Headlines, Human Rights, Latin America & the Caribbean

COLOMBIA-VENEZUELA: No One Takes Responsibility for Deaths Along Border

Constanza Vieira

BOGOTA, Sep 25 2004 (IPS) - It is still far from clear who was responsible for the recent killings of seven Venezuelans near the Colombian border as well as other murders in Venezuelan territory.

Both Colombia’s right-wing President Alvaro Uribe and the leader of the leftist Democratic Pole, Gustavo Petro, said it was not prudent to categorically state that the killings were the work of Colombia’s right-wing paramilitaries or leftist guerrillas.

A third possibility, mentioned by Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez himself, is that the attackers belonged to the radical pro-Chavéz Bolivarian Liberation Front (FBL), which recently emerged.

Six Venezuelan soldiers and a 23-year-old female engineer from Venezuela’s state oil company, PDVSA, were killed by armed attackers on Sep. 17 in the oil-producing region of Orinoquia, between the Caño Limón oil field in eastern Colombia and the Guafitas oil field in southwestern Venezuela.

Four engineers and seven of their military guards, who repelled the attackers, survived the ambush, which occurred as the PDVSA team was carrying out an inspection of oil fields.

In that region, the Colombian-Venezuelan border is marked by the Arauca River, which separates the Venezuelan state of Apure from the Colombian department of Arauca.

The inspection team was making its way along the banks of the small Sarare River in Venezuela, which runs parallel to the Arauca River, a full 20 km from the border.

“Whoever opened fire knew they were in Venezuelan territory. It was an ambush,” a local journalistic source from that area, who preferred not to be named, told IPS.

Both Colombia’s insurgents and paramilitary militias often cross the porous border.

But neither the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the main rebel group, nor the United Self-Defence Forces of Colombia (AUC), the paramilitary umbrella, have claimed responsibility for the attack.

The paramilitary commander known as “El Eléctrico”, who heads the group that is active in the capital of the Colombian department of Arauca, told Henry Colmenares, the director of the local radio news programme Meridiano 70, on Thursday that his forces “do not operate yet” on the other side of the border.

He said that was because the Venezuelan “National Guard is in cahoots with the (Colombian) guerrillas, and it would be two against one.”

Colmenares commented to IPS that the paramilitary commander added that he and his group “have no problems with the Venezuelan military,” and are not interested in attacking them.

The paramilitary group led by “El Eléctrico” belongs to the Vencedores de Arauca Block, one of the AUC factions currently negotiating their demobilisation with the government in exchange for an amnesty-like agreement. The talks are taking place in Santa Fe de Ralito, in northwestern Colombia.

Locals on the Venezuelan side of the border say they have seen Colombian guerrillas providing military training to members of the FBL. But those reports were not confirmed by ombudsperson Gloria Cuitiva of Arauca. “I have no knowledge of that but I will start making inquiries,” she told IPS.

The attackers “could have been anyone,” said Petro in an interview, although he said the FBL would not commit “an attack against Chávez,” adding that the Sep. 17 action “went against Chávez.”

The guerrillas have had a strong presence in that border region of Colombia since the 1980s, when the U.S. corporation Occidental Petroleum found oil in Caño Limón.

But since 1999, it has been the scenario of a turf war between the rebels – both the FARC and the smaller National Liberation Army (ELN) – and the paramilitaries.

While the FARC has a strict policy against offensive operations in neighbouring countries, the ELN has not adopted any such decision.

“After an investigation carried out in all of the units in our organisation, it has been verified that none of our troops participated” in the Sep. 17 incident, the FARC stated in a communique released by the commanders of the “X Front” on Friday night.

The insurgent group added that it does not see Venezuelan authorities as enemies, and “for that reason, they are not considered military targets.”

The statement also said that “by means of intelligence reports”, the group had detected in the area “the presence of extreme right-wing provocateur elements, dedicated to destabilising the revolutionary process” – a reference to the left-leaning Chávez’s “social revolution”, which involves numerous programmes in favour of the poor, including land redistribution in rural areas.

The FARC called on local residents on both sides of the border to “remain alert in the towns and villages in order to prevent infiltration by paramilitary groups sponsored by the Colombian government and sectors of the Venezuelan opposition movement, which are only seeking to create chaos and sow confusion among the population.”

Two years ago the Colombian security forces began to get involved in the increasingly intense territorial dispute over that area of eastern Colombia, which has been steadily militarised by Uribe since he took office in August 2002.

According to the London-based rights watchdog Amnesty International, the war is intensifying in the area as the armed factions step up their efforts to control the department’s natural resources by force.

The U.S. government provides military aid and advisers to army Brigade 18, created to guard oil installations in the area.

Amnesty reported that Occidental Petroleum and the Spanish oil company Repsol-YPF have also donated “funds to Brigade 18 through security accords.”

But Spain’s socialist government recently cancelled the sale of 46 AMX-30 tanks and 20 howitzers to Colombia. Instead, Spanish Defence Minister José Bono Martínez, on a visit to this South American country, announced the donation of two C-212 military transport aircraft that can be used for medical evacuation, along with supplies for a field hospital.

The territory of Arauca is being used by the Colombian government, with the support of the United States and the oil companies, as a testing ground for Uribe’s new “security policies”, says Amnesty.

In the past, the insurgents moved easily about the towns and cities of the department of Arauca, committing bomb attacks and targeted killings. But now “the guerrillas have lost ground” in urban areas in the region, said the local journalistic source.

“In the (provincial) capital (the city of Arauca, population 80,000), that anxiety (over the possibility of rebel attacks) does not exist anymore, things are calmer now, although the army has not yet got the (military) situation completely under control,” the source added. But people who live beyond the bounds of the city “are abandoned and frightened and very much affected by the conflict.”

It is not advisable to travel outside of the city, for security reasons, said the source, although moving around in nearby Venezuelan territory across the border is possible.

The local population’s “confidence in the army is not yet clear, because for many years the Colombian state was totally absent from this area. Ten years ago, we felt more Venezuelan than Colombian, and we sang the Venezuelan national anthem here,” Maureen Navarro, co-director of the Meridiano 70 radio newscast, two of whose journalists were murdered by hired killers in the city of Arauca, pointed out to IPS.

“Not a single police officer could stay in the department because (the guerrillas) would shoot them. This process (of the recovery of urban areas by the state) has barely begun,” she added.

On Thursday, the number of bodies found in Venezuelan territory rose to 14, including nearly all of the residents of the tiny hamlet of EL Nula. “At least seven (of the victims) were Colombians,” said Cuitiva.

The ombudsperson confirmed reports that seven Colombians had gone missing. “What they have in common is that they all left home in the direction of the border, and have not come back. According to their families, most of them went to buy building materials like iron and cement, and never returned.”

Three of them left the city of Arauca and crossed the river to the Venezuelan village of El Amparo. Four others, from Arauquita, some 70 km east of Arauca, crossed the border to the Venezuelan town of La Victoria.

The body of one of the members of the latter group was found in the Arauca River, with the intestines cut out and rocks in their place, to keep the corpse from floating.

Since the local Venezuelan currency, the bolivar, depreciated a year and a half ago, many Colombians along the border shop in the neighbouring country, where prices of products like cooking gas are half of what they cost in Colombia.

Meanwhile, in the Colombian municipality of Tame, 70 km from the border in the department of Arauca, some 200 men brought in by helicopter made incursions in several villages starting in the early hours of Wednesday morning.

A 17-year-old local young man was killed in the incursion, “apparently by paramilitaries,” according to the José Alvear Restrepo Lawyers Collective, a Colombian human rights group.

In a letter to the ombudsperson’s office, the Collective gathered testimony from local residents, who said the military “have intimidated and threatened the people, telling them ‘the paramilitaries are coming’.”

Paramilitary militias are responsible for the great majority of the atrocities committed in Colombia’s four-decade civil war, according to the United Nations, which has established their ties to the army and documented military support for several paramilitary operations.

According to the Corporación Reiniciar, a human rights group that released a report Thursday in Tame, the military violently broke into the residence of the director of the Campesino Association of Arauca, Luis Alfonso Gutiérrez, and other houses.

The troops arrived at two in the morning, and “immediately entered the houses, breaking down doors and windows,” said Reiniciar, which said the men were wearing “camouflage uniforms, without armbands or identifying insignia.”

On Thursday, the Lawyers Collective sent the ombudsperson’s office a request that it issue an “early alert” due to the “new abuses by the national army against the rural community” of Tame and a possible paramilitary incursion.

Meanwhile, the Mesa por Arauca, an umbrella group linking several Colombian and international social, labour and human rights organisations, said in a statement that in the operation in Tame, soldiers were accompanied by four paramilitaries who are habitually active in the area.

“All of the campesinos know and fear them because they know that the four of them have committed a number of murders and disappearances in the area,” says a communique by the Mesa por Arauca.