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A Brave Guatemalan Judge Challenges Corrupt Brass Hats

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Original article can be found here.

Something new and promising happened in Guatemala last month when Judge Marco Tulio Molina Lara sentenced ex-Army Lt. Col. Carlos Ochoa Ruiz to 14 years in prison for trafficking in cocaine. Mr. Ochoa Ruiz is one of at least 31 current or former Guatemalan military officers the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration has suspected of running drugs. But no Guatemalan officer of his rank has ever received such a lengthy sentence. He has one final appeal available, which may yet set him free.

In American eyes, Mr. Ochoa Ruiz is a recidivist criminal. In 1990, DEA special agents set him up in a sting operation; they claim that he sent half of a metric ton of cocaine, worth $7.5 million wholesale, to Tampa, Fla. He was indicted in absentia in federal court. The U.S. demanded his extradition but after Guatemala’s top judge ruled in favor of the extradition and was subsequently murdered, the ruling was later reversed by the same high court. The murder remains unsolved. Mr. Ochoa Ruiz was caught running cocaine again three years later, leading to his arrest and last month’s conviction.

Guatemala has a major problem bringing present or former military officers suspected of felonies to justice. “Guatemalan military officers strongly suspected of trafficking in narcotics rarely face criminal prosecution,” wrote the State Department in 1994, complaining that suspects like the former Lt. Col. Ochoa Ruiz were merely discharged from military service. “In most cases, the officers continue on with their suspicious activities.”

The Clinton administration has largely chosen to ignore military involvement in Guatemalan drug trafficking, in part because for much of its first term it was focusing on a peace agreement, finally concluded in 1997, to end Guatemala’s 35-year civil war. It feared that raising the impunity issue would disrupt the peace process. Earlier this year the State Department reported that Guatemalan traffickers are now moving 200 to 300 metric tons of Colombian cocaine a year to northern markets, up sharply from about 50 tons in the early 1990s. That is, according to State Department officials, at least half of all the cocaine reaching the U.S. Most of the cocaine coming in through Mexico transits through Guatemala as well.

Former or current military officers, who for years have enjoyed a high degree of impunity, often protect Guatemalan criminal syndicates. According to a signed petition from Guatemalan peasants that was presented to the DEA, one syndicate led by military officers and a mayor killed locals who resisted abandoning the land they farmed, which the trafficking syndicate wanted for clandestine runways. Ex-mayor Arnoldo Vargas Estrada was later convicted of drug trafficking in federal court in New York. The four Army colonels named by the peasants in the same petition were never charged anywhere.

Guatemalan President Alvaro Arzu undertook to clean house in the military when he began his four-year term in 1996. The State Department reports that last year he discharged even more “military officers thought to be involved in corruption and smuggling.” But one of the bravest steps taken by anyone in Guatemala so far was last month’s sentencing of Mr. Ochoa Ruiz by Judge Molina Lara. It was the Bush administration that first requested Mr. Ochoa Ruiz’s extradition in 1991. The Guatemalan military later discharged him explicitly to put distance between his name and the institution. But that did not stop a military tribunal from inexplicably reclaiming jurisdiction over the former officer in 1993 in order to dismiss the U.S. extradition case against him, citing a “lack of evidence.”

The Clinton administration appealed the case three times, all the way to Guatemala’s top judicial body, the Constitutional Court. The presiding judge, Epaminondas González Dubon, was already well respected for his integrity, having made a historic, independent ruling in 1993 when he declared unconstitutional the imposition of martial law by the country’s then-president, Jorge Serrano. Mr. Ochoa Ruiz’s extradition case reached Judge González Dubon’s bench less than a year later, and in March 1994 he signed an order to extradite the former officer and circulated it to the court’s other judges to sign as well. On April 1, as Mr. González Dubon was returning with his family from an Easter day-trip, four men assassinated him as his wife and son looked on.

How did the Clinton administration react? Neither President Clinton nor his ambassador to Guatemala, Marilyn McAfee, said a word about it. They remained silent when, on April 12, the Constitutional Court’s surviving judges quietly overturned the late Judge González Dubon’s ruling and set Mr. Ochoa Ruiz free. Apparently the Clinton administration saw no reason to publicly protest this reversal of its efforts to bring a suspected drug trafficker to justice.

Four months later, in the Village Voice I accused another military officer, Gen. Carlos Pozuelos Villavicencio, the former Air Force commander, of allegedly using military aircraft to transship cocaine. In a hastily called press conference, Guatemala’s then-defense minister, Gen. Mario René Enríquez, threatened to spend his “last personal penny” suing me for libel. Ambassador McAfee called her own press conference two days later and announced that Gen. Pozuelos Villavicencio was indeed a DEA suspect. The general was never charged nor did any lawsuit ever materialize.

Some important gains have been made under President Arzu, but Guatemala still has a long way to go and fear is still an overriding consideration for all judges. The record of impunity is one reason Colombian traffickers have made alliances, with Guatemalan military officers. Considering the price paid to finally convict Mr. Ochoa Ruiz, it is no wonder that the cocaine traffic through Guatemala expanded so rapidly.

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Mr. Smyth, a contributor to “Crimes of War: What the Public Should Know,” (Norton,
1999) writes regularly for Intellectual-Capital.com.

Heroes of the Revolution: Cuban Ingenuity Keeps American Classics Running

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SOUTH OF HAVANA, CUBA –The white ’57 Dodge convertible has perfect banana yellow underpanels with tall matching fins, even though its passenger compartment is all but gutted, save for the steering wheel.

The driver sits on a small wooden crate as he steers past fields of trees fruiting mangos as well as avocados.

He pulls into a cluttered yard with a tin-roofed shed and two small cinder block houses.

Ducks, chickens, and goats all make a racket, as children, followed by adults, come out to see who has arrived. All one can see of Alfredo, the breadwinner for both households, is his slate blue overall legs and sneakers. His back presses not against a dolly but against dirt as he works under the red body and fins of a four-door ’56 Dodge, which was built three years before Fidel Castro came to power.

Alfredo, 33, has been working on cars since he was eleven. His first job, of course, was in a state-owned shop, as by then all private enterprise on the island had long ended.

But things had begun to change by the time Alfredo turned twenty-three, when he began working for himself abajo del agua, or illegally under the water. Although he remains submerged, Alfredo has clients among some of the most discerning classic-car owners in Cuba. Some people like to go fishing. “I like fixing cars,” he explains, “and I like it when my customers are satisfied.”

Cars spanning the decades from the Great Depression to the Cuban Revolution await his care. In the yard is a black ’36 Chevy with skinny whitewall tires, broad running boards, and huge, round, free-standing headlights.

Beneath the barn’s falling roof is a ’49 Dodge convertible, its bench seats restored with creamy buttermilk leather smuggled to the island from Mexico. Next to the Dodge is a ’52 Chevy adorned with a shiny chrome swan. Both later models are painted only with sky blue primer.

Since Castro’s takeover in 1959, Cubans have managed to keep such vehicles running against all odds. Entirely cut off from trade with the United States and living on a communist-run island that prohibited, until recently, nearly all private economic transactions, Cubans have not enjoyed easy access to any consumer goods, let alone American automotive parts. The mechanics who have found ways past that handicap are among the most ingenious people anywhere. Take Alfredo. He compared American and Soviet engine blocks when looking for parts for the former Moscow planners were apparently so impressed by the innovations coming out of Detroit at the dawn of the industry’s golden age that they began copying the designs, and Alfredo discovered that many old Soviet trucks had engine blocks similar to those on many old American cars.

The pistons of a Soviet GAZ-51 truck, for one, are interchangeable with those of many early-fifties Chryslers.

“I learned this myself,” says Alfredo. “I took out each part and studied it, -he adds, holding up two matching pistons, one Russian and one American.”

Alfredo runs his operation like a prohibition-era moonshine still, and his example is now spreading like dandelions across the island. The soil has only been moistened by recent economic reforms. Although the Cuban Communist Party remains firmly in control of the country’s political affairs, Castro finally began loosening the reins over economic transactions in 1989, and then relaxed them more in 1993 following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Throughout the 1990s, dollars have slowly inundated the island, and anyone who can manage to attain them no easy task can now buy everything from disposable diapers to spark plugs.

The economic reforms have been accompanied, too, by a dramatic increase in state corruption, as Cubans pilfer government stockpiles like never before. Diesel fuel, which costs thirty-five U.S. cents per gallon in a legal, government-regulated transaction, can cost as little as five cents a gallon on the black market. While the profiteers risk possible incarceration, their cost for the stolen fuel is nearly zero. In this way, one can now buy anything from sheet metal to GAZ-51 parts dirt cheap. Of course, while widening informal economic transactions only make it easier to restore vintage automobiles, the pace of change overall raises many questions about the future of an island that has lived with a command economy for nearly four decades.

But to try and voice an answer would be dangerous, a risk most Cubans would still rather avoid. “You can swim safely if you keep your mouth closed,” explained another mechanic, Delfín Matos Ortíz. “But if you open your mouth, you may only drink in some water and drown.”

Unlike Alfredo, Ortíz operates legally and pays taxes. He has no choice because he is far better known. As early as 1962 it was apparent to Ortíz, a former shipbuilder, that Cubans would have to fabricate their own engine parts to keep their American cars running. He spent six months painstakingly testing the metal composition of piston rings and taught himself how to make them. Today Ortíz, a great-grandfather, is still doing what he has done for decades, skillfully crafting piston rings for old American engines.

“Every problem has a solution,” he says. “I feel best when I am doing challenging work.” As his wife joyfully serves tea, Ortíz displays some rusted iron tubes and, next to them, several shiny new rings that are tagged for different clients. How does he get from old iron pipes to those? “Well,” he says, “it took me some work to figure it out.”

Back in 1962, just months before the United States and the Soviet Union nearly went to war over the Cuban missile crisis, it became clear that the island and its northern neighbor were no longer going to trade goods. Could Cubans make their own piston rings? Ortíz decided to try. He brought some original rings to a few nearby university friends, who tested their chemical composition while he made ring molds, first out of wood and then out of metal. Relying on the same grapevine that is essential to everyone on the island, Ortíz made deals for equipment and materials. “There was a nickel and chrome factory,” says Ortíz. “They needed seals. I needed nickel.”

It took him about six months before he finally started producing rings that held up under pressure. Word of his craft spread fast. By 1964, Ortíz was producing engine rings for many people, although some were having trouble installing them. So he printed up a single-spaced, two-sided instruction sheet. Ortíz doesn’t just make piston rings for cars. He has made them for all sorts of gasoline-powered engines, and his reputation is so impeccable that his services were once requested by Castro himself. Regardless of what one might think of his strategic vision, the now gray-haired Communist leader has always been an incurable micro-manager, often intervening personally to make even the most mundane decisions. Back in early 1991 at a Politburo meeting, Castro learned that an old gasoline-powered generator in a Havana hospital had long been idle because its rings were shot. “What can we do?” he demanded. A Politburo member from Ortíz’s hometown of Santiago de Cuba told him about the mechanic and his skills.

The Communist Party flew him to Havana. “I spent three months on it,” he says. Though not paid for his time, Ortíz ate and slept at the hospital. It was a job, he adds with a self-effacing grin. “I did it.” Since then, Ortíz has been back in Santiago, quietly going about his business while living with his wife near their five grandchildren and two great- grandchildren. He is not sure what their future will be or what kind of political and economic system they will live under. But he doesn’t expect his own life to change. “As long as there are old cars here, I’ll continue making parts for them,” he says.

A generation younger, Edis de la Torre is among the few people willing to talk openly about politics, and that may be because he remains loyal to the Communist Party and its revolutionary ideals. “In the United States,” he notes, “the [vintage] cars would belong to rich people.” De la Torre has restored many vehicles for his family’s personal use, and he belongs to a community that transcends politics. What binds them is the enthusiasm they share for their automobiles and the common hurdles they have each needed to clear. “We are in solidarity with each other,” De la Torre says. But how do you keep the old cars running without easy access to anything? “No single place to buy parts exists,” he says while slowly shaking his head. There has not been one in Cuba since the early Sixties. “Instead I have had to find them through the grapevine.”

Fellow car owners, mechanics, government workers, party officials, and others have all helped De la Torre obtain parts for every vehicle he has maintained since La Revolución. Choosing models that he thought might last, De la Torre has owned five American classics, one Renault, and Russian motorcycle. When I met him, he was working on his latest, a ’52 Ford. But instead of selling this one after restoring it, as he has the rest, De la Torre is planning to drive a taxi.

This will be a new undertaking, since he has resigned from his abysmally low-paying government job. The Ford was owned by only one other man, De la Torre adds proudly, an architect who bought it back in ’52 directly from the dealer.

De la Torre has just finished the sky blue body, and it looks smooth. The six-cylinder engine, too, sounds clean. The block is original, as is the green vinyl rear bench seat, and the -FoMoCo- markings are still imprinted on the master cylinder. The wiper motors are also factory issue, working off suction generated by the carburetor. But appearances are deceiving. De la Torre points out that the carburetor was made by Ford in Argentina, the twelve-volt battery in Mexico, and the generator in the former Soviet Union.

While he is a self-taught mechanic, Julio, a 65-year-old grandfather, is a trained professional who got is start even before the Cuban revolution.

Just one month after D-Day in World War II, Julio, then only twelve, got his first job working in a car repair shop. He later became an electric motor specialist in his brother’s shop, which remained open for a time even after Castro took power. But by 1967, Castro launched a revolutionary offensive that nationalized nearly all remaining private property: It forced his brother’s shop to close. After that, Julio went to work for the state as an electrician.

Today, he knocks on doors as an unlicensed freelance mechanic, doing far more than just wiring for a growing number of car owners here and there in Havana. And he is revered by many for the patience he brings to each job. When we talk, Julio has just finished rebuilding the transmission of a ’48 Buick. It has a relatively small, straight-eight engine that Julio has also tuned.

Julio hopes to one day open his own repair shop. But only dollars are taken for taxes and rent. “Sure, I would like to open a shop,” he says. “But I don’t have the means to do it.” Julio, like De la Torre, is a taciturn man. Each is the kind of guy who avoids trouble. That’s the only way most people survive in cities like Havana, where the Communist Party, though giving them more room to roam, still tries to rein people in as if they were horses.

But elsewhere in Cuba, even right outside Havana, people like the Fernández brothers are already running loose. Oh, and they love speed. Alberto, the second-oldest and clearly the “alpha dog” of his siblings, peels out in the middle of a two-lane highway and then does fishtails in a teal ’58 Ford Thunderbird convertible, just to show off. It has a dual exhaust and a loud, bubbling V-8. It’s scary to watch him weave around opposing lanes of traffic especially since he’s just downed a few beers.

Finally, he gets off the road and turns off the ignition. He takes another can of beer, shakes it up, and sprays it. The Fernández brothers don’t bother about appearances. Take their Ford, a mean-looking T-bird with its convertible top long gone, revealing a rusted metal frame. Nor does it have any frills. No taillights, no headlights, not even a grille. No wipers. And inside? Nope, no dash.

There is little above the sheet metal floor but a makeshift seat. In fact, the T-bird’s only aesthetic distinction is its original chrome spoked wheels. Another original part that is long since gone is the double-barrel American carburetor. Alberto says that he and his brothers have installed a more efficient Soviet carburetor in the Thunderbird to save on gasoline. But they keep the American one safely oiled and stored and sometimes still install it for special occasions.

For racing, Alberto says, grinning. Sometimes we challenge them, sometimes they challenge us.

He adds without irony: “Yeah, for money.”

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.

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.”

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.

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.”

La Mano Blanca en Colombia

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La CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) ha respaldado por mucho tiempo a sus aliados anticomunistas quienes, durante su relación con la CIA o después, han traficado drogas. Esto no es sorprendente. Desde los primeros años ’60, los manuales militares estadounidenses sugirieron que los agentes de la inteligencia se aliaran con “contrabandistas” y con “operadores del mercado negro” para derrotar a los insurgentes comunistas, como reportó Michael McClintock en su libro “Los instrumentos de la formación del Estado” (Instruments of Statecraft). La CIA hizo precisamente eso, por ejemplo en el Sudeste de Asia.

Después, durante la misma década, la CIA se alió con los Hmong en Laos, entre otros, quienes según el historiador Alfred W. McCoy, traficaban con opio.Note1 Otro ejemplo es Afganistán donde, en los años ochenta, la CIA apoyó a los Mujahedeen en su lucha contra la Unión Soviética. Durante los años noventa, según Tim Weiner (The New York Times), los mismos Mujahedeen llegan a controlar hasta la tercera parte del opio (materia prima de la heroína) que llega a los Estado Unidos.

En nuestros días, el ejemplo de Colombia es aún más claro. Además de sufrir tasas desenfrenadas de criminalidad común, Colombia es un país lisiado por dos campañas de órden político en marcha; una es la guerra que, desde hace tres décadas, enfrenta a los militares colombianos (respaldados por la CIA) y sus aliados paramilitares, contra los grupos guerrilleros de la izquierda, anteriormente primero pro-Moscú y luego pro-Habana. La otra campaña es la guerra contra las drogas, con un campo de batalla mucho menos claro. Todos estos grupos tienen elementos involucrados en el narcotráfico colombiano que cubre aproximadamente el 80 por ciento de la producción mundial de cocaína, la materia prima del crack.

La CIA no es la excepción en Colombia. Desde 1995, un equipo de élite antinarcóticos, dirigido -en actitud progresista- por una mujer y conformado mayormente por tecnócratas jóvenes y competentes, tuvo una participación decisiva en la captura de los siete capos del Cártel de Cali. Pero en 1991 hubo un otro equipo de la CIA que jugó un papel diferente. Más interesados en apoyar a la guerra sucia contra la insurrección que a los esfuerzos antidrogas, éste equipo ayudó a forjar y financiar una alianza secreta anticomunista de los militares colombianos y grupos paramilitares ilegales, muchos de los cuales hoy en día trafican drogas.

¿Por qué fue secreta esta alianza? Dos años antes, en 1989, luego de que una investigación del gobierno colombiano descubrió que el Cártel de Medellín (encabezado por Pablo Escobar) se había apoderado de estos mismos grupos paramilitares, Colombia los había prohibido. En aquel tiempo, Escobar y sus socios estaban resistiendo ferozmente la presión de los EE.UU. para la aprobación en Colombia de leyes de extradición que permitieran su procesamiento en los EE.UU. por cargos de narcotráfico. Así, Escobar y sus socios empezaron a controlar a los grupos paramilitares más fuertes de Colombia, para utilizarlos en una lucha terrorista contra el Estado. Estos paramilitares, con sede en el Valle de Magdalena Medio, fueron los responsables de una ola de crímenes violentos, incluyendo la destrucción por bomba del vuelo HK-180 de la aerolínea Avianca en 1989, que causó la muerte de 111 personas. Investigadores concluyeron que la bomba fue detonada por un altímetro y que los autores del atentado fueron capacitados por merce

narios israelitas, británicos y otros, encabezados por un teniente coronel de la reserva del ejército israelita, Yair Klein. Los militares colombianos habían ayudado a proteger los entrenamientosNote2 y Escobar cancelaba los honorarios de los mercenarios.

La CIA ignoró estos hechos cuando, dos años más tarde, decidió renovar en secreto la alianza entre los militares colombianos y los grupos paramilitares. Los grupos insurgentes de la izquierda permanecían relativamente fuertes, a pesar de que había finalizado la Guerra Fría y la ayuda económica del bloque de Europa Oriental. Muchos sindicatos, grupos de estudiantes, campesinos y otros, les proveían con apoyo político y hasta logístico. Los agentes de la CIA sabían que los paramilitares -civiles generalmente comandados por oficiales retirados de las Fuerzas Armadas- podían ofrecer a los militares colombianos pretextos plausibles para negar su participación en asesinatos de izquierdistas sospechosos y en otros crímenes de esa índole. En palabras de Javier Giraldo, sacerdote jesuita y fundador de la Comisión Intercongregacional por la Justicia y la Paz en Colombia: “Una enorme red de civiles armados empezó a reemplazar, por los menos en parte, a soldados y policías quienes podían ser fácilmente identificados. Est

os grupos irregulares empezaron a emplear métodos cuidadosamente diseñados para mantener en secreto sus actividades y generar confusión.” Pero ni la CIA ni ninguna otra agencia estadounidense admitió que seguía apoyando a la campaña contra-insurgente en Colombia.

En cambio, los oficiales estadounidenses afirman que, desde 1989, todo el apoyo de su país a Colombia ha sido planificado en función de la guerra a las drogas. “Hubo un debate muy grande (sobre la mejor distribución del) dinero para las operaciones anti-narcóticos en Colombia”, afirmó el coronel (retirado) de Ejército estadounidense, James S. Roach (hijo), en ese entonces el agregado militar de más alto rango y enlace de la DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency) en Bogotá; “EE.UU. estaba buscando una manera de ayudar, pero si no estás dispuesto a combatir con tropas propias, hay que buscar una salida”.

Así hicieron. Primero, un equipo interagencial (que incluyó a representantes del Grupo de Asesores Militares de la Embajada de los Estados Unidos en Bogotá; del Comando Sur en Panamá; de la DIA en Washington; y de la CIA en Langley, estado de Virginia), formuló recomendaciones para hacer una reestructuración general de las redes colombianas de inteligencia militar. Después, la CIA financió independientemente la incorporación de fuerzas paramilitares a esas redes. No le importó a la CIA que estas fuerzas paramilitares en ese momento fueran ilegales en Colombia; ni tampoco le importó que fueran explícitamente prohibidas, debido a la creciente influencia de Pablo Escobar y su Cártel de Medellín en la dirección de estos grupos.

Además del tráfico de drogas, los nefastos paramilitares colombianos han sido implicados en muchos abusos de los derechos humanos. Este hecho llevó a que, entre otros, el Departamento de Defensa norteamericano recomendara que las Fuerzas Armadas colombianas no los incorporaran en sus nuevas redes de inteligencia. “La intención fue no ser relacionados con los paramilitares”, dijo el coronel Roach, quién mantuvo contactos frecuentes con agentes de la CIA en Bogotá, quienes, según él, tenían otra estrategia. “La CIA organizó las redes clandestinas por su cuenta; tenía bastante dinero, fue más o menos como si llegara Papá Noel”. Mark Mansfield, portavoz de la CIA, se negó a brindar cualquier comentario al respecto.

Noticias de estas redes clandestinas de inteligencia salieron por primera vez a luz pública a través de Human Rights Watch, cuando ésta organización privada publicó, en noviembre de 1996, documentos de las FF.AA. (estadounidenses y colombianas), así como testimonios orales, que demuestran que ambos, el Departamento de Defensa (EE.UU.) y la CIA, persuadieron a Colombia para reorganizar por completo su sistema de inteligencia militar. En mayo de 1991, Colombia conformó 41 nuevas redes de inteligencia en todo el país; según la orden colombiana que las estableció: “con base en las recomendaciones de la comisión de asesores militares de los EE.UU.”. Más tarde, cuatro ex-integrantes colombianos de una red en el Valle de Magdalena Medio, declararon que la red tenía incorporados a grupos paramilitares ilegales, pagados tanto por el acopio de información de inteligencia como por el asesinato de personas sospechosos de ser izquierdistas.

Aunque oficiales estadounidenses sostienen que apoyan la reestructuración del sistema de inteligencia como parte de los esfuerzos antidrogas, la mencionada orden colombiana instruye a las nuevas redes a luchar solamente contra “la subversión armada” o la guerrilla izquierdista. De hecho, la mayoría de la guerrilla izquierdista colombiana -especialmente las FARC (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias Colombianas)- está también involucrada con el narcotráfico. Sin embargo, un reciente estudio interagencial, encomendado por Myles Frechette, embajador de los EE.UU. en Bogotá, concluye que el papel de las guerrillas en el narcotráfico se limita principalmente a la protección de plantaciones de materia prima, y en menor grado, a las operaciones de procesamiento de droga. En cambio, de acuerdo a las autoridades de orden colombianas así como de inteligencia estadounidenses, los paramilitares derechistas (en alianza con los militares) protegen mayormente los laboratorios de droga y las rutas internas de transporte. Es más,

según un informe de las fuerzas de orden colombianas, el narcotráfico ha vuelto a ser el “eje central” de financiamiento de los paramilitares.

Asimismo, un informe de 1995 sobre el Valle de Magdalena y preparado por investigadores de la Policía Judicial colombiana, sostiene que los militares y paramilitares en esta zona permanecen aliados: “no exclusivamente para la lucha anti-subversiva, sino también para beneficiarse económicamente y abrir el paso a los narcotraficantes”. El informe nombra como paramilitar sospechoso a “el conocido narcotraficante Víctor Carranza”. Carranza, contemporáneo de Pablo Escobar, en un principio cobró fama al alcanzar la cumbre del rentable negocio de esmeraldas en las montañas de Boyaca, eliminando a la vez al númeroso frente guerrillero de esa región. Poco después, Carranza también llegó a ser un terrateniente de importancia, comprando enormes terrenos en los llanos orientales de Meta, una provincia plagada de cultivos para la droga así como de laboratorios para su procesamiento. Hoy en día, la policía colombiana identifica a Carranza como traficante de múltiples toneladas de droga, y como uno de los líderes principale

s de los abundantes grupos paramilitares colombianos, como por ejemplo, en Meta, el infame Serpiente Negra. Organizaciones de derechos humanos han acusado a Carranza de ser el autor intelectual de tanto asesinatos como masacres.

No existen evidencias de que Carranza haya sido, en algún momento, un informante o colaborador de la CIA pero tiene credenciales anticomunistas impecables y mantiene contactos frecuentes con los militares. Testigos militares han dado cuenta de una reunión con oficiales en su hotel “Los Llanos” en Villavicencio (Meta). También los oficiales estadounidenses saben mucho de él: “Carranza aparece a menudo en los informes de inteligencia”, según un experto. Don Víctor, como lo conocen sus hombres, es un líder chapado a la antigua. Continúa frecuentando sus minas de esmeraldas para disfrutar la primacia en la selección de las piedras más grandes y de las mejores vetas descubiertas.

Carranza es un hombre intocable. En 1995, uno de sus supuestos lugartenientes, Arnulfo (Rasguño) Castillo Agudelo, fue detenido, a consecuencia de la exhumación (en 1989) de aproximadamente cuarenta cadáveres en una de las haciendas de Carranza en Meta. Rasguño se negó a ser entrevistado en la prisión Modelo de Bogotá. Tampoco Carranza, quien normalmente evita la publicidad, quiso dar comentarios.

En años recientes, Carranza ha ampliado sus operaciones en Colombia central a través del Valle de Magdalena. El mencionado informe policial señala que: “Carranza está planeando adquirir Hacienda Bella Cruz (allá) para usarla como una base para sus actividades, (y) traer a 200 soldados paramilitares de Meta”. Testigos sostienen que ahora el lugar está sumamente concurrido por hombres armados, quienes han desterrado a centenares de campesinos del lugar. Según Jamie Prieto Amaya, obispo católico de la región, Carranza y otros sospechosos de narcotráfico han comprado cerca de 45.000 acres (18 mil hectáreas) de terreno a través del Valle de Magdalena.Note3

Otro personaje paramilitar sospechoso es Henry Loaiza (El Alacrán), detenido en 1995 con ayuda de la CIA bajo sospecho de ser uno de los siete capos del Cártel de Cali. Como Carranza, el Alacrán se encuentra implicado en varias masacres de civiles y supuestos izquierdistas, llevadas a cabo conjuntamente por fuerzas militares y paramilitares. Entre ellas está la masacre de Trujillo cerca de la ciudad de Cali, que se caracterizó por el uso de motosierras.

La policía colombiana identificó a otros (ex-)oficiales militares como sospechosos de narcotráfico, como es el caso del Mayor Jorge Alberto Lázaro, acusado de ordenar a los paramilitares en el Valle de Magdalena en la ejecución de masacres. Hoy día este valle, que se extiende por una distancia de 400 millas hacia los puertos caribeños en el norte, es uno de los corredores principales para el tráfico de drogas procesadas y de precursores químicos.

Más de un año después de la caída del muro de Berlín, La CIA ayudó a posibilitar una colaboración oscura entre los militares y los paramilitares colombianos. De este modo, la CIA ha facilitado crímenes, en el ámbito de los derechos humanos y del narcotráfico. Si ésta clase de comportamiento fue reprensible durante la Guerra Fría, ahora es completamente indefendible.

(Texto original en inglés, traducción: Kathy Ledebur.)

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Notas

Note1 MCCOY, Alfred W. “The Politics of Heroin: The CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade”, Laurence Hill Books, Chicago, Illinois, 1991.

Note2 Se estableció que los militares colombianos habían mantenido contacto por radio con la base de entrenamiento de los paramilitares.

Note3 Prieto Amaya fue citado en la revista Cambio-16 de Bogotá.

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Frank Smyth: Periodista independiente de nacionalidad estadounidense. Ha publicado sobre narcotráfico y políticas antidrogas en ‘The Village Voice’, ‘The Washington Post’, ‘The Wall Street Journal’ (Estados Unidos) y otros.