Author: Steve Silver | Date: March 2001
Terror in Colombia - Paramilitary violence escalates
Far-right death squad paramilitaries executed 35 people in an appalling massacre in a small Colombian farming community in January. Many of the victims of the slaughter, in the northern department of Sucre, were struck with machetes and tortured before being murdered. Six other people were forced to go with the paramilitaries and “disappeared” from the town of Chengue in Ovejas.
A hundred death squad members participated in the carnage, which took place in the early hours of 17 January. The victims, nearly half of whom were over 60 years old, were accused of supporting left-wing guerrillas. During the attack most of the houses in the small village were burnt to the ground and at one point the inhabitants were forced to stand in the park and watch as the death squads hacked 23 men and two children to death with machetes. Within a few hours there was an exodus from the town, with 1,200 of the 1,300 residents leaving.
Around two million people have been displaced as a result of violence at the hands of far-right death squads and the failure of the Colombian authorities to protect the population. As many as 170 unarmed people were killed in 26 massacres in January alone, according to a report by the United Nations, which called the escalation of violence an “alarming degradation” in Colombia’s 37-year conflict. Death squads attack and intimidate communities in the countryside in areas where Marxist guerrillas are active in a bid physically to clear the areas or “drain the sea” and prepare the ground for the army to drive out the guerrillas themselves.
Trade unionists and human rights activists murdered
In Colombia simply being an active trade unionist leaves one open to being singled out for murder. Elsa Clarena Guerrero and Carolina Santiago Navarro were murdered in January after they were stopped at an army road block in northern Colombia. The two members of the FECODE teachers’ union were on the road between Ocana and Convencion in the province of Norte de Santander; the army refuses to reveal which unit was on duty there that day. Last year 121 trade unionists were murdered and many others “disappeared”.
Human rights activists too are in mortal danger in Colombia. Several international bodies have criticised the Colombian government for having, with little doubt, the worst human rights record in the western hemisphere. Amnesty International called on the government to take “robust action” after Angel Quintero and Claudia Patricia Monsalve “disappeared” in the province of Medellín, Antioquia, on 6 October last year, barely a month after Amnesty had denounced death threats against them. Eyewitnesses said that the human rights activists were abducted by two gunmen on a motorcycle and a group of men in a pick-up truck. Both were members of the Asociación de Familiares de Detenidos Desaparecidos (ASFADDES) – Association of Relatives of the Detained “Disappeared” – a national organisation of people who try to discover the fate and whereabouts of their loved ones and ensure that those responsible are brought to justice.
Quintero had faced continual threats as a result of his work with ASFADDES on the “disappearances” of members of his wife’s family. Monsalve had been working with ASFADDES to find out what happened to her brother, a university student who “disappeared” in 1995. Since the abduction of Quintero and Monsalve, other members of ASFADDES have been the victims of a widespread campaign of intimidation.
Only last month right-wing paramilitaries threatened members of the Peace Brigades International (PBI). The PBI is an international human rights organisation that includes European, Canadian and Australian volunteers. Two gunmen burst into the Barrancabermeja offices of the Popular Women’s Organisation (OFP), a local women’s group, during a peace demonstration, identifying themselves as from the United Self-Defence Forces of Colombia (AUC). They confiscated mobile phones and a passport belonging to a Swedish PBI volunteer and told an international observer that the PBI was now a “military target”. The PBI has been operating in Barrancabermeja since 1994 when the Colombian government invited it to maintain a team of international observers in the area. Barrancabermeja is one of the main cities in which paramilitaries are active.
The incident involving the PBI came in the wake of an article in the February 2001 edition of the Colombian magazine Aeronautica, by the head of the Colombian Air Force, General Hector Fabio Velasco Chavez, which maintained that unnamed non-governmental organisations had been infiltrated by “militants”. Other senior members of the armed forces have gone on record saying similar things in the past in order to try to discredit human rights organisations.
Also last month a far-right death squad killed Ivan Villamizar, a former regional ombudsman in the north of the country. Villamizar, who worked as a government-appointed ombudsman in Norte de Santander between 1996 and 1999, was murdered in Cucuta, a city near the Venezuelan border.
These are just some examples of the latest attacks on trade unionists, human rights activists, priests, journalists, environmentalists – progressives in every shape and form – who are murdered or “disappeared” in their thousands every year by a triumvirate of far-right death squads, the military and the police.
The United Self Defence Forces of Colombia (AUC)
The largest of the far-right paramilitary organisations in Colombia is the AUC, which is a national network comprising 8,000 people. Its support by sections of the military is well known. Last month saw the first conviction of Colombian soldiers for allowing the AUC to carry out massacres. A military tribunal sentenced former General Jaime Uscategui and Colonel Jorge Orozco to three years’ imprisonment for permitting attacks by an AUC group that culminated in the massacre of 30 people in May 1997. Paramilitaries killed the peasants in the jungle village of Mapiripan, decapitating most victims with machetes and setting their bodies on fire. While the slaughter proceeded, a town judge made repeated phone calls and sent written messages to military and other authorities asking for help. The pleas were ignored and the judge later fled Colombia out of fear for his life.
The AUC is believed to be responsible for some 80% of the human rights violations committed against civilians each year in Colombia. The AUC’s commander, Carlos Castano, has publicly admitted that he was behind various high profile assassinations in Colombia in recent years. In spite of the numerous atrocities carried out under his command, Castano has been allowed to enter the United States. His two children attend private schools in London.
Cleaning up “drugs” with a US-backed dirty war against the left
The Colombian government is a close ally of the United States. The US has ploughed around $1.3 billion (£900 million) into Colombia in military aid to the Bogota government and there is more to come. Some 80 per cent of these funds will come in the form of 60 helicopters to help the Colombian military hunt down drugs “traffickers”. Amnesty says that the low-level air war, which is carried out with training and planning in the US, stems from the “same policy that backed death squads in El Salvador in the 1980s”.
In order to justify the war against the left, the Colombian government and the US are portraying military action as a war on drugs in spite of the fact that the far-right AUC and other paramilitaries are themselves funded by drugs money. As Peter Dale Scott pointed out in his book, Cocaine Politics, “corrupt Latin American politicians helped to invent the spectre of the drug-financed narco-guerilla, a myth”. He also cites a US military official who said that the way to counter “those church and academic groups that have slavishly supported the insurgency in Latin America” is to put them “on the wrong side of the moral issue”.
The US-financed “drugs war” is part of a wider government economic initiative known as “Plan Colombia”, which is opposed by nearly every trade union, human rights group and other non-governmental organisations in the country. Colombia’s neighbours and the European Union also oppose it. At the beginning of last month the European Parliament voted 474 to 1 against “Plan Colombia” after President Andres Pastrana asked for 750 million euros to back the plan.
Colombian military officials both are trained and give training in the US in the “art” of crushing left-wing insurgents. Many of these people are associated with the death squads. Some have even served at the Colombian Embassy in Washington DC. One example out of many is former Major-General Harold Bedoya Pizarro, who was chief defence attaché at the embassy in the mid-1990s. He was forced to resign “for reasons of state” after refusing to stand down as head of the Colombian armed forces in 1997.
Bedoya is believed to be a founder of the Colombian section of the far-right death squad American Anti-Communist Alliance (AAA). Before working at the embassy he was a military intelligence student in the US and a guest instructor at Fort Benning in Georgia. (Fort Benning absorbed the School of the Americas, which was previously based in Panama and of which Bedoya is a graduate.) The independent North American Congress on Latin America said in a recent report: “Throughout Bedoya’s entire career he has been implicated with the sponsorship and organisation of a network of paramilitary organisations. Bedoya has never undergone any investigation for his involvement in the massacres of civilians or other ‘dirty war’ crimes.”
In his capacity as president of the Fuerza Colombia Movement and as a former head of the Colombian armed forces, Bedoya endorsed the presidential candidature of the US fascist Lyndon LaRouche last year. Just as Bedoya defends the drugs-funded right-wing death squads in the supposed war against drugs, LaRouche also takes an anti-drugs stance that has been exposed as a sham. He and his followers are alleged to have courted links with individuals close to cocaine and heroin trafficking.
Bedoya’s letter of support for LaRouche’s candidature showed how close they were politically, containing, as it did, typical coded antisemitism: “Your promethean efforts to alter the mistaken course of economic, financial and cultural policy of the United States, have made you a target of the powerful interests of usury which control Wall Street, as well as of the big media. It’s no accident that Richard Grasso, president of the New York Stock Exchange, is leading the absurd process of legitimizing the narco-terrorist gangs which assail Colombia. What do these bankrupt international financiers seek? Leveraging the speculative bubble with funds from the cocaine and poppy [trade]? Installing as Colombia’s official government a merciless gang of terrorist psychopaths, dedicated to drug-trafficking and kidnapping?”
Bedoya is himself a former presidential candidate for the Fuerza Colombia Movement. The Colombian people showed what they thought of him when they gave him the lowest vote for a presidential candidate in the 1998 Colombian election, with a paltry 1.9%.
The solution to the conflict will be political, not military
The largest of the left-wing guerrilla groups that the US wants to help crush is the 17,000-strong Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). The Marxist guerrillas control a 66,000 sq km demilitarised zone in the south of the country that was ceded to them by the government. Last month President Pastrana, flew into this zone – which is the size of Switzerland – for talks with Manuel “Sureshot” Marulanda, the FARC commander. Earlier talks had collapsed in November last year resulting in a threat that the military would re-enter the area last month as the period for the zone’s existence came to an end. The resumption of talks has extended the lifespan of the demilitarised zone until October, after which Pastrana could order the military to re-enter the area if the talks do not produce long-term progress. This would mean the return of death squads to the only area of Colombia that has been free of paramilitaries for the past two years. After prisoner exchanges, one of the key demands of the FARC is that the government take decisive and visible action against the far-right paramilitaries.
Moves to set up a demilitarised zone for the smaller National Liberation Army (ELN) have been met with fierce opposition from the AUC. Last month members of cattle ranchers’ associations who support the AUC blocked a main road in protest at government plans to cede territory to the ELN for peace talks. The blockade of the main link road between Bogota and the Caribbean coast strangled the delivery of goods. Last year, weeks of blockades in the southern Bolivar state forced the government to backtrack on a proposal to grant the ELN an even bigger piece of territory.
An end to the violence in Colombia can only come about through a political, not a military, solution. Justice for the Colombian people lies in a root and branch clean-up of the military and the disentanglement of the US, the Colombian military and the far-right paramilitaries. When that time comes the displaced will begin to return, the relatives of the “disappeared” will find out the truth about what happened and the killers will finally be made to account for their crimes.
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© Searchlight Magazine 2001
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