Dulce Et Decorum Est

From El Tiempo (2007-10-07): Investigan a dos militares de E.U. por violación de niña de 12 años en Comando Aéreo de Melgar:

Air Force Command, Melgar, Colombia

On Saturday, August 25, Second Sergeant Michael J. Coen and his personal security officer, César Ruiz, who are serving with Colombian forces based in Tolemaida and appointed under Plan Colombia, evaded security protocols of the main Colombian Air Force bunker in the municipality of Tolima.

According to testimonies collected by the local authorities – in which military intelligence also have participated – at 4 am on Saturday, August 25, the soldiers arrived at the Air Force Combat Center 4 (Cacom-4) checkpoint, and without getting out of their white truck, Ruiz, known as The Mexican, lowered his window a few centimeters, identified himself and they continued on their way.

The poor car inspection, aided by the darkened truck windows, allowed the two men to enter the military complex with a 12-year-old girl who they had met at a dance club four hours earlier in Melgar.

Confidential informants point out that the truck, with license plate number CTU-046, La Calera, was parked in front of the apartment that Ruiz was assigned three months ago. Ruiz is a US citizen of Mexican origin, now apparently retired from the US Army, registered with the US Embassy and a member of the group in charge of the personal security of US personal participating in the counter-narcotics operations in Colombia.

According to a confidential report, Ruiz loaned his apartment to Mango (Coen’s alias) so that he could carry out the illegal conduct.

According to the testimony of the minor, around 8 a.m. on Sunday August 26, The Mexican took the girl out in the same truck. During the drive he tried to seduce her as he caressed her intimate parts, not paying any attention to her protests.

Minutes later, he left her in Melgar’s main park, where there were witnesses present.

Delays and Transfers

The same day, the girl traveled to Bogotá with her mother, Olga Lucía Castillo Campos, and during the trip she related what had happened to her on the base.

The girl’s mother, an artisan crafts seller who has been accused of allowing her young daughters to roam the streets until all hours of the night, accused the two Americans in the middle of the street in full view of the public, but was ignored. So, she decided to resort to the authorities on September 8.

But she was not the only one. Once I knew about the violations, I also took the case to the appropriate authorities, said Colonel Luis Ignacio Baron, Commander of Cacom-4. The Colonel preferred to make no other comment.

According to Paola Rueda, a psychologist with the Melgar Child Services Office who evaluated the young girl, even though the formal complaint was delayed, creating some difficulty, the thorough medical examinations left no doubt that there had been sexual relations.

Even though the investigation is incomplete, all signs point to the fact that Sargeant Coen, protected with diplomatic immunity, has left the country. Ruiz is still in Colombia.

For now, the Colombian Attorney General’s Office is not denying that Coen could be requested for extradition in order to explain his participation in this act. According to Colombian law, sexual relations with a minor of less than 14 years is punishable by up to 30 years in prison and the convicted person is not eligible for sentence reduction based on confession of crime.

Since this past Thursday, El TIEMPO has made official investigations into this case with the US Embassy in Bogotá and an official spokesperson issued a denouncement of the act. Even though [El Tiempo] has consistently renewed their efforts, at the close of this edition, they have not yet provided any further commentary or answers.

Other Judicial Proceedings against US Soldiers:

• Pornographic Videos: Three years ago, pornographic videos starring Melgar teenagers with US soldiers and technicians from the Tolemaida base were discovered. They were selling for 5 US dollars. The young girls had to leave the area.
• Ammunition Trafficking: In May 2005, the Police arrested a US Sergeant and Technician in the outskirts of Melgar involved in the trafficking of 32,900 cartridges that were apparently intended for the guerrilla.
• Cocaine Contraband: In May 2005, 5 US soldiers appointed under Plan Colombia, were arrested and accused of sending 16 kilos of cocaine hidden in a military plane, from the Apiay military base in Villavicencio.

–El Tiempo (2007-10-07): Investigan a dos militares de E.U. por violación de niña de 12 años en Comando Aéreo de Melgar. Translation by FOR.

BOGOTA, Colombia (AP) – Forensic teams have unearthed 211 bodies buried in dozens of mass graves near a single town in southern Colombia in the past 10 months, a legacy of fierce fighting in this coca-rich land.

Chief prosecutor Mario Iguaran told a news conference Saturday that investigators exhumed 105 bodies alone on Friday near La Hormiga, 340 miles (540 kilometers) south of Bogota in the province of Putumayo. Most of the victims, who investigators believe were killed between 1999 and 2001, had been dismembered before burial.

Historically a key region for growing the coca plant that is used to make cocaine, the Putumayo jungles near the border with Ecuador are the scene of almost daily fighting between leftist rebels, far-right paramilitaries and state security forces.

Iguaran said that based on information from local residents, authorities suspect both the paramilitaries and the rebels were responsible for the killings. Both sides regularly kill civilians they believe to be aiding their enemies.

Investigators have been digging for the mass graves in Putumayo since August of last year.

Forensic teams have found hundreds more shallow graves in recent months, as demobilized paramilitaries confess their crimes as part of a peace deal with the government.

Iguaran’s office estimates 10,000 murdered Colombians lie in unmarked graves across this South American country, now in its fifth decade of civil conflict.

Toby Muse, Associated Press (2007-05-06): Colombia Finds 211 Bodies in Mass Graves

Press reports have only told a little bit of the story behind the mass graves discovered in Putumayo. They mostly do not mention that it has become increasingly clear that the paramilitaries have been covertly sponsored and encouraged by powerful men within the Colombian government–possibly including President Alvaro Uribe himself–as a clandestine part of the military and drug war projects heavily underwritten by the United States government’s Plan Colombia.

The long, cozy relationship between Colombian President Alvaro Uribe and the US Congress is over. Washington has spent billions on the Plan Colombia policy to combat terror, increase security and economic development, and stymie the drug trade with little to show for it. Ongoing investigations into links between Colombian leaders and former paramilitary commanders have revealed close ties. For the Democratic leaders in Congress this has become hard to ignore, especially when discussing a possible free trade agreement (FTA) or continuing the financing of Plan Colombia.

… Beyond perceptions of human rights atrocities and the killings of union leaders, the reality is that paramilitary forces for many years have been the law of the land in rural areas where the Colombian state had little to no presence. Before Plan Colombia took flight, the 1990s was a decade when paramilitarism was seen as a viable solution to confront the spread of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia.

The shady nature of the relationship between Colombian leaders and paramilitary commanders allowed the latter to operate beyond the law with impunity. Such latitude, combined with profits from selling cocaine to the US market, allowed the paramilitaries to quickly grow beyond the control of their rural landowner masters. And one of them, it seems, might have been Alvaro Uribe himself.

Yet through his connections, Uribe sparked a process of disarmament that has led Colombia down a path that, among other unintended destinations, has taken Colombia into a phase of truth telling whereby Colombian leaders from the military, Congress and the president’s office, have been forced to reckon with their past.

While the so-called para-politico scandal continues and Uribe has managed to avoid direct scrutiny in Bogota, leaders in Washington don’t want to be seen as having supported the Colombian president when the scope of his past involvement with the paramilitaries is in question, despite the argument that such ties were necessary.

Sensing a climate change, Uribe hired a lobbying firm with known close ties to Democrats, The Glover Park Group, at US$40,000 a month to help improve his image in Congress.

His first stop in Washington was the White House, where US President George W Bush showed open-ended support for Uribe’s US$700 million request for Plan Colombia.

It is very important for this nation to stand with democracies that protect human rights and human dignity, democracies based up the rule of law, Bush said.

Uribe’s next meeting took him to the offices of Senator Patrick Leahy, who chairs the subcommittee that oversees congressional spending on Plan Colombia. In April, the subcommittee froze US$55.2 million in military aid to Colombia, citing accusations that paramilitary groups had infiltrated the Colombian government and military.

Leahy and Uribe likely discussed this as well as the fallout after the mid-April speech Colombian Senator Gustavo Petro gave his country’s Congress during which he presented a list of some 2,000 names of individuals closely tied to paramilitaries. One of those names was Santiago Uribe, the president’s brother.

Sam Logan, Spero News (2007-05-05): Uribe’s reality check

It is also increasingly clear that paramilitary groups, which have repeatedly murdered peasant activists and union organizers, have been backed by United States corporations.

Colombia’s President Alvaro Uribe headed to Washington this week, hoping to contain the fallout from an ever-widening scandal linking some of his closest allies to right-wing paramilitaries — a scandal that is threatening a key free-trade agreeement and future military aid from the U.S.

The trip puts Uribe under the spotlight of a Democratic-controlled Congress, some of whose legislators have expressed concern over the light sentences awaiting confessed paramilitary leaders under a deal negotiated by the Colombian government.

But Washington has made its own deal with at least one backer of the Colombian paramilitaries: Under an agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice in March, banana giant Chiquita Brands International acknowledged it had paid $1.7 million to Colombia’s paramilitary groups. The company said it had made the payments to protect its employees, but about half of the money was paid after the paramilitary federation in question, the United Self Defense Forces of Colombia, or AUC, had been placed on Washington’s list of foreign terrorist organizations in September of 2001.

… Still, Chiquita continued to make monthly payments to the AUC until February 2004, even after disclosing the situation to the Justice Department.

… Chiquita spokesman Michael Mitchell said that the company had felt obliged to make the payments to protect its employees. “We believe they saved people’s lives,” he said. However, during the time Chiquita was making the payments, thousands of people across Colombia died at the hands of the AUC, which expanded its power. In the banana belt alone between 1997 and 2004, right-wing paramilitaries are blamed for 22 massacres in which 137 people were killed, according to government figures.

Sibylla Brodzinsky, TIME (2007-05-02): Terrorism and bananas in Colombia