COLOMBIA: Bombs Explode in Government’s Face

By Constanza Vieira Reprint | | Print |

Constanza Vieira

BOGOTA, Sep 18 2006 (IPS) - The widow of a garbage picker killed by a car bomb reportedly placed by army officers to simulate an attack by leftist rebels has yet to receive reparations from the government.

The Jul. 31 bomb killed slum dweller Jesús Antonio Vargas and injured 19 soldiers. Vargas’ widow, a mother of five, recently told journalists, sobbing, that she has not received assistance from the state. She has taken over her husband’s “job” as a scavenger, trying to eek out a meager living selling rubbish to recycling companies.

Six weeks into his second term, President Álvaro Uribe is having a hard time convincing anyone with his government’s contradictory explanations of that incident and six other bombs that were intercepted before they went off in the Colombian capital in July and August. The bombs were allegedly planted by two army officers.

Human rights groups and pro-Uribe Senator Germán Vargas, who survived an attempt on his life in October 2005 that the authorities immediately blamed on the leftist guerrillas, are starting to put two and two together.

Only one of the less powerful of the seven bombs placed around Bogota in July and August went off. The army attributed all of them to the leftist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), that took up arms over four decades ago, and which Uribe is fighting with heavy U.S. military aid and advice in the vast swathes of rural territory under the rebels’ control.

But on Sep. 7, Uribe ordered the army chief, General Mario Montoya, to acknowledge that the bombs had been planted by members of the military, to simulate attacks by the insurgents.

However, the right-wing president changed his story three days later. After lashing out at the press, which had reported the ploy, he said the military had been carrying out an “antiterrorist intelligence” operation, while other authorities maintained that the soldiers had infiltrated the guerrillas.

According to some analysts, Uribe has had to lie to salvage the army’s image.

Press reports based on military sources who complained of serious irregularities within their ranks indicated that the bombs were placed with the aim of earning “merit points.”

In the army, merit points are earned by carrying out actions “that have public visibility and a political impact,” said a former government negotiator in the stalled peace talks held by the FARC and the government of Andrés Pastrana (1998-2002) in the southern region of Caguán, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Colombia’s chief federal prosecutor, Mario Iguarán, had announced last Friday that the investigation was heading in the direction of the FARC. But on Monday he told a local radio station that his office was attempting to clarify whether the bombs were part of a secret intelligence operation or a case of “state terrorism.”

The bombs were put together by 27-year-old Lidia Alape, alias “Jessica”, who left the FARC three years ago as part of a government programme of reinsertion into civilian life. She was captured by the public prosecutor’s office last Friday, and it was reported that she had been acting in coordination with the two army officers under investigation for placing the bombs.

The officers are Major Javier Efrén Hermida, 39, and Captain Luis Eduardo Barrero, 33, who belong to the B-2, an armed forces intelligence body that in July and August was in commission in RIME-5, which has jurisdiction in Bogota.

RIME (a regional army intelligence office) is dedicated to secret operations and has access to an armed forces’ reserved expenditure fund, which pays rewards to informants and bounty hunters – a cornerstone of the government’s “democratic security” policy.

Documents that fell into the hands of the local magazine Semana, which investigated the seven bombing incidents, show that the two officers collected 2,100 dollars, a sum that had been agreed with the owner of one of the two taxis used in planting the bombs.

The officers withdrew that amount from the reserved expenditure fund, deposited in one of the RIME’s 20 accounts – an account in the BBVA bank near the Defence Ministry.

But they only gave the owner of the taxi 42 dollars, and in reprisal he turned them in to the public prosecutor’s office.

The BBVA security cameras filmed the withdrawal of the funds by the two intelligence officers.

When these events were occurring, in the tense weeks before and after the Aug. 7 start of Uribe’s second term, the authorities recommended that Bogota residents avoid leaving their homes when possible, while 40,000 troops were staked out around this city of 6.8 million people, and tanks patrolled the streets at strategic points.

Yolanda Reyes, a columnist with the local daily El Tiempo, wrote at the time that she estimated there was “one soldier for every three families, one gun for every seven strollers or tricycles in the park, and one helicopter for every 50 kites in the sky” in her neighbourhood.

“Instead of feeling startled by the helicopters prowling around at night, we believe we are protected,” she wrote in a column titled “Living with Fear”.

The security measures were stepped up because four years earlier, while Uribe was delivering his first inaugural address in parliament, a mortar attack blamed on the FARC was launched on the adjacent presidential palace. In the surrounding area, a bomb killed 19 civilians, mainly slum dwellers, and left around 70 injured.

Senator Vargas, who has been one of the government’s key members of Congress, survived a letter-bomb explosion in December 2002, just a few months after Uribe first took office four years ago.

No one has been arrested in that attack, which was attributed to the guerrillas, nor in a second attempt on his life, involving a car bomb, in October 2005

Vargas blamed right-wing paramilitaries and the police for the second incident. But there have been rumours that the military knew about the attack before it occurred – versions that the senator now says “are making more and more sense.”

Retired General Carlos Alberto Ospina, commander of the armed forces at the time, denied that the military had any prior knowledge of the car bomb. He explained to the national news agency Colprensa that the FARC were “being defeated,” which is why “they have begun to come to urban areas to demonstrate that they still have military capacity.”

Today, Vargas says that for the first time he is thinking about “going abroad for a while.”

“I used to face all these threats from groups operating outside the law, the drug traffickers, the worst criminals in the country, but I felt that I was protected by the security forces. However, when we start to question the armed forces themselves, you start feeling very vulnerable,” he told a local TV station.

The July and August terrorist attacks, six of which were averted, coincided with a wave of searches and raids, death threats and arbitrary detentions in Bogota and other parts of the country.

“The figures of the police themselves, which were leaked, show that around 11,000 raids and searches were carried out” in Bogota, Jairo Ramírez, executive secretary of the non-governmental Permanent Human Rights Committee (CPDH), founded in 1979, told IPS..

Ramírez drew up a list of offices that were searched in the capital, which included CPDH headquarters, the Communist weekly newspaper Voz, and the national union of food and beverage industry workers (SINALTRAINAL), in search of weapons.

The police also searched the hard disk of a computer holding the files of the Consultancy on Human Rights and Displacement (CODHES), a human rights group that for 20 years has kept statistics on those displaced by the civil war.

CODHES, for example, reports that 3.8 million people have been displaced from their homes by the armed conflict in this country of 43 million, while the government puts the number at 1.9 million, and a recent national census counted 800,000.

Up to now, Ramírez “saw all of these developments as isolated incidents.”

“But when you see this information, you begin to understand that there was a strategy by the security bodies, not only the army but the Bogota police as well, to generate a climate of tension,” said the activist.

The aim was “to justify the militarisation of the city, and the arrests, raids and searches,” he said. The “averted terrorist attacks showedàin a misleading manner, that there are dangers, and that the government’s democratic security policy must be strengthened,” he added.

Ramírez also said that “This attitude taken by the security forces on the occasion of the inauguration of a president hadn’t been seen before. This was the first time our headquarters in Bogota were raided.”

When asked by IPS about the actions of the armed forces in July and August, the Committee of Solidarity with Political Prisoners (CSPP), founded in 1973 by Nobel Literature Prize-winner Gabriel García Márquez, described a wave of human rights violations that began after Uribe’s May 28 reelection.

For example, the CSPP received reports of five extrajudicial executions committed by the army in five different regions of the country between Jun. 27 and Sep. 4.

And between Jun. 3 and Sep. 7, 99 people were arbitrarily taken into custody in Bogota and nine different regions, including three minors (one of whom was just four years old). One of the detainees, José Isaías Mesa, a farmer, was killed on Jun. 7 when he was being held by an army unit in the southern province of Meta.