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RIGHTS-COLOMBIA: 'Parapolitics' Immunity Loophole Closing
By Constanza Vieira
BOGOTÁ, Jul 24 (IPS) - Colombia's Attorney General has asked that all cases against politicians for alleged links with rightwing paramilitaries commanded by drug traffickers be tried in the capital city. Human rights lawyers are applauding the move.
Attorney General Mario Iguarán's petition to the Supreme Court aims to prevent governing party legislators from resigning their seats in Congress in order for their cases to be dealt with in their own regions, where they tend to be well connected and wield great influence.
Members of Congress with parliamentary immunity can only be tried by the Supreme Court and have only one opportunity to appeal its verdict, whereas in lower courts there are many stages in the appeal process before a final judgment is reached.
The criminal section of the Supreme Court has already imprisoned 13 members of Congress, six former members of Congress and two former governors as a result of its "Paragate" investigations, the scandal that broke out in early 2006 over apparent links between the civil, military and economic powers-that-be with ultra-rightwing paramilitaries.
Civil society researchers believe there are many more trials to come in the "Parapolitics" scandal, as it is also known in Colombia.
A member of Congress, a former governor and a former minister, two of whom belong to the governing party, remain fugitives from justice. They supported the law granting leniency to the paramilitaries, who were partially demobilised in 2006 after negotiations with the right-wing government of Álvaro Uribe.
"We are pleased with (the Attorney General's move) and we think it will guarantee impartiality," Omayra Gómez, a lawyer with the Colombian Commission of Jurists, a human rights organisation, told IPS.
Gómez added that if Iguarán's petition is heeded, and the cases are moved to Bogotá, it will "protect the lives of officials who would have to press forward with these investigations in the regions," and said that human rights cases are already being handled in the capital, for the same reasons.
The first Paragate trial began on Monday in the criminal section of the Supreme Court. The accused, Eric Morris, former governor of the north-western department of Sucre and former mayor of the capital Sincelejo, is charged with "organising, promoting, arming or financing" paramilitary groups.
Morris is accused of acting with the paramilitaries since 1997, and so is his political boss, Senator Álvaro García Romero, who was elected to Congress seven times and whose party has taken the departmental governorship four times.
The Court is also holding a preliminary hearing at which Senator Mario Uribe, first cousin of the president and his political associate, will present his version of the facts. He is charged with association to commit a crime.
Jorge Noguera, Uribe's intelligence tsar as chief of the Administrative Department of Security (DAS) for three years, and previously the coordinator of Uribe's first presidential campaign in the northern department of Magdalena, is also in serious trouble.
Noguera is accused of putting DAS at the service of the paramilitaries. His case is being followed closely by the U.S. government and by the U.S. Congress, which has made approval of the free trade agreement between the two countries conditional on progress in clarifying Paragate and human rights cases.
Meanwhile, witnesses say Senator Uribe coordinated a pact with paramilitaries to gain votes in parliamentary elections.
According to the local newspaper El Tiempo, the Court will call on President Uribe to give his opinion about the so-called Ralito Pact, signed by 30 politicians of his following and by paramilitary chiefs, which calls for "refounding the country" and "writing a new social contract."
This has been interpreted as an agreement to take over power in the country.
Around that time, two people presumed to be close to Uribe, who was then campaigning for the presidency, are alleged to have contacted paramilitary commanders to propose their demobilisation in return for an amnesty for their crimes and a fine, according to the confession of a former paramilitary officer which has yet to be corroborated.
Uribe achieved a partial demobilisation of the paramilitaries during his first administration (2002-2006), and the paramilitary commanders are now confessing their crimes against humanity.
The Constitutional Court ruled that only if they tell the whole truth will they be eligible for the benefit of maximum prison sentences limited to eight years, stipulated by the demobilisation law.
Senator García Romero is also accused by the Supreme Court of Justice of being behind the massacre of Macayepo, in 2000, which caused the forced displacement of 200 families.
Fifteen campesinos (peasant farmers) were garrotted to death in the village of Macayepo, in the northern department of Bolívar. In January, Salvatore Mancuso, a former paramilitary commander, confessed to the crime.
The Court accuses García Romero of the murder of Georgina Narváez, a 30-year-old teacher who witnessed electoral fraud in Morris's favour in elections for the governorship of Sucre in 1997.
Paramilitaries assigned Morris the votes of at least three municipalities around San Onofre, a total of 10,000 ballots.
Such assignment of votes is usually accomplished by threatening the voters, as IPS has confirmed with direct sources, and not only in San Onofre.
Although the voting has been questioned, members of Congress in trouble over Paragate are being replaced by their official substitutes because the political responsibility for the frauds has not yet been adjudicated.
The search for the truth about the terrible crimes committed by all parties in the longstanding armed conflict in Colombia, in which paramilitaries and government forces are fighting leftwing guerrillas, is also being carried out on the victims' own initiative at the Inter-American Court of Human Rights.
The justice system of the Organisation of American States has ruled that many killings were due to collusion or neglect by the government forces and has condemned the Colombian state.
In parallel, and very slowly, the prosecution is taking the confessions of demobilised former paramilitaries.
Last week, Edwar Cobo, alias "Diego Vecino", started his confession. Demobilised two years ago, he was the political commander of the paramilitary bloc which devastated the department of Sucre, and knows all the secrets of the people in power in Sucre and its bordering departments, Bolívar and Córdoba.
Cobo is one of those who signed the Ralito Pact, alongside former paramilitary commanders Mancuso, Rodrigo Tovar, alias "Jorge 40", and Diego Fernando Murillo, "Don Bema".
Although the prosecution collected 4,000 complaints against the paramilitary bloc, the hearing was attended only by a handful of people in an adjacent room equipped with closed circuit television. All over the country, reports about threats to victims who attend the hearings are multiplying.
Neither did IPS see any victims present at the San Onofre cemetery in February, when the prosecution exhumed bodies from mass graves, following directions from the gravedigger who had been hired by the paramilitaries through the municipal government.
He told IPS that he was paid between 150 and 200 dollars by the municipal government for burying remains he received in black plastic bags or in sealed coffins.
"The paramilitary system appears to have remained intact in Sucre," spokesman for the Movement of Victims of State Crime (MOVICE), Iván Cepeda, told IPS.
"Vecino" said it was unjust that demobilised paramilitaries should be banned from standing as independent candidates in the regional and local elections of October, a matter which is under debate, although three such candidates have already registered.
MOVICE accuses the paramilitaries and their allies of having killed or forcibly disappeared, in Sucre alone, "at least" 3,000 people; of committing 75 massacres between 1999 and 2000 with 329 people killed; and of hiding their bodies in hundreds of mass graves.
They also blame the ultra-rightwing forces for the forced displacement of 70,000 people in Sucre and 2,162 families in San Onofre; of practising torture as a matter of course: of annihilating agrarian organisations; of violently appropriating campesinos' farms; of holding whole areas in political subjection; and of misappropriating public funds.
In addition, MOVICE accuses the paramilitary forces of the murder of 90 activists belonging to the Patriotic Union, a legal party created in 1985 after a peace agreement with the leftwing guerrillas.
(END/2007)
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