Colombian communists are victims of an ongoing attack
The current situation for
the surviving members of the Patriotic Union and the Communist Party in
Colombia, as well as their relatives, sympathisers or friends, is one of the
worst ever examples of political persecution by forces of the far right.
08.11.2002 (By the Colombian Communist Party) Between 1 March and 20 September 2001, more than 20 people belonging to the Patriotic Union/Communist Party were assassinated, more than 9 were massacred in two paramilitary incursions and two were disappeared.
Furthermore, 45
received death threats, there were four attempted assassinations, three were
forced into exile and more than 250 families were internally displaced, forced
to abandon their homes, their land and their work because of the threats and
intimidation on the part of paramilitaries and, in many cases, State forces,
even thought they fruitlessly sought guarantees from the latter for the
protection of their rights, as well as humanitarian assistance.
From March 2001 to
the present day, the number of victims of forced displacement has been
increasing at an horrific rate because of an escalation of paramilitary action
in different regions of the country. A disproportionate number of these victims
have been members of the Patriotic Union/Communist Party.
The human rights
crisis in Colombia, already critical before, has exceeded the bounds of human
comprehension.
Today, thousands of
members of the Patriotic Union/Communist Party, victims of persecution and
genocide for 18 years, not only have to live each day with the anxiety that at
any moment a hitman’s bullets are going to end their lives, but also have to
live in the knowledge that they are considered pariahs of society for the simple
fact that they are displaced and forced into the position of having to beg for
humanitarian assistance, for their lives to be protected, for their abused human
rights to be guaranteed and for conditions to be established for them to return
to their places of origin or to resettle somewhere else in a safe and dignified
way.
Members of the
Patriotic Union/Communist Party have had to leave various parts of the country,
abandoning absolutely everything they own, including loved ones, personal
belongings and culture, and have had to suffer terrible humiliations in their
dealings with the various State bodies that are dutibound to ensure they have
access to the help and protection the Law says they are entitled to. They are
obliged to join long queues and endure endless complex procedures just to try
and achieve the most basic conditions for survival in their strange
environment.
Moreover, in some
cases, such as the one that took place on 9 June 2001, in a district of Bogota,
more than 300 displaced families, the majority Patriotic Union/Communist Party
from different parts of the country, were victims of a sudden storm of violence
by the metropolitan police and members of the civil defence force when they
forcibly evicted them from an area of waste ground where the displaced families
had set up camp a month before because the State had failed to provide them with
a dignified place to stay. As a result, 20 people were injured, including a
child who was shot in the face, one person was killed and a number of people
were detained on charges of terrorism and violent protest.
One of the factors
that has most contributed to the persecution of Patriotic Union/Communist Party
activists in recent years has been the implementation of Plan Colombia in our
country, especially in zones in which they have been carrying out fumigations
against alleged illicit cultivations. In the departments of Narino, Putumayo,
Caqueta, Cauca, South Bolivar, Magdalena, as well as the Sierra Nevada de Santa
Maria and the Valle del Rio Cimitarra, Magdalena Medio, it works like this: the
people oppose the fumigations and even present alternative plans for manual
eradication of illicit crops, but the fumigations and military operations go
ahead regardless and in their wake comes paramilitary terror.
On 5 August 2001,
20 municipalities in the department of Narino were fumigated by aeroplanes and
helicopter gunships, supposedly to eradicate illicit crops, but in reality they
destroyed the subsistence crops of the campesinos such as potatoes, broad beans,
sugar cane, cabbage, maize and cereals. The fumigations took place against the
background of a heavy militarisation, and in this case, as in almost every
other, after they had taken place, the paramilitaries appeared to further
terrorise the people.
Almost exactly the
same thing happened in Valle del Rio Cimitarra in February, and again in August.
The fumigation of 30 regions of a number of different municipalities as part of
the army’s ‘Operation Bolivar’ left more than 870 hectares of subsistence crops
destroyed in February and rendered useless more than 1,800 hectares of
subsistence land in August.
Another factor that
has aggravated the persecution against Patriotic Union/Communist Party members
throughout the country has been the introduction of Law 81, of the Law for
Defence and National Security, also known as the Antiterrorist Statute which
gives a blank cheque to the army to use all available resources to escalate the
armed conflict in the country in direct opposition to the promises of the
current government to the international community and the efforts being made to
advance the peace process, so extolled by former President Pastrana as his
government’s flagship.
This statute worsens the human rights crisis in the country because it gives the military the power to act as judicial police without the presence of officials from the attorney general’s office. It violates the principle of habeas habeas which is rendered practically obsolete for periods of detention of 36 hours.
It also takes away
the administrative and budgetary autonomy of municipal and departmental
officials who have to answer to military commanders in those areas denominated
‘theatres of operation’, as well as restricting the freedom of movement of
citizens and criminalising social, popular, trade union and political protest,
especially in those regions with the highest level of guerrilla
presence.
In this way,
regions that historically attracted the most popular support for both the
Patriotic Union and the Colombian Communist Party, or where the Revolutionary
Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) or the People’s Liberation Army (ELN) are
present, or simply regions that are immensely rich in natural resources such as
water, minerals and oil, are not only under the watchful eye of the Colombian
military, but also of paramilitary groups that are paid by wealthy farmers,
landowners and far-right politicians.
In May 2001, there
was a shocking attempt to blow up the offices of the weekly Communist Party
newspaper, Voz, using an MK-82 torpedo built in North America for purely
military purposes. Fortunately the device was discovered before it could be
activated. The device contained 250 kg (500 LB) of TNT and was hidden under
fruit and vegetables in the back of a red Chevrolet truck, registration CIB-249.
Had it exploded it would have destroyed buildings radiating out from Voz’s
offices for up to three blocks.
The planting of
this bomb was disturbing not only because it was aimed at a leftist publication
belonging to the Patriotic Union/Communist Party, a group that has been
persecuted for more than 18 years, but also because it was an attack on freedom
of _expression_ in our country.
(Translated by the Colombia Peace
Association)
Army detains leaders of the Farm Workers Union
"They arrived in a red
truck and, without an arrest warrant , and without saying anything, they grabbed
him violently and made him get into the truck..."
04.11.2002 (By FENSUAGRO) ANNCOL is pleased to provide our readers with an English translation of the latest communiqué from the Colombian Agricultural and Farm Wrkers' Union FENSUAGRO:
***
ARMY DETAINING,
DISAPPEARING AND THREATENING LEADERS OF THE AGRICULTURAL AND
FARM WORKERS
UNION, FENSUAGRO
We are
denouncing the violations of human rights being perpetrated against comrades
affiliated to Fensuagro:
1. The detention of comrade TELBERTO GONZALEZ, President of the Sucre departmental trade union SINDAGRICULTORES, by six soldiers of the Bafin de Corosal battalion on 30 October 2002.
They arrived in a red truck and, without an arrest warrant , and without saying anything, they grabbed him violently and made him get into the truck. Straight away, the family tried to find out where they had taken him, but it took four hours for them to admit that they were holding him there at the battalion and this was only because his wife insisted that they were the ones who had taken him.
To date they
have held him completely incommunicado. They told his wife they were going to
investigate him and that if he turned out to be innocent they would release him
and if not they would not. We do not know how they can say this when he is just
a campesino and on the union executive.
2. On 20
September they raided his house.
3. They have also been detaining campesino comrades in the municipalities of Chalan, Coloso and Ovejas.
Taking into
account that the places in which the comrades were detained have been declared
rehabilitation and consolidation zones by the government in the context of its
state of emergency, we are shown once again the clear and open intention to
annihilate social and popular organisations. We are extremely worried about the
things that have been happening recently to our members.
For example,
there was the disappearance of our comrade, Victor Manuel Jimenez Fruto, on 22
October, and to date the government has not responded to our call for an
investigation. Prior to this event, the Union and the Atlantic Branch of the CUT
had told the departmental authorities about the threats that Victor and another
groups of campesinos had been receiving.
There were also
threats issued by a section of the capital block of the paramilitaries on 22
October 2002 in which they declared Gerardo Gonzalez, Mario A Moreno, Carlos
Dimate, Antonio and Demetrio Gerrero, Marco Moreno and Diogenes Correa military
targets. They are all members of SINPEAGRICUN, a subsidiary of FENSUAGRO.
Comrade
Cristobal Guamanga, President of SINPEAGRIC in Cauca department, has also
received death threats from individuals who move about on motorbikes.
We call for
accompaniment and the solidarity of members of the national and international
community who should express their condemnation of these actions to the
Colombian state. We demand respect and security for our organisation, that the
violations our our rights be made known, and that full respect be given to our
right to free association which has been so violated by the state.
National
Agricultural and Farm Workers Union (FENSUAGRO)
1 November 2002, Bogota
Pentagon sends
combat troops to Colombia
The U.S. administration has dropped any pretense of fighting a "drug war" in Colombia. Now the U.S. troops are on the battlefield fighting the Marxist insurgencies
31.10.2002 (By Andy McInerney, Workers World) Before the Clinton administration launched "Plan Colombia," a $1.3 billion military aid package to Colombia, the U.S. government admitted to having around 200 troops--Special Forces "advisers"--in that South American country. Today, according to an Oct. 12 in the British newspaper The Daily Telegraph, that number has doubled.
Now, with the Bush
administration dropping any pretense of fighting a "drug war," these troops are
on the battlefield. The Telegraph reported that Special Forces began operations
in Arauca, an oil-rich state on the Venezuelan border, in early October.
Their mission is "training local soldiers in helicopter-born operations, night
fighting and intelligence operations."
Congress approved
this overt military intervention in July as part of the $29 billion
"Anti-Terrorism" package. The appropriation included $35 million in new military
aid to
Colombia. Of that, $6 million is specifically aimed at protecting oil
pipelines for U.S.-owned oil conglomerates like Occidental Petroleum.
According to an
report in the New York Times headlined "America's For-Profit Secret Army," an
unspecified number of U.S. mercenaries hired by the Pentagon and by oil
companies
are also operating in Colombia. The oil pipelines are frequent
targets for attack by Colombia's two largest revolutionary armed insurgencies,
the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia-People's Army (FARC- EP) and the
National Liberation Army (ELN). Arauca, where
the Special Forces are
beginning their training, is a traditional stronghold of the ELN.
The right-wing
president of Colombia, Alvaro Uribe, declared Arauca a "Zone of Rehabilitation
and Consolidation." This elaborate title means that the Colombian military has
declared martial law: Peasant and union leaders can be arrested without warrant
or formal charges, and curfews can be declared at will.
The military head
of the zone is Brig. Gen. Carlos Lemus Pedraza. Human-rights groups charge he
has close ties to the right-wing death squads working with the army in the
region.
Since Uribe's election, fighting between the U.S.-backed Colombian
military and paramilitary death squads, on the one hand, and the Marxist
insurgencies on the other has intensified. Street battles have taken place
repeatedly in poor and working-class neighborhoods in Medellin, Colombia's
third-biggest city.
In September, just
six weeks after Uribe's inauguration, millions of workers, peasants and students
marched in a nationwide mobilization against the government's economic policies.
So the open U.S.
military intervention is taking place at the same time that the class
struggle--in both its armed and its mass forms--is intensifying in Colombia.
This raises the
prospect of the confrontation spilling over the narrow
bounds that the Pentagon is trying to delineate. Will the U.S. government be
able to fight a growing popular insurgency in Colombia at the same time as a
massive military adventure in the Middle East?
Street fighting turns into urban warfare
Street battles in
Medellín’s poor neighborhoods have recently developed into some of the worst
urban fighting seen in Colombia's mostly rural civil war.
01.11.2002
(ANNCOL) Earlier this month extremist President Alvaro Uribe gave troops
order to launch an all-out attack on the Medellín slums where left-wing
guerrilla groups enjoy broad support.
Throughout the
month of October the Colombian Army repeatedly carried out attacks with ground
troops, tanks and helicopter gunships coordinated with allied paramilitary death
squads.
Especially the
Comuna 13 area has been targeted. Scores of inhabitants have been killed and the
local human rights group CODEHSEL reports that in only six days more than two
hundred inhabitants have been arrested by the security forces. According to
CODEHSEL many of the detained persons have been beaten and tortured.
October 28, 2002
Comuna 13: Colombia’s Urban Battleground
By now the scene is familiar. In the early morning hours of May 21, 2002, some 700 troops backed by tanks moved in while neighborhood militias attempted to impede the advance with machine guns. Blackhawk helicopters rained down bullets indiscriminately on targeted neighborhoods; house-to-house searches that gave way to looting were conducted with no warrant and announced with bullets through front doors; young men were dragged into the streets, bound, beaten and/or killed with children looking on. Heroic neighborhood residents tried to rescue the injured and provide medical attention amidst a hail of bullets fired by agents of the state. People hung white sheets, towels, and shirts from their windows to express their desire for a cease-fire; children armed with sticks and stones confronted soldiers and police, demanding that they leave the neighborhood, shouting, “We want peace! We want peace!” The siege lasted more than twelve hours, and by the time it was finished, nine people including three children were dead, while 37 were injured and 55 detained.
This
did not happen in Nablus, Jenin, or Ramallah, but in Comuna 13—composed of 20
neighborhoods with an estimated 100,000 residents, many of whom are displaced
Afro-Colombian peasants with experience in community organizing—in the
central-western hills of Medellín, Colombia. Yet, unlike the situation in the
Middle East, there were no international observers demanding to enter the
cordoned-off area. Rather, community leaders noted “the apathy of official NGOs
and humanitarian organizations, both foreign and domestic, which have not
responded, as they should, to the gravity of the urban conflict. They are
absent.” Given the manner in which the state asserts itself in poor
neighborhoods on the city’s periphery, it is easy to sympathize with one
resident of Comuna 13, who said, “I didn’t lose any children or brothers or
friends, but I cried anyway. How do [the state authorities] expect us not to
hate them?”
Since the combined military/police incursion that began in the early morning hours of May 21, Comuna 13 has come under unrelenting paramilitary fire. And there have been many more police/military incursions, though until last week none of them had been as murderous as that of May 21. As of October 17, more than 450 people had died violently in Comuna 13 this year—six times the national homicide rate, which is already one of the highest in the world—and 500 families have been displaced in the last six months. Unlike the May 21 massacre committed by agents of the state, however, the paramilitary assaults on Comuna 13 do not make headlines. They are buried in the back pages of local newspapers—just as the strategists of low-intensity warfare intend. Only recently, as the urban conflict has escalated beyond previously imagined limits, has there been any semblance of public debate about the future of Comuna 13. For the most part, indifference and cynicism reign.
When the peace process between the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the Pastrana administration ended on February 20 of this year, many analysts predicted that the war would soon reach the cities where three-fourths of Colombians live. For the most part, with the exception of Barrancabermeja, that prediction has yet to be born out, though there are signs that the vast savannah in the southern part of Bogotá is also becoming more heavily militarized. In Medellín, however, the events of May 21 constitute the most visible evidence that a new chapter in a many-sided conflict between leftist guerrillas, the regional government, right-wing paramilitaries and street gangs has begun. Just as before, however, the majority of the victims in this conflict are young people, some of them combatants, but most of them civilians.
An official intelligence report estimates that the nation’s largest paramilitary organization, United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), currently control 70 percent of Medellín. All that remains to be conquered are the central-western slums (the exit to Urabá, where the FARC and the AUC have been fighting over important access routes to the Caribbean and the Panamanian frontier) and several neighborhoods in the central- and north-east (which give way to an important gold mining district controlled by the AUC). While the AUC has generated heated criticism for its massacres of peasants in the Antioquian countryside, a resounding silence surrounds the growth of paramilitarism in the city of Medellín itself. Some of the people displaced from Urabá by the state forces and paramilitaries during Uribe’s time as governor of Antioquia will be slated to disappear during his presidency. Uribe garnered 70 percent of the votes in Antioquia with the expectation that he will “pacify” the city of Medellín, as well as the rest of the country.
Comuna 13 was until recently firmly under the control of a pragmatic coalition of three insurgent guerrilla groups—the FARC, the National Liberation Army (ELN), and the Medellín-based People’s Armed Commandos (CAP). While relations between the FARC and the ELN, Colombia’s two largest insurgent groups, are, with some regional exceptions, chilly at best, in Comuna 13 the FARC, the ELN and the CAP have formed an alliance. For the three rebel groups, not to mention the residents of Comuna 13, the future looks bleak. After a police officer and three civilians, including nineteen year-old Laura Cecilia Betancur, died in Comuna 13 between October 13 and 14, President Uribe ordered “Operation Orion,” in which the supposed leader of the CAP, known as ‘Mazo,’ was killed in a combined military offensive that involved army, police, air force and special forces as well as members of the intelligence services.
A total of 1,000 troops participated in the first phase of the operation. Moving in with tanks and a Blackhawk helicopter with guns ablaze at 4am on October 15, it took the state forces less than two hours to reach the heart of Comuna 13. There they conducted house-to-house searches. By the time the first phase of the operation—which lasted for forty-one hours—had concluded on the afternoon of October 17, another 2,000 troops had cordoned off the area, and an army officer, two soldiers, a police officer, a civilian, and ten guerrillas were dead. More than forty civilians were injured and at least 176 suspected guerrilla fighters were detained. Given the scenarios described above, however, we should view official estimates with suspicion. We may never know how many really died, nor how many of them were guerrilla fighters and how many were adolescent civilians.
It is
worth noting that while paramilitaries control over 70 percent of Medellín,
there has been no official effort to root them out of their domains with
military repression, and not one paramilitary fighter has been killed in
“Operation Orion.” Comuna 13 was attacked again precisely because the
paramilitaries have not been able to gain control of it on their own, so to
speak, since the May 21 massacre. As such, “Operation Orion” is far from over.
Eighty percent of Comuna 13 is now under the direct control of 1,500 army
troops, who have continued to conduct house-to-house searches, rounding up
suspects while accompanied by informants dressed in ski masks and fatigues. In
response, the FARC dispatched approximately 250 fighters from its southern
stronghold of Caguán to Comuna 13 in order to prevent the military and/or
paramilitaries from gaining control of the strategic corridor leading north
toward Santa Fe de Antioquia and Urabá. Warfare has thus become part of the
fabric of daily life along the central-western as well as central and
northeastern outskirts of Medellín, and the authorities expect it will stay that
way. Colombia’s Minister of Defense, Martha Lucía Ramírez, has called Operation
Orion “permanent,” implying that a significant number of the occupying troops
will stay in Comuna 13 for the indefinite future.
General Mario Montoya, head of the army’s Fourth Brigade and leader of the scorched earth campaigns in Putumayo in 2000-2001, characterized the May 21 operation in Comuna 13 as an unqualified success: “We have obtained excellent results against the various bands of criminals that operate in the city. We will not stop.” For his part, General Leonardo Gallego, head of Medellín’s Metropolitan Police and another veteran of the Putumayo campaigns, denied charges of excesses in the May 21 operation, countering that it was the guerrillas who had committed excesses against the military and police. Referring to Comuna 13, Jorge Enrique Vélez, former municipal Secretary of Government in Medellín and currently the leading candidate for mayor, declared, “We need to have it as a zone of conflict, like Caguán or Sumapaz” (two of the FARC’s principal strongholds).
Not to be outdone, Medellín’s current mayor Luis Pérez announced that more operations—in the fashion of May 21 or Operation Orion, one supposes—will follow: “If we want a city in which there are no areas that are off-limits because of subversion, we will have to apply many violent actions.” Both Vélez and Pérez have called for an additional 2,000 police officers—who “can also be soldiers,” according to Pérez—as well as the creation of an Urban Mobile Brigade of the Army and the construction of military bases in central-western and northeastern Medellín. In short, Vélez and Pérez are looking to institutionalize on a municipal level key aspects of Operation Orion for the foreseeable future. In Pérez’s view, the poor, peripheral neighborhoods of Medellín that are beyond official control are “a cancer that we have to extirpate.”
Sadly, Operation Orion has proven to be another case of deaths foretold. Municipal Secretary of Government Jorge León Sánchez, debating the merits of a curfew for Comuna 13 with the city council, announced on October 12 that more military operations were on the way. “There is no turning back from a curfew and the installation of a military battalion in Comuna 13,” said Sánchez, “because the administration in Medellín is determined to recover the legitimate monopoly on arms.” As expected, on Friday October 18, mayor Luis Pérez announced that a curfew, the prohibition of alcohol sales and consumption, and a ban on the use of arms in Comuna 13 would go into effect over the weekend.
In response to the possibility of a curfew in Comuna 13, hundreds of people from NGOs and human rights organizations, led by the Popular Training Institute (IPC), bravely took to the streets to protest a week before Operation Orion unfolded. According to Fernando Quijano, director of the Colombian non-governmental organization CORPADES (Peace and Social Development Corporation), “The curfew is the first step in the conversion of Medellín into a ‘zone of rehabilitation’ and of military operations, which will only aggravate the conflict.” Presently, in accordance with President Uribe’s declaration of a “State of Internal Commotion,” nearly half of Colombia is so governed. We should not be surprised if Medellín becomes the first of many cities to suffer the same fate as the countryside, as Colombia becomes a country of displaced people with nowhere to run and nowhere to hide.
This article was excerpted from an INOTA special report titled, The Occupied Territories of Medellín.
Forrest Hylton is a freelance journalist based in South America. He has previously written for Against the Current, Left Turn, Asi es Bolivia, and the Colombian magazine Desde Abajo.
Colombian army lays siege to Medellín neighborhood
By Bill Vann
19 October 2002
Colombian assault troops and police backed by tanks and helicopter gunships laid siege Wednesday to an impoverished neighborhood in Medellín, the South American nation’s second largest city.
The operation, the biggest counterinsurgency campaign to be waged in a crowded urban area in recent years, was launched on the direct order of Colombia’s new right-wing president, Alvaro Uribe.
At least 14 people were killed in the first day of fighting, including a 16-year-old boy. Scores were wounded, most of them old people, women and children.
Medellín’s mayor, Luis Pérez, said Uribe had instructed the army to continue the operation until it secures full control of the district, known as Comuna 13, which is home to some 130,000 of Medellín’s 2.5 million people. General Mario Montoya, the army commander in the Medellín area, said that his forces intended to carry out house-to-house searches in a hunt for weapons.
The military assault was preceded by violent attacks by right-wing paramilitary units that work in close collaboration with the army. Both the military and the rightist paramilitaries are attempting to wrest control of the area from a militia known as the Armed Command of the People, which is affiliated to Colombia’s second-largest guerrilla movement, the National Liberation Army.
The Colombian office of the United Nations High Commissioner on Human Rights expressed its “deep concern” over the clashes.
Many residents of the neighborhood said that the army assault had forced them to take cover in their homes, preventing them from going to work, while some 6,000 students were kept out of schools and health clinics in the area were shut down. High-powered bullets in some cases found their victims after crashing through the windows and walls of homes.
Wounded civilians who streamed into the health clinic in the San Javier neighborhood recounted how a helicopter gunship flew over and began firing its machine-gun into the crowded residential area.
“We’re under fire from machine-guns,” one distraught woman told the local media. “The bullets come out of the helicopters and fall onto our roofs. It is terrifying. This is like Vietnam.”
This escalation of military repression coincides with a marked increase in the US intervention in Colombia’s 38-year-old civil war. Washington revealed earlier this month that US Army Special Forces units are being deployed in the country this month for the purpose of training a new Colombian special forces commando battalion dedicated to fighting the armed guerrilla organizations.
Last week, the Bush administration gave official authorization for the Colombian government to use military aid granted under Plan Colombia—whose ostensible purpose was to combat coca cultivation and the export of cocaine—for counterinsurgency operations against the guerrillas. This would include the use of US-supplied Black Hawk helicopters and other equipment.
Congress also recently authorized the Pentagon to begin training two Colombian army brigades that will be assigned permanently to protect the Cano-Limon pipeline, which carries oil that is being pumped out of fields in northern Colombia by Los Angeles-based Occidental Petroleum.
Special Forces units have begun arriving in the country to train the 5th and 18th Brigades of the Colombian Army to guard the pipeline. Both brigades have been charged by human rights groups with abuses against the civilian population and with working closely with the paramilitary death squads.
Colombia is one of Latin America’s poorest nations. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization issued a recent report indicating that fully 11 million Colombians, or approximately one in three, live in poverty. Even the government has recognized that the roots of the country’s endemic political violence is widespread misery and the vast gulf between rich and poor.
For US corporate interests, however, Colombia’s strategic importance is linked to oil. While the country’s known oil reserves amount to 2.6 billion barrels, only about 20 percent of its potential oil fields have been explored. Even now, Colombia is producing roughly the equivalent amount of petroleum that Kuwait supplied on the eve of the last Persian Gulf War. Together with neighboring Venezuela and Ecuador, it supplies the US market with more oil than all of the Persian Gulf producers combined.
Washington’s growing military role in Colombia is aimed essentially at assuring access to this oil, and repressing not only the armed guerrilla movements, but any popular opposition to US corporate domination of the country’s natural resources. Occidental Petroleum, Amoco, the ill-fated Enron Corporation—which owned Centragas, a 357-mile natural gas distribution system in northern Colombia—and several other energy firms have jointly lobbied Congress and the administration for increased military aid and involvement in Colombia.
Meanwhile, Amnesty International released a report based on its own investigations as well as those of the United Nations and the Organization of American States warning that President Uribe’s “security policies will only serve to entrench the cycle of violence affecting the whole of Colombia.”
The report noted that since 1985, more than 60,000 have been killed, four out of five of them civilians, and most of them victims of massacres by right-wing paramilitaries. Last year alone, more than 4,000 civilians were killed in political violence, the human rights group said, and the toll for 2002 is likely to be higher. Those displaced by the conflict, tortured or “disappeared” number in the hundreds of thousands.
Presenting the report at a Madrid press conference, Marcelo Pollack, an investigator for Amnesty International, said that evidence gathered by the human rights group as well as other agencies had demonstrated that “the link between the armed forces and the paramilitaries is an institutional relationship.”
The report states: “As the Colombian armed forces have faced mounting international condemnation for human rights violations in recent years they have resorted increasingly to the use of paramilitary auxiliaries to implement the ‘dirty war’ tactics. The security forces can no longer depend on traditional judicial mechanisms of impunity. International and national attention is increasingly focused on the urgent need to dismantle these mechanisms which have until now guaranteed that members of the armed forces would, in all but the most exceptional cases, escape investigation or appropriate sanction. To circumvent these pressures, those responsible for designing and implementing the ‘dirty war’ can continue their strategy without fear of prosecution by devolving these tasks to paramilitary forces.”
This report further exposes the fraud of legislation passed by the US Congress making the Colombian government’s observance of human rights standards a prerequisite for the release of military aid. The act demands effective action to sever ties between the Colombian army and the paramilitaries. Last month, the State Department once again “certified” Colombia’s compliance with the act, clearing the way for the release of another $70 million in training, arms and munitions Amnesty International also condemned the government’s attempt to create a network of civilian informers that would recruit up to one million Colombians to aid the military in counterinsurgency operations. The Army claims it has already signed up 40,000. This initiative, the human rights group warned, will “inevitably further fuel the spiral of political violence.” The creation of similar civilian units in the province of Antioquia, when Uribe was governor, gave rise to death squads that in many cases became the forerunners of the present paramilitary units.
The report provides a detailed account of the reign of terror implemented by the Colombian army and its paramilitary allies in San Vicente del Caguán, one of five municipalities that made up the demilitarized zone that was controlled by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC.
After talks between the government and the guerrillas were broken off last February, the town, which served as the guerrilla organization’s headquarters, was retaken by the military in an operation that included an aerial bombardment that inflicted heavy civilian casualties.
According to the human rights group, the military has branded the district’s civilian population as guerrilla collaborators, subjecting them to a relentless campaign of harassment. This has included the arbitrary searches of workers’ and peasants’ homes, accompanied by the destruction and theft of property and the burning of some residences. The military has also arrested many people without charges, refusing to inform relatives that they are under detention or why they have been taken.
Residents of the area also recounted incidents in which those detained have been physically tortured to force them to identify members of the FARC or their collaborators from photo albums carried by military interrogators. One young unemployed man told Amnesty International that soldiers had wrapped a wet towel around his head, blocking his nose and mouth, and then poured water on it, asphyxiating him. When he continued to deny that he was a guerrilla, they went on to other methods.
“So they burned me with a cigarette in the neck,” he said. “They asked me how long I had been with the guerrillas and I said I wasn’t a guerrilla, so they burned my arms and feet with the cigarette [...] They threw me to the ground and stamped on my face, feet and arms and began to cut my feet and stomach with a machete. They grabbed my testicles and placed the edge of the machete on them [...] I then felt a blow to my head and passed out.”
