Conspiracy of Silence? Colombia, the United States and the Massacre at El Salado

[Judi Lynn]

(Just ran across this, and wanted to get it on the record, since I've never seen it before, and it's valuable.)

~~~~~
Conspiracy of Silence?
Colombia, the United States and the Massacre at El Salado

By Michael Evans

The question of the exact role played by Colombian security forces in the February 2000 El Salado massacre occupies a small but crucial part of the new report issued this week by Memoria Histórica (Historical Memory), the independent group charged by Colombia’s National Commission on Reparation and Reconciliation with writing the history of Colombia’s internal conflict. A long overdue account of one of the most horrific and indiscriminate paramilitary atrocities in Colombian history, the report is also a stinging indictment of the culture of impunity that has long shielded members of the Colombian security forces from justice.

The killings unfolded over five fateful days during which time hundreds of paramilitaries, mostly from the Bloque Norte (Northern Bloc), descended upon El Salado and other towns in the region, leaving behind a trail of torture, mayhem and murder that left 60 people dead and forced thousands from their homes, most of whom have never returned.

But while the paramilitary authors of the El Salado massacre were identified long ago, the exact role of the Colombian military has never been definitively established. Nevertheless, and despite very limited access to military records on the case, the report is adamant about the responsibility of the Colombian state.

The El Salado massacre raises not only the question of omission but also the action of the {Colombian} State. Omission in the development of the acts because it is not understandable how the security forces were neither able to prevent nor neutralize the paramilitary action. A massacre that lasted five days and that involved 450 paramilitaries, of which only 15 were captured a week after the massacre ended.*

For the United States, the potential involvement of the Colombian security forces in paramilitary crimes was the crux of the matter. The killings came as the development of Plan Colombia was in its final stages—a package that called for massive increases in aid for the Colombian military, but would also require the Colombian government to show that the military was severing longstanding ties with paramilitary forces.

Declassified records from the era show just how low the bar had been set for the Colombian military. In the view of the U.S. Embassy, the fact that Colombian security forces had captured a mere 11 of the 450 paramilitaries involved in what it characterized "an indiscriminate orgy of drunken violence" was actually reassuring. In its first report on El Salado, sent to Washington just days after the killings, the Embassy, under Ambassador Curtis Kamman, said it was "the first time Post can recall that the military, in this case the Marines, pursued paramilitaries in the wake of atrocities in the region with some vigor." El Salado, it seemed, was a military success story, and the Embassy had little else to say about El Salado for nearly five months.

The United States should not have been too surprised by the allegations that security forces were involved at El Salado. During the previous year, U.S. officials had frequently expressed doubts about the willingness of the military to combat paramilitary forces.

• During a January 1999 meeting with NGO representatives organized by the Colombian armed forces and attended by U.S. Embassy staff, Deputy Army Commander General Nestor Ramirez said that the Army "had no business pursuing paramilitaries" as they were "apolitical common criminals" that "did not threaten constitutional order through subversive activities."
  
  
• Another 1999 report from U.S. military sources found that the Colombian armed forces had "not actively persecuted paramilitary group members because they see them as allies in the fight against the guerrillas, their common enemy."
  
  
• The United States was also well aware of the "body count syndrome" that fueled human rights abuses in the Colombian security forces. Intelligence reports from throughout the 1990s described "death squad activity" among the armed forces. A Colombian Army colonel told the U.S. that the emphasis on body counts "tends to fuel human rights abuses by well-meaning soldiers trying to get their quota to impress superiors" and that it led to a "cavalier, or at least passive, approach when it comes to allowing the paramilitaries to serve as proxies … for the in contributing to the guerrilla body count."
  
  
• Evidence of military participation in the 1999 La Gabarra massacres left little doubt that there were military officers who viewed paramilitary forces as allies in the fight against guerrillas. Army Col. Victor Hugo Matamoros, with responsibility for the region around La Gabarra, told Embassy staff that he did not pursue paramilitaries in his area of operations. Separately, the Vice President’s office told the Embassy that Colombian Army troops had "donned AUC armbands" and participated in one of the massacres.

Eerily similar patterns emerged just a few weeks after El Salado. In March, U.S. military sources reported on the movements of Colombian security forces in the days around the killings. Buried beneath the details in one Intelligence Information Report is a short paragraph, based on an unidentified source, indicating that "many of the captured paramilitaries were wearing Colombian military uniforms." This, the source said, suggested "that many of the paramilitaries are ex-military members, or that they obtain the uniforms from military or ex-military members."

Even so, it was apparently not until July, when the New York Times published a detailed investigation of the alleged military complicity in the massacre, that the Embassy began to take the allegations seriously. Among other things, the Times article found that Colombian police and marine forces had vacated the town before the killings began, set up roadblocks to prevent humanitarian aid to reach the town, and otherwise did nothing to stop the paramilitary carnage. Still, State Department talking points drawn up to respond to press inquiries about the case again pointed to the capture of 11 of the paramilitaries as evidence that security forces had actively pursued the perpetrators.


Days after the New York Times story, the Embassy sent a cable to Washington summarizing what it knew about El Salado and the status of the investigation. Repeated requests by the National Security Archive have now produced two very different versions of this cable, telling two very different stories. A copy of the cable declassified in 2002 omits several paragraphs that were later declassified in a version released in December 2008. These portions of the document, based on a conversation with a source apparently close to the investigation, strongly suggest that the Colombian Army knew about the massacre ahead of time and cleared out of the town before the killing began.

{Source}believes that the Army likely knew from intelligence reports that the paramilitaries were in the area, but left prior to the massacre. The paramilitaries then entered in trucks from Magdalena, went to Ovejas first and then onto El Salado…

More:
http://colombiasupport.blogspot.com/2009_09_01_archive.html

[Bacchus39]

1. FARC massacres 34 farm workers

SUSPECTED left-wing rebels gunned down at least 34 farm workers after tying them up at a ranch in one of Colombia’s biggest cocaine-producing regions.The workers were sleeping at the ranch near La Gabarra, 310 miles north- east of the capital, Bogota, when armed men burst through the doors at dawn, tied them up, and shot them, La Gabarra mayor Taiz Ortega said.

At least five people were wounded and were taken by boat to a hospital in the nearby town of Cucuta. It was the worst massacre in Colombia in at least a year.

Mr Ortega said the motive behind the attack was not immediately known, but it appeared to be the work of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, Colombia’s largest guerrilla group that has been battling to topple the government for 40 years.

A regional human rights official Yinith Guerrero villagers were now fleeing the area as news of the massacre spread. FARC has spurned calls to declare a ceasefire.

http://archives.tcm.ie/irishexaminer/2004/06/17/story294526714.asp

[Peace Patriot]

5. "suspected." "motive" unknown. "appeared to be the work of..."

What is your point in posting this iffy article? To justify the bloody massacre of non-combatants by the Colombian military and its death squads? To justify the heinous practice of "false positives" (murdering civilians and dressing up their bodies like FARC guerillas to 'up' the body count, and get more billions of U.S. tax dollars)? Torturing and murdering whole villages? Failure to prosecute well-connected mass murderers?

What. is. your. point?

[Bacchus39]

6. not at all, and you can ask the same of the OP

and we can go back and forth with dueling atrocities by the paras, army, ELN, FARC especially digging up info from the past.


what is the point? there are at least two groups that have and/or are engaging in atrocities in Colombia. I recognize that. do you??

I don't see a cessation of activities from these groups being dependent on who is the next president. Whoever it is will have to deal with all of them. fingers crossed, but I am not naive to believe the FARC and paras are going away anytime soon.

[Judi Lynn]

2. “Truth Behind Bars”: extradition should not shield paramilitary leaders

Feb 17
“Truth Behind Bars”: extradition should not shield paramilitary leaders
Extradition, Justice and Peace process, U.S. Policy

~snip~
About Gen. Rito Alejo del Río : “I don’t know why they haven’t tied him to any criminal investigation. I’ll just give you one piece of information: when I was the commander in Urabá and he was the commander of the 17th Brigade, I kidnapped two people who had been detained by the Army, held at the Brigade headquarters. I got them out of the brig (…) with complicity. I took them out in a car from the brigade itself, in a covered red Trooper (…). They were from the FARC’s 5th Front and they had kidnapped a woman in Buenaventura. I entered the Brigade, took the people out, we took them to Buenaventura and disappeared them. (…) Gen. Rito Alejo went to see Carlos Castaño many times and they met at ranches near the border of Córdoba and Urabá . The security forces were very tied down when it came to fighting the guerrillas, and we used the same methods the subversives did. Our results benefited the Army. There is more (…) I patrolled with Col. Byron Carvajal in 1995 and we fought the guerrillas (…). I went anywhere I wanted, like Pedro in his own house. I entered brigades’ headquarters, police barracks, I did what I wanted.”

About the victims’ bodies: “In Urabá, when we began, all the bodies were left where the people were killed. But the security forces protested and asked us to keep working, but to disappear the cadavers. That is why mass graves were implemented… (The problem was that) the mortality rates increased rapidly and this was not helpful (…). I traveled freely in a white Hilux , which they called ‘road to heaven,’ and we killed people every day, in all the municipalities of Urabá. The only one who denounced this was Gloria Cuartas .”

About the victims: “The biggest victims will be the victims who are going to be left without the truth (…). It is necessary to tell the truth about this war in which only the rich benefited, and the poor lost.”

More:
http://www.cipcol.org/?cat=79

[Judi Lynn]

3. Paramilitaries, successors still terrorizing Colombia

Posted on Thursday, 02.04.10
Paramilitaries, successors still terrorizing Colombia

A reemergence of the paramilitaries, and their successors, are terrorizing Colombia anew.
By SIBYLLA BRODZINSKY
Special to The Miami Herald

BOGOTA -- For some human rights activists, the new face of violence in Colombia comes with a familiar mask.

While a female activist was providing assistance to a woman victim of the paramilitaries at the victim's home in Antioquia, five men wearing balaclavas broke into the house, raped both women and warned the rights defender to stop doing human rights work.

The men who attacked them -- the rights worker feared having her name used -- were members of what Human Rights Watch calls the ``successor groups'' to Colombia's long-feared right-wing paramilitary groups, most of which demobilized under a deal with the government of President Alvaro Uribe.

In a new report released here Wednesday, called Paramilitaries Heirs: The New Face of Violence in Colombia, the U.S.-based NGO said the successor groups pose a growing threat to human rights and security in Colombia.

6 MAIN GROUPS

By the most conservative estimates, the new groups have at least 4,000 members who regularly commit massacres, killings, and forcibly displace individuals and entire communities. And as their ranks have swelled, the groups have consolidated into six main organizations and are present in 24 of Colombia's 32 provinces.

The groups are committing ``egregious abuses and terrorizing the civilian population in ways all too reminiscent of the AUC,'' the report said referring to the federation of paramilitary groups called the Self-Defense Forces of Colombia that demobilized more than 30,000 men between 2003 and 2006.

Defense Minister Gabriel Silva blasted the HRW report, saying it ``did not recognize at all the commitment of security forces in their fight against these criminal groups.''

The new independent groups are known as ``neo-paramilitaries'' groups, gangs, emerging groups or simply paramilitaries, but the government generally refers to them as Bacrim, short for criminal bands.

``Whatever you call these groups, their impact on human rights in Colombia today should not be minimized,'' said José Miguel Vivanco, Americas director at Human Rights Watch. ``Like the paramilitaries, these successor groups are committing horrific atrocities, and they need to be stopped.''

Local human rights groups and conflict analysts have raised the alarm over the heirs to the paramilitary militias.

The Corporación Nuevo Arco Iris, a Bogotá-based think tank that tracks the evolution of Colombia's four-decade conflict, said in its yearly report that violent activity by these successor groups in 2009 topped those of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, the country's main rebel group.

HOMICIDE RATE DOUBLES

In some areas like Medellín, where the homicide rate has nearly doubled in the past year, the groups' operations have resulted in a dramatic increase in violence. Murders jumped 108 percent in the city last year.

That has led Uribe to propose a controversial plan to pay students the equivalent of $500 a month to act as informants on the new criminal bands that are fighting for control of the city.

More:
http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/02/04/1461762/paramilitaries-successors-still.html#ixzz0oz3et0zJ

[Judi Lynn]

4. Media silent on Colombian atrocities

Media silent on Colombian atrocities
Saturday, February 27, 2010 - 11:00
By Les Blough

Apparently, the corporate media doesn't consider this to be newsworthy: the confession to a Colombian prosecutor of 30,000 murders by paramilitaries linked to the regime of President Alvaro Uribe.

As of February 25, Associated Press, Reuters and their contracted media outlets remain silent on the news.

If it had taken place in Somalia, China, Syria, North Korea, Iran or any other country Washington sees as its enemy, we would be seeing it on a CNN special report, backed up on the front pages of the New York Times and Washington Post.

The last prominent NYT article on Colombian paramilitary death squads, in January 2007, provided Uribe with cover, stating: "Senior members of Mr. Uribe's government and Mr. Uribe himself have said that anyone shown to have had illegal ties to the paramilitaries, which terrorised Colombian cities and the countryside in the nation's internal war, which has gone on for decades, and made fortunes in cocaine trafficking, should be prosecuted in courts of law…

More:
http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/43308

[Peace Patriot]

7. Up to 2,000 bodies found in La Macarena, Colombia.

A mass grave containing up to 2,000 bodies, with grave dates of 2005 through 2009, was recently discovered in La Macarena, Colombia, nearby to a U.S. military base in a region of Colombia of special interest and activity by the U.S. military and the USAID. The Colombian military says the bodies are FARC guerrillas (as if that would justify dumping them in a mass grave!). Local people say they are 'disappeared' local community activists. The mass grave was discovered because local children became sick from drinking water polluted by the corpses.

The La Macarena massacre (includes a description of, and links to docs about, U.S. ops in La Macarena)
http://www.cipcol.org/?p=1303

The UK military connection
http://www.tribunemagazine.co.uk/2010/02/04/silence-on-british-army-link-to-colombian-mass-grave/

U.S. and Colombia Cover Up Atrocities Through Mass Graves, by Dan Kovalik 4/1/10
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dan-kovalik/us-colombia-cover-up-atro_b_521402.html

Not a word about this massacre in the corpo-fascist press!

Bacchus39 seems to think that mass slaughter is justified because both sides in Colombia's 40+ year civil war are armed and kill people. But guess who kills by far the most people? According to Amnesty International, 92% of the murders of union leaders in Colombia have been committed by the massively U.S. funded Colombian military (about half) and their closely tied rightwing paramilitary death squads (the other half). And according to a recent UN human rights report, some 70% of all extrajudicial murders (union leaders and all others) are commited by the same parties (in about the same percentages). What is the most lawless and murderous force in Colombia, by far? The Colombian military and its death squads!

Murder is horrible no matter who commits it. And civil war is especially horrible. The answer to this human tragedy is PEACE, NOT $7 BILLION IN ARMAMENTS TO ONE SIDE! The result of $7 BILLION TO ONE SIDE is mass murder of COMMUNITY ACTIVISTS, HUMAN RIGHTS WORKERS, POLITICAL LEFTISTS, UNION ORGANIZERS, TEACHERS, JOURNALISTS, POOR VILLAGERS AND PEASANT FARMERS, AND THE DISPLACEMENT OF 3 TO 4 MILLION PEASANT FARMERS.

The answer is not to try to justify one side or the other in a civil war. The answer is to STOP THE CIVIL WAR.

[Bacchus39]

8. ok, let us know how to stop the civil war

I suggest the FARC and paras disarm. I doubt they will take up my suggestion though.