When Colombian President Andrés Pastrana meets with President George W. Bush next Tuesday (February 27), the two leaders will discuss U.S. military aid to Colombia, including the issue of Colombia's progress on improving human rights. This background briefing outlines the key human rights problems in Colombia and includes sample questions to be put to the two presidents at their joint press conference.
Political Violence in Colombia
Political violence is dramatically up in Colombia, in part the result of efforts by all sides to gain territorial control, increase revenue to fund war, and influence talks between rebels and the government. This continues a disturbing trend from the year 2000, when the average number of victims of political violence and deaths in combat rose to fourteen per day according to the Colombian Commission of Jurists.
Even by the Colombian National Police department's own estimate, there were twenty-three massacres by paramilitaries in the first seventeen days of 2001. Paramilitaries belonging to the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia, AUC) committed the largest single massacre on January 17 in the village of Chengue, Sucre, with at least twenty-six people registered killed.
Ties between paramilitaries and Colombian army and navy brigades remain strong and intimate. [See Human Rights Watch's 2000 Report: The Ties That Bind: Colombia and Military-Paramilitary]. These military brigades are deployed throughout the country, meaning that such relationships between the military and paramilitary groups are neither isolated nor unusual. They exist at the national level and include units in Colombia's largest cities. Paramilitary groups working with the tolerance or support of the Colombian military are considered responsible for nearly 80 percent of all human rights violations documented last year in Colombia.
Ties means active coordination in the field with paramilitary units; permanent communication via radios, cellular telephones, and beepers; the sharing of intelligence, including the names of suspected guerrillas collaborators; the sharing of fighters, including active-duty soldiers serving in paramilitary units and paramilitary commanders lodging on military bases; the sharing of vehicles, including army trucks used to transport paramilitary fighters; coordination of army roadblocks, which are suspended to let paramilitary fighters pass; and payments made from paramilitaries to military officers for their support.
Among them, the Army's Twenty-Fourth Brigade is slated to receive U.S. aid and training through the billion-dollar anti-drug strategy, Plan Colombia.
Human Rights Watch has plentiful and convincing evidence linking the Twenty-Fourth Brigade to direct support for and collaboration with paramilitaries under the command of Carlos Castaño. Although investigators with Colombia's Internal Affairs agency (Procuraduría) recommended investigating Colonel Gabriel Díaz, the former commander of this unit, five months ago for tolerating paramilitary activity, this officer not only remains on active duty, but is currently completing the course work necessary for a promotion to the rank of general.
The Colombian government announced on January 15, 2001, the creation of an Anti-Assassin Committee (Comité Anti-Sicarial), with the stated goal of pursuing and capturing paramilitary groups. In the past, similar committees have been no more than paper tigers. A similar group announced on October 4, 1998, produced no visible improvement. Another, announced in February 2000 after a similar series of massacres, never even met.
Human rights defenders remain in danger, despite government promises to take effective measures to protect them. Most attacks on human rights workers are perpetrated by paramilitary groups. On February 13, 2001, ten gunmen attacked and killed Iván Villamizar, the former Public Advocate in Cúcuta, Norte de Santander. During his tenure as advocate, Villamizar had been repeatedly threatened by paramilitary groups for his work documenting massacres carried out with Colombian army collusion in the La Gabarra region in 1998.
Far from fortifying the work of human rights, President Pastrana has cut funding for key government investigators. The Attorney General reported in September 2000 that budget cuts implemented by President Pastrana are "dramatic" and threaten to "paralyze" the work of the Human Rights Unit, responsible for progress on important cases. Dozens of defenders have had to suspend their work or flee the country because of threats on their lives.
Forced displacement is one of the most visible symptoms of political violence. Human rights groups estimate that at least 317,000 Colombians became displaced in 2000; of those, an estimated 15,000 crossed Colombia's borders for an uncertain future as refugees. This represents an all time high for a single year. Human rights groups estimate that over 600,000 Colombians have become displaced since President Pastrana took office.
Damage by the U.S. Human Rights Waiver
The decision by the Clinton Administration to waive human rights conditions contained in Public Law 106-246 has been devastating. Judged by its behavior in the field B not by rhetoric or public relations pamphlets B the Colombian military understood the waiver as a virtual carte blanche for its strategy, which depends on continued, active coordination with paramilitary groups.
As long as Colombia's military high command understands that the United States will not enforce human rights conditions, we do not expect progress in the protection of human rights. The deterioration has been dramatic and devastating for Colombia, particularly since the waiver was invoked on August 22, 2000.
High-ranking military officers continue to attack human rights groups, calling them guerrilla facades or even drug traffickers, in defiance of President Pastrana's explicit orders to respect the work of these groups. Recently, Air Force commander Gen. Héctor Fabio Velásco Chávez asserted that human rights are being "utilized by some ultra-Left movements, which wield as a facade the so-called non-governmental organizations and lend themselves warmly to dark plots." He went on to claim that human rights groups "try to delegitimize us using the extortion [sic] of the truth, lies, and slander."
U.S. funds meant to support the Human Rights Unit of the Attorney General's office have yet to be disbursed, a damaging delay that ignores the emergency nature of the human rights situation in Colombia. In addition, the Witness Protection Program continues to be seriously short of funds, limiting witnesses to only three months of protection. Once that period is concluded, witnesses are on their own again, exposing them to serious risk.
The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia, FARC) and the Camilist Union-National Liberation Army (Unión Camilista-Ejército de Liberación Nacional, UC-ELN) violate international humanitarian law by killing civilians, kidnaping for ransom and using indiscriminate weapons, including propane tank bombs. Half of the over 3,300 kidnapings registered in 2000 by País Libre, a non-governmental organization that advocates an end to this violation, were attributed to guerrillas. Both guerrilla groups continued to use child soldiers.
Sample Questions for Presidents Bush and Pastrana:
Questions for President Pastrana:
President Pastrana, you have announced three times the formation of a high-level government task force to target paramilitary groups. Yet there are no visible results despite the fact that information on the location, identity, vehicles and even telephone numbers of paramilitaries is widely known and is in the hands of the authorities. Indeed, most observers agree that the paramilitaries have gained strength over the last year. When will the government show real results in this fight?
President Pastrana, you have vowed to get tough on military officers who work with paramilitary groups. Yet officers against who there is credible evidence of tolerating and working with paramilitary groups, including Colonel Gabriel Díaz, remain on active duty. What are the obstacles to dismissing these officers?
Questions for President Bush:
In August 2000, President Bill Clinton invoked a waiver that allowed the U.S. government to send military aid to Colombia despite the fact that the Colombian military had not complied with human rights conditions, and continued to maintain close ties with the paramilitary groups responsible for most human rights violations in Colombia. Does you support Clinton's use of the waiver?
(If President Bush does support the use of the waiver.) Please explain how requiring the Colombian military to uphold human rights protections threatens the national security interest of the United States.
