Human Rights Watch has been locked in a struggle with the
U.S. government over whether to use a $1.3 billion military aid package to Colombia as a source of leverage to improve Colombia’s abysmal human rights record. At issue is whether this aid package should be used to insist that the Colombian military sever its links with the country’s ruthless paramilitary groups.

Human Rights Watch played a central role in convincing influential members of the U.S. Congress to allow the aid to go forward only on the condition that the Colombian government end this deadly alliance. We did so by exposing how the Colombian military, to make itself more politically palatable, was subcontracting its executions, massacres, and torture to allied paramilitary organizations. Working with exiled Colombian civilian prosecutors and drawing on years of detailed research, we showed that at least half of Colombia’s eighteen army units had ties to paramilitary activities. Indeed, government investigators told us that one army brigade had actually set up its own paramilitary unit in 1999.

In testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, José Miguel Vivanco, Human Rights Watch’s executive director for the Americas, led the charge for strict human rights conditions on any security assistance to Colombia. In other Senate testimony, our Colombia researcher, Robin Kirk, stressed the importance of the military taking clear, measurable steps to break its links with paramilitary groups.
At the last minute, however, at the White House’s insistence, the president was given the right to suspend these human rights conditions in the interest of “national security.” Although the State Department found no evidence of progress by the Colombian military to cut ties with the paramilitaries, President Clinton invoked this waiver for the first aid installment. The waiver squandered an important opportunity to end continuing massacres and other atrocities in Colombia. It also risked U.S. government complicity in these abuses.
Human Rights Watch launched a major advocacy campaign to denounce the Administration’s action. During President Clinton’s visit to Colombia, eight days after he signed the waiver, members of the press bombarded him with tough questions, showing that there will be a large political cost to ignoring human rights. Sustaining this public pressure will be necessary to convince the U.S. government to use the next aid installment as a meaningful incentive for severing the murderous ties between the Colombian military and paramilitary groups.