Human Rights Groups Demand Bush Suspend Military Aid To Colombia

by Yadira Ferrer

The non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are seeking to block the delivery of $30 million, part of $250 million in aid approved by the U.S. Congress for the 2003 fiscal year, which ends on Sept. 30.

Washington should not release the final instalment of the funds because "Colombia has failed to comply with the standards required by the law" for the disbursement of foreign aid, a spokesman for the NGOs, who asked not to be identified for security reasons, told IPS.

The NGOs sending the statement to the U.S. State Department include the Consultancy for Human Rights and Displacement, the Centre for Popular Research and Education, the Colombian Jurists' Commission and the Permanent Civil Society Assembly for Peace.

The U.S. law in question states that the military aid is contingent on verification by the State Department that Colombia has lived up to certain human rights performance conditions -- which local and international human rights groups say the country has not met, Luis Valencia, a political science professor in Bogota, said in an interview.

The requirements include suspending the worst human rights abusers from the armed forces, severing ties between the military and right-wing paramilitary groups, and ensuring that military officials cooperate with civilian authorities seeking to investigate and prosecute rights abusers.

The right-wing paramilitary organizations are held responsible for the majority of gross human rights violations in Colombia's four-decade armed conflict, in which thousands of people are killed every year.

But "a number of soldiers and police officers remain in active service despite the fact that they have been accused of, and are being investigated for, serious human rights violations," said the spokesman for the human rights groups.

The list of cases cited by the NGOs includes the extrajudicial execution of seven people in a rural school in Mocoa, in the southern department of Putumayo, in connection with which the human rights unit of the attorney-general's office has brought charges against two members of the national police who remain on active duty.

The statement that the Colombian rights organizations will present to Secretary of State Colin Powell, and to which IPS had access, also cites a Jan. 23, 1991 operation in Putumayo in which police killed a teacher, two workers, and four local residents in the rural schoolhouse in Mocoa.

The police later dressed the victims in "military fatigues and presented them as guerrillas who died in combat, burnt their clothing and intimidated several witnesses" so they would not talk, the letter adds.

The Inter-American Commission for Human Rights has handed down a ruling condemning Colombia for the Mocoa murders.

Another case mentioned in the letter took place in the municipality of Tibu, in the northeastern department of Santander, where some 60 members of the Self-Defense Forces of Cordoba and Uraba (ACCU), a local paramilitary group, killed at least 32 people in 1999.

The rights groups also note that members of the armed forces implicated in massacres in Chengue in northern Colombia, and Santo Domingo in the southeastern department of Arauca, as well as the kidnapping and murder of Nidia Bautista, have not been suspended from duty.

The groups presented reports on those cases to the U.S. State Department earlier this year.

Rear Admiral Rodrigo Quinonez, who is accused of being responsible for the mass murder of around 30 peasant farmers in Chengue, in February 2001, has not been suspended by the military.

Sergeants Mauricio Angarita and Luis Hernandez, who also remain on active duty, are accused of the August 1987 abduction and extrajudicial execution of Nidia Bautista, a former member of the legalised ex-guerrilla group M-19.

Human rights organizations handed in a list containing these and other cases to the office of the vice-president, who is in charge of the government's human rights policy, in July.

Vice-President Francisco Santos said he was unfamiliar with several of the cases, and ensured that his office would look into the cases in cooperation with the attorney-general's office.

The disbursement of the $30 million in U.S. military aid was approved after Powell certified in July that Colombia was living up to the human rights performance conditions set by Congress.

To substantiate its human rights certification, Washington cited the fact that more than a dozen army officers accused of human rights violations or of ties with the paramilitaries had been pushed into retirement.

But prominent international rights watchdogs like the New York- based Human Rights Watch, the U.S. office of Amnesty International and the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA) said that "This is the fifth time in three years that such authorisation has been given by the State Department, despite compelling evidence" of incompliance with the conditions outlined by Congress.

The head of the Consultancy for Human Rights (CODHES), Jorge Rojas, told IPS that what is important is that due to the noise made by human rights organisations, "there is already greater interest in Congress in ensuring that the law's requirements are met."

In Rojas's view, the U.S. Congress will feel the heightened pressure, and will be forced to require better human rights performance from Colombia.

Colombia is the largest recipient of U.S. military aid after Israel and Egypt, and is set to receive around $600 million in aid in the 2004 fiscal year, which begins on Oct. 1.

From 1999 to 2002, the United States provided Colombia with more than $2 billion in aid, over four-fifths of which went to Colombia's military and police.

The $30 million to be released by the end of the year does not form part of the U.S. aid that goes towards the Plan Colombia anti-drug and counterinsurgency strategy.