Headlines, Human Rights, Latin America & the Caribbean

RIGHTS-COLOMBIA: ‘Battalions of Lawyers, Not Soldiers’

Constanza Vieira

BOGOTÁ, May 21 2007 (IPS) - In San Onofre, a municipality in the northwestern Colombian province of Sucre, where according to the Movement of Victims of Crimes of the State the far-right paramilitaries have killed 3,000 people, locals say in a low voice that “He will get us out of this.”

The “he” they are referring to is leftist Polo Democrático Alternativo (PDA) Senator Gustavo Petro – the thorn in the flesh of rightwing President Álvaro Uribe.

Petro has been making the government nervous by speaking out in parliament and presenting abundant documents and tape recordings that show that powerful paramilitary chiefs, many of whom are drug lords, merely do the bidding of local politicians, landowners and business owners, as confirmed by the confession of former paramilitary commander Salvatore Mancuso.

Earlier this month, the senator heard that he would receive this year’s Letelier-Moffitt Human Rights Award from the Washington-based Institute of Policy Studies.

The prize, which will be bestowed on him in October, has been awarded annually since 1978 in memory of former Chilean foreign minister Orlando Letelier, who was assassinated by a car bomb in September 1976 along with his assistant Ronni Moffitt, by the Chilean dictatorship.

Petro, 47, is an economist and a former guerrilla fighter of the nationalist Movimiento 19 de Abril (M-19), best known for its 1985 occupation of the Palace of Justice. The rebel group became a legal political party in 1990 as a result of peace talks with the government.

Today, he is a firm believer that only democracy can bring about improvements in Colombia, which has been in the grip of armed conflict for nearly half a century.

In the parliamentary elections of 2006, the PDA took the largest number of votes of any party, and in the presidential elections that year it even outperformed the badly weakened Liberal Party, one of the country’s two traditional parties, taking 22 percent of the vote. The leftwing coalition is now the second-strongest political force in the country.

Petro’s 70-year-old mother, and his two brothers, who run a school for poor children on the outskirts of Bogotá, have received death threats as a result of an Apr. 17 debate led by Petro in the Senate on the activities of the paramilitary militias in Antioquia when Uribe was governor of that northwestern province (1995-1997).

“In the written and telephone messages, they were told they would be killed if I held the debate. It was an attempt to keep me from speaking out,” Petro told IPS.

A few days before the debate, a prosecutor ordered a search of his office in the Senate, but Petro was able to head it off. “I had all of the information here. If something had happened, it could have been legal sabotage,” he said. Later, military intelligence agents were discovered spying on his family’s home.

Since the last legislative session, when Petro was a member of the Chamber of Deputies, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights has obliged the Colombian state to take strong measures and provide him with bodyguards.

But this month, his family refused the security offered by the government: a police officer posted outside their house, another outside the school run by his brothers, and another accompanying his brothers on the bus they take to work through a sparsely populated district.

Petro said he discovered plans for two assassination attempts against him by paramilitary militias, in 2002 and 2004, and was thus able to prevent them.

Intelligence officials have now informed him that a group of 10 “sicarios” – paid thugs – held a meeting to organise another attempt on his life, with high-powered weapons.

IPS: Who wants to kill you?

GUSTAVO PETRO: Undoubtedly, it was the paramilitaries at first. But lately, as legal proceedings have shown that more and more politicians and public officials have links to the paramilitaries, and more are going to jail, I believe the threats are coming from the state, from the government.

In fact, the latest plan for an attempt on my life that was discovered involved a retired colonel – not someone close to the paramilitaries, but close to the government.

IPS: Do you trust the bodyguards assigned by the state?

GP: There’s nothing else we can do.

A recent week-long visit to the United States by Petro, who met there with Democratic Party legislators, upset the Uribe administration. In his meetings with the Democratic lawmakers, Petro lobbied against the free trade agreement signed by the Colombian and U.S. governments, which has been stalled in the U.S. Congress because of human rights concerns and the scandal over ties between Uribe allies and the paramilitaries. The senator also proposed modifications to the U.S.-financed Plan Colombia anti-drug and counterinsurgency strategy, which the George W. Bush administration wants to extend. With regard to the free trade deal between Colombia and the United States, Petro warned the Democratic legislators that it would bring about such extensive changes in Colombia’s agricultural industry that it would end up benefiting drug traffickers, “which have seized most of the fertile land, because that is their main strategy for laundering money.”

Rural production patterns are already changing, with food crops being replaced by export products that generate revenues eight, 10 or 20 years after planting, like African oil palm trees or plantation forestry, he said.

“That requires two conditions. First of all, large extensions of land; you can’t plant a forest on just one hectare. And second, sufficient liquidity to wait until production begins. In Colombia, these things are only possible in one sector of the countryside: only the drug traffickers have that kind of liquidity and huge extensions of land,” said Petro.

The senator visited the U.S. before the attorney-general and inspector-general asked for international support for the Colombian justice system, to help it process the flood of confessions by paramilitaries that the prosecutors must investigate and verify. The confessions have come from paramilitary leaders taking part in the demobilisation process that resulted from negotiations with the Uribe administration.

With the current number of prosecutors, forensic experts and support staff, it would take 300 years – according to estimates reported by the local press – to fully identify the remains of the 800 to 900 victims found so far in clandestine common graves whose whereabouts were revealed by demobilised paramilitaries or by local residents who have finally dared to speak out.

“In the United States, I asked them to modify Plan Colombia to make it a strategy for getting to the truth,” said Petro.

Instead of continuing to use “U.S. taxpayers’ money” for aerial spraying of coca crops with the herbicide glyphosate, “which the drug traffickers just laugh at,” the focus should be on “severing the ties between drug traffickers and the state,” he said.

To do that, the justice system and the movement of victims of crimes of the state would have to be strengthened, he argued. “Instead of battalions of soldiers financed by Plan Colombia, we should have battalions of defence lawyers for victims” and their families, he added.

That would shore up “what we call the ‘truth’ process in Colombia, which basically means uncovering the ties between the genocidal drug traffickers and the state,” in order to weaken the drug trade.

“This is a much more effective route than the anti-drug policy” involving fumigation of coca crops, he maintained. “Plan Colombia has not been effective, if you look at it from the anti-drug angle, which was its original purpose.”

IPS: What did you suggest to the secretary-general of the Organisation of American States, José Miguel Insulza?

GP: A mission of election observers for Colombia. The paramilitaries have carried out a kind of genocide in specific areas of the country where they have taken over local politics. And that has been done through elections. Votes have been won through numerous fraudulent techniques, many of which have involved bloodshed and threats, which meant the people who were elected were the candidates of the paramilitaries.

International oversight of those areas, starting two months before the elections, could prevent the risk of that happening again in the October polls, which happen to be local, making them indispensable to them (the paramilitaries).

The government has accused me of being a traitor for making that proposal. But I believe it is indispensable if we want to separate the political authorities from the drug traffickers.