One-third of senators and over one-fifth of the lower house that will potentially vote on peace accords in Colombia are suspected of links with paramilitaries. Credit: Photo composite by VerdadAbierta.com

By Constanza Vieira
BOGOTÁ, Mar 13 2014 (IPS)

In July 2004, when paramilitary leader Salvatore Mancuso was demobilising, he admitted to the Colombian parliament that the illegal extreme rightwing forces controlled 35 percent of the seats. Ten years later the situation is very similar: one-third of the new senate, where congressional power mainly resides, is allegedly linked to the paramilitaries.

These are the conclusions of the non-governmental Peace and Reconciliation Foundation’s monitoring of candidates in the congressional elections of Sunday Mar. 9.The former president, himself also under investigation for alleged links with the paramilitaries, was angered by the announcement of the peace talks.

Thirty-three candidates related or allegedly related to paramilitary forces active in the Colombian armed conflict were elected to the senate, equivalent to 32.4 percent of the 102 seats. In the lower chamber, 37 were elected, or 22.3 percent of the 166 seats, the Foundation said.

They are the heirs of politicians related to paramilitarism (the parapoliticians, in local terms, dozens of whom have been tried and convicted), or they are alleged to have direct links with the criminal organisations that took over after the paramilitaries demobilised under then president Álvaro Uribe (2002-2010).

The specialised web site VerdadAbierta.com (OpenTruth) says that 15 politicians elected to the senate were under investigation for allegedly making pacts with the paramilitaries, while 11 under the same suspicion won seats in the lower chamber.

This Congress, elected by Colombians with an abstention rate of 56.42 percent, is potentially the most important in half a century.

Apart from the abstentions, among the 14.3 million people who did cast a ballot, over 2.3 million votes were invalid, and 885,375 electors cast blank votes, more than six percent of the total, following a campaign over the social networks promoting this protest action, according to preliminary official data.

This means that lawmakers elected by a minority in this country will decide what happens to the accords that could end a civil war lasting 50 years, and debate new bills arising from the negotiations.

But no party obtained more than 20 percent of the vote, and divisions persist among the elites between support for a negotiated solution and the pursuit of a military outcome. This is one reason why the peace talks have been able to make headway.

Juan Manuel Santos, in office as president since 2010 and now running for reelection for 2014-2018, has achieved significant political consensus in support of his peace efforts, with a five-party National Unity coalition made up of Partido de la U, Cambio Radical, Partido Conservador (all three of the right), Partido Liberal (centre) and Alianza Verde (centre-left).

The coalition has 80 of the senate’s 102 seats, 100 of which are disputed nationally by the parties and the other two set aside for indigenous people’s candidates.

Santos leads voting intention polls for the presidential elections on May 25 by a wide margin. But analysts say he will have to go to a runoff ballot on Jun. 15 to win victory.

If the result bears out the polls, Santos would begin his term with a parliament, installed Jul. 20, with 46 senators in his support, not counting the conservatives, who are divided for and against the peace talks, and he would control the lower chamber, with 92 out of 166 members.

No doubt the Partido Conservador, which went from 22 to 19 seats, will again hold the balance of power, and will demand bureaucratic posts and contracts for its activists in exchange for its support. Four of its elected parliamentarians are under investigation for alleged paramilitarism.

The Partido de la U dropped from 28 seats to 21 in the senate, but continues to be the most voted party. Eight of these senators are under investigation for paramilitary connections. Cambio Radical rose from eight to nine seats, with four elected members under investigation. The Liberals maintained 17 senators, seven of them with alleged paramilitary connections.

Alianza Verde, for its part, still has five senate seats, one of them to be occupied by Claudia López, the main investigator of links between politics and paramilitarism.

According to Verdad Abierta, 16 percent of elected members of Congress for Cambio Radical and 14 percent of those for Partido de la U are under investigation for paramilitarism.

Another party that has supported some of Santos’ initiatives, Opción Ciudadana, is strongly criticised for links with far-right paramilitarism and 27 percent of its lawmakers are under suspicion.

The centre-left Polo Democrático Alternativo fell from five to three senators. This small bloc, which expelled the Partido Comunista from its ranks, could be an ally in the peace process.

According to some analysts, the biggest threat to a negotiated peace now comes from Uribe’s new extreme rightwing party Centro Democrático, which basically won the 19 senate seats lost by the Partido de la U and the Partido Conservador combined.

Uribe wants a military defeat of the guerrillas to force them to surrender their weapons, and to sentence them to prison terms in accordance with their crimes, without adopting measures of so-called transitional justice and without political rights, which would cause the collapse of the peace negotiations.

The former president, himself also under investigation for alleged links with the paramilitaries, was angered by the announcement of the peace talks.

The dimensions of the conflict are shown by justice system and journalistic investigations indicating that Santos and his peace negotiators were spied on by military intelligence agents loyal to Uribe and possibly linked to human rights violations.

Uribe did not achieve his goal of winning one-third of the senate, but the Centro Democrático has more than 14 percent of senate seats and is the second strongest party, with over two million votes.

Coal mining company Prodeco's port terminal in the Colombian city of Santa Marta, on the Caribbean coast. Credit: Juan Manuel Barrero/IPS

By Constanza Vieira
BOGOTA, May 9 2013 (IPS)

“I was displaced here by mining a month ago. Illegal miners forced me out of my municipality. No, don’t write down where I’m from, let alone my name,” said a 40-year-old black man frightened for his safety. IPS agreed to say only that he is from Colombia’s southern Pacific coast region.

Two leftwing guerrilla movements are active in the biodiverse area between Colombia’s Andes mountains and the coast. The larger group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), is currently engaged in peace negotiations with the government of conservative President Juan Manuel Santos, and the smaller one, the National Liberation Army (ELN), is expected to start peace talks soon.

Far-right paramilitary groups are also operating in the region, termed by the authorities “bacrim” (from “bandas criminales” or criminal bands), after the demobilisation negotiated during the administration of former rightwing president Álvaro Uribe (2002-2010). The paramilitaries are the only armed sector that is growing in numbers.

The illegal armed groups are now involved in artisanal gold mining, which has long been practiced in the area. Production and trafficking of cocaine are apparently in decline in the south of the Pacific coast region. “Gold is the business now,” the displaced source said.

He said gold generates between 13 and 23 times more net profit now than cocaine in the southwest of Colombia, near the Ecuadorean border.

But to extract gold, initial capital is needed. And mining brings conflicts in its wake.

In the last 20 years, Colombia has been transformed radically, as it became a mineral and oil producing country. And its institutions have not yet adjusted to the new reality.

These are the conclusions arrived at by experts who talked to IPS at the presentation of “Minería en Colombia: Fundamentos para superar el model extractivista” (Mining in Colombia: A basis for improving the extractivist model), the most complete study to date, and the first of a series of reports from the comptroller-general’s office, the country’s highest fiscal control agency.

For six months, economist Luis Jorge Garay led the group of co-authors, made up of experts Julio Fierro, Guillermo Rudas, Álvaro Pardo, Fernando Vargas, Mauricio Cabrera, Rodrigo Negrete and Jorge Espitia.

The speakers during the Monday, May 6 launch of the report were former environment minister Manuel Rodríguez; Jorge Iván González, head of the National University of Colombia’s Centre for Economic Studies; and constitutional law expert Rodrigo Uprimny, head of the local NGO Dejusticia.

“This study is extremely important,” Rodríguez said. “For the first time, the complexity of mining in all its facets has been analysed in one volume, including environmental, social, legal and economic aspects.”

The report “indicates that we are undertaking mining with very little regard for the enormous social and environmental costs involved,” he said.

The 1991 constitution establishes a series of fundamental rights that have, however, been eroded when it comes to mining regulations. A government official can adopt a measure that runs counter to the constitution, but will take precedence in practice.

“For the last two or three decades, the state has been giving up a large part of its potential share in legal mining profits,” said Rudas, an economist. “The problem is not only illegal mining, but legal mining too, which is not yielding enough returns for the country to have a strong state that can afford to solve its other problems.”

Comptroller General Sandra Morelli said “the Colombian state has been considerably weakened, and it is not a question of size but of technical capacity and legal powers to intervene in a much more timely manner, to prevent the public interest from being harmed.”

Mining brings 1.1 billion dollars a year to Colombia, according to Morelli. “But the question is whether this sum is sufficient compensation for the impact of mining activity,” she said.

Colombia’s main mineral products are coal, nickel and gold, for which it is the world’s tenth, seventh and 22nd largest producer, respectively.

“There is an idea in Colombia that foreign investment must be attracted by offering gifts. This is not true. Foreign investment goes where there are resources, but even more to where there are clear rules,” said Garay, who coordinated the study.

“The report shows that mining, while it is promising, also entails enormous dangers,” said Uprimny. These range from environmental hazards, harm to indigenous and Afro-Colombian people, and disputes over land, to the possible intensification of armed conflict and forced displacement.

The study “makes recommendations to strengthen environmental regulations and legal regulatory powers. It is a very important report in a country that has become a mining nation,” said the expert on constitutional law.

“Environmental licences (to conduct mining operations) are given to anyone who asks; only three percent of applications are denied,” said Uprimny.

The displaced man, who attended the launch of the report, is part of the affected minorities – and of the three percent who are refused mining licences. “Afro-descendant communities are not given mining permits. We are told that we do not meet the requirements,” he said.

“In geographic terms, there is overlap of areas where displacement has occurred and where licences have been applied for or granted,” said report co-author Fernando Vargas, a lawyer and sociologist.

“Especially in the ancestral territories (of indigenous and black communities), gold mining is generating extremely serious tensions and humanitarian crises, violations of international humanitarian law and serious and systematic violations of human rights,” he said.

Paramilitaries destroyed the free school buses that had been operating in Cap Haitian under Aristide's government. Credit: Judith Scherr, Cap Haitian, Haiti, August 2004.

By Judith Scherr
OAKLAND, California, Aug 16 2012 (IPS)

Haiti’s brutal army was disbanded in 1995, yet armed and uniformed paramilitaries, with no government affiliation, occupy former army bases today.

President Michel Martelly, who has promised to restore the army, has not called on police or U.N. troops to dislodge these ad-hoc soldiers.

Given the army’s history of violent opposition to democracy, Martelly’s plan to renew the army “can only lead to more suffering”, says Jeb Sprague in his forthcoming book “Paramilitarism and the Assault on Democracy in Haiti”, to be released mid August by Monthly Review Press.

The role of Haiti’s military and paramilitary forces has received too little academic and media attention, says Sprague, a doctoral candidate in sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He hopes his book will help to fill that gap.
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Sprague researched the book over more than six years, traveling numerous times to Haiti, procuring some 11,000 U.S. State Department documents through the Freedom of Information Act, interviewing more than 50 people, reading the Wikileaks’ files on Haiti, and studying secondary sources.

The author is an academic, but he doesn’t strive for neutrality. His is an unapologetic belief in the right of the Haitian masses to control their destiny.

To support his narrative, Sprague includes 100 pages of footnotes.

“I know there will be critics of the book,” he told IPS, “I wanted to have a lot of information there to back up what I’m saying, so it’s not just seen as conjecture or rumour.”

In his historical analysis, Sprague takes the reader back to the “poison gift” the U.S. gave Haiti during its 1915-1934 occupation: an army “that would continue the U.S. occupation long after U.S. troops were gone,” Sprague writes, explaining that U.S. Marines created an army “subservient to the interests of the U.S., the bourgeoisie, and the big landowners”.

Sprague writes about the period of the father and son dictators Duvalier, 1957-1986, when the U.S. considered the Haitian army a “bulwark” against the spread of communism. He explores the military’s “incestuous” relationship to the Duvaliers’ infamous Tontons Macoute, whose purpose, he writes, was “to extort and attack government critics, often acting as secret police or executioners”.

After the Duvaliers, paramilitary forces continued their violence. In 1988, gunmen were thwarted in their attempt to murder the liberation theologian priest Jean Bertrand Aristide, whose popularity was rising; 13 people were killed and 80 injured in the attack.

The gunmen didn’t act alone. Sprague ties these paramilitaries to a former Macoute trained at the School of the Americas, the mayor of Port-au-Prince and wealthy businesspeople.

Throughout the book, Sprague underscores links between paramilitary forces committing overt violent acts and the often-hidden forces of wealth, and national and international political power supporting the paramilitaries.

In 1991, Aristide became the first democratically elected president of Haiti, but the army overthrew him after less than eight months in office. The military didn’t act alone. Sprague writes that it took Haitian elites, officials in Santo Domingo, Washington and Paris, and “even the Vatican” to pull off the coup.

In 1994, President Bill Clinton and 20,000 Marines returned Aristide to office. Aristide presided over a government that was weakened by the terms of his reinstatement, particularly an agreement to drastically reduce tariffs on rice, a severe blow to Haiti’s rural economy.

Aristide disbanded the army in 1995, an act celebrated by the masses, but one that former and would-be military personnel continue to revile today.

Disbanding the army did not rid the country of militarism. Few soldiers surrendered their guns; many fled to the Dominican Republic.

Still others were integrated into the police force. The U.S. took advantage of the situation, bringing recruits to the state of Missouri for training. Sprague quotes Aristide’s legal counsel Ira Kurzban, who visited Ft. Leonard Wood in Missouri.

“’When we drove into the base … the first thing we saw was an army intelligence unit,’” Kurzban writes in an email to Sprague. “’We later learned that the infiltration process began at Ft. Leonard Wood and the U.S. intelligence concept was to pick those people (or push those people) who they thought would be leaders in the police, corrupt them, and have them at the U.S. government’s disposal.’”

A unique contribution of the book is Sprague’s detailed analysis of the role of neighbouring Dominican Republic in support of Haitian paramilitaries.

In 2000, just before Aristide was to take over from President Rene Préval for his second term, paramilitaries attempted a coup which failed. Those responsible fled to the D.R. Haiti asked for their return, but D.R. officials refused.

Over the next few years, the D.R. would provide a safe haven for paramilitary forces making murderous incursions into Haiti and returning to safety in the D.R.

Neither the U.S. nor the Organisation of American States “put pressure on the Dominican government to stop…the cross-border murder sprees,” Sprague told IPS.

During this period, the U.S. funded opposition parties that Sprague says met in the D.R. with paramilitaries.

Skewed media reporting also supported the paramilitaries and their allies. Opposition protests usually drew a few hundred people and could depend on media coverage. But, Sprague wrote, Aristide’s Lavalas movement “could count on huge rallies…but it had the coverage of only a few small grassroots and government-financed media outlets….”

While paramilitaries dramatically destroyed police stations to take control of a number of cities and towns, it was U.S. officials in the dead of night that physically removed Aristide, quietly flying him to a seven-year exile.

With Aristide gone, the paramilitaries took on new roles. “In March 2004,” Sprague writes, “a reinvigorated paramilitary campaign was launched in the face of an anti-coup backlash by Haiti’s poor, who organized huge demonstrations and rallies.”

On the civilian front, the U.S., France and Canada set up an interim government headed by a Haitian-born Floridian. Sprague writes: “At the top of their agenda was stabilizing the country and securing it as a platform through which global capital could flow freely.”

The U.S. stance toward the paramilitaries was inconsistent. Sprague writes that soon after the coup, the U.S. ambassador spoke on Haitian radio in their favour, but later recognised that the ex-military might eventually undermine the government.

Some 400 paramilitaries were integrated into the police force after the 2004 coup. Haiti’s small police force works, sometimes uneasily, with the 10,000 UN troops stationed in Haiti since the coup.

Today, Sprague writes, “with a large U.N. presence, a new kind of ‘normality’ was forced upon the country. Following the horrendous earthquake of January 2010, and with the return of Jean-Claude Duvalier and the controversial election of Michel Martelly… disgruntled ex-army paramilitaries have gained more freedom. Numerous neo-Duvalierists and rightist ex-army work key security positions for the Martelly government….”

“And Martelly’s trying to bring back the army; but he’s saying, ‘Oh it’s not a military.’ They have a different name they’re giving it (the ‘public security force’),” Sprague told IPS, adding that today, as in the past, “the elites are trying to find the right ingredient to maintain their control.”

*Jeb Sprague will be traveling around the U.S. with his book. For information, see http://jebsprague.blogspot.com.