Back to the Bad Old Times?

In yesterday's El Tiempo, the coincidence of two headlines sent a disturbing message about the danger of bad old times returning.

In the upper left-hand corner, a report about the end of the informal truce between the government and the FARC guerrillas. The peace negotiations in Havana, Cuba look to be in danger of breaking down, in the wake of a FARC ambush which killed 10 soldiers and military bombardments in which the government claims to have killed two dozen guerrilla fighters.

The peace talks have bogged down over the past year, primarily over what the guerrilla leaders' fate

Free man: Para leader Julian Bolivar.

would be after a peace deal. The guerrillas want to become politicians, but the overwhelming majority of Colombians wants to see them in prison.

In the lower right corner, the paper reports the release from prison of Julian Bolivar, the first major paramilitary leader to win his freedom after serving the 8-year prison term stipulated by the controversial Law of Peace and Justice. Under the law, paramilitaries who confessed to their crimes and ceased committing crimes receive maximum 8-year prison terms. Bolivar, whose real name is Rodrigo Pérez Alzate, had confessed to responsibility for or been convicted of crimes including massacres, recruiting children, driving peasants off their land, torture, narcotrafficking, assassinating union leaders, money laundering and 'barbarous acts' as head of a paramilitary group in the Antioquia and Magdalena Medio regions.

The crimes were committed as head of the Bloque Central Bolívar, under the pretense of battling leftist guerrillas.

The succession of paramilitary leaders being released has victims worried that they will return to crime and terrorism and take vengeance on those who denounced them. And the ohe ongoing resurgence of the conflict with the guerrillas makes that seem all the more possible.

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

The Tragedy of El Placer, Remembered

The past few days El Tiempo and El Espectador have published some really horrific accounts of terrible abuses, mostly committed by right-wing paramilitaries, and mostly committed against women, in the terribly-misnamed town of El Placer, whose name means 'pleasure,' in the bajo Putumayo region.

Thankfully, these crimes mostly ended a half dozen years ago, altho that doesn't reduce their horror. The media is publishing these accounts because of the presentation Wednesday evening in the BLAA of a report, entitled 'Women, Coca and war in the Lower Putumayo,' by the Center for Historical Memory as part of the Fifth Week of Remembering. The southern Putumayo region, desired by outlaw groups because of its valuable coca-leaf plantations, had long been dominated by lefist guerrillas, who trampled residents' human rights in their own ways. But in 1999 right wing paramilitaries invaded, driving out the guerrillas and accusing residents of having collaborated with them.

A cadaver unearthed
in South Putumayo.

The newspapers publish chilling accounts of women raped and tortured by the paramilitaries, who murdered many residents and forced girls and women into sex slavery. The area's new rulers accused the villagers of having collaborated with the guerrillas or of being guerrillas themselves - even tho townspeople often collaborated only under the threat of death. Similar tragedies were repeated in many parts of Colombia, carried out in some areas by paramilitaries, in others by guerrillas.

The accounts are particularly disturbing in light of Colombia's controversial Justice and Peace Law, which enabled the paramilitaries' demobilization, but was heavily criticized for letting vicious criminals off with only light sentences or none at all, and invite reflection on the negotiations now beginning between the government and the leftist FARC guerrillas.

Ex-Pres. Alvaro Uribe has been the loudest critic of the negotiations with the guerrillas, which he believes will permit impunity. But he conveniently forgets the impunity received by the right-wing paramilitaries - who notoriously fought alongside government forces while Uribe was governor of Antioquia Province and later president of Colombia.

The paramilitary demobilization, with all of its defects, at least reduced the number of civilian massacres and displacements. A possible peace treaty with the FARC guerrillas would undoubtedly have huge flaws, but could also prevent many future human rights violations.


By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

The Greatest Show in Colombia?

Real or pretend? (Photo: Swedish Int'l Coop.)

They were billed as great advancements in Colombia's road from war to peace - but they may have been no more than great theatre, with casts of thousands.

Over the past decade mass demobilizations of paramilitary and guerrilla fighters, backed by U.S. funding, provided dramatic evidence of progress towards ending Colombia's half-century-long armed conflict. But now it appears that at least some of those events were staged, designed to obtain political and legal advantages.

That's at least according to recent declarations by ex-paramilitaries and others reported in Colombian media. But ex-President Alvaro Uribe and members of his administration insist that the demobilizations were legit.

Paramilitary victims (Photo: El Tiempo)

There are several reasons why these groups might have staged fake demobilizations. Primarily, it allowed them to participate in the government's 'Justice and Peace' program, which offered very forgiving conditions for guerrillas and paramilitaries who turned themselves in and confessed to crimes. In fact, many of the paramilitary leaders are now doing time in U.S. prisons - but back then they expected to pay for their drug trafficking and massacres with just a short 'house arrest' on their luxury estates. From the start, human rights organizations criticized the Justice and Peace program as too lenient for groups responsible for horrific abuses, including massacres of peasants.

For the government, naturally, more demobilizations of bad guys made great p.r.

Bad actors?

In many regions whether the demobilizations were real or not may be irrelevent. Quickly, new, violent drug-trafficking groups, these lacking any political ideology, sprang up to replace the paramilitaries.

According to the recent declarations, in the best tradition of good theatre, criminal leaders recruited hundreds of young men from Medellin's bad neighborhoods, trained them, gave them rifles to turn in and lined them up as 'desmovilizados.' The leaders got political instead of criminal treatment, the false desmovilizados got things like government stipends and education, and supposedly even their criminal records erased. And reporters got a great show.

Government prosecutors are now investigating the accusations.

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

Peace and Justice?

About five years ago, the Law of Peace and Justice was passed, intended primarily to aid in the demobilization of Colombia's vicious paramilitary armies and promote the confession of their crimes, while contributing to some degree of justice.

The paramilitaries have committed about the worst sorts of horrors you can imagine - mass chainsaw murders, feeding people to crocodiles, chopping people apart alive... Along the Colombian-Venezuelan border, people told me they found sacks of chopped up human flesh floating down the river, evidently placed there by paramilitaries to terrify those living downriver.

Five years on, this is what's happened: Only two convictions, which happened only this week, and those for only eight years each. These paramilitary leaders were likely guilty of mass murders, forced displacements, narcotrafficking, kidnappings, etc. But eight years is what someone can get for a simple drug deal in lots of countries.

(To the government's partial credit, however, about a dozen paramilitary leaders are in U.S. prisons, which is exactly where they planned not to be when they agreed to be tried using the law. However, these men were extradited because they'd allegedly continued committing crimes while in prison.)

Meanwhile, many say that the paramilitaries, who supposedly demobilized years ago in mass ceremonies actually continue operating in many regions.

What the Peace and Justice Law has accomplished, however, is to generate lots of confessions:

163.000 homicides

32.000 forced disappearances

66.000 forced displacements

3.500 children recruited

More than 800 kidnappings .... all of which shows how measly the punishments are.

This blog written by Mike Ceaser, of Bogota Bike Tours