Operation False Positive: Behind the Colombia / Venezuela Tensions

[Judi Lynn]

August 3, 2010
Operation False Positive
Behind the Colombia / Venezuela Tensions
By CONN HALLINAN

If you want to understand what’s behind the recent tension between Colombia and Venezuela, think “smokescreen,” and then go back several months to some sick children in the Department of Meta, just south of Bogota. The children fell ill after drinking from a local stream, a stream contaminated by the bodies of more than 2,000 people, secretly buried by the Colombian military.

According to the Colombian high command, the mass grave just outside the army base at La Macarena contains the bodies of guerilla fighters killed between 2002 and 2009 in that country’s long-running civil war. But given the army’s involvement in the so-called “false positive” scandal, human rights groups are highly skeptical that the dead are members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia and the National Liberation Army, the two insurgent groups fighting the central government.

“False positive” is the name given to the Colombian armed forces operation that murdered civilians and then dressed them up in insurgent uniforms in order to demonstrate the success of the army’s counterinsurgency strategy, thus winning more aid from the U.S. According to the human rights organizations Comision de Derechos Homanos del Bajo Ariari and Colectivo Orlando Fals Borda, some 2,000 civilians have been murdered under the program.

The bodies at La Macarena have not been identified yet, but suspicion is that they represent victims of the “false-positive” program, as well as rural activists and trade unionists. The incoming Colombian president, Juan Manuel Santos, was defense secretary when the murders were talking place. Santos also oversaw a brief invasion of Ecuador in 2008 that reportedly killed a number of insurgents. The invasion was widely condemned throughout Latin America.

Diverting attention is what outgoing Colombian President Alvaro Uribe is all about. While his foreign minister, Luis Alfonso Hoyos, was laying out photos and intelligence claiming that Venezuela was hosting upwards of 1500 Colombian insurgents, a group of Latin American NGOs were uncovering a vast scheme by Uribe’s Department of Administrative Security (DAS) to sabotage the activities of journalists, judges, NGOs, international organizations and political opponents. Some of these “dirty tricks” included death threats.

Because the U.S.—which has pumped more than $7 billion in military aid to Colombia—supplies the DAS with surveillance technology, Washington may end up implicated in the scandal.

The U.S. may also be tarred with the murder of Colombian trade unionists. According to Kelly Nichollas of the U.S. Office on Colombia, testimony at the trial of former DAS director Jorge Noguera indicated that the U.S. trained a special Colombian intelligence unit that tracked trade unionists.

More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/hallinan08032010.html

[gbscar]

1. Characterizing "False Positives" as an operation seems just a bit misleading, to say the least, when

...it actually refers to the results of a widespread behavior and mentality. In other words, it is a wholly different kind of phenomenon.

But I suppose it makes for a more ideologically useful set of mental images to think of "false positives" as some sort of particular program than can be treated as such, as opposed to dealing with the far more worrying and difficult to resolve underlying structural and long term problems, no?

Thankfully, however, a lot of the critical reporting from human rights organizations themselves doesn't tend to fall into that kind of trap, regardless of its other virtues and limitations. They're usually painfully aware of the nature of the Colombian military's human rights record throughout history and, perhaps more importantly, the ugly depths of the mentalities and policies that go along with it. Calling the current "false positives" phenomenon just a simple program, in a way, isn't just factually inaccurate but, tragically, even misleadingly hopeful in the face of what I've just referred to.

In addition, Santos himself was Defense Minister between 2006 and 2009. The bodies buried in the La Macarena gravesite date all the way back to at least 2004 or, as the article says, perhaps even 2002. This doesn't automatically absolve him of all responsibility, because he certainly oversaw military activities for three years while those horrible killings still continued to take place, but it does make the overall timeline of the abuses clearer as opposed to obscuring it and, as a result, simplifying the rest of the issues involved in a way that doesn't help address the problem.

Moving on from that specific point...I would be more willing to agree with the gist of the final statements if the drug war itself had been dismantled on a regional level in countries where U.S. influence has been scaled back, but the persistence of prohibition even in the majority of those nations makes that almost impossible. The fact that the police, rather than the military, are usually involved doesn't make the overall policy any less counter-productive and harmful.

[Judi Lynn]

2. A refresher from material we've already covered here earlier:

Rights violations hang over new Colombian president
Monday, June 28, 2010
By Juan Forero, The Washington Post

BOGOTA, Colombia -- The verdict last week was a milestone: A distant court affiliated with the Washington-based Organization of American States held the Colombian government responsible for the 1994 assassination of a prominent senator.

A lion of a radical political party whose members were slain by the hundreds, Manuel Cepeda was shot dead in an operation partly organized by Colombia's army. But the 16-year-old case is no anomaly in a country suffering from a simmering, half-century-old guerrilla conflict. Hundreds of cases of murder and massacres, old and new, are coursing through the inter-American justice system.

As President Alvaro Uribe prepares to leave office in August after eight years in power, investigators at the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, a branch of the OAS, are grappling with many of these cases. The most recent have triggered a firestorm in Colombia and as far away as Europe: the army's systematic killing of peasant farmers to inflate combat kills and revelations that Mr. Uribe's secret police spied on opponents, foreign diplomats and rights groups.

"If you put all of this together, the extrajudicial executions, the espionage of human rights defenders, it's all really a constant over the years," Santiago Canton, an Argentine who has headed the rights commission for nine years, said by phone from Washington. "That's very dangerous."

Read more: http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/10179/1068840-82.stm

~~~~~
Wednesday, August 11, 2010
Military human rights trials in Colombia: a big step backward

At some point between now and the end of September, the Obama administration’s Department of State is likely to issue a document "certifying" that Colombia’s armed forces’ respect for human rights is improving. Upon that document’s submission to Congress, according to foreign aid law, 30% of aid to Colombia’s military aid, which has been “on hold” since the beginning of the year, will be released.

Among the conditions that the State Department has to certify is the following:

The Government of Colombia is suspending, and investigating and prosecuting in the civilian justice system, those members of the Colombian Armed Forces, of whatever rank, who have been credibly alleged to have committed violations of internationally recognized human rights, including extra-judicial killings, or to have aided, abetted or benefitted from paramilitary organizations or successor armed groups, and the Colombian Armed Forces are cooperating fully with civilian prosecutors and judicial authorities in such cases.

This condition exists because human rights abuses committed by Colombia’s armed forces are notoriously difficult to investigate and punish. “Estimates of the current rate of impunity for alleged killings by the security forces are as high as 98.5 per cent,” noted a recent report on Colombia from the UN Special Rapporteur for Extrajudicial Executions. “Soldiers simply knew that they could get away with murder.”

More:
http://justf.org/blog/2010/08/11/military-human-rights-trials-colombia-big-step-backward

~~~~~
Dan Kovalik
Human and Labor Rights Lawyer
Posted: April 1, 2010 09:22 AM

U.S. and Colombia Cover Up Atrocities Through Mass Graves

The biggest human rights scandal in years is developing in Colombia, though you wouldn't notice it from the total lack of media coverage here. The largest mass grave unearthed in Colombia was discovered by accident last year just outside a Colombian Army base in La Macarena, a rural municipality located in the Department of Meta just south of Bogota. The grave was discovered when children drank from a nearby stream and started to become seriously ill. These illnesses were traced to runoff from what was discovered to be a mass grave -- a grave marked only with small flags showing the dates (between 2002 and 2009) on which the bodies were buried.

According to a February 10, 2010 letter issued by Alexandra Valencia Molina, Director of the regional office of Colombia's own Procuraduria General de la Nacion -- a government agency tasked to investigate government corruption -- approximately 2,000 bodies are buried in this grave. The Colombian Army has admitted responsibility for the grave, claiming to have killed and buried alleged guerillas there. However, the bodies in the grave have yet to be identified. Instead, against all protocol for handling the remains of anyone killed by the military, especially those of guerillas, the bodies contained in the mass grave were buried there secretly without the requisite process of having the Colombian government certify that the deceased were indeed the armed combatants the Army claims.

And, given the current "false positive" scandal which has enveloped the government of President Alvaro Uribe and his Defense Minister, Juan Manuel Santos, who is now running to succeed Uribe as President, the Colombian Army's claim about the mass grave is especially suspect. This scandal revolves around the Colombian military, most recently under the direction of Juan Manuel Santos, knowingly murdering civilians in cold blood and then dressing them up to look like armed guerillas in order to justify more aid from the United States. According to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pilay, this practice has been so "systematic and widespread" as to amount to a "crime against humanity." And sadly, when Ms. Pilay made this statement, she literally did not know the half of it.

To date, not factoring in the mass grave, it has been confirmed by Colombian government sources that 2,000 civilians have fallen victim to the "false positive" scheme since President Uribe took office in 2002. If, as suspected by Colombian human rights groups, such as the "Comision de Derechos Humanos del Bajo Ariari" and the "Colectivo Orlando Fals Borda," the mass grave in La Macarena contains 2,000 more civilian victims of this scheme, then this would bring the total of those victimized by the "false positive" scandal to at least 4,000 --much worse than originally believed.

More:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dan-kovalik/us-colombia-cover-up-atro_b_521402.html

ETC.

[naaman fletcher]

3. Is Chavez a liar?

Chavez has said that the tensions are because of Colombia's accusations about FARC camps in Venezuela. This article says its about an internal Colombian matter that has nothing to with with Venezuela. Is Chavez lying?