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COLOMBIA: Same Paramilitary
Abuses; New Faces, New Names
By Constanza Vieira
BOGOTÁ (IPS) - A leading international rights
group urged the Colombian government to take action
against what it called the "successors" to the far-right
paramilitary militias, which continue attacking
civilians and human rights defenders.
In its new report, "Paramilitaries’ Heirs: The New Face
of Violence in Colombia", Human Rights Watch (HRW) says
the 2003-2006 demobilisation of the "brutal, mafia-like,
paramilitary coalition known as the AUC (United
Self-Defense Forces of Colombia)" was a failure, despite
repeated government claims that the paramilitaries no
longer exist.
The 122-page report, the result of two years of
fieldwork, says that after the demobilisation process
had come to an end, new groups almost immediately
"cropped up all over the country, taking the reins of
the criminal operations that the AUC leadership
previously ran."
"The emergence of the successor groups was predictable,
in large part due to the Colombian government’s failure
to dismantle the AUC’s criminal networks and financial
and political support structures during the
demobilisations," adds the report, which was released in
Bogotá Wednesday.
"The successor groups are engaged in widespread and
serious abuses against civilians in much of the country.
They massacre, kill, rape, torture, and forcibly
'disappear' persons who do not follow their orders. They
regularly use threats and extortion against members of
the communities where they operate, as a way to exert
control over local populations," it says.
The appearance of the successor groups has also likely
contributed to a significant rise in the number of
internally displaced persons nationwide since 2004, HRW
says. According to official figures, the number of
people forced to flee their land dropped to less than
229,000 in 2004, before increasing each year to a total
of 327,600 in 2007.
The groups "are quietly having a dramatic effect on the
human rights and humanitarian situation in Colombia,"
says the report, which adds that they often target human
rights defenders, trade unionists, displaced persons,
victims of the paramilitaries who are seeking justice,
journalists, and community members who do not follow
their orders.
HRW Americas director José Miguel Vivanco said "death
threats against labour leaders and other social
activists from these groups have increased drastically.
Threats are very effective and sadly allow (the groups)
to control the population under their influence."
AUC, which emerged in the 1980s and was heavily involved
in the drug trade, according to its own leaders, was
blamed by United Nations human rights officials for 80
percent of the atrocities committed in Colombia's
four-decade civil war.
They also worked in close cooperation with the military,
as documented by U.N. officials, the Inter-American
Court of Human Rights, the U.S. State Department, and
prominent international rights watchdogs like HRW and
Amnesty International.
To eliminate evidence of the thousands of murders they
committed every year, the paramilitaries sometimes built
ovens to burn the bodies. Another frequent practice, to
avoid the effort of digging graves, was the use of
chainsaws to cut up victims - dead or alive. Rivers were
also extensively used, to get rid of entire corpses or
dismembered bodies.
Most of the successor groups inherited the AUC's modus
operandi: forging alliances with government forces to
gain territorial control and fight the leftwing
guerrillas.
"Successor" groups, neo-paramilitaries, or criminal
gangs?
But there is no consensus on what term to use to refer
to these new or reassembled groups, nor on how many
there are.
Since the rightwing government of Álvaro Uribe
officially declared in early 2007 that paramilitary
groups no longer existed, the police have referred to
them as "criminal bands" or "bacrim" for short,
estimating that they have a total of 4,000 members.
But the Armed Conflict Observatory of the Corporación
Nuevo Arco Iris, a Bogotá think tank, believes the
neo-paramilitaries number more than 10,000.
And former paramilitary chief Salvatore Mancuso, who was
extradited to the United States on drug trafficking
charges in May 2008, said in mid-2007 that there were
16,000 members of these new groups, and added that the
best weapons were not turned over by the paramilitaries
in the demobilisation process.
According to the police, the groups were operating in 24
of Colombia's 32 departments (provinces) in mid-2009;
there were at least nine groups with a certain level of
regional influence and authority; and the majority of
the leaders were former mid-level AUC commanders.
HRW says the government has not paid enough attention to
the groups. Vivanco noted that the Attorney General's
Office has assigned just four prosecutors and 12
full-time investigators to the "bacrim".
By contrast, he said, the Uribe administration spends a
million dollars a year on lobbying in Washington to push
for congressional approval of the free trade agreement (FTA)
signed by the U.S. and Colombian governments.
"How many prosecutors could have been paid with those
funds?" asked Vivanco, after clarifying that the HRW is
not philosophically opposed to FTAs.
The FTA remains blocked in the U.S. Congress by
Democrats who insist that the government must first
demonstrate progress on human and labour rights in
Colombia.
This South American country is also negotiating an FTA
with the European Union, but a group of European
Parliament legislators is pressing to include additional
guarantees in order to improve implementation of core
labour and human rights standards.
Catherine Ashton, EU High Representative for Foreign
Affairs and Security and Vice President of the European
Commission, informed the MEPs that the Commission had
decided to take a break in the free trade negotiations
with Colombia.
Emmanuel Raison, spokesman for the International Office
for Human Rights - Action on Colombia (OIDHACO - a
network of 35 European civil society organisations),
reported from Brussels on Jan. 29 that in Ashton's view,
it was not appropriate for the new European Commission
to already reach conclusions on such a delicate issue.
And in the face of the MEPs' insistent demands, EU
Commissioner-designate for Trade Karel de Gucht promised
to take the time to open up an in-depth political debate
on human rights in Colombia, Raison added.
HRW researcher Maria McFarland told IPS that the most
important thing to understand from the new report is
that "in this country there is an extremely serious
problem with violence, abuses against civilians,
committed by the paramilitary successor groups."
"The human rights problems represented by the AUC were
not resolved by means of a supposed demobilisation by
the paramilitaries, and the abuses have continued,
perhaps with new faces, new names," she added.
The government "has failed to make this issue a
priority. It has not tackled it with the seriousness it
deserves," said McFarland.
In the HRW's view, "it is of utmost importance for the
international community to address this problem, and to
press the Colombian government for an effective
response," she said, adding that any mechanisms, such as
FTAs, should be used to pressure the government to deal
with the issue.
Inflated figures
Reportedly, 37 paramilitary militias that presented
themselves as belonging to the AUC demobilised in the
negotiations with the Uribe administration.
The government reported that 32,000 members of
paramilitary groups lay down their arms between 2003 and
2006, although at the start of the negotiations it
estimated that the total number of paramilitaries was
between 3,000 and 6,500.
Vivanco urged journalists to ask the government how many
of those 32,000 who supposedly demobilised were actually
paramilitaries, and said the administration does not
have the answer because no one has ever investigated.
In 2004, the Consultancy on Human Rights and
Displacement (CODHES) reported "the existence of a group
of young men who were specifically recruited to take
place in a demobilisation in the south of the country,"
the president of the human rights group, Jorge Rojas,
pointed out to IPS.
HRW verified that the practice of recruiting new
paramilitaries in order to pad the numbers during the
demobilisation process occurred in at least three
regions.
No one knows exactly how inflated the numbers were, "but
as a paramilitary told me, only 10 percent demobilised
and only 10 percent actually complied. As to the rest,
it was a huge failure," said Rojas.
"What HRW is doing today is reasserting that not all the
people who demobilised were paramilitaries, and not all
the paramilitaries demobilised," he added. |
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