themselves into civilian life. Several ex- guerrilla movements formed legal political parties, including the M-19 and the leftist parties Esperanza, Paz y Libertad (Hope, Peace, and Liberty) and the Union Patriotica.
The Union Patriotica quickly became a significant political force, winning elections throughout Uraba and raising particular alarm on the part of Colombia's traditional Liberal party, which until then had dominated politics in the region. The backlash has been dramatic. Since the Union Patriotica's founding in 1985, it has lost over 2,200 members to political assassination, including many mayors and both of its presidential candidates.
"The Liberal Party wants to win back the political space that it lost," said Jairo Bedoya, a former Union Patriotica representative in the Colombian National Assembly. "The problem is that they never resort to legal methods. They always look for dark forces to accomplish their purposes. In the northern part of Uraba are four towns, all of them controlled by the Liberal Party. It isn't possible for our organizers to carry out activities in that region, because paramilitary groups walk freely on the streets, and we know for a certainty that many of those paramilitary groups are people who belong to the armed forces. Our friends in those towns advise us not to visit."
"Paramilitary groups" are a new phenomenon in Colombia, widely understood to operate under the direction of the Colombian military. They function as covert death squads, enabling the army to carry out assassinations while disavowing responsibility. Their activities have been extensively documented by Justicia y Paz (Justice and Peace), a Colombian human rights commission comprising 55 religious congregations. Justicia y Paz researcher (let's call him) Arnoldo Hernandez believes that Colombia's paramilitary groups are a "pilot project in counter-insurgency" which military forces are planning to extend to other parts of Latin America.
Paramilitary groups are an innovation. In addition to carrying out assassinations, they establish themselves as a permanent presence in the communities where they operate by building cooperative links with targeted social and economic groups. "The nature of the paramilitary phenomenon varies in different regions of the country," Hernandez says. "In the Meta region in the eastern plains, paramilitaries works in cooperation with emerald dealers, the military, and the secret police.
In another region, drug dealers, cattlemen and the military are involved. In the Cauca Valley, drug dealers participated with the military in the assassination of a Catholic priest. They use very savage methods, such as cutting off people' s arms and legs with chainsaws."
The army's methodology for setting up paramilitary groups is to first conduct a census of the area. Approximately 15 days later they call a meeting, and the coordinator of the paramilitary group comes, wearing a uniform, and invites people to join. Even people who do not join are expected to pay "taxes." People who don't pay are killed. In some cases, people who resist participating in the paramilitary receive an ultimatum in which they are given a certain amount of time, after which they have to leave the area or die.
Officially, the Colombian government claims that there are no paramilitary groups or that they are groups organized by peasants for "self-defense" against the guerrillas. In fact, Hernandez says, "These civilian paramilitary groups have very close relationships with the hierarchy of the military. How do we know this? Because they already have the census of the population. They know who goes out, who travels. There have been cases when they stop people at a checkpoint and ask for a specific person who rides on the bus. They have a tremendous system of information. In their recruiting meetings, paramilitaries always say they are working with the permission and authorization of the army. Paramilitaries who have left and refused to be part of it and denounced it publicly have indicated places and dates for meetings of the armed forces with them."
The paramilitary strategy has been chillingly effective: "In Meta almost all of the members of the Union Patriotica have been killed. The same thing is happening in the entire country, even in Uraba. Especially right now in the plains, the people who are being disappeared and tortured are the people of the Union Patriotica. To become a target, they don't necessarily even have to belong to the Union Patriotica, just to be related somehow. The Patriotic Union used to have 12 mayors in Uraba, and now there are only two, and the few that are left are being eliminated."
In addition to direct political violence, Hernandez said that paramilitary groups engage in so called "social cleansing," in which they go out and take people that they consider disposable people, like beggars, prostitutes, street children and homosexuals, and kill them, because they consider them human garbage.... There are many ways of killing a person without leaving traces. According to journalists who work in Bogota, for example, they kill homeless street boys by throwing gasoline on them and setting them on fire. The only thing left is ashes, and you don't even know that it happened."
The Real Stake
If your conception of Latin America is based on images of poor Central American countries like Nicaragua or El Salvador, Colombia would surprise you. By comparison, Colombia is an immensely rich nation. During a recent visit to Bogota, I visited a shopping mall and stopped in a jewelry store where the cheapest item on sale was a thousand-dollar fountain pen. In addition to bananas and coffee, the country exports coal, sugar and flowers. Also, the largest known oil reserves in the Western hemisphere were recently discovered in Colombia. Cocaine, of course, is another important source of national income, although coca is mostly grown in Peru and Bolivia where the soil is better suited to its production.
Colombia's role in the cocaine trade consists of processing the coca leaves into powder and transporting it to the United States. For this purpose, Colombia's role as a marketing and distribution center derives from the fact that it has borders along both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, which provide disembarkment points for shipments to both the east and west coasts of the United States.
Measured in dollar terms, therefore, the stakes for U.S. policy in Colombia are substantial, for traditional business interests as well as for the more enterprising venture capitalists who participate in the drug trade. This fact was noted by Clinton during his welcoming address to the Colombian ambassador, in which he praised the Colombian government's free-market "economic liberalization" policies and "efforts to promote economic integration" which "mirror our own efforts to enact the North American Free Trade Agreement" (NAFTA).
Clinton added that U.S. businesses "are eager to explore new opportunities for trade and investment, especially in sectors which make Colombia such an exciting prospect now: petroleum, with the major discovery in your eastern plains; power, with new legislation which opens investment in electricity generation to the private sector; and transportation and telecommunications, with the aggressive privatization programs you have undertaken."
Telecom, Colombia's state-owned telephone company, is a case in point, illustrating the nexus between corporate interests in "aggressive privatization," the drug war, and a pattern of behavior that human rights organizations are describing as the Colombian government's policy of "criminalizing social protests."
Upon assuming office, Colombian President Cesar Gaviria began to undertake changes aimed at privatizing the telephone system and seeking foreign investment. According to Carlos Cely Maestre, a representative of the Telecom workers' union, Gaviria's policy was aimed at "selling off Telecom in pieces to the highest bidder. Even before they presented this proposal to the public in Colombia, the government had advertised it in Time magazine in the United States, where in a discreet way they offered Telecom for sale. The proper way to consider this sort of proposal is to first discuss it in Congress in a democratic way. But we are used to seeing things like this, where before discussing things publicly the government has lots of breakfasts at the palace, and they make deals with political groups so they vote in their favor."
In addition to concern for their jobs, the union felt that piecemeal privatization would undermine the quality of phone service in rural areas of the country, since foreign companies would purchase the system's profit centers (such as international calls), which presently subsidize rural services. The unprofitable components of the phone system would be left to fend for themselves and phone service would degrade.
After a series of fruitless meetings with government representatives, the union carried out a work stoppage on April 22, 1992. According to Cely, the army responded by "expelling the workers from the building in a very violent way. They broke doors and windows, and everybody was pushed out into the street. The high officers of Telecom and the government tried to break the workers' movement by calling technicians from foreign companies to replace the Telecom workers, but the foreign workers were unable to maintain the communication system."
For a period of one week, Colombia's entire phone system was out of service. Finally, the government signed an agreement with the union in which they publicly promised not to sell the phone system. The workers returned and brought the system back online. Within Colombia, however, the disruption of phone services created a major scandal and a source of embarrassment to the Gaviria government, which responded by filing legal charges accusing the workers of sabotage.
"A special prosecutor was appointed who said that the case of Telecom was terrorism, and that in these modern times interfering with the communication of information is even more serious than using explosive or violent methods," Cely said. "The workers were accused of `sophisticating' the communication system by making it so sophisticated that other people couldn't figure it out, and it was argued that this act of `sophistication' in itself constituted terrorism."
The Real Terrorists
During my visit to Colombia I stopped at the U.S. Embassy for an interview with Karen Gallegos, the U.S. official in charge of human rights. At the time of the interview, she was one week away from her rotation back to the States and openly eager to return home, expressing a particular nostalgia for "shopping at WalMart."
With regard to Colombia' s human rights situation, Gallegos described her work as "very tense." "On one level it's very interesting. There have been some very positive changes. President Gaviria has really institutionalized his emphasis on human rights. We're seeing military people fired or at least suspended. It has been fascinating for me because of the access I've had to the Colombian people."
Gallegos admitted, however, that her access to the Colombian people has been limited by embassy security regulations which forbid her from traveling beyond the embassy compound and other designated "safe" areas. "I really haven't had the chance to get out of Bogota to look at these problems," she said. "What I've tried to do is cultivate contacts by phone. Also, I read the newspapers and reports from human rights organizations, and I just get a feeling for what is happening in the country."
Gallegos characterized the Colombian government as caught in the middle between drug traffickers, guerrillas, terrorists, and over-zealous military officers who commit unauthorized abuses. An attorney by training, she said that her work on human rights has focused particularly on "judicial reform," including a U.S.- funded program known in Colombia as the system of "faceless justice," aimed at protecting Colombia's judicial system from intimidation by "narcoterrorists."
"There is such a level of endemic violence in Colombia that the judges come under threat of assassination, and in order to perform their job, they have to be protected," Gallegos said. U.S. support for this protection includes $36 million provided through the U.S. Agency for International Development to purchase bullet-proof cars, radio systems, bodyguards, and, most importantly, from the point of view of the workers at Telecom, a high-tech system for disguising the identity of judicial system employees from defendants accused of terrorism.
Under the system of faceless justice, a judge who tries a case involving terrorism or drug trafficking is kept hidden behind a partition that renders him invisible to defendants and their attorneys. Special electronic equipment is used to disguise the judge's voice. Prosecuting attorneys and witnesses may also have their identities kept secret, and defendants are even denied access to information about the legal process and the evidence that has been brought against them.
Following the death of Pablo Escobar in December of 1993, 60 Minutes ran a segment extolling the bravery of the Colombian judges who serve on the faceless courts. Cecilia Zarate, a Colombian woman active with human rights groups in the United States, had a different opinion: "What they've done is bring back the court system that existed under the Spanish Inquisition," she said. "This is really scary. Within the Spanish culture, people have a vivid historical memory of the killings, tortures and injustices that went on during the Inquisition. It's horrible that they should be bringing this back, really horrible."
The Center for Investigation and Popular Education (CINEP), a highly respected Jesuit organization which studies social, economic, political and human rights conditions, has conducted a study of the system of "faceless justice." The study shows that of the 618 persons detained to be prosecuted during the first six months of 1992, 584 of them, that is, 94 percent, were persons engaged in social protests or civic organizing, while only 6 percent consist of drug-trafficking or guerrilla cases.
"Faceless justice," in fact, was the system under which Telecom's union leaders were arrested and brought to trial on charges of terrorism. On February 23, 1993 - six months after the work stoppage, the government arrested 13 workers who until that time had continued to work for the phone company. The government used what Cely described as "big military operations with 20 and more men armed with machine guns coming to their homes in front of their wives and children.
One man was arrested in the school where he was picking up his children, in front of the children. Anibal Henriquez was another of the men arrested. They searched his house and took him out. He was with his two children because his wife was in the hospital. He begged the authorities to leave him with the children so he wouldn't have to leave them alone, and promised to voluntarily give himself up, but they took him anyway by force."
Inside Colombia, it was difficult to find anyone involved in human rights work willing to defend the government's handling of the Telecom workers. The Colombian government's own human rights ombudsman, a man named Mario Madrid-Malo Garizabal, said the system of faceless justice puts "human rights, and moreover, due process, at risk." He stated that the work stoppage carried out by the union might have been an "illegal work suspension" which "may result in sanctions such as fines," but it was "not a criminal matter" and definitely not terrorism. He also said that he did not believe the government's claim that workers sabotaged equipment, and that his office has been denied access to information about the case, in violation of the Colombian constitution.
I interviewed Carlos Vicente de Roux, President Gaviria's own Counselor for Human Rights. When asked about the Telecom case, he said it was a "very delicate matter for me" which he would rather not discuss specifically, but added that as a general principle, he did not think work stoppages and damage of equipment should be defined as terrorism. "Leaving the country completely incommunicado - just think of what it means for the economic state of the country. I don't know whether these people in prison actually damaged the equipment, but if they did, I think it's a crime. What I don't believe is that it's terrorism."
In fact, Karen Gallegos at the U.S. embassy was the only "human rights advocate" I encountered in Colombia who failed to criticize the government's handling of the Telecom case. She would only say that the U.S. was "concerned" about the case and "watching to see what happens." Asked if she thought a trial of union leaders went beyond the "faceless justice" program's stated objective of countering "narcoterrorism," she answered, "Look, the phone system in this entire country was out of commission for one week."
I pointed out that some of the workers facing trial have worked for the phone company for decades. "They have no history of violent behavior, even if the claim that they sabotaged equipment is proven true. Do you really believe that they pose a threat to the life of the judge trying their case?"
Gallegos answered, "There's really no telling."
From the point of view of the Colombian government, meanwhile, there was "really no telling" who was responsible for the death of Telecom union member Jose Joaquin Caicedo Angulo. He had worked for Telecom for 20 years, rising to the position of chief of maintenance operations. In May 1993, he was strangled, gasoline was poured on his body, and he was set on fire. The government's investigation into his death concluded that he had committed suicide. Later that year, a car bomb claimed the life of another Telecom worker, a technician named Gonzalo Garcia. The government listed his murder as "unsolved."
"These official `explanations' serve two functions," says Jack Laun, a Wisconsin attorney who has been active for many years in Colombian human rights networks. "Before the international community, they enable the Colombian government to represent itself as innocent of crimes committed by its agents. To the victims of those crimes, on the other hand, they send a very different message. Obviously, nobody who knows how Jose Joaquin Caicedo died really believes that he committed suicide. By saying that he did, the government is announcing to the workers of Telecom, `We can kill you with impunity, and whatever we say about it afterwards will be believed'."
Several groups are working in the United States to raise awareness about human rights conditions in Colombia. For additional information or to become involved, contact the Colombia Support Network, PO Box 1505, Madison, WI 53701; phone (608) 255-6554; fax (608) 255-6621.