By Constanza Vieira
BOGOTÁ, Apr 20 2007 (IPS)

The Colombian government has assigned military intelligence agents to monitor opposition legislators who are travelling to the United States to express their views on different aspects of relations between the two countries, rightwing President Álvaro Uribe himself revealed.

The president said Thursday night that “I have evidence from military intelligence and the police” on these activities engaged in by critics of the free trade agreement that the Colombian government signed with Washington, but which has not yet been ratified by the U.S. Congress, and of Plan Colombia, the U.S.-financed anti-drugs and counterinsurgency strategy whose continued funding must be decided on this year by the U.S. legislature.

Uribe did not give specific names of legislators.

The U.S. House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere announced that it would hold hearings on Colombia, to study relations between the two countries. The first will be held on Tuesday, Apr. 24.

Senator Gustavo Petro of the leftist Alternative Democratic Pole led a high-profile parliamentary debate Tuesday in which he showed documents and testimony about members of the military and people close to Uribe with alleged links to the paramilitaries.

The evidence he presented forms part of cases that have been shelved by the attorney general’s office (Fiscalía General de la Nación) and the office of the inspector general (Procuraduría General de la Nación), which oversees the behaviour of public officials and is charged with ensuring respect for human rights.

Opposition lawmakers “are very obvious; they’re not as careful as they think they are,” said Uribe in a nearly two-hour press conference late Thursday, which was broadcast by radio and televised by all of the country’s private and public stations during prime time.

Only a few hand-picked media outlets were allowed to take part in Thursday’s press conference. Among those that were excluded were El Tiempo, the country’s largest circulation newspaper; Semana, the leading political magazine, which from the start has led the revelations that gave rise to the “parapolitics” scandal; and this agency, IPS.

Eight pro-Uribe politicians are in jail for their ties to the paramilitary militias so far, as a result of the parapolitics, or “paragate” scandal, as it has been dubbed in Colombia.

The scandal has shed light on the close relations between the economic and political elites and the paramilitary groups, many of which are led by drug lords, and which are held responsible for the great majority of human rights crimes committed in Colombia’s four-decade civil war, although the leftist guerrilla groups active since the 1960s also commit atrocities.

Thursday’s news briefing was the first time, since Uribe took office in 2002, that he did not lash out at journalists for raising uncomfortable questions about his family and its supposed ties to the paramilitaries. In the past, said the president, “I grabbed the throat” of a U.S. reporter who asked questions that bothered him. “That’s true,” he added.

Uribe was rehearsing responses for another news conference that he himself organised Friday in Miami, through the Colombian consulate, to which U.S. media outlets were invited.

In that press conference, he said “people from the opposition shout out in the south against Yanqui imperialism” and then go to the United States to bad-mouth the Colombian government – an argument he also voiced on Colombian TV and radio Thursday night.

“It is clearly not democratic to invite only some media. They chose the outlets that are most convenient to them. I don’t know of a good reason why they didn’t invite Semana,” the magazine’s chief editor, Mauricio Sáenz, told IPS.

“The holding of such a strange press conference shows how nervous the government is,” he added.

Uribe explained that he called the press meet because of former U.S. vice president Al Gore’s announcement Thursday that he was cancelling his participation in an environmental conference in Miami Friday, where both he and Uribe were scheduled to speak, because of the Colombian leader’s presence there.

Gore’s spokesperson said he regretted that he would not be attending the forum, where he was to be the keynote speaker, because of very problematic reports about the Colombian government.

This Friday it emerged that Gore also cancelled his attendance at Expogestión, a business management forum to be held in Bogotá in September. It was reported that Gore took both decisions on the basis of a report from the State Department, not articles in the press.

Uribe admitted that, as governor of the northwestern province of Antioquia (1995-1997), he did authorise the creation of the private security cooperative (CONVIVIR) Sietecueros Association, led by paramilitary chief José “Chepe” Barrera, who controlled two provinces on the country’s northern Caribbean coast for two decades.

Sietecueros was one of the two security cooperatives commanded by paramilitaries mentioned by Petro in the debate. These CONVIVIR associations, legalised as vigilante-style neighbourhood groups in 1993, fell into disrepute due to abuses and had their teeth drawn in 1997, when the Constitutional Court forbade them to use military-grade weapons, Gustavo Gallón, head of the Colombian Commission of Jurists human rights group, told IPS.

As governor, Uribe “invented his own authority for creating CONVIVIR groups. In Antioquia, in addition to the CONVIVIR groups recognised by the Defense Ministry and authorised by the Superintendency of Vigilance and Private Security, there were CONVIVIR groups operating by the sole authority of Governor Uribe,” he said.

The president said he found out that “Chepe” Barrera was a paramilitary in 2004, when Barrera demobilised as a result of the negotiations the Uribe administration carried out with the paramilitary groups. “I must apologise for my mistakes, but not for any crimes,” Uribe stated.

He said he hoped for a positive outcome in the case of his former intelligence tsar, Jorge Noguera, who had his U.S. entry visa withdrawn by the United States last December, it transpired on Thursday.

Noguera is accused by the attorney general’s office of having placed the Administrative Security Department (DAS), in charge of national security intelligence matters, at the service of paramilitary groups.

According to U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) documents quoted by the Los Angeles Times, current army commander Mario Montoya collaborated with paramilitaries in an occupation of Comuna 13, a low-income neighbourhood of Medellín, the capital of Antioquia, in an action known as Operation Orion in October 2002.

Uribe pointed out that Montoya had commanded the military base of Tres Esquinas, in the south of the country, where the Colombian army is engaged in fighting the leftwing Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), with heavy U.S. assistance.

“Whoever commands Tres Esquinas has to have the confidence of the United States,” Uribe said. “Peace in Medellín had a starting point, and that was Operation Orion,” he added about the city, where the murder rate has dropped significantly.

The president also said that clashes between the two rebel groups, the FARC and the smaller National Liberation Army (ELN), “had a major influence on” the murders of union members in 2006.

The number of these murders has fallen, but “they killed 38,” the president said, in a turn of phrase that might be interpreted as attributing all such deaths to the guerrillas.

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