Colombia This Week

18/07/2005

Fri 08 – Colombian Defence Minister resigns; US embassy official admits uncertainty.

• Colombia's defence minister resigns amid criticism over his handling of the country's counterinsurgency war and his alleged relationship with a jailed female drug trafficker. Camilo Ospina, a lawyer who currently serves as President Uribe’s judicial counsel will replace Jorge Alberto Uribe, officials said. Uribe's decision to quit as defence minister follows a series of guerrilla attacks that have killed more than 300 troops this year and shattered government claims the rebels were nearing defeat. Last month, he narrowly survived a no-confidence vote in Congress that left him politically weakened. ‘I am leaving with the satisfaction of knowing that the armed forces are working toward the sole objective of securing peace in the country,'' Uribe told a news conference, ‘I feel I have accomplished my mission’, Guardian reports.

• A top official in the US Embassy in Bogota confesses that he's not sure where the ‘goal line’ is for US policy in Colombia. The US State Department is withholding certification of the military's human rights record due to stalled human rights cases involving the armed forces and their ties with paramilitary groups. This includes the murder of eight members of the San Jose de Apartado peace community, including women and children, in February 2005, in which community testimony and physical evidence implicates the military as the responsible party. This ‘certification’ is necessary to release a portion of the funding passed by Congress. And while the Colombian government boasts increased security and a demobilisation process with the paramilitary, the silence of the State Department indicates another story. It has been unable to approve the Colombian human rights record this year, CommonDreams.org reports.

• The Colombian government and commanders of the paramilitary group BCB (Central Bolivar Bloc) have agreed that between 5,500 and 6,000 combatants will be demobilised in the next few weeks. This paramilitary bloc has presence in the departments of Bolivar, Santander, Vichada, Antioquia, Boyaca, Caldas, Risaralda, Caqueta, Nariño and Putumayo, El Espectador reports.

• The Director of the DAS (Colombia’s secret police) in the Atlantico department, Emilio Vence Zabaleta has been sacked for fabricating three false attacks against the person of President Uribe Velez. According to the reports, the functionary, with 22 years’s experience in the DAS, wanted to win presidential recognition. The last of the reported ‘threats’ was ‘discovered’ last June, El Tiempo reports.

• Six people are killed and two more injured in another masacre in the city of Buenaventura. According to local authorities, gunmen wearing military uniforms arrived by boat in a poor district of this coastal city and shot their victims. According to Wilson Perez, from the regional governor’s peace office, 130 people have been killed this year in similar circunstances, El Espectador reports.

• Colombia is willing to pay members of the ELN group if they agree to abandon their arms, President Uribe said in Spain. The Colombian government has long attempted to establish peace talks with the ELN but this group has rejected government conditions of unilateral disarmament and an end to kidnapping which it uses to finance its operations. President Uribe said informal discussions were taking place with the ELN: "If they accept a complete halt to hostilities, the government has no problem in seeking funds to sustain the members of the ELN in a peace process as long as they do not commit crimes," Uribe told El Pais newspaper.

• Monsignor Luis Agusto Castro Quiroga, the 63 year-old archbishop of Tunja, is named as the new President of the Episcopal Conference in Colombia, one of the most influential positions in the country. According to reports, he is widely admired among the religious community, due to his ability and disposition to help out in issues related to public order and has been actively involved in community projects. Castro's interest in looking for peace without wanting to be seen as a protagonist in the process has gained him a lot of respect among his colleagues and the government, El Tiempo reports.

• A Colombian Navy officer is killed and ten soldiers and two civilians injured in an ambush by the FARC group. Authorities report the attack took place when the patrol were responding to a kidnapping threat on the road between Cali and Buenaventura, El Pais reports.

• A new peace deal in Colombia will not shelter a top right-wing paramilitary leader from prosecution in the US on cocaine trafficking charges, the US ambassador to Colombia William Wood says. ‘The partial pardons granted under the accord will only apply to crimes the paramilitary leader Diego Murillo committed during the brief time that he has been a member of the group’, he told El Tiempo newspaper.

• After a meeting with his Colombian counterpart, Spanish President Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero expresses his support for the anti-terrorist policies of President Uribe Velez, adding that he will defend the Justice and Peace Law in front of the European Union, El Pais reports.

• Luis Fernando Granados, a CNC reporter who was reporting from Buenaventura, where six people were killed last Saturday, was shot six times, local Police Commander Colonel Uriel Toro reports. The Inter-American Press Society classifies journalism as a high-risk profession in Colombia because of the level of threats and the impunity in investigating these killings, Colprensa reports.

• Relatives of five policemen captured by the FARC group in Puerto Rico (Meta) six years ago ask the Colombian authorities and the international community to remember their loved ones, pointing out that they were serving their country when they were captured by this armed group. In a statement released by Asfamipaz, (the organisation of relatives of the military and policemen held hostage by the FARC group), the relatives urged the FARC to send proofs of life from Carlos Jose Duarte, Jose Libardo Forero, Wilson Rojas, Jorge Humberto Romero and Jorge Trujillo, El Colombiano reports.

• The magnitude of the paramilitary slaughter in Colombia will likely never be fully documented. Rights groups have tallied more than 14,000 murders, torture and "disappearances" during the past 15 years alone. Paramilitaries committed hundreds of massacres during the 1990s. Despite this, few people in Colombia dare to speak out publicly against President Uribe's alternative justice plan. Former Colombian Ombudsman Eduardo Cifuentes said, "hundreds of acts of terrorism, massacres, disappearances, torture, war crimes and crimes against humanity will go unpunished." President Uribe's critics say the AUC negotiation is an integral part of the government’s national security plan, designed not to disarm and demobilise the AUC but to legalise its organisation and resources and reintegrate it back into the government state security apparatus. The AUC has infiltrated provincial and national politics and is active in 26 of Colombia's 32 departments and more than a third of the country's municipalities, an editorial in The Toronto Star reports.

• The Attoney General’s office has charged paramilitary commander Rodrigo Antonio Pelufo (a. Rodrigo Cadena) for his involvement in the murder of the Mayor of El Roble (Sucre) Eduardo Diaz, killed by gunmen in April 2003, Colprensa reports.

• Three people are killed in a poor district of the city of Cartagena. 25-year-old Jader Contreras Beltran and two minors were shot dead by a group of armed men wearing military uniforms. Authorities accuse a social cleansing group for the killings, El Espectador reports.

• In a meeting with President Uribe, Amnesty International Secretary General Irene Khan says that ending impunity is the key for the protection of human rights in the country and urged the President not to ratify the Justice and Peace Law. "The law is deeply flawed and will only serve to strengthen the already chronic problem of impunity in Colombia. This is why I urged President Uribe not to ratify the legislation and to promptly implement the recommendations of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, as his government has promised," said Ms Khan. Amnesty International has urged the international community, including UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, not to support any demobilisation of illegal armed groups until the Colombian government has legal guarantees in place to ensure that any members of these groups responsible for human rights abuses are brought to justice.

• A column in the Guardian newspaper is heavily critical of the new ‘Justice and Peace law’ that Congress has ratified and which President Uribe is trying to ‘sell’ in Europe. Journalist Isabel Hilton writes that the bill ‘offers amnesty and cash rewards to rightwing paramilitary fighters, many of whom are guilty of human rights abuses and cocaine trafficking. President Uribe's solution to this unhappy situation is to pardon them, allowing some to change their uniforms for those of private security firms, and others to sign up for duty in Iraq. Both options provide continuing career opportunities for killers. Justice and peace, as the UN commissioner for human rights in Colombia, Michael Frühling, observed, is hard to achieve without truth.’

• In a meeting with representatives of the Caqueta department, local leaders of the inhabitants of Cartagena del Chaira (Caqueta) denounce the military authorities present in the area for abusing and stigmatising local civilians, in this area previously under the control of the FARC group. Feliciano Sanchez, president of the 179 local neighbourhood committees, said that the army blocks the supply of food and other basic provisions in the area. The army official responsible for Plan Patriota in the region alleged that the FARC were behind these accusations, El Tiempo reports.

• A UN panel calls on Colombia's government to break ties with outlawed paramilitary groups that have been involved in the disappearances of hundreds of Colombians. Concluding a week-long investigation into 897 unsolved disappearances in which there is evidence that the state played a role, a UN panel urged Colombia to prosecute security forces and public officials implicated in crimes committed by the paramilitaries. Investigators said families of the victims are often too scared to testify or even report the disappearances. "They are afraid of illegal armed groups that are being protected by the police," said Santiago Corcuera, a member of the UN Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances, which studies cases around the world in which governments either permit or participate in such crimes, Reuters reports.

• British Foreign Office Minister David Triesman meets his Colombian counterpart Carolina Barco in London. After the meeting, Lord Triesman said: ‘I reiterated our strong support for the Colombian government's efforts to solve their interconnected problems of the illegal drug trade, the long-running internal armed conflict and human rights abuses’. He also noted that Barco briefed him on the recently passed ‘Justice and Peace' law, adding that this law will be considered carefully by the European Union, the Foreign Office reports. The press statement made no mention of the meeting between Tony Blair and Alvaro Uribe Velez.

• The police have captured Jose Aldemar Rendon, a boss of Colombia’s violent Norte del Valle drug cartel. He is on the US list of nine most wanted Colombian drug lords, with a $5 million price on his head and was arrested in a luxury complex near the city of Medellin, El Tiempo reports.

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