US Military Aid Contingent on Reversal of Rights Record

[Judi Lynn]

US Military Aid Contingent on Reversal of Rights Record
By Matthew Berger

WASHINGTON, Sep 1, 2010 (IPS) - As a new administration takes over in Bogotá, some groups are hoping for change in the human rights record of Colombia - and that the U.S. will use its clout in the country to ensure that change occurs.

At some point in September, the U.S. State Department will likely certify that Colombia is meeting the human rights conditions required for receiving some of the military aid provided by the U.S. But in the year since the last certification numerous human rights violations have occurred in the country, Colombian and U.S. NGOs said in a statement issued Monday. The groups hope that the fact that those human rights violations occurred while former president Álvaro Uribe was in power means that Colombia has a chance to break that trend under new president Juan Miguel Santos - and that the U.S., which gives hundreds of millions of dollars in aid to Colombia each year, has a chance to pressure them to do so.

The certification requirement only affects U.S. military assistance - and only a percentage of it. Moreover, the State Department has never not certified that Colombia meets the human rights conditions required for receipt of the aid in the ten years that certification has been required.

The certification requirement has "still been a useful tool because the State Department, in anticipating these decisions, sometimes delays certifying and discusses with the Colombian government the serious issues of human rights," says Lisa Haugaard, executive director of the Latin America Working Group, one of the 18 groups behind the statement. "It’s been the one tool we have available to put some pressure not just on the Colombian government but on the State Department," she told IPS.

Rather than simply asking for delays, the groups would like the State Department to not certify Colombia’s human rights record. Haugaard explains that it has been a particularly bad year for human rights in the country. "We’ve seen considerable backsliding, particularly in terms of investigating and prosecuting effectively abuses by the army, even the most egregious ones," she says.

Over the past year, several infractions have remained unaddressed, including the supposed failure to prosecute rights violations like the "false positive" extrajudicial executions in which Colombian military personnel have allegedly executed civilians then dressed them up as guerrillas in order to inflate their combat body count. Though the cases involve 3,000 victims of extrajudicial executions dating back to 2002, results are slow, according to the groups.

In response to the false positive scandal, 27 military personnel were dismissed in 2008, but none have been charged with crimes, they say. They also write that 31 union leaders, 7 community leaders and one indigenous leader have been killed so far in 2010, and that there has been an "exponential increase in threats against defenders via email since April 2010." They also point to the expanded operations of paramilitaries and criminal groups as well as evidence of military-paramilitary cooperation.

More:
http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=52692

[Peace Patriot]

1. "hundreds of millions of dollars in aid to Colombia each year"--the total is $7 BILLION,

and that is just the total that is countable. For instance, it may not include the millions to Blackwater for its "unauthorized" "trainings" of Colombian military personnel for use in Afghanistan and Iraq; the costs of Pentagon maintenance of at least seven Colombian military bases--likely many more--with U.S. air force, naval, high tech and other hardware, weaponry and "training" available to the Colombian military; CIA and other covert ops, and many other extravagances in support of the narco-thugs running Colombia.

The $7 BILLION in military funding is the largest U.S. military aid package in the world, outside of Israel.

This article understates the case against U.S. policy in Colombia, and, while I greatly sympathize with "David" in this "David & Goliath" situation--human rights groups vs the U.S. State Department, the Pentagon and their fascist, murderous client state, Colombia--and, while I can understand why they are grasping at ANY little miniscule hope they see in the UTTERLY HYPOCRITICAL State Department bullshit about "human rights," it makes me uneasy--even queasy--to see how this hopeless hope influences how they frame the situation, or, perhaps, it is fault of the article writer, not the human rights groups who are calling for NO "certification" of Colombia.

For instance, this:

"Over the past year, several infractions have remained unaddressed, including the supposed failure to prosecute rights violations like the 'false positive' extrajudicial executions in which Colombian military personnel have allegedly executed civilians then dressed them up as guerrillas in order to inflate their combat body count. Though the cases involve 3,000 victims of extrajudicial executions dating back to 2002, results are slow, according to the groups."

"Infractions"??? In La Macarena, the local children became ill from the drinking water, which is how it was discovered that the Colombian military had dumped TWO THOUSAND bodies into a mass grave, whose rotting corpses were polluting the local water source! TWO THOUSAND in that one grave alone--whom local people say are the bodies of local 'disappeared' community activists. This cleansed writing about "infractions" understates the horrors of the human rights violations, and the human rights groups' strategy of trying to appeal to State Department hypocrisy about "human rights" conceals the awful truth that La Macarena, for instance, was a region of special interest and activity by the U.S. military and the USAID, which DESIGNED the program of "pacification" in which these murders occurred!

"...results are slow...". No, "results"--from the U.S. point of view--were FAST. The "results" of a DELIBERATE policy of massively FUNDING the Colombian military, and ENCOURAGING murder and brutality against the poor--including Blackwater "trainings" in assassination of civilians--were FAST: the decimation of local community leadership and terrorization of the people of La Macarena!

Again, I sympathize with thin hopes--even totally unreasonable hope--that the people of Colombia might be given some relief from mass murder and terror at the hands of their own government, funded by you and me. Hope that Hillary Clinton's interest in democracy cosmetics and this new 'Smiley Face' former 'Defense' Minister Manuel Santos, might let up on the mass murder and even tidy up a bit, with prosecution of a few underlings, now that so many opposers of corpo-fascist rule are dead. But I think that we, the people of the U.S., need to face up to the REALITY of what our government has done in Colombia, in our name. We may have no power any more, as a people, to influence our government but we do have an obligation to at least KNOW what it has done and is doing.

[Judi Lynn]

2. It's hard to believe a situation so horrific as La Macarena's, so many murdered people

unceremoniously dumped into a mass grave that they actually start poisoning the waters in the area, bringing disease to the ones who just happen to live in the area.

There could not be an uglier event on any planet.

We were left to sit in total darkness, in our "information age," blissfully ignorant that our government-required taxes, taken from the labor of our lives, is being used to fund this kind of barbaric, brutal repression of an entire people, while keeping us entirely ignorant of it all.

We should make a bet on when the first atrocity by Santos' government will be revealed, and then, how many years it will take between the event and the revelation. There's no way he's not going to be as ruthless destroying peoples' lives as his predecessor.