COLOMBIA-U.S.: Military Runs Paramilitary Forces, Says Rights Group

By Jim Lobe Reprint | | Print |

Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Nov 26 1996 (IPS) - The Colombian military has made supposedly independent right-wing paramilitary groups an integral part of its intelligence-gathering apparatus and is using them to eliminate targeted opposition figures, according to a report by a U.S. human rights group.

The report by the Washington-based Human Rights Watch/Americas and the Human Rights Watch Arms Project also concludes that U.S. military and intelligence agencies provided assistance in a 1991 Colombian intelligence reorganisation and has since supplied growing amounts of weapons that have been used to commit grave human rights abuses.

The groups are calling on Washington and the countries of the European Union (EU) to immediately suspend all military aid and sales to Colombia until such rights abuses by both the military and their paramilitary partners have ceased.

“It is time to clear the smokescreen of official denial and identify the military-paramilitary partnership for what it is,” says Jose Miguel Vivanco, Human Rights Watch/Americas director who released the report Monday.

“This is a sophisticated mechanism, in part supported by years of advice, training, weaponry, and official silence by the United States, that allows the Colombian military to fight a dirty war and Colombian officialdom to deny it,” he added.

The report, ‘Colombia’s Killer Networks’, comes just as the administration of President Bill Clinton is planning to ship more than 200 million dollars’ worth of military assistance to Colombia, ostensibly to help fight drug-trafficking.

The aid includes 12 Blackhawk helicopters, 24 door-mounted machine guns, three C-26 surveillance aircraft and six river patrol boats. Another 12 Huey helicopters and other military items are to be provided to the Colombian National Police at the same time.

Human rights groups and some lawmakers on Capitol Hill oppose the aid, citing the thousands of killings committed by both the military and police over the past decade.

U.S. officials strongly deny that weapons provided to Colombian security forces are being used for anything other than prosecuting the war against drug traffickers. On Monday, for example, State Department spokesman Glyn Davies insisted that an “end-use monitoring programme” would detect any deviation by the Colombian authorities from the purposes for which the aid was supplied.

“Through that ongoing regime, we’re able to keep a pretty good grip on what is being done with the material,” he said. “We’re not planning any larger campaign or investigation to look at what’s been done with the material.”

But the Human Rights Watch/Americas report, like a recent study by Amnesty International, says that military units which have received U.S. weaponry include many which are engaged in counter- insurgency campaigns and stand accused of serious human rights abuses.

The group cites two recent U.S. government reports on the brigades and battalions which have received the aid. Most of them, according to the group, have committed serious abuses, including massacres.

“Massacres committed by just one of the units that received U.S. military aid, the Palace Battalion, took the lives of at least 120 people since 1990, killings that remain largely unpunished,” the report says.

The new report adds two major new charges about the apparatus of rights abuse in Colombia — by asserting in a more concrete way than ever that the military controls various paramilitary groups; and by pointing to the possible involvement of U.S. military and intelligence agencies in setting up and possibly even tending the apparatus that joins the two entities together.

Colombian military commanders, according to the report, “have not only promoted, encouraged and protected paramilitary groups, but have used them to provide intelligence and assassinate and massacre Colombians suspected of being guerrilla allies.” It notes that in 1995, almost half of all acts of political violence where the perpetrator was identified were attributed to paramilitaries.

According to one retired army major quoted in the report, paramilitary groups are the “principal source” of army intelligence in troubled areas. “These people live in the region and have contacts with both their own side and with the enemy,” he told Human Rights Watch. “In fact, the principal action of the paramilitaries is (to collect) intelligence, in addition to serving as an extermination group.”

Central to this development was a secret 1991 military intelligence reorganisation plan called Order 200-05/91 which made paramilitaries a “key component” of the military’s intelligence apparatus.

An intelligence network organised by the navy under the Order, according to the report, was responsible for “dozens of extrajudicial executions in Barrancabermeja. In northern Magdalena, the military has armed and equipped paramilitaries and even patrolled with them, according to the report. In some cases, the military has “apparently moved paramilitaries around the country to carry out political killings.”

“Based on our interviews with witnesses and former participants, the government’s own investigations, and abundant material collected by human rights groups and journalists, we believe that the military high command continues to organise, encourage and deploy paramilitaries to fight a covert war against those it suspects of support for guerrillas,” the report concludes.

It says Washington has played a “disturbing role” in the military-paramilitary partnership. “Despite Colombia’s disastrous human rights record, a U.S. Defence Department and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) team worked with Colombian military officers on the 1991 intelligence reorganisation,” according to the report.

Since then, Washington has provided thousands of machine guns, pistols, rifles, landmines, and grenades, much of which is more suitable for counter-insurgency than for the war against drugs.

In addition, Colombian officers trained by the U.S. — some at the controversial School of the Americas — have been implicated in serious abuses, including massacres, according to the report.

In 1996, it says, Washington deployed at least two teams of 52 Army Sepcial Forces personnel to Colombia for two-month missions. It also scheduled 49 deployments involving a total of 231 U.S. military and intelligence advisors, including 97 in support of the Colombian navy in Santafe de Bogota. The covert action wing of the CIA has also sponsored training for Colombian Special Forces units, according to the report.