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The Genocide Doctrine

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President Clinton was morally disgraced at home only to become a moral crusader abroad four months after being impeached. His newly discovered moralism, however, began to emerge two months after the Drudge Report broke the Lewinsky liaison.

Who expected such a turnaround from Bill Clinton? Even more surprising, who thought that it would be rooted in steps taken by Ronald Reagan and George Bush? Did anybody think that such a domestic-oriented president would usher in the most ambitious U.S. foreign-policy doctrine since Harry Truman? What was predictable, however, was that any Clinton doctrine would be as morally ambiguous as its author.

The ensuing tension of the Lewinsky crisis did not stop Clinton from making an unprecedented trip to Africa. In March 1998 in Kigali, Clinton became America’s first leader to apologize to foreigners, in this case Rwandans. In doing so, he was admonishing his own administration’s failure back in 1994 to call Rwanda’s then-ongoing ethnic slaughter of up to 1 million people –or well over half Rwanda’s minority Tutsis– genocide.

Last week President Clinton finally expressed his contrition about Rwanda at home. In a May 13 speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, he said about the situation in Kosovo: “I think the only thing we have seen that really rivals that, rooted in ethnic or religious destruction, in this decade is what happened in Rwanda. And I regret very much that the world community was not organized and able to act quickly there as well.”

Saying I’m Sorry

The United States has been legally obligated to stop crimes of genocide since President Ronald Reagan’s last year in office. Though few people have ever heard of it and there is no enforcement mechanism, the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide obligates all its signatories to “undertake [measures] to prevent and to punish” genocide whenever it occurs. The United States ratified it in 1988.

Although it took America 40 years to agree to it, the genocide convention preceded by one year the four Geneva conventions that the international community developed in response to the many war crimes including the Holocaust of six million Jews by Germany during World War II.

In June 1998, Clinton articulated another piece of his doctrine at home. In response to a reporter’s question about Kosovo during a general press conference, he said: “I am determined to do all that I can to stop a repeat of the human carnage in Bosnia and the ethnic cleansing” that occurred there before.

On Feb. 26, this year, in a speech hosted by San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown, Clinton articulated a big nugget of his doctrine: “It’s easy, for example, to say that we really have no interests in who lives in this or that valley in Bosnia, or who owns a strip of brush land in the Horn of Africa, or some piece of parched earth by the Jordan River. But the true measure of our interests lies not in how small or distant these places are, or in whether we have trouble pronouncing their names. The question we must ask is, what are the consequences to our security of letting conflicts fester and spread. We cannot, indeed, we should not, do everything or be everywhere. But where our values and our interests are at stake, and where we can make a difference, we must be prepared to do so.”

Two weeks later, Clinton took a rare step that was consistent with the same general theme. He expressed regret to Guatemalans in Guatemala City for the contribution that the CIA and other U.S. agencies had made to their military’s war crimes during and even after the Cold War.

Clinton made his third act of foreign contrition the evening he informed the nation that he was leading NATO into attacking Yugoslavia: “The world did not act early enough to stop” abuses in Bosnia back in 1995, he said, even though “[t]his was genocide in the heart of Europe.” By admonishing the world for its inaction then, Clinton was pointing his finger again at himself — and again at the United States.

The road less taken

The United States has long avoided intervention in the internal affairs of sovereign nations, especially when they involve messy secessionist issues, irrespective of any human-rights concerns. But Clinton has developed a bold new doctrine that urges intervention to stop crimes of genocide when we can or “where our values and our interests are at stake.” The doctrine has so far been accompanied by no further guidelines to assess future situations.

The Clinton doctrine builds upon previous foreign-policy measures. Besides following a course that occurred under Reagan, the Clinton doctrine follows the lead of President George Bush.

Bush took two initiatives during his last year in office that pushed the United States in its current direction. He established the precedent of U.S.-led humanitarian intervention by deploying U.S. troops in 1992 to Somalia to help feed its starving people. Later that year, he warned Yugoslavia’s Serbian leader, President Slobodan Milosevic, that the United States would bomb Yugoslavia if Milosevic went ahead with his plans then to attack Kosovo.

After Clinton assumed office in 1993, the Somalia intervention failed, and U.S. troops were withdrawn after the killings of 19 U.S. servicemen by well-armed Somali clans. Nonetheless, the bipartisan effort undertaken there marks the beginning of a rising trend. The following year the Clinton administration, after several false starts, sent U.S. troops to Haiti to force the reinstatement of its deposed, but elected president, Jean Bertrand Aristide. The Clinton administration later sent U.S. troops to Bosnia in a peacekeeping capacity along with European allies to enforce compliance of the Dayton accords.

Realists have opposed most of America’s interventions in the 1990s on the grounds that the United States has had no national interests at stake. In fact, not even the radical critic Noam Chomsky — no foreign-policy realist, he — writing in Harper’s sees a hidden economic agenda in NATO’s current intervention over Kosovo.

In search of consistency

A moralist creed, the Clinton doctrine is unprecedented in its full-body embrace of human rights. Either it marks a clear break, or it contradicts certain U.S. practices of the Cold War, while it remains in contradiction with several ongoing U.S. practices. In 1947, the Truman doctrine made the case for the United States to embark on a prolonged strategy of containment of the Soviet Union.

In Vietnam, Chile, Guatemala and elsewhere, the United States backed Cold War practices that involved serious human-rights abuses. Today, NATO and the United States now all accept the premise that national sovereignty is no protection against perpetrators of egregious human-rights crimes, though the United States still is only doing so selectively. Even as it crusades for human rights in the Balkans, the Clinton administration is continuing to provide military and intelligence assistance to countries including Turkey and Colombia, irrespective of their ongoing gross human-rights abuses in their prolonged campaigns against ethnic Kurds and Marxist guerrillas, respectively.

But who expected Bill Clinton to be consistent? And does anybody now expect him to keep his word? One danger of the Clinton doctrine is that it will discredit the notion of humanitarian intervention as well as the credibility of both NATO and the United States. Another is that it will come to place more burdens on America than Americans are prepared to take. However noble his doctrine’s objectives, Clinton still lacks the moral authority he needs to accomplish them.

Frank Smyth, a freelance journalist, is a contributor to the forthcoming book, Crimes of War: What the Public Should Know, edited by Roy Gutman and David Rieff.

Limp Willy?

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As the Clinton administration escalates NATO’s bombing of Yugoslavia to a level not seen in the Balkans since World War II, the worst humanitarian disaster in Europe since that war is likewise emerging, as Yugoslavia’s Serbian troops attack ethnic Albanians in the southern province of Kosovo.

Clinton himself has referred to “genocide” in defending his decision to bomb Yugoslavia. “The world did not act early enough to stop” abuses in Bosnia back in 1995, even though “this was genocide in the heart of Europe,” Clinton said last week. This week State Department spokesman James Rubin went even further. “There are indications that genocide is unfolding in Kosovo,” Rubin said Monday. “We can clearly say that crimes against humanity are being committed.”

But even as the State Department calls the Kosovo situation “genocide,” the administration and its NATO allies are resisting what seems to be the only option to stop the slaughter: The use of ground troops to protect the remaining Kosovar Albanians.

Human rights advocates are frantic over the escalation of the carnage in Kosovo, but they are divided over whether to openly call for ground troops. Slobodan Milosevic’s Serbian forces “have decapitated the community leaders” and “destroyed civil society” in Kosovo, says an anguished Holly Burkhalter of Physicians for Human Rights in Washington. Burkhalter and others observe that scenes from Kosovo are disturbingly reminiscent of the 1995 massacres at Srebrenica, when at least 8,000 men and boys were marched out by Serbian forces in long lines. Only to be killed and dumped into mass graves. The initial refugees fleeing Kosovo were “mostly elderly [people along with] women and children,” says Fred Abrahams of Human Rights Watch. “That makes us wonder what happened to the men.” Lines of men and boys, he adds, have been seen marching out of Kosovo in some places.

A self-described “humanitarian interventionist,” Burkhalter insists Clinton “can’t wait” to act to save Kosovo’s people. She says the Clinton administration is obligated to resolve the Kosovo crisis by sending ground troops, pointing out that the United States signed (in 1988) the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. “You don’t have to kill everybody for it to be a genocide,” says Burkhalter. The language of the convention she mentions includes “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group” — including “killing members of the group” and “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.” Physicians for Human Rights “is calling this one genocide,” Burkhalter adds.

“A year ago, I was in favor of early intervention with a lot of force to stop abuses” in Kosovo, including “ground forces,” she says. But she points out that she speaks only for herself; neither Physicians for Human Rights nor Human Rights Watch has officially endorsed sending ground troops. “I’m still in favor of [ground troops],” she says. Besides deploying ground forces, Burkhalter thinks the United States and other NATO member states should indict Yugoslavia’s Milosevic himself as a war criminal.

But Fareed Zakaria, author of “From Wealth to Power: The Unusual Origins of America’s World Role” and managing editor of Foreign Affairs, favors humanitarian intervention only in far more limited cases. “I don’t rule out all humanitarian assistance or intervention,” says Zakaria. But he sees the Kosovo crisis as a messy secessionist issue, as the province’s relatively new and weak guerrilla group, the Kosovo Liberation Army, along with many of the province’s civilians, is seeking Kosovo’s independence from Serbia.

Zakaria is in favor of the Clinton administration cutting its losses now and pulling out of Kosovo. Most observers believe that further intervention to defend Kosovo could make it a NATO protectorate for years to come. “It is a thorny political problem to get involved in backing a secessionist province [of any country],” Zakaria says. “Is this political objective in our strategic interest?” President Clinton “says it is strategic [for us to intervene] because it is in the heart of Europe,” but “to say the fate of Kosovo is vital to our national interest seems to be a stretch,” he continues.

Many human rights advocates maintain that the time is long overdue for the United States to adopt clear guidelines for humanitarian intervention. So far, President Clinton has actually remained fairly consistent, in that he has consistently drifted into one foreign policy crisis after another, rather than steering a clear course. The Clinton administration never took the time to present a strategic argument to justify the current need for humanitarian intervention, or outline how this intervention would achieve its goals. And those looking for a “Clinton Doctrine” will be disappointed. The administration has certainly never articulated a set of guidelines on when to intervene and when not to.

Genocide has not been a reason to intervene before. The Clinton administration has stood by while genocide occurred at least twice. In 1994, by Clinton’s own belated admission last year, the administration watched by satellite as at least 500,000 people were slaughtered in Rwanda’s genocide. And in 1995, as he acknowledged last week, the United States and other NATO member states did nothing to stop the 1995 massacre in Srebrenica.

One place the Clinton administration did intervene to stop a mass tragedy was in Somalia, and that 1993 experience is one reason the president resists deploying ground troops anywhere. The Somalia intervention began under President Bush, who in 1992 ordered U.S. military forces to the clan-split African country, trying to provide order for a besieged relief effort. Bush even visited U.S. forces there near Christmas as one of his last official acts. But Clinton paid the price months later when Somalia clansmen killed 29 U.S. Marines and Army Special Forces “Green Berets.” The tragic loss still limits the Clinton administration’s options.

Surprisingly, Zakaria, the de facto dean of the contemporary realist school of thought about the use of U.S. power, says that Somalia should stand as a model for future intervention. “It was in and out,” he says, with the modest objective of trying to help distribute food to starving people, rather than intervention in an internal crisis.

But even among Clinton’s fractious critics, who disagree with each other about what to do next in Kosovo, there’s consensus that the current policy is failing fast. Bombing alone is “too little, too late,” says Bianca Jagger — who has long advocated for intervention to stop Serbian aggression in the Balkans — by telephone from London. Zakaria says the current policy is “futile.” And Burkhalter worries that ground troops might be too late, as Milosevic “may have already accomplished his goal” of driving out most of the ethnic Albanian population of Kosovo.

Frank Smyth, a freelance journalist who has also served as an investigative consultant for Human Rights Watch as well as Amnesty International, is a contributor to Crimes of War: What the Public Should Know, edited by Roy Gutman and David Rieff.

Letter from Havana: Gays, Catholics, and Transvestites in the New Cuba

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Che Guevara would have been puzzled by the joy of this past Christmas in Cuba, the first time this traditionally Catholic island has officially celebrated the holiday since the revolution. But Christmas isn’t the only thing that might confuse Che as 1999 begins, marking the 40th anniversary of the Cuban revolution.

Imagine him walking into, say, the Committee for the Defense of the Revolution (CDR) No. 12, a Communist Party meeting hall in central Havana. Back in the old days — meaning anytime while Cuba’s economy was still being subsidized by the Soviet Union — he might have found party loyalists gathered beneath its stucco arches discussing what it would take for an aspiring individual to become a truly selfless communist or what Che called “The New Man.”

There was certainly a new man down at CDR No. 12 one sweaty Friday night last year. Calling herself “Dianna,” she wore a retrograde, psychedelic multicolored dress with gold glitter while waving a plastic fan by her face to keep her blue mascara from running. Her dark hair was tied up in a bun with a gaudy plastic ornament, at the center of which was a rose. Dianna, one of 12 contestants waiting to perform in a transvestite lip-syncing competition — now held at CDR No. 12 twice a year — fretted back stage behind a curtain made of plastic sheets painted black.

Facing the stage, wooden benches were filled with people of all ages and genders. Behind the curtain and backstage area, families with children perched atop what remained of the CDR’s crumbling rear wall and nearby falling buildings. Everyone waved whenever a BBC camerawoman panned them. Organizers of the event tested the sound system, briefly playing a song by Pat Benatar in Spanish. The festive mood was intensified by warm rum sold in plastic cups.

“This doesn’t have any political significance,” explained “El Rey” (The King), the master of ceremonies. A big, bearded man wearing a long-sleeve, ultramarine shirt, he declined to further identify himself. “This is a natural development that has finally come,” he went on. “Everything has its moment.”

But it wasn’t long ago — certainly within the last five years — that Cuban Communist Party officials harassed, arrested and even imprisoned transvestites and homosexuals, whom they considered “social deviants” who do society no good. Not any more. With nearly all Cubans fuming about their declining standard of living, the party needs to release lots of steam. Today nonconformists from cross-dressers to Catholics are embraced by party officials — the first ruling Communists anywhere to celebrate Christmas. Catholics and gays are even allowed to evangelize, as long as they do not allow themselves to become platforms for dissent.

What constitutes dissent in a country still under the strict control of the Communist Party is far from clear. But it is obvious that Cuba is changing dramatically. On any given day, La Epoca, the largest dollar store in Havana, is packed with people perusing everything from American brand-name hair coloring to disposable diapers. Everyone on the island either has dollars or wants them. Not unlike the wild market forces that were unleashed in Russia following the breakup of the Soviet Union, supply and demand in Cuba are already rushing to meet.

They don’t always do so respectably. Stimulated by rising demand, mainly from foreigners, prostitution has become commonplace. Cuba is now second only to Southeast Asia as a sex tourism destination. To advertise their services, some professionals wear huge platform heels, even on the beach. More than a few there and elsewhere look like teenagers. In Old Havana, near the Malecon, Havana’s seaside boulevard, I saw one girl, maybe 14, sporting bright green Spandex; she stood wantonly near two uniformed Cuban police.

The island is reaching a new equilibrium as it metamorphoses into a service economy while the productive capacity of the state steadily wanes. Take the island’s brain drain. Though the government makes available no relevant statistics, many of the country’s top professionals have left in recent years, while others have stayed but found other livelihoods. I met a Cuban nuclear physicist and his wife, a doctor, in Bogotá. In Cuba, I rented rooms from families led by a former mechanical engineer and a chemistry professor.

Many students, too, are leaving school as the steady exodus from traditional employment continues. People who can leave the island usually go. Anyone who wants to fly must first collect enough bribe money to negotiate an exit visa. Far more Cubans have paddled out on makeshift wooden rafts. Nearly every Cuban one meets has a relative in Florida, New Jersey or elsewhere in the United States. Most Cubans at least know of someone, too, who died at sea.

Among those who make it, many send back remittances to family members left behind. In 1997, a United Nations study estimated that they totaled around $800 million a year. Most of the dollars that reach the island eventually wind up in state stores like La Epoca. So far the government has maintained its monopoly on foreign consumer goods, and their sales to Cubans earn more for the state now than even foreign sales of the island’s main commodity, sugar.

Lots of state goods, materials and other resources, however, are also flowing away from Cuba. Shadowy street hustlers sell boxes of quality Cohiba cigars (or sometimes only harsh imitations) for far less than they would cost in government stores. Diesel fuel, which costs 35 cents a liter in a legal transaction with a government supplier, can be bought on the black market for as little as five cents a liter.

Across the island, Cubans are pilfering government stockpiles like never before. “They know what’s going on,” said one source who has dealt with party officials. “How could anyone not see it?”

But Fidel Castro’s regime is one that, in the past, did not tolerate corruption. Back in the 1980s, Castro even privately lambasted the Nicaraguan Sandinistas for taking with their own hands from what became widely know as their ” piñata.” Today in Cuba, though Castro still discourages Communist Party members from conspicuous consumption, an unknown number of officials have their own hands inside Cuba’s piñata, which is anything on the island owned by the state. Every day Cubans steal more such candy, while all such theft is only the system’s loss. As long as most of the dollars, however, still eventually find their way to stores like La Epoca, party officials don’t seem to care.

It would be foolish to flag this trend as a sign of Castro’s imminent fall. Now 72, he looks more and more like a stubborn old commander in a Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel who outlasts everyone. Castro’s old enemy, voluble Miami expatriate Jorge Mas Canosa, died last year.

Nonetheless, it is hard to imagine how the new equilibrium could be self-sustaining over time. The rank corruption that allows it to take place is steadily eroding the social gains of the revolution along with the legitimacy of the state. Despite whatever other criticism one might have of the revolution, Cuba under Castro did succeed like few other developing countries in promoting health services, raising literacy rates and educating its population. Castro also, for better or worse, nationalized private property and produced a society without anyone who was either extremely rich or poor.

Today, however, the quality of all basic services provided by the state, except for those catering to tourists, is declining. At the same time, the underground spread of market forces is only watering criminal syndicates of all kinds that are just beginning to sprout. Meanwhile, the Communist Party has been slow to respond to new challenges like taxation as well as free-market regulation and law enforcement control. New kinds of transactions now occur daily, like the sale of cocaine. Once unheard of on the street in Cuba, it is now available on the Malecon like nearly everything else.

Beneath the veneer of a communist system, the basest kind of capitalist decadence is spreading like mold. Everyone in Cuba, of course, can see it, and the Communist Party youth, especially, has even begun denouncing the fungus out loud. Young Communists often invoke Che, whose memory and example are still widely admired, while promoting a particularly Communist kind of moral revival. They decry the rising rate of prostitution, which they blame on individuals making poor moral choices. Apparently few of these youthful idealists have been to Havana’s Museum of the Revolution, which blames the prostitution that flourished before Castro’s takeover on capitalist decadence and the harsh choices it forced upon young Cuban women.

Che’s New Man was not expected to go for prostitution. But he wasn’t expected to look like Dianna, either. Though she won the last two lip-syncing contests back to back, some of her detractors claim that she had an unfair advantage. At both competitions, Dianna’s supporters, many of whom she knows from the hospital where she is being treated for AIDS, dominated the audience. The detractors say that their raucous applause may have unduly influenced the judges. Nonsense, says Dianna, CDR No. 12’s reigning queen.

Frank Smyth, a freelance journalist who has also served as an investigative consultant for Human Rights Watch as well as Amnesty International, is a contributor to Crimes of War: What the Public Should Know, edited by Roy Gutman and David Rieff.

Still Seeing Red: The CIA Fosters Death Squads in Colombia

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Back in 1989, the CIA built its first counter-narcotics center in the basement of its Directorate of Operations headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Since then, the newly renamed “crime and narcotics center” has increased four-fold, says CIA spokeswoman Anya Guilsher. She says she cannot comment about any specific counter- drug operations, except to say that the agency is now conducting them worldwide.

The CIA was established in 1947 as a frontline institution against the Soviet Union. Today, nine years after the Berlin Wall fell, the agency is seeking a new purpose to justify its $26.7 billion annual subsidy. Besides the crime and narcotics center, the CIA now runs a counterterrorism center, a center to stymie the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and even an ecology center to monitor global warming and weather patterns, including El Nino.

George J. Tenet, the Clinton Administration’s new Director of Central Intelligence, recently told Congress the United States faces new threats in “this post-Cold War world” that are “uniquely challenging for U.S. interests.”

But the CIA remains a Cold War institution. Many officers, especially within the clandestine operations wing, still see communists behind every door. They maintain warm relationships with rightist military forces worldwide that are engaging in widespread human-rights abuses. These ties conflict with the agency’s purported goal of fighting drugs, since many of the rightist allies are themselves involved in the drug trade.

Take Colombia. In the name of fighting drugs, the CIA financed new military intelligence networks there in 1991. But the new networks did little to stop drug traffickers. Instead, they incorporated illegal paramilitary groups into their ranks and fostered death squads. These death squads killed trade unionists, peasant leaders, human rights, journalists, and other suspected “subversives.” The evidence, including secret Colombian military documents, suggests that the CIA may be more interested in fighting a leftist resistance movement than in combating drugs.

Thousands of people have been killed by the death squads, and the killings go on. In April, one of Colombia’s foremost human-rights lawyers, Eduardo Umana Mendoza, was murdered in his office. Umana’s clients included leaders of Colombia’s state oil workers’ union. Reuters estimated that 10,000 people attended his funeral in Bogota.

Human-rights groups suspect that Umana’s murder may have been carried out by members of the security forces supporting or operating in unison with paramilitary forces. At the funeral, Daniel Garcia Pena, a Colombian government official who was a friend of Umana’s, told journalists that before his death Umana had alerted authorities that state security officials along with security officers from the state oil company were planning to kill him.

The killings are mounting at a terrible pace. In February, a death squad mowed down another leading human-rights activist, Jesus Maria Valle Jaramillo. He had pointed a finger at the military and some politicians for sponsoring death squads.

“There is a clear, coordinated strategy of targeting anyone involved in the defense of human rights,” says Carlos Salinas of Amnesty International. “Every statement of unconditional support by U.S. lawmakers only encourages these kinds of attacks.”

A new debate is taking place today between human-rights groups and the Clinton Administration over U.S. aid to Colombia. The Clinton Administration has escalated military aid to Colombia to a record $136 million annually, making Colombia the leading recipient of U.S. military aid in this hemisphere. Now the administration is considering even more, including helicopter gunships.

Colombia did not figure prominently on the world stage back in late 1990 and early 1991. Germany was in the process of reunification, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein had just invaded Kuwait, and El Salvador was negotiating an end to its long civil war. But the Bush Administration was not ignoring Colombia. It was increasing the number of U.S. Army Special Forces (or Green Beret) advisers there. And the CIA was increasing the number of agents in its station in Bogota — which soon became the biggest station in Latin America.

“There was a very big debate going on [over how to allocate] money for counter-narcotics operations in Colombia,” says retired Colonel James S. Roach Jr., the U.S. military attaché and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) country liaison in Bogota in the early 1990s. “The U.S. was looking for a way to try to help. But if you’re not going to be combatants [yourselves], you have to find something to do.”

The United States formed an inter-agency commission to study Colombia’ s military intelligence system. The team included representatives of the U.S. embassy’s Military Advisory Group in Bogota, the U.S. Southern Command in Panama, the DIA, and the CIA, says Roach, who was among the military officers representing the DIA. The commission, according to a 1996 letter from the Defense Department to Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, recommended changes in Colombia’ s military intelligence networks to make them “more efficient and effective.”

In May 1991, Colombia completely reorganized its military intelligence networks “based on the recommendations made by the commission of U.S. military advisers,” according to the secret Colombian reorganization order, which Human Rights Watch made public in 1996. The U.S. commission of advisers backed the reorganization plan ostensibly as part of the drug war. Yet the secret Colombian order itself made no mention anywhere in its sixteen pages or corresponding appendices about gathering intelligence against drug traffickers. Instead, the order instructed the new intelligence networks to focus on leftist guerrillas or “the armed subversion.”

The forty-one new intelligence networks created by the order directed their energies toward unarmed civilians suspected of supporting the guerrillas. One of these intelligence networks, in the oil refinery town of Barrancabermeja in Colombia’s strife-torn Magdalena Valley, assassinated at least fifty-seven civilians in the first two years of operation. Victims included the president, vice president, and treasurer of the local transportation workers union, two leaders of the local oil workers union, one leader of a local peasant workers union, two human-rights monitors, and one journalist.

Colonel Roach says the Defense Department never intended the intelligence networks to foster death squads. But Roach says he can’t speak for the CIA, which was more involved in the intelligence reorganization and even financed the new networks directly.

“The CIA set up the clandestine nets on their own,” says Roach. “They had a lot of money. It was kind of like Santa Claus had arrived.”

The secret Colombian order instructed the military to maintain plausible deniability from the networks and their crimes. Retired military officers and other civilians were to act as clandestine liaisons between the networks and the military commanders. All open communications “must be avoided.” There “must be no written contracts with informants or civilian members of the network; everything must be agreed to orally.” And the entire chain of command “will be covert and compartmentalized, allowing for the necessary flexibility to cover targets of interest.”

Facts about the new intelligence networks became known only after four former agents in Barrancabermeja began testifying in 1993 about the intelligence network there. What compelled them to come forward? Each said the military was actively trying to kill them in order to cover up the network and its crimes. By then the military had “disappeared” four other ex-agents in an attempt to keep the network and its operations secret.

Since the military was already trying to kill them, the agents decided that testifying about the network and its crimes might help keep them alive. Saulo Segura was one ex-agent who took this gamble. But rather than prosecuting his superiors over his and others’ testimony, Colombia’s judicial system charged and imprisoned Segura. In a 1996 interview in La Modelo, Bogota’s maximum-security jail, Segura told me he hadn’t killed anyone and that his job within the network was limited to renting office space and handling money. Segura then glanced about nervously before adding, “I hope they don’t kill me.”

Two months later, on Christmas Eve, Segura was murdered inside his cellblock. His murder remains unsolved; the whereabouts of the other three ex-agents is unknown. No Colombian officers have been prosecuted for ordering the Barrancabermeja crimes.

In 1994, Amnesty International accused the Pentagon of allowing anti-drug aid to be diverted to counterinsurgency operations that lead to human-rights abuses. U.S. officials including General Barry R. McCaffrey, the Clinton Administration drug czar who was then in charge of the U.S. Southern Command, publicly denied it. But back at the office, McCaffrey ordered an internal audit. It found that thirteen out of fourteen Colombian army units that Amnesty had specifically cited for abuses had previously received either U.S. training or arms. Amnesty made these documents public in 1996 (full disclosure: I provided the internal U.S. documents to Amnesty; Winifred Tate and I provided the secret Colombian order to Human Rights Watch).

Colombian military officers, along with some of their supporters in the United States, say the line between counterinsurgency and counter-drug operations in Colombia is blurry, as Colombia’s leftist guerrillas are more involved today than ever before in drug trafficking.

Indeed, they are. For years, about two-thirds of the forces of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and about half the forces of the National Liberation Army (ELN) have been involved in the drug trade, mainly protecting drug crops, according to both U.S. intelligence and leftist sources.

Colombia’s rightist paramilitary groups, however, are even more involved in the drug trade, and they have been for a decade. Back in 1989, Colombia’s civilian government outlawed all paramilitary organizations after a government investigation had found that the Medellin drug cartel led by the late Pablo Escobar had taken over the largest ones.

At the time, Escobar and his associates were fiercely resisting U.S. pressure on the Colombian government to make them stand trial in the United States on trafficking charges. They took control of Colombia’s strongest paramilitaries and used them to wage a terrorist campaign against the state. These same paramilitaries, based in the Magdalena Valley, were behind a wave of violent crimes, including the 1989 bombing of Avianca flight HK-1803, which killed 111 passengers. Investigators concluded that Israeli, British, and other mercenaries, led by Israeli Reserve Army Lieutenant Colonel Yair Klein, had trained the perpetrators in such techniques. In February, Klein and three other former Israeli reserve officers, along with two Colombians, were indicted in absentia for their alleged involvement in these crimes.

The CIA bears some responsibility for the proliferation of drug trafficking in the Magdalena Valley since it supported rightist counterinsurgency forces who run drugs. But the CIA has also helped combat drug trafficking in Colombia. In other words, different units within the agency have pursued contrary goals.

The CIA’s most notable success in the drug war was the 1995-1996 operations that, with the help of the DEA, apprehended all top seven leaders of Colombia’s Cali drug cartel. One of those apprehended was Henry Loaiza, also known as “The Scorpion,” a top Colombian paramilitary leader. He secretly collaborated with the CIA-backed intelligence networks to carry out assassinations against suspected leftists.

A young, techno-minded CIA team led the Cali bust. Heading up the team was a woman. “I’m just a secretary,” she protested when I called her on the phone at the time.

But despite her denials, she was not unappreciated. On September 19, 1995, a courier delivered a white box to her at the U.S. Embassy in Bogota. I happened to be in the lobby at the time. She opened the box to find roses inside. They had been sent by the head of Colombia’s National Police, General Rosso Jose Serrano.

Most other agency counter-drug operations, however, have yielded few breakthroughs.

The net result of CIA involvement in Colombia has not been to slow down the drug trade. Mainly, the agency has fueled a civil war that has taken an appalling toll on civilians.

Colombia is not the only place where these two elements of the CIA nave clashed with each other.

In Peru, the CIA coordinates all of its counter-drug efforts through the office of the powerful Intelligence chief, Vladimiro Montesinos — even though DEA special agents have produced no fewer than forty-nine different intelligence reports about Montesinos and his suspected narcotics smuggling. It is no wonder that agency counter-drug efforts in Peru have failed.

In Guatemala, the agency has played a strong role in both counterinsurgency and counter-drug operations. As in Peru, the agency has worked with Guatemala’s office of military intelligence, even though DEA special agents have formally accused a whopping thirty-one Guatemalan military officers of drug trafficking. Despite the CIA’s efforts, not even one suspected officer has been tried.

The Clinton Administration finally cut off CIA counterinsurgency aid to Guatemala in 1995 after revelations that an agency asset, Guatemalan Army Colonel Julio Roberto Alpirez, had been involved in the murder of Michael DeVine, a U.S. innkeeper, as well as in the murder of Efrain Bamaca Velasquez, a leftist guerrilla who was married to the Harvard-educated lawyer, Jennifer Harbury. But the Clinton Administration has allowed the CIA to continue providing counter-drug aid to Guatemala.

Most of the major drug syndicates so far uncovered by the DEA have enjoyed direct links to Guatemalan military officers. One of the largest syndicates, exposed in 1996, “reached many parts of the military,” according to the State Department.

This year, the State Department reports, “Guatemala is the preferred location in Central America for storage and transshipment of South American cocaine destined for the United States via Mexico.”

Mexico is the next stop on the CIA counter-narcotics train. The fact that Mexico’s former top counter-drug officer, General Jesus Gutierrez Rebollo, was himself recently indicted for drug trafficking, raises the same old question: What is U.S. policy really all about? Before Gutierrez was busted, the DEA thought he was dirty, while U.S. officials, like General McCaffrey, still sporting Cold War lenses, thought he was clean and vouched for him shortly before his indictment.

Some DEA special agents question the CIA’s priorities in counter-drug programs. Human rights groups remain suspicious of the same programs for different reasons.

“There is no magic line dividing counter-narcotics and counter-insurgency operations,” says Salinas of Amnesty International.

“Given the current deterioration of human rights in Mexico,” an expanded role in counter-drug operations by the United States “could lead to a green light for further violations.”

Testifying before Congress in March, the CIA Inspector General Frederick R. Hitz finally addressed allegations that the CIA once backed Cold War allies like the Nicaraguan contras even though they ran drugs. Hitz admitted that, at the very least, there have been “instances where CIA did not, in an expeditious or consistent fashion, cut off relationships with individuals supporting the contra program who were alleged to have engaged in drug trafficking activity, or take action to resolve the allegations.”

What CIA officials have yet to admit is that the agency is still doing the same thing today.

San Jorge’s Struggle: Guatemalan Village Blocks Resort

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Original title: “San Jorge’s Struggle: A Guatemalan Village Blocks a Planned Luxury Resort”

When Jorge found me, I was having coffee with a friend in the lakeside town of Panajachel, Guatemala. Jorge was panting, having peddled a fast mile on his bike from the nearby village of San Jorge de la Laguna or “Saint George by the Lake.” “Hurry, they’re going to hurt people,” he pleaded. Four days into a tense land dispute and occupation, the military had finally arrived. There are ten Mayan villages around Guatemala’s Lake Atitlan, a clear blue basin ringed by mountains including twin giant volcanoes and one lava-induced dwarf. In several villages, people’s first language is Tzhutuhul. In San Jorge and the others it is Cachiquel. The women, especially, from both groups still wear tipica clothing. The general designs and colors are specific to each group, while the patterns and images within them are unique to each village.

I collected my foreign press credential and cassette recorder, while my friend, Michael, a photographer, dusted off his 35mm camera — I didn’t want to cover the situation alone. We drove quickly to San Jorge. Descending a winding dirt road, we came upon two mismatched sides preparing to clash. About 50 armed military police confronted about an equal number of unarmed San Jorge villagers comprised of women, children, and men. Each side was arranged in three lines. The first rows of each were faced off like two touch football teams in a scrimmage. The first line of police wore solid dark blue uniforms and white helmets and wielded black truncheons. The first line of villagers, all women, wore dark red and black smocks known as guipils, embroidered with violet, pink and red flowers around the neck. The guipils were tucked into long black skirts with silver glitter and matching red trim.

Behind the women were a group of children. Even the tiniest girls also wore matching guipils and skirts. Behind the children were a group of men, most of them old and also wearing matching shirts and pants (by then the younger men had abandoned the scene so as not to be perceived as provoking violence). The old men were gathered around a flat green plank bier with sanded round handles. On top of it sat a motionless figure, a plaster statue of San Jorge. After the Conquest, San Jorge villagers had merged their own spiritual deity with that of Saint George the Dragon Slayer, one of many Christian deities forced upon the Maya people. San Jorge’s ancestors accepted this icon and today, he is considered their modern-day spiritual guide. This plaster figure held a lance that looked and felt like it was a solid piece of silver. Elders from the village told me that the original conquistadores had brought the lance from Spain.

Behind the first row of helmeted police with truncheons stood another row of fewer men, more spread out. Each held either a tear gas grenade launcher or an Israeli galil automatic rifle. Behind them another row of police, each holding a leash to a dog.

As we entered the scene, the Sergeant-in-command gave an order. The first line of police raised their truncheons, dogs barked, and soldiers wrapped index fingers around rifle triggers. The women held their line and sealed it by shuffling themselves closer together. Only a few of the children behind them began to cry. The elder men behind them reached down and raised San Jorge by his bier. The Sergeant turned to look at us, the only witnesses to the confrontation that was about to occur. Michael and I approached calmly and extended our hands. I gave the Sergeant my press credential and told him that my friend was a photographer working for me. He looked the credential over before giving it back. Then he ordered his men at ease. Everyone, including the dogs, found a spot in the shade. Two hours later, after it became apparent to the Sergeant that we weren’t leaving, he ordered his men to withdraw.

Several days later the military returned and attacked at dawn. First they threw rocks, and then fired tear gas and moved in with truncheons. Dozens of people, including women, children, and young teenage boys, were injured, many with gaping head wounds. Sixty-seven villagers, all adult men, were arrested. Soldiers tied each prisoner’s hands behind his back and then together in groups of six or seven. One young soldier carrying a galil rifle taunted one of the prisoners. He accused him of being a leftist guerrilla, claiming to recognize him from a firefight in the mountains. The prisoners were loaded onto army boats on Lake Atitlan and then ferried a short distance to Panajachel — a partly successful attempt to avoid waiting television cameras, which by mid-day, had gathered in San Jorge’s square. In Panajachel, the prisoners were loaded onto old yellow school buses and taken to the municipal prison in nearby Solola.

This confrontation took place in 1992 — the quincentenary year of Columbus’ arrival. Two weeks later, all 67 prisoners were released. There were lucky, as they could have “disappeared.” Human rights groups accuse the military in Guatemala of forcibly “disappearing” up to 40,000 victims, and killing as many as 100,000 more in the course of its 30-year counterinsurgency against leftist guerrillas. In this case, however, hundreds of witnesses including dozens of foreigners saw the military detain San Jorge’s men. It was reported by the local press. I wrote a story about it for the Christian Science Monitor. Rather than attract more attention, the military eventually freed them all.

Since then, the villagers of San Jorge have continued to hold their ground. Theirs’ is a struggle over land, but not for growing food. The disputed area is approximately 200 acres of gently rising slopes between the shoreline of Lake Atitlan and the foothills holding the mountainside village of San Jorge. The land is too sandy to be fertile. Instead, this conflict pitches property rights and ventured capital against the survival of this village. Two wealthy brothers from Guatemala City, Luis and Carlos Saravia Camacho, are trying to build a hotel luxury resort between the village and the lake; the community is resolved to resist them.

San Jorge is no idyllic place, clinging to its past. Members of almost every one of its families work in some form of wage labor. Most families are also dependent on Lake Atitlan’s tourist trade. But tourism around the lake has attracted more backpackers than tour buses so far. At present, there are only several large hotels and dozens of smaller hostels, mostly in nearby Panajachel. San Jorge, by comparison, is undeveloped.

The Camacho brothers want that to change and they hold legal title to the shoreline property between the lake and the village. But the community of San Jorge says they have “a historical right” to the same land, which they communally share, because their ancestors founded the village before the Conquest. The Camacho brothers bought the shoreline property in 1975 from Domingo Fuentes, a man who neither lived nor worked on the land. His parents acquired title to the land in the late 1800s — during the coffee boom that swept much of the Central American isthmus. During this period, Creole governments forcibly broke up land collectively held by indigenous communities and issued new titles to recent European immigrants. The changes created landowning oligarchies among the immigrants while greatly reducing the indigenous population’s farmland.

If the Camacho brothers succeed in building their resort, they boast that it will be one of the largest in Central America. Any such endeavor would forever change San Jorge as well as other communities on the lake. Indeed tourism, in different ways, works in favor of both sides in this dispute. The idea that a five-star resort could attract upscale clients is the foreseen demand driving the Camacho brothers’ plan. The proximity of San Jorge to Panajachel — which has the largest foreign presence of any highland Guatemalan village — is what deters the military from using force to control the villagers.

Another option would be to offer the community “carrots.” In 1992, the Camacho brothers offered to expand a school, improve electrical lines, and install sewers if the villagers would relinquish their claim to the land. The community said no. Since then the situation has evolved into stalemate. By 1995, the villagers had built a flat board structure in the middle of the road, which serves as the headquarters of San Jorge’s volunteer fire brigade and first aid clinic. This ramshackle structure also doubles as a classroom for literacy and multi-purpose community center. It blocks all access to the terrain between San Jorge and the lake. So far no one has tried to remove it.

Can this village survive? The Camacho brothers are in no hurry to break ground. The combination of bad press over human rights abuses along with rising common crime has kept a lid on tourism in Guatemala. Recent attacks like the January 1998 rape of five students from St. Mary’s College in Maryland will continue to keep all but the most unconventional tourists away. Someday, however, the memories of this and other attacks will fade and the Camacho brothers will again try to develop their planned resort. The community again will resist them.

The physical wounds from their first battle have healed. In fact the only permanent loss was to San Jorge himself. In the confusion of the dawn attack, the military stole his silver lance. Does this worry the community? “No,” one elder says, “San Jorge draws his strength from the people, and the people draw their strength from him.”

Africa’s New Block

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Coming of age

Sub-Saharan Africa is undergoing its most profound changes since the early years of independence. Forces that have long held sway over the region are now either waning or gone. For decades the United States, the Soviet Union, and France propped up dictators who served their interests — men like Ethiopia’s Mengistu Halle Mariam, Somalia’s Mohamed Siad Barre, Rwanda’s Juvenal Habyarimana, and the former Zaire’s Mobutu Sese Seko. The scaled-down presence of foreign powers has helped topple the regimes these men built. Other despots like Kenya’s Daniel arap Moi and Cameroon’s Paul Biya are also feeling unprecedented pressure for democratic change. Many were military officers who took advantage of the general disorder left by departing colonial forces to seize power. Once entrenched, each preached some form of nationalism, only to evolve cynical regimes which, in addition to being brutal, did little for their own people while shamelessly enriching their leaders’ inner circles. Now, with the clear exception of Nigeria, Africa’s postcolonial despotic order is finally breaking down.

But several new trends are evident. Since the departure of foreign powers, pre-colonial ethnic conflicts — exploited by local political forces — have reemerged with a vengeance. Although the divide between the Hutus and Tutsis dates back to at least the sixteenth century, Rwanda’s 1994 genocide, in which up to 800,000 people were slaughtered, was unprecedented. Ethnic and clan-based political identities are resurfacing elsewhere on the continent as well. In Nigeria they fuel a regionally based opposition movement to the central government, in Sudan an armed rebel group that threatens secession. And in places like Liberia and the Somali Republic, they have dissolved nations into anarchy.

Another rising trend is the propensity of African states to invade each other. Besides deploying combat forces, Rwanda helped plan, organize, and lead the rebel campaign that deposed Mobutu last year, turning Zaire into the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Angola also marched against Mobutu and had a hand in Brazzaville’s more recent leadership struggle. Uganda, which has a history of backing military campaigns in the Great Lakes region, is now allied with Ethiopia and Eritrea in support of rebels in Sudan. Ethiopia is also backing forces in Somalia. Nigeria has deployed peacekeepers under dubious mandates in Liberia and Sierra Leone.

Africans are increasingly taking matters into their own hands. A new generation of leaders backed by highly trained and disciplined armies is assuming power. The most assertive of these new leaders are former guerrilla commanders who developed their character and worldview as their movements defeated foreign-supported, postcolonial despots in drawn-out struggles. While highly nationalistic, these leaders were once students of Marxism, organizing along democratic-centralist lines and planning to nationalize their economics. Although some still own Lenin’s complete works, they are pragmatists, favoring free markets and insisting that corruption, not class difference, is the greatest threat to national development. Steeped in the values of secular nationalism, each has sought to incorporate disenfranchised ethnic and religious groups. Yet not one of these leaders can easily be called democratic, as each still runs a de facto one-party state.

Some of these states are coalescing into a new political and military bloc that, though relatively small, aspires to remake much of the continent. At its core are Uganda, Rwanda, Ethiopia, and Eritrea, with Angola and South Africa playing smaller roles. These countries enjoy the sympathies of Tanzania, Zambia, Zimbabwe, and Burundi. Having ousted Mobutu, the bloc now seeks to topple the Islamist regime in Sudan and influence Chad, the Central African Republic, and Somalia. While these new leaders disagree over tactics, they share the goal of ending the cronyism and instability that has epitomized postcolonial Africa.

More by default than by design, the United States has gained influence while France, especially, has lost ground. The Clinton administration has largely played catch-up in response to events in Africa, with guidance flowing as much from foreign missions to Washington as the other way around. U.S. policymakers have been mostly sanguine about the new bloc and its aims. Yet on key issues affecting Africa, they remain divided.

The agents of change

LEADERS OF the new bloc share interests and experiences that manifest themselves in fiercely independent attitudes. Take Eritrea, a small, poor country on the Red Sea, colonized by Italy and forcibly incorporated into neighboring Ethiopia in 1962. It fought U.S.- and then Soviet-backed Ethiopian regimes for 30 years before gaining independence in 1993. Its new president, Isaias Afwerki, is a long-time guerrilla leader and is unusually candid. In his first address to the Organization of African Unity, Isaias (Afwerki, by regional custom, is his father’s first name) lambasted the assembled heads of state for neglecting Africa’s problems while wasting money on their own lavish lifestyles.

A former engineering student, Isaias, 51, is a problem-solver, willing to borrow from any plan or formula that might work. At 23, he went to China for military training at the height of the Cultural Revolution. Today he is taking a correspondence course at a British institute to earn a business degree. Isaias retains — and demands from his followers — an unyielding spirit of self-sacrifice. Crime and corruption are rare in Eritrea. In 1995 the government imprisoned several high-ranking Eritrean revolutionary veterans for embezzlement. National service, including both military training and civilian labor, is compulsory, and many young men and women are surprisingly eager to serve. And unlike other African capitals, Asmara is impeccably clean.

Eritrea, while allowing more political freedom than before, is not a democracy. Isaias states clearly that the country will advance toward greater pluralism according to its own schedule and on its own terms. The movement he founded, which still dominates, has successfully incorporated Muslims and ethnic minorities into its ranks. But fearing ethnic fragmentation, Eritrea outlawed parties deemed to be ethnically or religiously motivated. Furthermore, only demonstrations in favor of the government are tolerated. In 1993, when disabled revolutionary veterans protested by blockading roads and taking hostages, government soldiers killed several of them. There is no free press either. An Eritrean journalist with Agence France Presse was arrested in 1997 for reporting on a private speech Isaias gave on Eritrea’s military involvement with allied states against neighboring Sudan.

Ethiopia, much larger than Eritrea, is one of those states. Its prime minister, Meles Zenawi, 42, who joined a revolutionary movement when he was a 20-year-old aspiring medical student, is another eclectic thinker. Meles fought alongside Isaias for 15 years against the brutal, Soviet-backed Mengistu. Isaias, who provided experienced combatants to help Ethiopian revolutionaries in 1975, provided the artillery for Meles’ final march on Addis Ababa in May 1991. These two leaders then negotiated the protocols for a referendum two years later that led to its independence. They have even more in common. Both men are ethnic Tigrinya, which leads many non-Tigrinya Ethiopians to suspect a conspiracy.

A third leader within the bloc is Yoweri Kaguta Museveni, about 53 (he is not sure), the president of the small but powerful Uganda. Often described as the “godfather” of the new bloc because of his voluble utterances, Museveni is the only bloc leader who came to power during the Cold War. He, too, has a history of involvement in revolutionary movements. In 1968, the 24-year-old Museveni was studying in socialist Tanzania. Later he led a group of students behind enemy lines in Mozambique to visit Marxist Guerrillas. He also spent time in North Korea seeking military training. By 1971 he was back in Uganda, working for President Milton Obote’s first regime when the army commander Idi Amin seized power. Museveni formed a guerrilla force to oppose Amin but eventually disarmed and joined the second Obote regime, only to break with him again. In January 1986, five years after forming a new guerrilla army, Museveni and his men overran Kampala.

Museveni has been a relatively benign dictator, often delivering homilies about the value of work and individual initiative. While encouraging political participation in villages, he outlawed political parties, claiming they would only breed chaos. Before the 1996 presidential elections, he allowed long-dormant parties to resurface, although they were still prohibited from formally endorsing candidates or organizing rallies. During the campaign, Museveni’s followers intimidated the opposition, while state resources were used to mobilize his own supporters, and he won easily. Opposition groups nevertheless hold some seats in the parliament and control The Monitor, Uganda’s second-largest daily. While the opposition tries to attract members of ethnic minorities, the issue of ethnicity is less divisive in Uganda than elsewhere. The country has many small ethnic groups, so no single group dominates. Museveni himself is from the Banyankore ethnic group in southwestern Uganda. Because some key Rwandans who fought alongside him during his rise to power are Tutsi, he is frequently accused by foreigners, especially Francophones, of being one as well.

Paul Kagame, 40, Rwanda’s vice president and minister of defense was one of Museveni’s comrades, supporting him in 1981. In turn, Museveni aided Kagame and the Tutsi rebels that defeated the French-backed Hutu government in Rwanda in 1994. Like others in the new bloc, Kagame and his movement have a Marxist past; some Rwandan officers still subscribe to North Korean newspapers. Yet the new Rwanda is hardly antediluvian. Western experts consider Kagame a top military strategist who commands an effective army that he is not afraid to use. Kagame does not deny that his forces played a decisive role in the recent Zairean rebellion that brought Laurent Kabila and his followers to power. Kagame’s main objective was to rid eastern Zaire of Rwandan Hutu rebels. But an unknown number of them have since returned to Rwanda, hiding among its Hutu majority and launching new attacks. Hutus outnumber Tutsis six to one. Kagame has no intention of sharing any real power.

The new four-state African bloc, therefore, emerged from the prior understandings between the men who are now leaders of Eritrea and Ethiopia on the one hand, and Uganda and Rwanda on the other. These leaders still disagree on many issues, however. While Rwandan and Eritrean senior officials get along well, Uganda’s Museveni is critical of Ethiopia’s Meles for encouraging ethnic identity politics that could backfire and divide the country. Similarly, since Kagame’s 1994 takeover in Rwanda, some distance has opened up between the Ugandans and the Rwandans. Although Museveni is prone to making indecorous public comments, he privately discouraged Kagame from taking measures that might have provoked France in the former Zaire. Kagame ignored him. In general, Museveni has advocated restraint, while the leaders of the bloc’s two smallest countries, Rwanda and Eritrea, have called for action.

For better or worse?

Emerging conflicts have brought the four members of the bloc closer together. Since the late 1980s, Sudan has provided bases and arms to various Islamist and extremist rebel groups launching raids into Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Uganda. After one cross-border attack into Eritrea in December 1994, Isaias took the initiative to strike back. He invited various factions of the Sudanese opposition to Asmara to forge a military alliance and flew to Addis Ababa and Kampala to persuade Ethiopia’s Meles and Uganda’s Museveni to form a coalition of frontline states. Each, state now provides bases, logistical support, and arms to Sudanese rebel groups operating from its territory, with their combined momentum even drawing U.S. support. In 1997 the Clinton administration’s budget for nonlethal military aid to Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Uganda to help fend off rebels backed by Sudan was $20 million.

The former Zaire was a second catalyst of cooperation. While Zaire had long provided bases to rebels of the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) fighting the Angolan government along its western border, its own ethnically-driven policies on its eastern border harrowed the terrain for insurrection. Zaire allowed Rwandan rebels to operate from its territory, and Zairean forces joined with these groups in 1995 and 1996 to attack local Tutsis, massacring thousands and displacing as many as 250,000.

Although Laurent Kabila took credit for its success, the Zairean rebellion was a joint effort. Kagame has since admitted that Angola and Uganda provided initial funding. Angola also deployed troops right before the fall of Kinshasa; Rwanda helped plan and execute the operation and provided combat forces. From the beginning, Eritrea provided material support and combat training in eastern Zaire. The operation, while impressive by military standards, exacted a grisly human cost. Evidence suggests that both Kabila’s and Kagame’s forces hunted down and killed unarmed civilians — including women and children — suspected of being, or being associated with, the rebels. Many officers suspected of ordering the killings spoke Kinyarwanda, Rwanda’s language. These massacres cast a harsh light on Kagame, Kabila, and the new bloc.

Despite this record, some international observers like the World Bank and Oxfam International, a private anti-hunger consortium, welcome the bloc. They see a new axis emerging across the continent, linking leaders who seek to break the corrupt and colonial ties of the past and ending the vast patronage systems that have undermined African development. For decades, leaders failed to invest in infrastructure, education, health care, or legal and regulatory reform. Nations became aid-dependent, while their leaders established predatory regimes. They used their armies and what judiciaries they had to insulate themselves from any pressure for reform. When challenged, tyrants like Amin, Habyarimana, and Mobutu responded with unspeakable violence.

The legacy of their generation is obscene. Among Sub-Saharan Africa’s 590 million people, almost half live on less than one dollar a day and lack safe drinking water. More than one-third have no health care. Tuberculosis, malaria, hepatitis, and AIDS run rampant, and preventive measures are minimal. Nearly half the adult population is illiterate, and worker productivity in most countries is among the lowest anywhere. Africa’s aggregate per capita income is lower than that of any region but south Asia. In fact, under the last generation of rulers, the continent grew poorer with every passing decade. Even if Africa’s aggregate growth doubles over the next nine years, its per capita income in 2006 would still be five percent lower than it was in 1974.

Africa’s new leaders aspire to reverse this decline — to establish what Oxfam calls “new political systems of responsive and accountable government.” Interestingly, while all four members of the bloc share this goal, Eritrea and Rwanda have been particularly suspicious of foreign nongovernmental organizations. Neither country is a beggar. In 1996 Rwanda expelled many NGOs, accusing them of aiding rebels. Eritrea accuses NGOs of perpetuating their own existence by creating aid-dependency among its people. In 1996 Eritrea ended food relief programs, and in 1997 it suspended all other activities of NGOS in the country, allowing them to fund, but not operate, health and education projects.

The bloc’s four countries encourage development through investment and work rather than through foreign aid. With the exception of Rwanda, whose economy continues to plummet due to the civil war, these countries have seen their economies grow. Ethiopia experienced a 3.4 percent average annual increase in GDP in this decade. Uganda did even better, averaging 6.9 percent growth during the same period, rising to 10 percent in the past two years. This prosperity follows efforts, especially in Uganda, supported by the World Bank and others, to stabilize currencies, sell state-owned enterprises, reduce government budgets, and create a stable business climate designed to attract private capital. Pursuing similar policies, Eritrea has seen recent annual growth of almost 8 percent.

Sub-Saharan Africa now receives only five percent of all direct foreign investment flowing to developing countries. About half of that goes to Nigeria, mainly to extract oil. Nonetheless, South Africa, the Ivory Coast, and Ghana are attracting new investors, and countries like Senegal and Mozambique are trying to. Private capital alone, however, will not eliminate poverty. Oxfam and many other groups urge the World Bank and other Western institutions to use their funds to encourage economic equality, improve health and education, and develop agricultural and other projects that are self-sustaining in the long term.

Economic development should not distract attention from human rights abuses like the Congo’s recent massacres. These events, however, should not be seen through an historical lens. Looking at events over time, everyone emerges sullied, including members of the international community. Rwanda’s genocide began in April 1994. United Nations peacekeepers were already there, but their force structure and mandate were too feeble to stop the bloodletting. France deployed troops in Rwanda once the genocide was under way, but they set up a safe haven that protected many war criminals. The U.N. Security Council approved France’s establishment of a sanctuary. Oxfam and U.N. relief agencies also played host to killers in refugee camps in eastern Zaire.

Almost everyone involved agreed that civilian refugees should be separated from war criminals, but they disagreed on who should do it. When the United Nations in late 1996 decided to deploy a force under Canadian command, its proposed mandate was limited to providing safe corridors for refugees to voluntarily repatriate to Rwanda. It had no authority to segregate them forcibly from the killers who were holding them back. By then Kagame, the Rwandan leader, was fed up. Just as the U.N. force was about to mobilize, Kagame unleashed a rebellion. In less than one month, local Tutsi and Rwandan forces routed the war criminals from the U.N. camps, separating them from most of the refugee population. Half a million refugees returned to Rwanda within three days. The rebellion continued, and, Kabila proclaimed himself its leader.

A member of the Muluba ethnic group from diamond-rich southeastern Zaire, Kabila had participated in several communist-led revolts and an ethnic rebellion. He formed his own revolutionary party in 1968. Although it attracted little support, Kabila financed it through ivory, diamond, and gold smuggling. He remained in relative obscurity until he was recruited by Kagame and others to lead eastern Zaire’s Tutsi rebellion. Since assuming power, he has failed to incorporate opposition leaders and other ethnic groups into his movement, raising questions about whether he will be able to control the Congo, one of Africa’s largest countries with over 200 ethnic groups. His forces, like Kagame’s, have much to answer for concerning human rights, although he has agreed to allow the United Nations to investigate their alleged massacres. But brokered by U.S. Ambassador Bill Richardson, the U.N. commission’s mandate begins in March 1993, which will enable its members to investigate Rwanda’s deadly slide into genocide, as well as subsequent events that precipitated the Congo massacres. Kagame, Kabila, and others have been assured that the antecedents to their own crimes will not be overlooked.

New targets

Although the bloc is cohesive, its influence elsewhere on the continent is modest. Stretching from the Great Lakes region to the Red Sea, its combined forces are one of several major military concentrations in Africa. While together they are stronger than the Sudanese army, they are no match for the armies of South Africa or Nigeria. Economically the bloc is small. Its most militant members, Eritrea and Rwanda, have economies smaller than that of Cyprus. The bloc’s two largest countries, Ethiopia and Uganda, have economies that are each less than that of oil-rich Sudan. So far the bloc’s influence has been limited to central and eastern Africa as well as the Horn. Nigeria dominates the Economic Community of West African States, and post-apartheid South Africa is a rising force on the continent.

Sudan is next on the bloc’s list of targets. For years the Islamist regime, led by General Omar Bashir, has backed fundamentalist rebels in three bloc states and elsewhere, including Egypt, Kenya, Senegal, and the former Somalia. Khartoum was also behind assassination attempts on Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak in Addis Ababa in 1995 and Eritrea’s Isaias in Asmara in 1997. Here the bloc and the United States share common interests. Washington is irritated at Sudan’s support of individuals like the wealthy Saudi Osama bin Laden, whom the State Department claims has financed terrorism worldwide, and groups including Algeria’s Islamic Salvation Front, the Palestinian-based Hamas, and Islamist veterans of the war in Afghanistan.

Composed mainly of Muslim Arabs in the north, the Bashir regime has escalated the war against rebel forces in the south. The regime has banned political parties, trade unions, and all other “nonreligious institutions,” and has restricted dress and behavior in accordance with Islamic law. Taking some cues from Iran, it has also restricted the press and purged more than 78,000 people from its army, police, and civil service, reshaping the state apparatus to better stifle dissent. The army, faced with unprecedented rebel attacks, has been forced to recruit 14-year-olds to sustain its ranks.

Leaders of Sudan’s armed rebels are close to the bloc. John Garang, the commander of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army, based mainly in the south, was in a revolutionary study group in Tanzania with Uganda’s Museveni. Abdel Aziz Khalid, commander of the Sudan Alliance Forces, a new group based in the east, is a former Sudanese army commander who consults frequently with Eritrea’s Isaias. Elsewhere in Africa, another leader compatible with the bloc is Thabo Mbeki, 55, the South African deputy president. More militant than President Nelson Mandela, Mbeki is expected to succeed him in 1999.

The bloc supports change elsewhere in Africa, even in states beyond its reach like Nigeria. Described by one U.S. expert as “a massive criminal enterprise,” Nigeria has become a major transit point for heroin from Asia and other drugs en route to Europe and the United States. Led by General Sani Abacha, who seized power in a 1993 coup, Nigeria’s regime has killed hundreds of political opponents and imprisoned thousands more, including many members of ethnic minorities. Composed mostly of northerners like Abacha, it has crushed dissent in the country’s southeast, especially among the Ogonis, who blame him and his predecessors for destroying their homeland. Ignoring them, Abacha in November 1995 hung Ken Saro-Wiwa, the award-winning writer, along with eight fellow Ogoni activists.

However unlikely the bloc is to effect change in Nigeria, it has already bolstered the opposition in other countries like Kenya. President Moi recently closed the offices of Ugandan rebels in Nairobi, and demonstrators there have begun shouting Kabila’s name in the streets. Moi has finally extradited Rwandan rebel leaders to stand trial. As part of its effort to isolate Sudan, the new bloc also seeks influence in the Central African Republic and Chad. In the former Somalia, the bloc plans to help rebuild the state’s institutions. On the Horn and elsewhere, it aims to inspire regimes in its image.

Although disorder reigns over much of the continent, Africa’s new leaders have begun to fill the vacuum left by the end of the Cold War. While all four members of Africa’s bloc are leery of France for historical reasons, all enjoy warm relations with the United States.

The Clinton administration has embraced the bloc and its allies. Since 1995 U.S. army special forces have been training Kagame’s troops in Rwanda. Last December, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright visited Ethiopia, Uganda, Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Angola, South Africa, and Zimbabwe. She sidestepped, however, many abuses, including the recent massacres in the Congo, drawing criticism from human rights organizations. Moral versus pragmatic views are at the heart of most foreign policy debates; the most sustainable solutions usually result from a synthesis of both. Such a policy is appropriate for dealing with Africa’s new bloc, which is led by market-oriented men who earned their mandates through protracted struggle. Although they still resist foreign guidance on democracy and human rights, they are far more responsive, accountable, and egalitarian than any of their predecessors. Together they comprise a new political-military alliance that is engaged in joint campaigns from the Great Lakes to the Sahara. However imperfect, the bloc changes Africa’s balance of power.

Colombia’s Gringo Invasion

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The US military boasts that its Army Special Forces or “Green Berets” are “the most versatile special operations soldiers in the world.” [1] While serving under the Department of Defense (DoD), members of these units, trained in unconventional warfare, psychological operations, and other skills, sometimes work on temporary “attachment” to the CIA’s Directorate of Operations.[2] Under CIA auspices, Green Beret advisers have been involved in both covert actions (never to be attributed to the US) such as Operation Phoenix, which set up death squads in Vietnam in the 1960s, and clandestine operations (secret only during their execution) such as the training of El Salvador’s Long Range Reconnaissance Patrols in the 1980s.[3]

In the 1990s, Green Berets and other US advisers have been deeply involved in Colombia, even though it has the worst ongoing human rights record in Latin America.[4] Last year, at least 231 US military and intelligence advisers were sent there, according to the DoD’s official deployment schedules.[5] These include two teams with 52 US Green Beret advisers each to train the Colombian Army in “junior leadership” combat skills. That official count is only three fewer than the congressionally-imposed limit (often violated[6]) on the number of in-country US advisers deployed in El Salvador during the peak of its war. Even more Green Beret advisers have trained Colombian Army Special Forces units outside Colombia at US bases in Panama.[7] According to US officials involved, this particular training has taken place under the auspices of the CIA as part of a “Top Secret” counter-drug program.[8]

Since 1989, all US military training, advice, arms and services to Colombia have been officially earmarked for the drug war. While most coca leaf is grown in surrounding Andean countries, Colombia refines and exports about 80 percent of the world’s processed cocaine.[9] US anti-drug policy, by prioritizing law enforcement over prevention and treatment measures, puts considerable pressure on countries such as Colombia. All of Washington’s $169 million annual aid to that country is earmarked to counter drugs. Some has actually been used for this purpose. A Bogota-based CIA team, for example, was instrumental in the 1995 arrests of the top leaders of the Cali cartel. But most US aid has been diverted to Bogota’s counterinsurgency war against leftist guerrillas. Since the 1960s, the Colombian military, with US backing, has been fighting the formerly pro-Moscow Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the pro-Cuba National Liberation Army (ELN), as well as other groups. In recent years, the conflict has heated up, with Amnesty International reporting more than 20,000 dead since 1986.[10] While all sides have committed abuses, the military and allied (though illegal) rightist paramilitary groups are guilty of the vast majority.[11]

Spooks Bearing Gifts

Human rights monitors have long accused Washington of complicity in these crimes. Now they have proof. Last October, Amnesty International released internal US military documents showing that the US had provided arms to 13 of 14 Colombian army units that Amnesty had cited for abuses.[12] In November, Human Rights Watch released US and Colombian military documents, along with oral testimony, showing that in 1991, both the CIA and DoD advised Colombia before its Defense Ministry established 41 clandestine intelligence networks. According to a classified (reservado) ministry order creating the program, the networks’ only function was to target “the armed subversion,” i.e., leftist guerrillas and their suspected supporters. Four former members of one network, based in the river port town of Barrancabermeja, testified that it incorporated illegal paramilitary groups and was responsible for killing hundreds of civilians.[13]

The CIA was directly involved in helping design and fund the intelligence networks, according to retired US Army Col. James S. Roach, Jr., then military attaché and Defense (Department) Intelligence Agency liaison in Bogota. “The CIA set up the clandestine nets on their own,” Roach says. “They had a lot of money. It was kind of like Santa Claus had arrived.” CIA spokesman Mark Mansfield declined to comment.[14]

These CIA-promoted intelligence networks enabled the Colombian military and illegal paramilitaries to expand the pattern of secret collaboration which began in the early 1980s. According to Javier Giraldo, a Jesuit priest and founder of Colombia’s Inter-Congregational Commission for Justice and Peace:

A vast network of armed civilians began to replace, at least in part, soldiers and policemen who could be easily identified. They also started to employ methods that had been carefully designed to ensure secrecy and generate confusion. Because of this, witnesses and victims of crimes are unsure of the exact identity of the individual(s) responsible for committing them. This problem with identifying the perpetrators is often insurmountable.

At the same time, members of the army and police began to conceal their identities, frequently wearing civilian clothes and hoods, to drive unmarked cars and to take their victims to clandestine torture centers, all in order to forego legal formalities in arrest. What has frequently followed these abductions is intimidation or torture, enforced disappearances and murder.[15]

SOA’s Traditional Values

While DoD officials continue to deny complicity in human rights violations, the close ties between US intelligence and defense agencies and their Colombian counterparts are well documented. Last year, for example, the US Navy deployed 97 operations and intelligence advisers in-country. There they helped plan strategy with the Colombian Navy command and provided tactical advice to units based out of ports including Barrancabermeja.[16] Meanwhile, US Green Berets train the Colombian army in Cimitarra, a town that even Colombian police reports identify as a center of illegal paramilitary operations.[17] Other US officials work closely with Colombia top commanders. The US Military Advisory Group’s office is inside the Colombian Armed Forces command compound, conveniently down the hall from the offices of the Colombian army commander.

As is the case throughout much of Latin America, many key human rights violators have received US training. Commander Gen. Manuel Jose Bonett Locarno is one of hundreds of Colombian officers who have graduated from the US School of the Americas (SOA).[18] He was later implicated in torturing and murdering trade unionists, community leaders, and human rights monitors. Bonett, who denies responsibility for these or any other crimes, reports to Gen. Harold Bedoya Pizarro, Colombia’s Armed Forces commander, who studied military intelligence at the SOA in 1965 and was invited back to teach it as a guest professor in 1978 and 1979. A coalition of European human rights groups and others have accused him of running death squads comprised of joint military and paramilitary forces. More recently, Bedoya has mapped out “intelligence planning regarding the country’s internal political situation” through El Diario de Bedoya, a classified analysis with general orders from Bedoya himself, regularly sent to all divisions and brigade commanders.[19]

While Bedoya acknowledges that he has identified suspects for army surveillance, both he and Bonett deny that these targets include such legal entities as community leaders, non-governmental organizations, or political parties and their elected officials. But a July 1995 “reservado” division-wide order signed by Bonett instructs army intelligence networks to conduct “permanent surveillance of the municipal governments and the ways in which they are managing their funds.”[20] Another classified Colombian army document from March 1995 claims that the guerrillas have infiltrated an estimated 800 locally-elected municipal governments nationwide and an unknown number of non-governmental organizations, “especially leftist ones … in Colombia, the United States, Canada, Europe.” This activity has led the groups, the document goes on, to adopt positions favoring “the overcoming of impunity,” “the vigilant and effective monitoring of human rights,” and “the construction of a peace process.”[21]

Within Colombia’s tense climate, simply identifying an organization or individual as “leftist” is tantamount to authorizing anything from surveillance to murder, and indeed, many Colombians so labeled have disappeared or been killed. Take the rural town of Aguachica in the northern Magdalena Valley, where the army’s ability to process intelligence is made more efficient with computers. One classified printout, “Latest Information on the Enemy,” was prepared by army Task Force No. 27 Pantera (Panther). It names dozens of alleged subversives, including leaders of the local Community Action Movement (CAM), a legal group which this printout identifies as a “political branch” of the guerrillas. Their crime? Community leaders “led a meeting of peasants where they espoused their political objectives and how they plan to achieve them as a movement.”[22]

Among CAM’s popular leaders were “Libardo Galvis, a.k.a. Lalo” and his brothers, Jesus Emilio and Luis Tiberio. On September 24,1995, two months after the army printout, Jesus and Luis were abducted by armed men, “some wearing civilian clothes and others wearing army uniforms with the insignias of the Counter-guerrilla Unit Task Force No. 27.” Witnesses quoted by the human rights group, MINGA, later said: “The brothers were brutally tortured. They burned the fingers of their hands, and then decapitated them.” The same armed men then walked to a nearby village and killed a local police inspector, Emelda Ruiz, who had been investigating death squad crimes. According to witnesses: “The perpetrators announced that they would be back for other people whose names they had on their lists.”[23]

There is also good documentation of abuses by the Colombian Navy, which has also been armed, trained, and advised by the United States. The US helped design its Riverine units to patrol rivers in search of trafficking boats. One of the ports the Riverines are based in is Barrancabermeja, also the site of one of the 41 intelligence networks promoted by the CIA. Four ex-agents of this network have testified about it. In a pattern used around the country, naval intelligence wanted to keep the network covert, so it incorporated retired military officers and other civilians to both gather intelligence and execute operations. One such clandestine operative was ex-naval Sgt. Saulo Segura. He reported to Capt. Juan Carlos Alvarez, the network chief who served under Lt. Col. Rodrigo Quinonez, then the Navy’s top intelligence commander.[24] Together these men identified targets for surveillance and decided which ones to hit.

One ex-agent testified:

[Lt.] Col. Rodrigo Quinonez was told everything about the [surveillance] operations. And according to what was discovered, he would speak with Capt. Juan Carlos Alvarez, alias El Ingeniero [“The Engineer”], giving the green light if the operation was OK or not, in other words, to kill people or not. After that, Capt. Juan Carlos Alvarez would communicate directly with [our team leaders], who told us what to do. If it was by phone, they used the following codes: “There are some broken motors. I need you to repair them. They are in such and such a place.” And they would give the address. “Take good mechanics and good tools.” Mechanics meant sicarios [hired assassins], good tools meant good arms, and the motors meant the victims.[25]

According to the testimony of four ex-agents, early victims included the president, vice-president, and treasurer of the local transportation workers union; two leaders of the local oil workers union (another one of its leaders was killed last October); one leader of a local peasant workers’ union; and two human rights monitors.[26]

These murders and others drew the interest of Ismael Jaimes, editor of La Opinion, Barrancabermeja’s leading independent newspaper. After investigating for several months, he began writing columns alleging that the military was behind these crimes. Finally Jaimes was targeted too. One witness said: “After following him for several months, they established that he went every morning to drop off his son at school in the Torcoroma neighborhood, where he was killed one moming.”[27]

Soon the network attracted even more attention as many of its sicarios were also accused of robberies and other common crimes. To protect itself from exposure, the Navy began killing off operatives. On June 1, 1992, after four network sicarios were apprehended by a regular army unit over an authorized murder, military intelligence officers disappeared all four, according to a document signed by the regular unit’s commanders.[28] Later, several more network personnel were killed. Unidentified gunmen eventually tried to kill Segura, wounding him twice. [29]

This turned Segura against the Navy, and he joined three of his former colleagues who testified against their superiors. But instead of prosecuting the officers named by these ex-agents, the Colombian government charged and imprisoned Segura. Last year inside La Modelo, Bogota’s maximum security jail, he glanced about nervously before saying, “I hope they don’t kill me.” Two months later, on Christmas Eve, Segura was murdered inside his cellblock with a handgun left next to his corpse. His murder remains unsolved; the whereabouts of the other three witnesses remain unknown. Nonetheless, they provided solid and overlapping details about the murders of 57 specific political opponents and activists. Yet not one case has gone to Court.[30]

American Hand

The US bears complicity in Colombia’s human rights record, having armed, trained and advised most of the military units and commands directly implicated in the killing. Still, the Clinton administration is now increasing aid to the Colombian military. This year, the US is sending a record $169 million in arms. They include 12 Blackhawk helicopter gunships, even though Amnesty International has already shown how US weapons have been diverted to the Colombian military’s dirty counterinsurgency war. Nonetheless, US officials insist that this time, the weapons will be used to fight drugs. “[W]e are very clear that the military assistance that we provide to Colombia must be used for the purposes intended, counter-narcotics,” said Nicholas Burns, The State Department spokesman.[31] But human rights groups no longer believe it. Recent revelations by both Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch “confirm what we expected,” says Charles Roberts of the Washington, DC-based Colombia Human Rights Committee. ” While trying to avoid the appearance of complicity in human rights violations, the United States has continued to provide training and materiel to the Colombian military irrespective of its horrendous abuses.”[32]

1. US Special Operations Forces Posture Statement, (Washington, D.C.: US Defense Department, 1994), p. 10
2. Interviews with senior Department of Defense (DoD) officials, Dec. 1995.
3. Douglas Valentine, Phoenix Program (New York: William Morrow, 1990); and Frank Smyth, “Secret Warriors: U.S. Advisors Have Taken Up Arms in El Salvador,” The Village Voice, Aug. 11, 1987. The US role in training these patrols first came out in testimony by Lt. Col. Oliver North during the Iran-Contra hearings. One of the CIA operatives involved, Felix Rodriguez, a.k.a. Max Gomez, also participated in the 1967 Bolivian operation, which resulted in the capture and summary execution of Che Guevara.
4. See, among others, Amnesty lnternational, Political Violence in Colombia: Myth and Reality (London: Al Publications, 1994); Javier Giraldo, S.J, Colombia: The Genocidal Democracy (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1996).
5. “List of FY96 Deployments for USMILGP [US Military Advisory Group] Colombia. This document first appeared in Appendix 3 of Human Rights Watch, Colombia’s Killer Networks: The Military/Paramilitary Partnership and the United States, Washington, D.C., 1996)
6. Interview with Anne Manuel, deputy director, Human Rights Watch/Americas, Feb. 1997.
7. Human Rights Watch. op. cit., p. 91.
8. Interviews with senior DoD officials, Dec. 1995.
9. See “The Cali Cartel: New Kings of Cocaine,” US Drug Enforcement Administration Drug Intelligence Report, Nov. 1994; and The National Narcotics Intelligence Consumers Committee Report 1993: The Supply of Illicit Drugs to the United States, Aug. 1994, pp. 2-6.
10. Amnesty International, op. cit., p. 1.
11. Ibid., pp. 67-74.
12. See, among others, Reuters, “Amnesty calls for halt in U.S. aid to Colombia,” Oct. 29, 1996.
13. Human Rights Watch, op. cit., pp. 27-41.
14. Telephone interview, March 1996.
15. Giraldo, op. cit., p. 22.
16. List of FY96 Deployments, op. cit.
17. “Human Rights Watch,” op, cit., p. 91.
18. Out of the one list of 247 Colombian military officers implicated in specific human rights cases, 124 of them have received training at the US School of the Americas. Another seven Colombians, including Bedoya, have been invited to teach there. This Alumni list was prepared by Fred Gaona and is on file at the Washington Office on Latin America. Profiles of both the known abusers and the evidence against them was compiled by a coalition of European human rights groups in El Terrorismo de Estado en Colombia (Brussels), Ediciones NCOS, 1992, pp. 71-72.
19. Authors’ notes on document, Oct. 1996.
20. “Asunto: Examinacion de la Estrategia Divisionaria, Reservado,” signed by Maj. Gen. Manuel Jose Bonett Locarno, when he was the Colombian Army Second Division commander, July 24,1995.
21. “Asunto Apreciacion Coyuntural Situacion Nacional,” signed by Lt. Col. Jose Domingo Garcia Garcia, second commander and chief of staff of the Colombian Army Fifth Brigade, March 2, 1995.
22. Fuerza de Tarea No. 27 “Pantera, Ultimas Informaciones del Enemigo,” April 8-July 11, 1995.
23. MINGA Urgent Action, “Political Genocide Continues in Aguachica, Cesar,” Sept. 25, 1995.
24. Interview with Saulo Segura Palacios, La Modelo prison, Bogota, Colombia, Sept. 18, 1995.
25. Testimony of Carlos Alberto Vergara Amaya to the Colombian attorney general, Feb. 11, 1994.
26. Letter from Carlos David Lopez to the Colombian attorney general, Dec. 7, 1993; Letter from Saulol Segura Palacios to the Colombian attorney general, Dec. 7, 1993; Testimony of Carlos Alberto Vergara Amaya to the Colombian attorney general, Feb. 11, 1994; and Letter from Felipe Gomez to the Colombian attorney general, Nov. 29, 1994.
27. Letter from Carlos David Lopez, Dec. 7, 1993
28. “Asunto: Informe desaparicion personas,” signed by Colombian Army Gen. Marino Gutierrez Isaza, June 2, 1992, as quoted in Human Rights Watch, op. cit.
29. Interview with Segura, op. cit.
30. See Human Rights Watch, op. cit.; and Charles Roberts, “Rule of Law and Development: U.S. AID and the Public Courts of Colombia,” Georgetown University Law Center manuscript, Spring 1995.
31. Transcript of State Department briefing, Washington, D.C., Oct. 29, 1996.
32. Interview, Washington, D.C., Jan. 21, 1997.”