Colombia's so-called "Demobilization" of paramilitaries

"Reintegrating Colombia’s Killers",
Mark L. Schneider in The Orlando Sentinel

9 September 2007
The Orlando Sentinel

September in Washington, D.C., is all Iraq, all the time, with Congress, the president and the public debating the war.

But Iraq cannot eclipse other foreign-policy issues that affect American lives.

Take Colombia -- a country whose violence and drug trafficking are exported to U.S. cities every day.

This fall Congress debates progress on the Bush administration's implementation of "Plan Colombia," a U.S. program to help the Colombian government wipe out half its coca fields.

Congress will decide whether to cave in to the Bush administration's demand that Plan Colombia continue to deliver funding at an 80/20 split between military to economic aid, and support Colombian paramilitary mobilization without question. Democrats are skeptical, particularly after reports from the International Crisis Group and others that rearmed paramilitary groups still hold sway over cocaine corridors.

President Alvaro Uribe's initial tradeoff with them was to leave the battlefield in exchange for partial amnesty. The worst offenders would face minimal prison terms if they confessed their crimes, disclosed where victims were buried and explained how they had acquired and hidden illegal assets.

An overwhelmed attorney general's office must hold them to their promises or ensure they face the full force of the law if they refuse.

The process has been drawn out and tortuous. Over 30,000 combatants have registered and formally demobilized. Nearly 3,000 ringleaders are seeking reduced sentences under the Justice and Peace law. Only a few dozen have actually admitted crimes.

I just returned from two centers of paramilitary power, where I got a ground view of the disarmament, demobilization and resettlement (DDR) process three years after it began.

In the rural municipality of Tierralta, former paramilitary troops, their victims and the poor campesinos who survived decades of war all blamed the government for failing to deliver on promises.

In Tierralta, where the Organization of American States (OAS) has monitored the process, I sat with a half-dozen former paramilitary in a local church as they described their fears that stipends would dry up, and jobs would be scarce. They were frustrated and angry, and talked about re-arming.

Similar sentiments were expressed in the backroom of a nearby evangelical church by a dozen victims describing how loved ones had been killed and they had been forced to flee their villages. They wanted jobs and new houses -- or at least the chance to return to their old ones -- and wondered why the paras seemed to be getting benefits denied to them.

I took rutted roads to a rural center where community conciliators were waiting in the zone where the para warlords had negotiated their deal with Uribe's advisers. Villagers recalled promises by government officials that the paramilitary demobilization would bring clear benefits of peace -- new schools, water systems, health clinics and farmland. One said, "We don't even have latrines." Another said, "Yes, there is a school but no teachers."

I saw a different process in the Antioquia departmental capital of Medellin the headquarters of "don Berna," one of Colombia's paramilitary barons whom the U.S. has indicted for drug trafficking. There the local mayor, Sergio Fajardo, has made DDR the highest priority, committing extra resources to the program, which has USAID support, and has combined psychological profiling, education and training to bring former paramilitary troops back into society.

Frank Pearl, the businessman who accepted Uribe's challenge to work on the national reintegration program, has adopted many of the Medellin lessons. But a few are missing: He is not responsible for assuring aid to the victims -- yet they cannot be left out. And even in Pearl's plans, the rural villages of Colombia, hard to reach, mired in deep poverty and long abandoned, still won't get sufficient investment in governance and infrastructure.

Yet it is in those villages where the 40-year civil conflict between the government, the paramilitary and the two left- wing guerrilla revolutionary groups has raged. Abandonment by a succession of governments not only gave the guerrillas their base of operations but also fostered illegal coca cultivation and Colombia's humanitarian tragedy.

The new U.S. Congress wants to direct more aid to displaced, rural communities and to the attorney general, who is investigating confessed links between para leaders and Uribe party politicians. The Uribe government could help end impunity by digging into its vast intelligence files and providing the attorney general with full dossiers on nearly 3000 para leaders it has said should be granted reduced sentences. So far all it has offered is tantamount to name, rank and serial number.

The one clear and important benefit of the demobilization process has been to remove thousands of killers from the battlefields, with a parallel decline in homicides and kidnappings. However, the victims of their earlier crimes have a right to be sure the attorney general has resources to ensure the paramilitary at least tell the full truth.

Colombia's demobilization of paramilitary armies that committed massacres, forced hundreds of thousands to flee their villages and ran cocaine drug trafficking is important to Americans. We have to get it right -- or we have to help Colombia get it right.

Mark Schneider is the senior vice president and special adviser on Latin America of the International Crisis Group, the conflict resolution organization, and a former director of the Peace Corps.

Turkey, China, Colombia: The Human Cost of Development Projects

Dear Reader,

Today I'd like to share with you an article by David Bacon (details see below) concerning the high human cost of development projects. It is a well-written article focusing on Colombia and explaining succinctly the nefarious effects of market-driven investment and exploitation policies.

Your comments are most welcome.

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MURDER AND MIGRATION
By David Bacon*

The American Prospect, January/February 2007, www.prospect.org

Development projects anywhere in the world often have a high human cost. In Colombia, the price is often measured in human lives and blood.

Esperanza (she would risk her life, she says, if her real name appeared in print) saw her neighbors pay that price in 2001. Her house sits on the bank of the Rio Salvajina, in the Afro-Colombian municipality of Buenos Aires in Cauca province. "I saw armed men arrive in cars," she remembers, "with two, three, four, even five people tied up. They dragged them onto the bridge, shot them two or three times and threw their bodies into the river." When the paramilitaries came to her own home, she was so frightened she lost the baby she'd been carrying for five months.

Today Esperanza is a community activist organizing against the hydropower project for which her neighbors were killed. If ratified by Congress, the U.S.-Colombia Free Trade Agreement, which President Bush and Colombian President Alvaro Uribe signed in mid-November, could lead to more such projects, she fears, and more such violence. "It will permit many more development projects by multinational companies. Many more people will be displaced. And if they won't leave voluntarily, there will be more assassinations. We know this because we live with it already."

Esperanza's experience is a microcosm of the large-scale impact of corporate development in Colombia's countryside. One quarter of Colombia's nearly 43 million people are Afro-Colombian, and most live in rural areas, where resources like hydropower and gold and mineral deposits are concentrated. Far from enhancing the villagers' lives, however, these projects more commonly despoil their lands and force them to flee.

Esperanza's family was first displaced by construction of the dam on the Río Salvajina in 1984. Along with 3,600 others, her parents and brothers were compelled to leave the valley. Behind the dam, water flooded schools, homes, churches, even cemeteries. And when the turbines started to roll, the Spanish energy conglomerate, Unión Fenosa, had plenty of electricity to sell on Latin America's power market (the dam's purpose was to generate power that Unión Fenosa could market to other countries).

A number of community leaders who resisted removal were killed or disappeared. "The company didn't kill people directly," Esperanza cautions. "It asked the state, through the army, to force people to leave so they could run their business."

Afro-Colombian and indigenous communities insisted that the country's Constitution, rewritten in 1991, recognize their right to their historical territories. Law 70, passed in 1993, said these communities had to be consulted and give their approval prior to any new projects planned on their land. Having a law is one thing, however. Enforcing it is another.

By 2001, silt had begun to build up behind the Río Salvajina dam. Power generation, and Unión Fenosa's income, dropped. The company then proposed a new megaproject, to divert the Río Ovejas from its course in the next valley into the Río Salvajina reservoir. Knowing families couldn't survive the loss of their river, local communities refused to consent. Unión Fenosa asked the government to put the project on hold.

Then right-wing paramilitaries moved in.

Because the government is under pressure to respect international human rights standards, it's not as easy to use the army to drive out people as it was 20 years ago. "They use the paramilitaries," Esperanza says. That's when she saw the bodies thrown into the river in front of her house. "Leaders began to disappear. There were massacres, not just of people living in the area, but even those who'd fled to other places. Their bodies were dumped here. And after the paramilitaries arrived and the resistance was weakened, they came back with the proposal again."

Another megaproject is planned for the same area. Anglo American, the South African gold mining consortium, wants to pulverize a nearby mountain and extract gold from the ore. For generations, families in nearby Buenos Aires and Palo Blanco have depended on small-scale gold mining to survive. It's a hard living, however. Many women already leave their children in the care of neighbors and family to work as domestics in Cali, the closest city. "If we can't mine the gold the way we've done in the past, we won't even have that to sustain us," says Palo Blanco resident Ana Valencia (whose name also has been changed for fear of reprisals).
Large gold mines often leave behind huge mountains of tailings, and ponds filled with chemicals used to leach the metal from ore. Pollution will also make subsistence farming harder.

Power and gold sales create dividends, but the only Colombians who really benefit from them are a handful of brokers in Bogotá. The Colombian government, however, like many in thrall to market-driven policies, sees foreign investment in these projects as the key to economic development, and thus revenue. It cuts the budget for public services needed by Afro-Colombian, indigenous and other poor communities. The collusion of the Colombian government with business has also made Colombia the most dangerous nation for union activists, more of whom are murdered there every year than in any other country—and in some years, than in every other country.

In Washington, leading members of the incoming Democratic Congress have called for stricter labor and environmental standards for proposed free trade agreements; some have labeled the agreement with Colombia a non-starter. And while a number of prominent Democrats oppose the U.S. military aid program, Plan Colombia, which underwrites much of the Colombian military budget in the name of curtailing drug production, its fate is not so clear. What is crystal clear is that a number of leaders of rural Afro-Colombian and indigenous communities who stand in the way of such foreign investment will, like the leaders of Colombia's unions, in all probability disappear or die. And while most displaced Colombians become internal migrants in the country's growing urban slums, that migratory stream will eventually cross borders into those wealthy countries whose policies have set it into motion.


*David Bacon is a California photojournalist documenting labor, globalization, and migration. His photo-documentary book on immigration, Communities Without Borders, was just published by Cornell University Press.

http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/cup_detail.taf?ti_id=4575

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