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COLOMBIA: ‘Parapolitics’ Scandal Brings Down Foreign Minister

Constanza Vieira

BOGOTÁ, Feb 19 2007 (IPS) - In a brief statement Monday, Colombian Foreign Minister María Consuelo Araújo said she was stepping down to avoid interfering in the legal proceedings taken against her father, brother and cousin for their alleged links to the far-right paramilitaries.

Araújo, who had stated on Friday that she would not resign, said she was certain that her family members were innocent, and that “I want to be free to be at their side, as a daughter and sister.”

President Álvaro Uribe has praised Araújo’s performance as foreign minister and says she is a victim of circumstance.

“It was unsustainable, it was politically and ethically impossible, especially after the criticism voiced over the weekend,” remarked Darío Arizmendi, news director on Caracol Radio, after the announcement that Araújo was resigning.

The comments made by analysts and observers over the weekend made it clear that the decision to keep Araújo in her post would hurt Colombia’s foreign policy, which revolves around the government’s need to continue receiving U.S. military support and the free trade agreement signed with the United States.

Both of these depend on support from the U.S. Congress, which is now controlled by the Democrats.

The front page of the important Bogotá daily El Tiempo referred Monday to what may have brought Araújo down: “In Washington there is already talk about ‘Paragate’.”

“It was a noble, responsible and generous decision. I believe it was the right thing to do,” said Defence Minister Juan Manuel Santos.

When he was head of the biggest party in the pro-Uribe coalition, Santos was threatened by the U.S. embassy that his entry visa to the United States would be withdrawn if he did not remove the names of several people with ties to the paramilitaries from the list of parliamentary candidates in last March’s legislative elections.

On Saturday, the Washington Post dedicated a report to the “parapolitics” scandal.

Some 20 U.S. lawmakers are scheduled to visit Colombia within the next few weeks. At least one of them, a very influential legislator, wants to meet with the National Movement of Victims of Crimes of the State, IPS was told by a source who preferred to remain anonymous for safety reasons.

The now ex-foreign minister’s father, former legislator Álvaro Araújo Noguera, and her brother, Senator Álvaro Araújo Castro, are also accused of kidnapping a political rival to remove him from an earlier election campaign.

Her father will be investigated by the Attorney-General’s Office at the request of the Supreme Court.

Araújo Castro was arrested last Thursday along with five other pro-Uribe lawmakers. They were taken to a minimum security prison south of the capital.

The legislators are accused of undermining public security through their close ties with paramilitary groups that, by means of violence, are able to “influence the administration of justice so that it does not operate with the efficiency that society demands of it,” according to a Supreme Court resolution first quoted on TV on Friday and published in the Sunday papers in Colombia.

The resolution was made public the same day that Supreme Court magistrate and former chief justice Yesid Ramírez received a death threat.

Since the Supreme Court began to investigate links between politicians and the paramilitaries last year, the Court decided that all of its statements and resolutions would be signed by all nine magistrates, in order to safeguard its members.

The alliance between “Alas” – the Araújo clan’s political movement – and the paramilitary militias reveals an agreement through which the latter gained direct access to power, or through supporters, the Supreme Court said in its resolution.

The former foreign minister’s cousin, Hernando Molina Araújo, governor of the northeastern department of Cesar – the Araújo family’s home province – was also brought in for questioning in connection with “crimes against life and national security,” said Attorney-General Mario Iguarán.

Molina Araújo reportedly handled large amounts of money for members of the paramilitary militias who apparently ensured that he was the only candidate in the elections by threatening and forcing his opponents to pull out of the race, in what was billed at the time as a “political agreement.”

Molina is the stepson of Inspector-General Edgardo Maya, who has been put in an awkward position by the probe into what is known locally as the “parapolitics” scandal, although he pointed out on Friday that whenever his office (the Procuraduría) has had to act in investigations of his family members, he has delegated the task to other officials.

Maya also noted that his relatives cannot obtain the legal benefits offered by the Justice and Peace Law, which is governing the demobilisation of the paramilitary groups.

Under the law, paramilitary leaders are eligible for lenient sentences – a maximum of eight years – if they provide full confessions to the crimes against humanity that they have committed.

Maya is the widower of former minister Consuelo Araújo, Molina’s mother and the aunt of the foreign minister who resigned Monday. Consuelo Araújo was killed in September 2001 when she was kidnapped by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the main insurgent group involved in Colombia’s four-decade civil war.

With respect to the former foreign minister’s brother, Maya said he should be subjected to the full force of the penal code, which means Senator Araújo could face up to 40 years in prison.

Around 60 regional and federal lawmakers, nearly all of whom belong to pro-Uribe parties, have come under scrutiny from the Supreme Court, the legal body with the authority to bring them to trial.

They are all being investigated for their involvement with the paramilitaries.

According to a study by a local peace and development group, the Corporación Nuevo Arco Iris, and by academics at the public National University of Colombia, suspicion could hang over 33 of the 102 members of the Senate. (The coalition backing the president holds a 70 percent majority in the national Congress.)

The Supreme Court resolution made public on Friday confirmed that the paramilitaries not only had influence over Congress, but that legislators and drug traffickers actually created their own paramilitary groups.

After the paramilitary militias were labelled “terrorist organisations” by the United States, and in the wake of the first request for the extradition of paramilitary chiefs to the United States on drug trafficking charges, leaders of the groups decided to engage in negotiations with the right-wing Uribe administration, with the aim of demobilising.

But the paramilitary groups actually work closely with the security forces, as demonstrated by the numerous sentences against Colombia handed down by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights for crimes against humanity perpetrated by paramilitaries.

United Nations officials say the paramilitary militias are responsible for 80 percent of the atrocities committed in the armed conflict, and the Comptroller-General’s Office estimates that the groups have seized 4.5 million hectares of the best land in the country.

Some 3.8 million small farmers have been displaced from their land, according to the Consultancy on Human Rights and Displacement (CODHES), a local human rights group.

The paramilitaries and their sponsors are tremendously powerful mafias that are profoundly involved in the drug trade, Human Rights Watch expert Maria McFarland said early this month in the national conference on cooperation and human rights in the northern Colombian resort city of Cartagena.

Far from being victims, the politicians who are now investigated for their ties to the paramilitaries have benefited enormously for decades from extremely serious crimes, human rights violations and acts of corruption, and they created criminal organisations that are still active, said the lawyer, who is Human Rights Watch’s Colombia researcher.