The Bush Administration’s Hollow Commitment to Colombian Democracy

[Judi Lynn]

January 28, 2008
The Bush Administration’s Hollow Commitment to Colombian Democracy
by Michael Walker

The administration of President George W. Bush likes to boast of its commitment to promoting democracy around the globe, and has employed the same sort of rhetoric to defend US policy toward Colombia. On a trip to Bogotá in January last year, US General Peter Pace, at the time the chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, stated that he had discussed with his Colombian colleagues “how to continue the very good partnership, to strengthen the democracy here in Colombia, which in turn strengthens the democracy in the United States.” However, and notwithstanding the pretensions of General Pace and other US officials, the reality is that democracy promotion has barely featured in the Bush administration’s Colombia policy. This is evident from the administration’s stance on paramilitarism and free trade.

The paramilitary phenomenon has long been a blight on Colombia’s democracy. In the Caribbean departments, extreme right-wing paramilitaries effectively replaced the Colombian state, enforcing their rule through bribery, co-optation of politicians and regular bouts of savage violence. In short, democracy did not exist where the paramilitaries held sway. In light of its declared desire to strengthen democracy in Colombia, one would therefore expect the United States to have taken an extremely hard line against paramilitarism. And yet, over the last few years the Bush administration, desperate to bolster the government of its Colombian ally, President Álvaro Uribe, has provided strong diplomatic support to a massively flawed peace and demobilization process that has allowed the paramilitaries to retain immense political and socio-economic influence.

In November 2002, the paramilitary organization known as the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC) declared a ceasefire, and announced the following year that it would disband by the end of 2005. It quickly became apparent that the ceasefire was a meaningless gesture, for the AUC continued to murder its presumed enemies, and it is widely assumed that the AUC bears responsibility for several thousand murders in the years since its ostensible decision to lay down arms. Nonetheless, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was decidedly upbeat during a trip to Bogotá in April 2005, deeming the demobilization of 5,000 AUC members to that point “the impressive result of tough policies.”

The Bush administration then reacted favorably to Colombia’s June 2005 Justice and Peace Law, which was to provide the legal basis for the demobilization process. The law, which stipulated that paramilitaries who had committed major human rights abuses would receive sentences of up to eight years in return for confessing their crimes and surrendering assets obtained by illegal means, was deplored by Human Rights Watch, which noted that it “utterly fails to satisfy international standards on truth, justice, and reparation for victims.”

http://www.colombiajournal.org/colombia271.htm

[Judi Lynn]

1. US approval of the death squads, and more from the posted article:

~snip~
What the administration blithely ignored was that the “demobilization” didn’t signal the end of paramilitary power, far from it. The paramilitaries have continued to exert great influence over Colombian politics, with the AUC pre-determining the winners of many elections in the Caribbean departments. Thus, in Magdalena in 2003, Trino Luna Correa was elected to serve as governor following a one-man contest, his prospective opponents having wisely pulled out in the face of paramilitary threats. In 2007, however, Governor Luna was arrested on suspicion of working with the paramilitaries. Meanwhile, the congressional elections of March 2006, which were also notable for paramilitary intimidation, saw several unapologetically pro-AUC politicians enter the legislature. According to the International Crisis Group, between 10 and 20 percent of senators were assumed to have paramilitary connections.

That the paramilitaries retained significant power became inescapably clear in October 2006 when a laptop computer discovered by Colombian prosecutors revealed that notorious AUC commander Jorge 40 had ordered the murders of 558 Colombians in the Caribbean department of Atlántico while the paramilitary ceasefire was supposedly in effect. It also transpired that Jorge 40 had organized sham demobilizations, using peasants in the place of his fighters, had greased the palms of police to ensure they turned a blind eye to his continued drug trafficking and had worked with local politicians to advance their electoral prospects.
The ensuing scandal has proved exceptionally embarrassing for President Uribe.

In February 2007, Senator Álvaro Araújo, the brother of then Colombian foreign minister Maria Consuelo Araújo, was arrested, accused of conspiring with the AUC to kidnap a political rival before the 2002 election. The foreign minister promptly quit the government. And then, in October, the president’s cousin, Mario Uribe, resigned from the Senate when the Supreme Court began looking into allegations that he had had dealings with the paramilitaries. Senator Uribe was the leader of Colombia Democrática, the party he and President Uribe had co-founded some years before. Two other senators from Colombia Democrática, Álvaro García and Miguel de la Espriella, have also been arrested on suspicion of co-operating with the AUC. García was accused, sensationally, of having orchestrated a massacre in 2000 and of involvement in the murder of an electoral official in 1997.

The “para-politics” scandal has been truly explosive, revealing the existence of a sinister and anti-democratic partnership between a criminal mafia and Colombia’s elected representatives. In a bizarre twist, however, the Bush administration has tried to turn these incendiary revelations into a success story for the government of Álvaro Uribe. Testifying before Congress in April last year, State Department official Charles Shapiro argued that “the allegations that have surfaced … about government connections to paramilitary groups show both the progress Colombia has made in rooting out such people and the challenges that lie ahead.” Another overly optimistic official was Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte who, when asked about the scandal during a television interview in Colombia in May, declared, “I basically see the situation with respect to the paramilitaries in a positive way.”

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

This son of a bitch has always been partial to death squads, hasn't he? God love him.



Honduras
During his tenure as US ambassador to Honduras, Jack Binns, who was appointed by President Jimmy Carter, made numerous complaints about human rights abuses by the Honduran military. In one cable, Binns reported that General Alvarez was modeling his campaign against suspected subversives on Argentina's 'dirty war' in the 1970s. Indeed, Argentine military advisers were in Honduras, both advising Alvarez's armed forces and assembling and training a contra army to fight in Nicaragua.

When the Reagan administration came to power in 1981, Binns was replaced by Negroponte, who has consistently denied having knowledge of any wrongdoing. Binns claimed he fully briefed Negroponte on the situation before leaving the post.

In These Times writer, Terry Allen described Negroponte as a "zealous anti-Communist crusader in America's covert wars against the leftist Sandinista government in Nicaragua and the FMLN rebels in El Salvador."

In a biographical profile Foreign Policy In Focus reported that "on Negroponte's watch, diplomats quipped that the embassy's annual human rights reports made Honduras sound more like Norway than Argentina. Former official Rick Chidester, who served under Negroponte, says he was ordered to remove all mention of torture and executions from the draft of his 1982 report on the human rights situation in Honduras. In a 1982 letter to The Economist, Negroponte wrote that it was 'simply untrue to state that death squads have made their appearance in Honduras.' The Country Report on Human Rights Practices that the embassy submitted to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee took the same line, insisting that there were 'no political prisoners in Honduras' and that the 'Honduran government neither condones nor knowingly permits killings of a political or nonpolitical nature.'"

As ambassador to Honduras from 1981 to 1985, Negroponte played a key role in US aid to the Contra death squads in Nicaragua and shoring up the brutal military dictatorship of General Gustavo Alvarez Martínez in Honduras. Between 1980 and 1994 U.S. military aid to Honduras jumped from $3.9 million to $77.4 million. Much of this went to ensure the Honduran army's loyalty in the battle against popular movements throughout Central America. <1>

"The high-level planning, money and arms for those wars flowed from Washington, but much of the on-the-ground logistics for the deployment of intelligence, arms and soldiers was run out of Honduras â?¦ So crammed was the tiny country with U.S. bases and weapons that it was dubbed the USS Honduras, as if it were simply an off-shore staging ground. The captain of this ship, Negroponte was in charge of the U.S. Embassy when, according to a 1995 four-part series in the Baltimore Sun, hundreds of Hondurans were kidnapped, tortured and killed by Battalion 316, a secret army intelligence unit trained and supported by the Central Intelligence Agency," Allen wrote. <2>

According to the New York Times, Negroponte was responsible for "carrying out the covert strategy of the Reagan administration to crush the Sandinistas government in Nicaragua." Critics say that during his ambassadorship, human rights violations in Honduras became systematic.

Negroponte supervised the creation in 1984 of the El Aguacate air base, where the US trained Nicaraguan Contras and which critics say was used as a secret detention and torture center during the 1980s. <3>

In August 2001, excavations at the base discovered 185 corpses, including two Americans, who are thought to have been killed and buried at the site. <4>

Records also show that a special intelligence unit of the Honduran armed forces, Battalion 3-16, trained by the CIA and Argentine military, kidnapped, tortured and killed hundreds of people, including US missionaries. Critics charge that Negroponte knew about these human rights violations and yet continued to collaborate with the Honduran military while lying to Congress.

More:
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=John_D._Negroponte%27s_track_record_in_Central_America