Headlines, Human Rights, Latin America & the Caribbean

COLOMBIA: Paramilitaries Seeking International Impunity

Constanza Vieira

BOGOTA, Nov 24 2003 (IPS) - Carlos Castaño, leader of the right-wing paramilitary United Self-Defence of Colombia (AUC), is going after a tailored peace agreement with the government, one that includes international guarantees against extradition.

Colombia recently signed an agreement with the United States that protects U.S. citizens from the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court on genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes.

"Something along those lines" could be agreed between the paramilitaries and the government of Alvaro Uribe, says Castaño on the AUC’s Internet site.

In early October, Washington released five million dollars in military aid to Colombia, after convincing Bogotá to seek permission from the White House before putting any U.S. national under the authority of the International Criminal Court.

In the past few weeks, Castaño has asked for "national and international" legal guarantees for paramilitaries who lay down their weapons in the context of the peace negotiations underway with the Uribe government.

"We don’t think it would be fair that they put us in prison," and "we must be certain" that the agreements have national and international scope, said the AUC leader.

The AUC are included on the U.S. and European Union’s lists of international terrorist organisations – as are Colombia’s two main leftist guerrilla groups – and U.S. justice authorities have petitioned for the extradition of Castaño and of Salvator Mancuso, another paramilitary leader, on drug trafficking charges.

Castaño has been fingered as the mastermind behind several of the most shocking crimes in Colombia’s recent history. In January, at least 35 criminal cases were filed against him, and 27 arrest orders loom over his head.

Among these crimes is the January 1997 massacre in the northern town of Chenge, where 27 people were rounded up by force and murdered one by one in the central plaza. The attackers crushed the victims’ heads with big stones.

On May 19 of that same year, under Castaño’s orders, an armed group dressed in black broke into a middle-class apartment building in Bogotá to assassinate Mario Calderón and Elsa Alvarado, a husband-wife team of human rights defenders.

Also killed in the attack was Carlos Alvarado, Elsa’s father. Autopsies found 64 bullets in their bodies.

The couple’s young son survived because Elsa was able to hide him in a closet as the assailants broke into the apartment.

In 1998, according to official investigations, Castaño ordered 200 of his men to take over the central-eastern city of Puerto Alvira, where they murdered more than 20 civilians, claiming they were collaborators of leftist guerrilla groups.

On Feb. 18, 2000, some 300 men under Castaño’s command entered the northern town of El Salado, set up a "court" in the main plaza and for two days took prisoners, tortured and killed residents, stabbing or shooting them to death.

A schoolteacher received the coup de grace as she lay face down in front of her two young children.

The paramilitaries tied a six-year-old girl to a post and suffocated her by tying a plastic bag over her head.

"For them it was like a big party. They drank and danced and celebrated while they killed our people as if they were dogs," a survivor told journalists months later.

The El Salado death toll was 36.

On Aug. 21, the Uribe administration presented a draft law to the Senate to suspend the sentences for atrocities committed by members of the irregular armed groups that agree to demobilise. These individuals would instead receive lesser punishments.

The penalties would include a ban on holding public office, carrying weapons, or living near anyone who they have victimised, or the victims’ families.

The benefits of reduced sentences would be applied immediately in the case of Castaño and of other members of paramilitary groups, with the argument that it is essential to implement "formulas that go beyond the narrow concept of justice that centres on punishing the guilty."

But the wave of protests in Colombia and abroad prompted the new Interior minister, Sabas Pretelt, to announce that the government would leave room for more moderate revisions.

The proposed reduction of penalties could also be made to apply to guerrilla leaders, according to the government. But the two insurgent movements – the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the National Liberation Army (ELN) – have rejected Uribe’s peace offers.

According to the United Nations, the penalties under the government proposal are disproportionate to the seriousness of the crimes committed, and their application could give footing to arguments that international courts have jurisdiction over the Colombian crimes, said a U.N. official speaking on condition of anonymity.

The United States, meanwhile, warned that not only would the extradition requests for Castaño and Mancuso remain in place, but that others would be added against paramilitary commanders linked to drug trafficking.

After seven months of confidential exploratory talks between the government and the AUC, in the framework of a truce first and a declaration of a unilateral AUC ceasefire later, the two sides signed the Santafé de Ralito Accord in July, marking the launch of formal dialogue.

If anything was made clear during three years of attempts at peace talks with the AUC’s foes, the leftist FARC, it is that demobilisation is key.

The FARC guerrillas, a 40-year-old movement of communist origins, have tested Colombian governments in this sense, and the same is believed to apply to the paramilitaries, who, ironically, were created by the state to fight the FARC.

Human Rights Watch, an international organisation based in New York, warned in September that among those to benefit from the "amnesty" agreement are "men who have ordered and carried out the killings of thousands of Colombian civilians."

According to the Human Rights Database of the Jesuit Centre for Research and Popular Education, the paramilitaries, "in January 1998 alone, had 11,388 victims, of which 7,096 were executed, 1,180 were forced disappearances and 753 were tortured."

Even during the months of truce, the AUC were responsible for more than 600 assassinations and forced disappearances, according to the London-based human rights group, Amnesty International.

The paramilitaries hope to negotiate "impunity contracts", said Amnesty spokesman Peter Drury last week.

But it appears to be a done deal that on Tuesday, Nov. 25, a portion of the AUC will demobilise in the north-western city of Medellín, the country’s second city. Some 800 members of the Cacique Nutibara unit are to lay down their weapons.

This "bloc" – in the terms used by the paramilitaries – acted under the command of "Adolfo Paz", the alias of Diego Murillo, one of the signatories of the Santafé de Ralito Accord. Just over a decade ago he worked as head of security for a family of drug lords of the Medellín Cartel, which was initially a partner, and then a rival of the notorious Pablo Escobar.

Murillo had ties to the country’s largest band of assassins-for-hire, known as La Terraza, and a confidential report cited by Human Rights Watch mentions that President Uribe’s advisers have identified him as a leading drug trafficker this year.

"I am capable of forgiveness. But it’s not going to happen overnight. The soul of this country is torn. The suffering has to be mended, and to do that, we must be able to talk about everything," Luz Helena Sánchez, a doctor and women’s rights activist, told IPS.

"They must tell the whole truth, those who have organised and financed (the human rights crimes). Giving details, they must admit to the crimes and the places where they were committed. The process should not continue behind closed doors, between patriarchs, or through subtle communiqués," she said.