Tuesday 13 January
2009, San José, Costa
Rica
COLOMBIA:
Secret Documents Show US
Aware of Army Killings
in 1990s
By Constanza Vieira
BOGOTA (IPS) -
Declassified U.S.
documents show that the
CIA and former U.S.
ambassadors were fully
aware, as far back as
1990, that the military
in Colombia -- the third
largest recipient of
U.S. aid after Israel
and Egypt -- were
committing extrajudicial
killings as part of
"death squad tactics."
They also knew that
senior Colombian
officers encouraged a
"body count" mentality
to demonstrate progress
in the fight against
left-wing guerrillas. In
an undetermined number
of cases, the bodies
presented as casualties
in the counterinsurgency
war were actually
civilians who had
nothing to do with the
country’s decades-old
armed conflict.
Since at least 1990,
U.S. diplomats were
reporting a connection
between the Colombian
security forces and
far-right drug-running
paramilitary groups,
according to the
Washington-based
National Security
Archive (NSA).
In the meantime, the
U.S. State Department
continued to regularly
certify Colombia’s human
rights record and to
heavily finance its "war
on drugs."
The declassified
documents were published
Jan. 7 by the NSA, a
non-governmental
research and archival
institution located at
the George Washington
University that
collects, archives and
publishes declassified
U.S. government
documents obtained via
the Freedom of
Information Act.
NSA’s Colombia Project
identifies and secures
the release of documents
from secret government
archives on U.S. policy
in Colombia regarding
issues like security
assistance, human
rights, impunity and
counternarcotics
programmes.
"These records shed
light on a policy --
recently examined in a
still-undisclosed
Colombian Army report --
that influenced the
behaviour of Colombian
military officers for
years, leading to
extrajudicial executions
and collaboration with
paramilitary drug
traffickers," says the
NSA report released last
week.
The secret army report
mentioned by the NSA led
in late 2008 to the
dismissal of 30 army
officers and the
resignation of Gen.
Mario Montoya, the
Colombian army chief who
long "promoted the idea
of using body counts to
measure progress against
the guerrillas," writes
the author of the NSA
report, Michael Evans.
In one of the
declassified documents
obtained by the NSA,
then U.S. Ambassador
Myles Frechette
complained in 1994 about
the "body count
mentalities" among
Colombian army officers
seeking to climb through
the ranks.
"Field officers who
cannot show track
records of aggressive
anti-guerrilla activity
(wherein the majority of
the military’s human
rights abuses occur)
disadvantage themselves
at promotion time," said
Frechette.
Evans, director of the
NSA Colombia Project,
states in his report
that "the documents
raise important
questions about the
historical and legal
responsibilities the
Army has to come clean
about what appears to be
a longstanding,
institutional incentive
to commit murder."
"But the manner in which
the investigation was
conducted -- in absolute
secrecy and with little
or no legal consequences
for those implicated --
raises a number of
important questions,"
says Evans, who asks
"when, if ever, will the
Colombian Army divulge
the contents of its
internal report?"
The question of
extrajudicial killings
by the army made the
international headlines
and drew the attention
of the United Nations
after a scandal broke
out in the Colombian
media in September 2008
over the bodies of young
men reported by the
armed forces as dead
guerrillas or
paramilitaries.
It turned out that the
men had gone missing
from their homes in slum
neighbourhoods on the
southside of Bogotá and
that their corpses had
turned up two or three
days later in morgues
hundreds of kilometres
away.
Since then, scores of
cases of "body count"
killings by the army,
also known as "false
positives," have
emerged.
Although the government
expressed shock and
indignation, evidence
soon began to emerge of
a pattern that dated
back years.
As defence minister
under current President
Álvaro Uribe, Camilo
Ospina, who is now
Colombia’s ambassador to
the Organisation of
American States (OAS),
signed a 15-page secret
ministerial directive in
2005 that provided for
rewards for the capture
or killing of leaders of
illegal armed groups,
for military information
and war materiel, and
for successful
counterdrug actions.
According to the W Radio
station, which reported
on the secret directive
in late October, it
could have encouraged
extrajudicial killings
under a new system,
which may include "a
mafia of bounty-hunters
allied with members of
the military."
But in the view of Iván
Cepeda, spokesman for
the National Movement of
Victims of State Crimes
(MOVICE), "this is not
about an infiltration of
organised crime in the
armed forces, nor about
people who have broken
the law. As the NSA
report shows, this is an
institutional practice
that has been followed
for decades."
The Defence Ministry
directive encouraged the
phenomenon by creating a
system of incentives
that rewards "results"
in the form of
battlefield casualties,
"discounting accepted
methods and controls and
the observance of human
rights and international
humanitarian law," he
said.
Cepeda also maintained
that the activities of
far-right death squads
and the army’s "body
count" killings were
connected, and that the
military used the
paramilitaries to show
results.
"The paramilitaries
delivered to the army
the bodies of people who
were supposed members of
the guerrillas but who
were actually people
selectively killed by
those (paramilitary)
groups," he told IPS.
When the killings became
more and more
widespread, the armed
forces themselves asked
the paramilitaries to
hide the remains, to
keep the country’s
homicide rate from
soaring any further,
paramilitaries who took
part in a demobilisation
process negotiated with
the right-wing Uribe
administration have
confessed.
The declassified
documents demonstrate
"that the U.S. military
as well as U.S.
diplomats and
governments have taken a
complacent stance
towards this kind of
practice," said Cepeda.
The declassified records
are in line with the
results of "Colombia
nunca más" (Colombia
never again), a
monumental effort to
document human rights
abuses carried out by 17
organisations since
1995.
"’Colombia nunca más’
has created a databank
on 45,000 (human rights)
violations, including
around 25,000
extrajudicial executions
and 10,000 forced
disappearances,
committed between 1966
and 1998," said Cepeda.
Colombia’s two insurgent
groups emerged in 1964
and the paramilitaries
in 1982, although the
latter launched a lethal
offensive beginning in
1997.
Cepeda told IPS that in
the next few months,
MOVICE would begin to
organise the families of
victims of extrajudicial
killings, which would
culminate in a national
meeting to discuss "what
routes of documenting
the truth and obtaining
justice can be followed
in an organised manner
by the families of the
victims of this
practice."
The earliest of the
declassified documents
obtained by the NSA is a
1990 cable signed by
then U.S. Ambassador
Thomas McNamara,
addressed to the State
Department and copied to
the Defence Department,
the U.S. army Southern
Command, and the U.S.
embassies in Venezuela,
Bolivia, Ecuador and
Peru.
The cable, whose subject
line reads "human rights
in Colombia --
widespread allegations
of abuses by the army,"
cites reports that an
army major "personally
directed the torture of
11 detainees and their
subsequent
execution…carried out by
cutting of the limbs and
heads of the still
living victims with a
chain saw."
Referring to the
connection between army
officers and the
paramilitaries, the
ambassador stated that
many "officers continue
to discount virtually
all allegations of
military abuses as part
of a leftist inspired
plot to discredit the
military as an
institution."
In addition, the cable
mentions "strong
evidence linking members
of the army and police
to a number of
disappearances and
murders which took place
earlier this year in
Trujillo, Valle de Cauca
department."
McNamara also mentioned
"an apparent June 7
incident of
extra-judicial
executions."
"The military reported
to the press that, on
that date, it killed 9
guerrillas in combat in
El Ramal, Santander
department. The
investigation by
Instruccion Criminal and
the Procuraduria (legal
authorities) strongly
suggests, however, that
the nine were executed
by the army and then
dressed in military
fatigues. A military
judge who arrived on the
scene apparently
realised that there were
no bullet holes in the
military uniforms to
match the wounds in the
victims’ bodies, and
ordered the uniforms
burned," said the
ambassador.
As sources told the
ambassador, "all of the
victims were part of the
same family, and one of
them, said by the army
to have been a
guerrilla, was 87 years
old." |
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