Colombian President admits army death squad links
By Dara MacNeil
With municipal elections scheduled for 26 October, voters in
Colombia go to the polls secure in the knowledge that their
President has admitted that members of his armed forces are in
``sympathy'' with the country's right wing death squads.
President Ernesto Samper also conceded, in an interview with the
daily El Espectador, that the armed forces were guilty of human
rights abuses.
Just such an abuse occurred earlier this month, when Colombian
armed forces launched a massive offensive in the south of the
country. Such was the ferocity of their assault that the areas
under attack became literal `free fire zones': in just under a
fortnight over a million rounds of ammunition were expended and
the local inhabitants were subjected to a sustained, two-week
aerial bombardment campaign. Officially, nine civilians lost
their lives. Realistically, the death toll had to be much higher.
The Colombian government has claimed that the offensive was part
of a strategy to guarantee security for the 26 October poll.
A more likely explanation, however, is that the offensive was
planned to lessen official embarrassment at successful guerrilla
advances over the past 18 months.
In early October, for example, guerrillas ambushed and almost
killed the head of the country's armed forces, Manuel Jose
Bonett.
Admitting that the guerrillas had made substantial advances in
recent months, President Samper attempted to play down their
significance by claiming they had been driven out of other areas.
He cited in particular the Uraba region on the country's
north-western coast.
As coincidence would have it, the Uraba region is also a
powerbase of drug cartels and right-wing death squads.
While President Samper denied any direct link between the death
squads and ``his government', he did concede that there were those
in the armed forces who were in ``sympathy with the (right-wing)
paramilitary groups.''
Unfortunately for Samper, the available evidence suggests the
army plays a far more active role than that of a sympathetic
bystander. Uraba is infamous as the site of a massacre of fifty
campesinos by a death squad in 1988. The massacre was
perpetrated, ostensibly, by the euphemistically titled Peasant
Association of Farmers & Cattle Ranchers of the Middle Magdalena
valley, or ACDEGAM.
A viciously anti-left wing organisation that operated as an
umbrella group for other such groups, ACDEGAM was a tool of
Rodriguez Gacha and Pablo Escobar, both members of the Medellin
Cartel.
investigation into the organisation, in the wake of the Uraba
massacre, exposed links to politicians, police and senior army
officers. More damningly, evidence provided by a deserter
revealed the presence of senior army officers in the
organisation's command structure, and the participation of army
personnel in its murderous operations.
In 1987, ACDEGAM gunmen murdered Pardo Leal, then head of the
left-wing Patriotic Union. Leal had been preparing a campaign for
the presidency and appeared to stand a good chance of winning.
d despite declarations to the contrary, and a supposed war on
the drug cartels, little appears to have changed since the 1980s.
This year alone, according to a report in The Economist, some
10,000 people have been forced to flee Uraba as a result of
continuing death squad activity.
Earlier this month, they withdrew from an area which houses an
800 strong community of campesinos. San Jose de Apartado styles
itself as a ``community of peace'', wherein inhabitants have
declared a stance of ``active neutrality.'' The death squad
withdrawal was prompted by the arrival in the community fo the
director of Oxfam.
As the Oxfam party left the village, the death squads re-entered
and shot one man dead. The following week three more were killed.
Meanwhile Samper's disingenuous attempts to distance himself from
the activities of such organisations is proving a fiction too
far. Thus, while the army was busy bombarding civilians in the
south of the country, one of Colombia's most notorious death
squad leaders - Carlos Castano - was on a veritable
meet-the-press spree.
The Colombian government claims Mr Castano is a wanted man, even
going so far as to put a price of $1 million on his head.
Nonetheless, the devilishly cunning Castano has so far eluded all
attempts at capture - such as they have been. This has not
prevented him, in recent weeks, from meeting with and being
interviewed by journalists from the national daily, El Tiempo,
along with a plethora of foreign correspondents.
Last February, the US officially blacklisted Colombia, subjecting
the country to a series of sanctions for its failure to prosecute
the `war on drugs' with the vigour demanded by Washington.
Five months later, Washington dispatched 500 tonnes of war
material to Colombia's security forces.
In the 1980s, an official US study estimated that fully one third
of Colombia's death squad membership was made up of serving
members of the army. They're obviously doing something right, to
be deserving of such largesse.
No press freedom in US colony
One of the great myths employed to underwrite the imperialist
project was the supposed benefits that would accrue to the
colonised, as a result of their being ruled by a more
`enlightened' colonial power. Thus, the subject peoples could
only gain in terms of greater education, prosperity and freedoms.
The reality, of course, was that the traffic went entirely in the
opposite direction.
Puerto Rico is a case in point. Occupied by the US in 1898, this
contemporary colony now operates under the guise of devolved,
local government. However, that which the US boasts of - the
freedom of the press - appears to be an alien concept in the
country it runs at a remove.
At a recent meeting of the InterAmerican Press Society, in
Mexico, delegates form Puerto Rico angrily denoucned the manner
in which authorities have curbed freedom of expression on the
island. In particular, the Puerto Rican delegates highlighted the
manner in which the authorities bring enormous pressure to bear
on media outlets which carry criticism of official actions.
Most insidious is the manner in which the (local) government
denies any official publicity to any paper which it deems to be
too critical. This official `order' has been in place since April
last.
The InterAmerican Press Society has resolved to dispatch a
delegation to the island colony to investigate the matter.
Strangely, given the propensity of US politicians to work
themselves into a fit of apoplexy over similar alleged violations
in Sandinista Nicaragua and latterly Cuba, there has been a
remarkable reluctance to comment on this suppression of freedom
of expression in the United States' own territories.
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