1993

Second Report on the Situation of Human Rights in Colombia OAS

The 1968 enactment of Law 48 created the self-defense groups. As a result, groups of individuals with ties to economic or political sectors in the country's various regions emerged in the 1970's and became entrenched in the 1980's. With the sponsorship or acquiescence of sectors of the armed forces, these groups used violence to protect partisan or group interests. Originally, the relationship between the self-defense groups and State national defense organizations was occasional and informal in nature. However, these legal self-defense groups started to grow stronger and to coalesce precisely when the Army was finding it increasingly difficult to perform its function of defending public law and order in the country.

As the paramilitary groups became stronger, some of them began to be absorbed and then run by drug cartels. The cartels originally used them as a means to protect the lawful businesses that they had acquired with their ill-gotten gains. Later, however, they began to use them as actual armies, to eliminate political opponents and to deal with and resolve problems between drug cartels, especially between the groups in the Medellín cartel and those in the Cali cartel. The paramilitary groups also started to carry more sophisticated weaponry and were given highly specialized training, for which Israeli, British and mercenaries of other nationalities were recruited. These mercenaries established training camps and actual schools to train the paramilitary and hired gunmen that drug traffickers used in their gang wars and on their suicide missions to assassinate prominent people and Colombian politicians.

Under President Betancur [1982-1986], while peace efforts got underway through negotiations with the guerrilla forces, the paramilitary movement escalated, at least partly because of the sense of frustration that the peace negotiations caused in some sectors of the military, the curb on anti-guerrilla activities, the restrictions that the Government imposed as to the type of activity that could be used to combat the guerrilla movement and the increased effort to prevent lawlessness on the part of the military.

Also during this period, the Asociación Campesina de Agricultores y Ganaderos del Magdalena Medio (ACDEGAM) was created on July 24, 1984. This group and other regional associations of farmers, businessmen and entrepreneurs took advantage of Law 48, from 1968, to play a major role in promoting and consolidating paramilitary groups, aided by the armed forces. In May 1984, a truce known as the Uribe Agreements was declared with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). Out of that came a new political force in Colombia, the Unión Patriótica (UP), the first leftist political group, consisting of former members of the guerrilla movement and of other leftist political groups.

[M]embers of the newly-created Unión Patriótica started to be assassinated. The extermination campaign may have been motivated by the fact that former FARC members who had become members of the Unión Patriótica seemed to be benefitting by their re-incorporation into the legal political system, even though some either maintained or seemed to maintain ties with the guerrilla movement that continued to engage in military activities. Another possible motive for the extermination campaign may have been a fear that the UP would win control of local government with the armed support of the guerrilla movement.

In 1989 the administration of President Barco enacted a series of laws calculated to dismantle the paramilitary groups, making it unlawful to form any new, private self-defense groups. During this same administration, measures were also taken to strengthen controls to ensure that the military were operating within the law, such as the appointment of a civilian Prosecutor for the Military and Police Forces and the creation of an Office of the Attorney Delegate for Human Rights with the authority to investigate and punish cases of genocide, disappearances and torture. These measures, however, did not seem to have much of an effect.

There was an explosion of violence during this period, one of the worst in Colombia's history. Three presidential candidates were assassinated Luis Carlos Galán of the Partido Liberal on August 16, 1989; Bernardo Jaramillo of the Unión Patriótica on March 22, 1990, and Carlos Pizarro of the Alianza Democrática M-19, on April 26, 1990. Also assassinated was the Attorney General, Carlos Mauro Hoyos, on February 25, 1988. The drug cartels started to practice their own brand of terrorism to force the government to change its policy of suppressing drug trafficking and in the process created an unprecedented climate of fear and intimidation. This new brand of almost uncontrollable aggression, called "narcoterrorism", raged on in Colombia from 1988 and 1990 virtually unchecked. In many rural areas, members of the UP continued to be exterminated, partly as a result of differences between the FARC and the drug traffickers.

State of War: Political Violence and Counterinsurgency in Colombia (HRW)

Colombia is Latin America's leading recipient of U.S. military aid, ostensibly provided for counternarcotics measures, but the armed forces' priorities remain counterinsurgency tactics. The centerpiece of army strategy has been the creation of three Mobile Brigades, elite units of professional soldiers that receive special training and operate in areas of greatest insurgent activity. The units have been implicated in a shocking number of abuses, including extra-judicial executions, disappearances, rapes, torture, the wanton burning of houses, crops, and food, indiscriminate bombings and aerial strafing, beatings, and death threats.

1996

Colombia's Killer Networks: The Military-Paramilitary Partnership and the United States (HRW)

Human Rights Watch has obtained evidence, including the heretofore secret Colombian military intelligence reorganization plan called Order 200-05/91 and eyewitness testimony, that shows that in 1991, the military made civilians a key part of its intelligence-gathering apparatus. Working under the direct orders of the military high command, paramilitary forces incorporated into intelligence networks conducted surveillance of legal opposition political figures and groups, operated with military units, then executed attacks against targets chosen by their military commanders.

Human Rights Watch has also documented the disturbing role played by the United States in support of the Colombian military. Despite Colombia's disastrous human rights record, a U.S. Defense Department and Central Intelligence Agency team worked with Colombian military officers on the 1991 intelligence reorganization that resulted in the creation of killer networks that identified and killed civilians suspected of supporting guerrillas.

Colombian Armed Forces Directive No. 200-05/91

The above report seems to have been deliberately leaked by either DAS or the US State Dept, rather than being the work of a whistleblower. One of the authors told me that the head of the DAS (Colombian Intelligence Service) personally gave it to him. Then on another occasion, he told me that the head of some division of DAS gave it to him.

As it turns out, this human rights activist gets most of his documents from the State Department, so I think that's probably where he got Directive No. 200-05/91.

I knew I was in trouble when this person offered me the State Department's files on Eduardo Umaña Mendoza, a human rights activist who was murdered a few years ago while investigating military support for the paramilitaries. The author contended that the files showed that Umaña was linked to the ELN.

Although Human Rights Watch has done a lot of great work on Colombia over the years, and much of it is linked from this webpage, I was disappointed to learn this report was essentially a fake. Fake in the sense that the report was said to have been secretly leaked by a disgruntled member of the Colombian military who just couldn't keep it a secret any longer. But that was not the case; it was deliberately leaked either by DAS, as the author contended, or by the U.S. State Dept, which I think is more likely.

The Genocidal Democracy by Javier Giraldo S. J.

This book, published by Common Courage Press in 1996, is no longer in print. However, in view of continuing violence in Colombia and recent proposals by the US Government to increase military aid, we are making it freely available online.

This proposed military aid -- cash, weapons, training, and US troops -- continues a history of US support for a system that, according to Father Giraldo's Inter-congregational Commission of Peace and Justice, produced over 67,000 victims of political violence between 1988 and 1995. Under the guise of drug interdiction, this action will no doubt fuel the existing violence and do little to stop the production of narcotics. The history exposed in this book will make clear the folly of this approach to narcotics production in Colombia and make you wonder to what end US involvement is really intended. Please read this information, use it, and spread it around.

1997

Mapiripan: A Shortcut To Hell Cambio 16

Fear runs so rampant in this little village that even the special Prosecutors sent to investigate the massacre have felt its sting, as evidenced by their managing to take testimony in a record five (5) hours without once venturing forth from the Mayor's Offices. According to a military source, the Army received information on the presence of paramilitary groups in the region on July 14, the very same day that 120 or 150 armed men marched into the town of Mapiripan. The town's penal municipal judge, Leonardo Iván Cortés-Novoa, called the Army battalion commander in charge of the area eight (8) times to ask for assistance. Nevertheless, the army waited until July 21 to send in troops, after 25 of the townspeople had been torn limb from limb while still alive, according to Cortés and other residents who saw the victims forced into the town's slaughterhouse. Those present claim that members of the paramilitary groups savagely dismembered their friends with knives and machetes, throwing the severed arms and legs into the turbulent waters of the Guaviare River, which borders the town.

1998

War Without Quarter: Colombia and International Humanitarian Law (HRW)

Violations of international humanitarian law -- the laws of war -- are not abstract concepts in Colombia, but the grim material of everyday life. War bursts into the daily activities of a farm, a village, a public bus, or a school with the speed of armed fighters arriving down a path or in four-wheel drive vehicles. Sometimes, armed men carefully choose their victims from lists. Other times, they simply kill those nearby, to spread fear. Indeed, a willingness to commit atrocities is among the most striking features of Colombia's war.

1999

Barrancabermeja: A City Under Seige (AI)

On the evening of 16 May 1998 a large heavily-armed paramilitary force drove unhindered through a number of poorer districts of the city of Barrancabermeja, department of Santander. On route the gunmen rounded up residents, killing several on the spot and forcing many others on to trucks. By the next day the bodies of seven victims of the paramilitary attack had been discovered. The whereabouts of the remaining 25 people who were forcibly abducted is still unknown.

Despite the fact that the Colombian armed forces maintain a heavy presence in close proximity to the districts where the attack took place and that these units had only recently received intelligence reports indicating that paramilitary forces were planning a massacre in the city; despite the sound of gunfire and the reported cries for help of the victims and the appeals made to the security forces to pursue the paramilitary attackers, no action was taken by the security forces either to confront the paramilitary force during the attack or to track them down as they made their exit from the city. Furthermore, there is evidence that a security force check-point which had been established on the orders of a local military commander to control the route into the area for a period of 24 hours from the afternoon of 16 May 1998, inexplicably withdrew to barracks shortly before the arrival of the paramilitary group.

This incursion heralded the beginning of a paramilitary onslaught in the south of Bolívar department which resulted in over 6000 peasant farmers and miners from the municipalities San Pablo, Simití, Santa Rosa and Cantagallo fleeing their homes and seeking refuge in Barrancabermeja. The city's traditional solidarity was stretched to the limits as the displaced took over libraries, schools and other public buildings. The demands of the displaced included that the government provide them with humanitarian assistance and take effective steps to guarantee their safe return to lands they had been forced to abandon.

Report of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights in Colombia

Informe del Alto Comisionado sobre la situacion de Derechos Humanos en Colombia


2000

The Ties That Bind: Colombia and Military-Paramilitary Links (HRW)

Together, evidence collected so far by Human Rights Watch links half of Colombia's eighteen brigade-level army units to paramilitary activity.

In 1997, 1998, and 1999, a thorough Colombian government investigation collected compelling evidence that Army officers worked intimately with paramilitaries under the command of Carlos Castaño. They shared intelligence, planned and carried out joint operations, provided weapons and munitions, supported with helicopters and medical aid, and coordinated on a day to day basis.

There is credible evidence, obtained through Colombian government investigations and Human Rights Watch interviews, that in 1998 and 1999, Army intelligence agents gathered information on Colombians associated with human rights protection, government investigative agencies, and peace talks, who were then subjected to threats, harassment, and attacks by the army, at times with the assistance of paramilitary groups and hired killers.

There is credible evidence that this alliance between military intelligence, paramilitary groups, and hired killers is national in scope and is able to threaten key investigators in the Attorney General's office and the Procuraduría.

Report of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights in Colombia

Informe del Alto Comisionado sobre la situacion de Derechos Humanos en Colombia

2001

The "Sixth Division": Military-Paramilitary Ties and U.S. Policy in Colombia (HRW)

Even as President Pastrana publicly deplores successive atrocities, each seemingly more gruesome than the last, the high-ranking officers he commands fail to take the critical steps necessary to prevent future killings by suspending security force members suspected of abuses, ensuring that their cases go before civilian judicial authorities, and pursuing and arresting paramilitaries.

With one signature, the White House sent a direct message to Colombia's military leaders that overshadowed any other related to human rights. Put simply, the message was that as long as the Colombian military cooperated with the U.S. antidrug strategy, American officials would waive human rights conditions and skirt their own human rights laws.

Judged by the Colombian military's behavior in the field - not by rhetoric or public relations pamphlets - its leaders understood this message clearly. Even as Colombia's high command has agreed to scrub some units for human rights problems, the rest of the military appears to have a virtual carte blanche for continued, active coordination with the paramilitary groups responsible for most human rights violations in Colombia.

Report of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights in Colombia

Informe del Alto Comisionado sobre la situacion de Derechos Humanos en Colombia