COLOMBIA
Spying Knows No Borders
By Constanza Vieira
BOGOTÁ (IPS) - Venezuela's
Minister of Interior and Justice, Tarek
El Aissami, presented a report Oct. 29,
2009, to his country's National
Assembly. That report is believed to
have resulted, two days later, in the
murder of two people on a farm in
neighbouring Colombia, near the capital.
Filed officially as a row amongst drunks
at a Halloween party attended by agents
from Colombia's Administrative
Department of Security (DAS, attached to
the office of the president), survivors
of the incident claimed six months later
that the killings were an attempt to
obstruct justice.
DAS officers took over the crime scene
that day, and for several hours blocked
Colombia's judicial police from
entering.
The detective who fired his weapon did
so under orders from his superiors,
claim the survivors. Current DAS
director Felipe Muñoz denies the
accusations and says the agent in
question accepted the charges of double
homicide.
The dead, the two people injured, and
the agent who fired, "were part of a
special counterintelligence corps" that
for a time mixed legal and illegal
activities, according to a May article
in the Bogotá journal Semana.
In his report to the Venezuelan National
Assembly, El Aissami presented DAS
documents found in the possession of a
Colombian woman and obtained through
interrogations of two Colombians and one
Venezuelan arrested Oct. 2, 2009 in the
northern Venezuelan city of Maracay.
Many of the facets of the incident
exposed by the Venezuelan ministry were
verified in April of this year by DAS
officials on the Colombian Contravía
television programme, interviewed in
Semana, or in sworn testimony in the
case before the Supreme Court against
the former DAS director Jorge Noguera.
The DAS coordinated four operations,
three against Latin American
governments: Falcon (Venezuela), Salomon
(Ecuador), Fénix (Cuba) and Cóndor, the
last reportedly against "Islam" in
general, according to one detective's
statement on Contravía.
The DAS cross-border intelligence
offensive began four yours ago,
intensified in 2008 and continued with
force in 2009, said the detective.
But that contradicts the version of
events reported in the Ecuadorean
newspaper El Universo de Guayaquil,
based on statements from a DAS agent
operating in Quito. In its edition
Monday, Jun. 28, the newspaper detailed
the alleged DAS espionage against
Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa.
According to the source in El Universo,
the operations in Ecuador began in 2008
and only after the Mar. 1 bombardment
just inside the Ecuadorean border of a
Colombian guerrilla camp in which rebel
negotiator Raúl Reyes was killed. That
aerial attack caused a rupture between
the two neighbouring countries.
The coordination of the Falcon, Salomon,
Fénix and Cóndor operations took place
under front businesses, outside the DAS
sphere. The rent for those headquarters
was allegedly paid for by the U.S.
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA),
according to the documents that El
Aissami presented.
In that respect, a DAS witness in the
Supreme Court case mentioned the U.S.
embassy in Bogotá, and another statement
refers to "a foreign government."
Falcon, Fénix and Cóndor were said to
have been financed by the CIA through a
cooperation programme with the DAS that
paid people for information. The deputy
director for counterintelligence in
Bogotá is said to have overseen the
operations.
Fénix and Falcon had 14 members and
hired what they referred to as "human
sources" in positions to provide
strategic trans-border information.
The DAS investigator who spoke on
Contravía referred to a "terrible crime
against sister nations," but did not
specify what it was.
DAS top brass would have sought
indictment of the DAS officials and
former agents to prevent them from being
tried in the International Criminal
Court, he said.
The ICC, based in The Hague, only hears
cases of war crimes, crimes against
humanity or genocide in which national
courts are unable or unwilling to
prosecute.
The results of the spying operations
were allegedly sent to the Colombian
presidential palace to the advisors of
President Álvaro Uribe, as well as to
Juan Manuel Santos, who was Defence
minister at the time and is now
president- elect.
At least three official presentations
were made to Santos, including one at
his home, such as an assessment of
Andrés Peñate, DAS director from
November 2005 to August 2007, say DAS
agents.
The coordinating group has changed its
name and objective over the years. Just
from 2003 to 2009, it was known by three
different titles: G-3, GONI and GCOE.
The group GAME existed in 2005, financed
and trained by the United States,
according to the Semana article, and
obtained weapons on the black market,
one detective confessed.
The activities of these groups have been
classified as "matters of national
security," which means tough
restrictions on information sought by
court investigators or journalists.
The "national security" status remains
despite the fact that former director
Noguera is on trial for having put the
DAS at the service of the ultra-
rightwing paramilitary groups in
Colombia led by drug-trafficking bosses.
Such collusion is considered a
transnational crime.
All of the DAS directors who served
under the government of Uribe (in office
since August 2002) are facing lawsuits
for the illegal persecution of judges,
human rights defenders, political
opposition and civil society leaders,
and journalists. |
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