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Wednesday, May 2, 2012

French journalist captured in Colombian town at the center of 2004 U.S-backed offensive

The southern Colombian town where FARC guerrillas captured French journalist Romeo Langlois last weekend has a difficult history. La Unión Peneya is an object lesson in how difficult “counterinsurgency” is, even in a country that has substantially weakened its largest insurgency.

In 2004, Colombia’s armed forces launched one of the biggest offensives in its history. Backed by U.S. advisors and logistics personnel, “Operation JM,” the second and largest phase of what was known as “Plan Patriota,” sent about 18,000 Colombian soldiers deep into a broad swath of the southern departments of Caquetá, Meta and Guaviare that had been a FARC stronghold for decades.

As they launched the offensive from bases in western Caquetá, the first major town the troops hit was La Unión Peneya, a coca boomtown along the Caguán river in the municipality of Montañita. By the end of 2003, Colombia’s El Tiempo newspaper writes, the town had “7 pool halls, 20 bars, 2 bordellos, 4 drugstores, 3 gas stations and about 20 stores selling fine clothes and trinkets, as well as 5 apartment buildings and 400 houses.”

In January 2004 the FARC, aware of the coming offensive, told everyone in La Unión Peneya to clear out. The town center’s entire population of 2,500 displaced. According to a different El Tiempo report:

When the troops entered they found a well-cared for guerrilla cemetery and many pieces of the scrip, signed by José Benito Cabrera (Fabián Ramírez, one of the chiefs of the FARC’s Southern Bloc), that were used as money in that part of the country.

Even as the Army established its presence in the town center, la Unión Peneya remained a ghost town for at least three years. As “Plan Patriota” wound down in 2007, authorities announced plans to rebuild the abandoned town and the population began to trickle back. This rebuilding, and provision of other services, has been very slow as the government later decided to dedicate more resources to the “La Macarena” zone just to the northeast.

Today, more than eight years after the U.S.-backed “Plan Patriota” rolled through, the town where it all began still has a very heavy FARC presence, and a lot of coca and cocaine production.

Last Saturday, troops from the Colombian Army’s U.S-backed Counternarcotics Brigade helicoptered into the rural part of La Unión Peneya on a mission to destroy cocaine laboratories. They were accompanied by two embedded journalists: French reporter Romeo Langlois (creator of a documentary about Cauca’s “Indigenous Guard”) and Italian reporter Simone Bruno (creator of the documentary “Falsos Positivos”).

The army column and the reporters came under heavy guerrilla attack. A police officer and three soldiers were killed. Langlois was wounded in the arm and taken by the FARC. In a phone call yesterday, a guerrilla spokeswoman told reporters that Langlois is safe, but that because he was wearing a military helmet and jacket at the time, the FARC is holding him as a “prisoner of war.”

Since Langlois’s status as a journalist for France24 TV is confirmed, the FARC’s claim is invalid according to international humanitarian law. (Meanwhile, Colombian Air Force video seems to show the FARC fighters themselves wearing plainclothes, which also violates IHL.) The FARC must release Langlois immediately.

Last weekend’s tragedy highlights the frustrations of Colombia’s approach to counterinsurgency. With a constant military presence in the town center since 2004, La Unión Peneya today should not be the sort of place where the FARC can carry out this sort of attack, much less maintain cocaine laboratories. But the fatal flaw of “Plan Patriota” was that over the past eight years, the government presence has been almost entirely military. Behind the troops came nothing: the civilian part of the state failed to appear with roads, schools, health care, land titles and other services one would expect from a government.

This lopsided approach did not bring governance, and did not convince the population that it lived under a credible government. And so La Unión Peneya remains ungoverned.

Friday, April 27, 2012

Defense Department drones at the border

WOLA’s report about U.S.-Mexico border security, published last week, says that the Defense Department is not using drone aircraft for surveillance on the U.S. side of the border zone.

The main reasons for this are that most Pentagon drones are being used in war zones, and because there are still concerns about air traffic control (the possibility of drones crashing into commercial planes). The Homeland Security Department’s Customs and Border Protection agency, however, runs six Predator-Bs, plus one maritime variant, out of Sierra Vista, Arizona and Corpus Christi, Texas.

In fact, WOLA’s report is already out of date on this issue. Testimony last week by the Pentagon’s top homeland security official, Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul Stockton [PDF], reveals that, as of this year, four Defense Department drones are now operating out of Arizona.

They aren’t Predators or Global Hawks, though. They’re RQ-7Bs, far smaller craft with a 14-foot wingspan, usually launched by a catapult.

(Photo from Department of Defense.)

Wednesday, April 25, 2012

Iran in Latin America: views from the Defense Department

Here are two top Defense Department officials’ recent statements on Iran’s influence in Latin America.

Gen. Douglas Fraser, commander, U.S. Southern Command, testifying in the House Armed Services Committee, March 6, 2012:

Primarily I see diplomatic as well as commercial interests, economic interests, and that’s how their relationship has been growing. There is connections, and that is our concern as we watch this, the connections with Hezbollah and Hamas, who have been in the region for a number of years, primarily still focused on supporting — conducting illicit activity to provide funding support and logistic support back to parent organizations within the Middle East. That is still the relationship that I see today. I don’t think that President Ahmadinejad had the impact that he was looking for, except with the ability to continue to strengthen his anti-U.S. connections in the region.

Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, aboard an aircraft en route to Colombia, April 23:

Well, we always have a concern about in particular the IRGC [Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps] and the efforts by the IRGC to expand their influence in — not only throughout the Middle East but into this region as well.  And, that, in my book, that relates to expanding terrorism.  And that’s one of the areas that I think all of us are concerned about.  And I hope that we can work together to make sure that all the steps are taken to ensure that anything that encourages terrorism can be fought against.

Fraser talks about diplomatic and economic contacts, and possible Iranian “connections” to fundraising for terror groups’ activities in the middle east.

Panetta, on the other hand, sees the IRGC potentially “expanding terrorism” right here in the hemisphere.

The two Defense officials don’t quite contradict each other, but the difference in emphasis — especially on a topic as important as Iranian influence in Latin America — is still worth noting.

Friday, February 24, 2012

Colombia steps back from the human rights precipice

Last November, Colombia’s government proposed to reduce the civilian justice system’s ability to try and punish human rights abuses committed by the country’s U.S.-aided military. On this blog and elsewhere (PDF), the organizations participating in the “Just the Facts” project expressed concern about this proposal. Late last week, the Colombian government withdrew it — or at least, delayed it and modified it substantially. Despite some continued concerns, we applaud this step.

Defense Minister Juan Carlos Pinzón quietly added the original proposal to a larger package of judicial reforms moving through Colombia’s Congress. It sought to have all crimes committed by soldiers, including human rights abuse, be considered “acts of service” and thus sent to Colombia’s military justice system, which has a very poor track record of investigating and punishing abuses within the ranks.

The proposal, which would have been a big step backward for the cause of human rights in Colombia, appeared to be a response to military pressure to end what officers called “judicial insecurity.” The term refers to a perception within the ranks that human rights investigations and trials, including over 2,500 extrajudicial execution cases mostly from the past decade, were making it difficult for the troops to carry out operations.

Indeed the civilian criminal justice system, as a 2006 Defense Ministry order was being interpreted, had become the first body to investigate and review every combat death, whether an abuse was alleged or not. Perhaps because the government at the time denied that an “armed conflict” existed, the result was a conflation of international humanitarian law and criminal law.

This was not the intent of the Colombian human rights community’s decades of efforts to curtail impunity by moving abuse cases out of the military justice system. But the November proposal, which was passing through Colombia’s Congress with little debate and with strong military backing, would have moved the bar way too far in the other direction. It would have sent all cases first to a military justice system that suffers from a severe lack of capacity, and whose judges are military officers within the chain of command and subject to potential retribution for decisions that do not please their superiors.

Faced with an outcry among human rights defenders and quiet expressions of concern from U.S. officials, the government of President Juan Manuel Santos sent the proposal to an ad hoc “Commission of Experts.” The Commission was made up of two former Supreme Court judges, a former Justice Ministry official (and right-of-center newspaper columnist), and two retired generals, one from the police and one from the army.

The commission determined that the November proposal should be withdrawn from the justice reform bill. It suggested that a different proposal be considered in a standalone bill. Santos government officials say that this new proposal will likely be issued in about a month. The new bill would send allegations of the most serious human rights crimes immediately to the civilian justice system: crimes against humanity, torture, forced disappearance, and extrajudicial executions.

However, while jurisdiction about specific crimes remains to be determined, this proposal would likely send other violations of international humanitarian law — such as theft, assault, accidental killings of non-combatants during combat, or indiscriminate bombings — to the military justice system. Complicated or disputed cases (for instance, when relatives or human rights defenders allege that a military “combat kill” was an extrajudicial execution) would go first to a mixed commission made up of military and civilian judicial police, which would review the evidence.

We applaud the Santos government’s decision to step back from a proposal that was too radical, and to establish a more open, deliberative process to clarify responsibilities in line with international humanitarian law.

Some Colombian observers have alleged that the course change in Bogotá owes to pressure from U.S. NGOs, as well as quiet Obama administration diplomacy. (Under U.S. law, Colombia may have stood to lose millions of dollars in military aid if the State Department could not certify that Colombia is sending abuse cases to civilian courts.) We do not know if this is true.

In this author’s view (speaking as Adam Isacson and not in the name of the entire “Just the Facts” project), Santos government officials themselves likely had little enthusiasm for their original, radical proposal, but were under intense pressure to move it forward. If anything, vocal advocacy from U.S. groups merely helped to counter-balance that pressure, creating political space for these officials to adopt a more moderate course.

Tuesday, February 14, 2012

Military aid to Colombia and Mexico slowly declines

The State Department yesterday released the first document outlining its foreign assistance request for 2013. Yesterday's "Executive Budget Summary" provides few details and lacks country-by-country totals for many programs.

Still, it allows us to provide a crude "snapshot" of how U.S. aid to the region looked in 2011, how it's looking this year, and what the Obama administration has in mind for next year.

Here is our best estimate of how U.S. military and police aid to Colombia, Mexico and Central America look between 2008 and 2013.

  • The data show aid to Colombia's armed forces and police declining still further, to levels last seen before 1999, the year before "Plan Colombia" began.
  • Aid to Mexico's security forces, while still far higher than pre-Mérida Initiative levels, continues to decline from the 2008-2010 period of large-scale purchases of expensive heliopters and aircraft.
  • Aid to Central America's security forces, however, is holding steady.
Military and Police aid to Colombia 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013
International Narcotics Control and Law Enforcement 223,124,500 228,089,000 194,750,000 180,350,000 130,600,000 128,200,000
Foreign Military Financing 52,570,000 53,000,000 55,000,000 47,904,000 37,000,000 30,000,000
NADR - Anti-Terrorism Assistance 3,288,000 2,750,000 2,750,000 2,250,000 2,250,000 2,250,000
International Military Education and Training 1,421,000 1,400,000 1,694,000 1,695,000 1,665,000 1,575,000
NADR - Conventional Weapons Destruction 427,000 2,500,000 2,500,000 2,500,000
NADR - Humanitarian Demining 400,000 2,000,000
Defense Department programs 121,274,115 153,386,261 177,094,480 106,913,480 95,880,480 95,880,480
Total Military and Police Aid 402,104,615 439,025,261 433,288,480 341,612,480 269,895,480 260,405,480

Military and Police aid to Mexico 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013
International Narcotics Control and Law Enforcement 292,298,000 343,500,000 89,500,000 98,000,000 88,000,000 64,064,386
Foreign Military Financing 116,500,000 39,000,000 265,250,000 7,984,000 7,000,000 7,000,000
NADR - Anti-Terrorism Assistance 548,000 3,000,000 3,000,000 4,500,000 4,500,000 4,500,000
International Military Education and Training 357,000 1,084,000 989,000 1,006,000 1,635,000 1,549,000
NADR - Export Control and Border Security 800,000 670,000 900,000 1,200,000 1,200,000 1,200,000
NADR - Counter-Terrorism Financing 175,000
Defense Department programs 26,508,270 35,375,999 90,960,999 72,885,999 76,719,999 76,719,999
Total Military and Police Aid 437,011,270 422,804,999 450,599,999 185,575,999 179,054,999 155,033,385

Military and Police aid to Central America 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013
International Narcotics Control and Law Enforcement 4,150,000 51,825,000 60,412,000 75,500,000 65,000,000 62,000,000
Foreign Military Financing 7,119,000 5,600,000 5,728,000 5,504,000 11,001,000
International Military Education and Training 4,079,000 3,470,747 5,550,000 4,338,000 4,625,000 4,320,000
NADR - Conventional Weapons Destruction 500,000 500,000 500,000
NADR - Export Control and Border Security 250,000 150,000 150,000 150,000 150,000 150,000
Global Peace Operations Initiative 380,921
NADR - Humanitarian Demining 350,000
NADR - Anti-Terrorism Assistance 248,000
Defense Department programs 32,136,813 28,071,909 36,545,428 53,285,428 39,548,428 39,548,428
Total Military and Police Aid 48,363,734 89,467,656 102,657,428 139,501,428 115,327,428 117,519,428

A few notes about these tables:

  • These simplify or summarize information that you can find in more detail, and for more countries, elsewhere on the "Just the Facts" site.
  • Cells on these tables shaded in light gray are estimates. In the case of the "International Narcotics Control and Law Enforcement" program, which funds both military and economic aid, we estimated the military portion to Colombia and Mexico by prorating the administration's request according to the last available year's division between military and economic aid. For all other programs, we repeated amounts from the last available year. Actual numbers may differ significantly; we will update them on the "Just the Facts" website as we obtain them.
  • These tables lump together "Defense Department programs" in one category. The vast majority of this assistance is from the Defense Department's counter-narcotics account. This Defense Department aid is _not_ part of, nor does it appear in, the State Department's budget request. We include it, however, because it is a big part of the picture, well over a third of the military-police aid total in all three tables.
  • Central America is lumped together into one regional table because we still lack country-by-country breakdowns for much INCLE aid going through the "Central America Regional Security Initiative" category. We note that some of this INCLE aid may be going to judicial systems and other civilian institutions, and that the actual military-police aid amount may be lower. We will adjust these numbers on the "Just the Facts" website as we obtain them.

Tuesday, February 7, 2012

Human rights and military "morale" in Colombia

This chart, from a Colombian Defense Ministry document (PDF), shows Colombia's armed forces and police with a combined 452,475 members at the end of 2011, their highest number ever and 4 percent higher than 2010.

Contrast that to this chart, from a January 2012 report, using Defense Ministry figures, by the Center for Security and Democracy at Bogotá's Sergio Arboleda University. The data show a sharp decline in combat actions initiated by the Colombian armed forces -- so sharp that, in 2011, the FARC may have attacked the armed forces more often than the other way around.

This trend is likely continuing in 2012; guerrillas attacked the security forces 132 times during the first 20 days of the year. The Sergio Arboleda University study also finds 2011 increases in guerrilla kidnappings and attacks on infrastructure (though it also notes a 5% decrease in homicides).

But why would Colombia's security forces, though at the height of their strength, be responding less? The author of the Sergio Arboleda University's study, former Colombian defense ministry advisor Alfredo Rangel, claims that the problem is military morale. The troops' morale is low, Rangel asserts, because the civilian justice system is trying to hold them accountable for human rights violations.

"Without a doubt, the legal uncertainty to which members of the security forces are submitted as a consequence of the abolition -- in practice -- of military jurisdiction [el fuero militar] and the disarticulation of the military justice system, is the element behind their de-motivation in combat, which explains the drop in the level of their offensive operations against guerrilla groups. The Colombian military forces are the only army in the world that fights a war without the legal guarantees that military jurisdiction should offer the state's combatants." (Our emphasis.)

Rangel goes on to list as "arbitrary" several of the civilian justice system's recent landmark verdicts for human rights crimes. These include verdicts against Gen. Humberto Uscátegui for permitting the Mapiripán massacre (2009), and against Col. Alfonso Plazas (2010) and Gen. Armando Arias Cabrales (2011) for crimes committed during the 1985 Palace of Justice takeover. Rangel also criticizes as "devastating" (fulminante) the 2008 decision by then-Defense Minister Juan Manuel Santos to fire officers whose units were involved in "false positives" killings of civilians.

Since 1997, Colombian jurisprudence and government directives have required that cases of military human rights abuse be transferred to the civilian justice system. The military's own justice system had proven to be too lenient, with the armed forces incapable of punishing their own ranks for crimes against non-combatants. To this day, military defense lawyers routinely fight to move their clients' cases out of the civilian system in the hope of escaping guilty verdicts and prison sentences.

Only very recently has the civilian justice system begun successfully trying senior officers for human rights abuses. This is an advance -- one that may soon be reversed by legislation that would require any future human rights cases to begin in the military courts.

But according to Rangel's analysis -- which is shared by organizations of retired military officers -- this human rights advance has left much of Colombia's huge military demoralized. Angry at the justice system, troops are remaining in their barracks, unwilling to carry out operations.

In fact, much of this drop in activity occurred before the first verdicts were handed down: the Rangel study shows military-initiated combat beginning to fall in a year (2008) of extremely high morale, when the armed forces killed top guerrilla leaders and bloodlessly freed hostages. But never mind that: it's an insult to Colombia's armed forces to argue that their morale hinges on their abusive members not being held accountable to justice.

If true, this would also reflect poorly on U.S. assistance. Colombia's security forces have received US$6.3 billion in U.S. aid since "Plan Colombia" began in 2000. U.S. officials frequently contend that this assistance has been instrumental in helping the Colombian armed forces become more respectful of human rights and the rule of law. These claims are hollow, though, if Rangel is right -- if, after so many years of U.S. aid and training, much of Colombia's army is on a sit-down strike to hold out for more impunity.

That would be shameful. We hope that there is another reason for this reduced military activity, and that Alfredo Rangel's study has simply missed it.

Thursday, February 2, 2012

Collected maps of suspect trafficking

Here, we share our collection of maps, produced by the U.S. Southern Command's Joint Interagency Task Force-South, showing the trajectories of boats and planes suspected of trafficking drugs toward the United States from South America.

Image quality varies here: we take what we can get. The maps we have obtained over the years depict trafficking patterns in 2005, 2007, 2010 and 2011.

The first set of maps shows the tracks of boats believed to be carrying drugs or other illegal cargo. A few changes over the years are notable:

  • It is increasingly rare to see boats attempting to traverse the Caribbean. Fewer landings occur in Jamaica or the island of Hispaniola than did in the mid-2000s.
  • Boats no longer attempt to reach Mexico in a single journey. In 2005, it was common for long-haul vessels to pass by the Galápagos Islands en route to Mexico's Pacific coast, or to go straight from Colombia to the Yucatán Peninsula. Today, few boats try to do that.
  • Instead, boats stop overwhelmingly in Central America first. Boats leaving Colombia prefer to make a "short hop" to Panama and Costa Rica before presumably moving on elsewhere up the coast or over land. Some boats exiting Colombia go all the way to Honduras's Caribbean coast as well. Boats leaving Ecuador appear to head to Guatemala's Pacific coast.
  • Boats almost entirely originate in Colombia and Ecuador. That has changed little over the years, though more volume today appears to leave Ecuador, and Colombia's Pacific coast, than before.
  • Cuba is very rarely used as a destination for trafficking boats.

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The second set of maps shows the tracks of aircraft, which Southern Command estimates are used to carry perhaps 20 percent of drugs entering the United States. Here, the change in patterns is stark:

  • Flights no longer originate in Colombia, an indication that "air bridge denial" efforts have brought results.
  • Instead, since at least 2007, the vast majority of flights have originated in Venezuela's state of Apure, across the border from Arauca, Colombia.
  • Landings in Haiti and the Dominican Republic have shrunk significantly. Now, most flights from South America appear to be landing in Honduras's Mosquitia region. The map for the first half of 2011 shows a virtual "air highway" between Apure, Venezuela and Colón/Gracias a Dios/Olancho, Honduras.

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2005 maps are from a Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff report (PDF). 2007 maps are from a presentation by the White House "Drug Czar." 2010 slides are from a Southern Command presentation available online (PDF). 2011 slides are photos taken by Noel Maurer, a blogger covering Latin America.

If you have other, better maps like these and you're able to share them, let us know at info@justf.org.

Monday, January 30, 2012

"Consolidation," land restitution, and rising tensions in Montes de María, Colombia

(If you follow this blog regularly, you may recall a period in November when it was nearly dormant, as "Just the Facts" program staff paid a research visit to a region of Colombia that has been a significant destination of recent U.S. assistance. Here is a report of what we learned on that trip.)

Map of Montes de María municipalitiesFor nearly 5 years, with U.S. support, Colombia’s Montes de María has been a priority region for the government’s National Territorial Consolidation Plan (PNCT, or “Consolidation”). The PNCT, as we have explained elsewhere, is the successor program to “Plan Colombia.” It is a combined military and civilian “state-building” strategy operating in a few zones that have seen little prior government presence. Montes de María is a historically conflictive region of 15 municipalities (counties) located inland from the Caribbean Sea, about 2 hours’ drive south of Cartagena.

In November 2011, researchers from two Washington-based organizations (Washington Office on Latin America [WOLA] and Center for International Policy [CIP]) and two Bogotá-based organizations (Instituto de Estudios para el Desarrollo y la Paz [INDEPAZ] and Asociación MINGA) visited several municipalities of the Montes de María region, including all four in which the Consolidation program is operating. These are San Onofre and Ovejas in the department of Sucre, and El Carmen de Bolívar and San Jacinto in the department of Bolívar. (WOLA staff also visited the region in August 2011, accompanying U.S. Rep. Jim McGovern [D-Massachusetts].)

We found a zone where, following several years of relative peace, tensions are rising. The national government is gearing up to launch an ambitious land-restitution program. Consolidation, meanwhile, gives a big role to the military while assisting small farmers, including returning displaced populations, and improving local government. This is happening amid a backdrop of rapid concentration of land in fewer hands, a notable increase in violence against small-farmer leaders, doubts about local leadership, and the presence of “new” paramilitary groups.

The land restitution program, an initiative coming from Bogotá, and the “Consolidation” program, designed in Bogotá and Washington, confront an environment that is complex at best and outright hostile at worst. To succeed, both will require extensive political will, resources, attention from top leaders, and a well-defined plan. These elements are not yet in place, we conclude from our interviews of military and civilian officials, local government leaders, development practitioners, civil-society leaders, analysts and others.

Montes de María

In a country that never implemented a true land reform, the Montes de María region is notable for being home to some of Colombia’s most cohesive and active small-farmer (campesino) activism. It is also notable for the ferocity of the landowner-supported paramilitary backlash against this activism in the late 1990s and early 2000s. A remarkable 2010 report from Colombia’s Historical Memory Group, detailing this fertile area’s struggle for land, puts it well.

This zone combines two essential conditions. First, it was the epicenter of the most important campesino movement of the 20th century’s second half, not just in Colombia but perhaps in Latin America: the National Association of Campesinos (ANUC), a contemporary of the also notable Campesino Federation in Peru. And the second reason was that in that zone — not coincidentally — was incubated a political-military program of regional state capture and configuration of a submissive society, which included the dismantling of campesino organizations and the reversal of the grants of small landholdings carried out since the 1960s.

The paramilitary terror campaign in Montes de María, which reached its height in 2000-2002 and encountered no military opposition, included dozens of massacres so brutal that the names of the towns where they occurred (El Salado, Chengue, Macayepo, Mampuján) are infamous throughout Colombia. In the four municipalities where the PNCT is focused, according to a confidential report from a PNCT-funded consultant, violence since 1995 forcibly displaced more than 110,000 people, or over half the population.

Home abandoned by displaced people in Chinulito, SucreOver the course of the 2000s, Montes de María grew steadily more peaceful. The paramilitaries who came to dominate the zone underwent a negotiated demobilization process with the government, and (perhaps more importantly) began to encounter significant opposition from Colombia’s Marines — the principal military force in the zone — during the second half of the decade. The FARC guerrillas, for their part, were dispersed from the area following a 2007 bombing raid that killed their longtime commander. At present, Colombia’s security forces — the Marines, supported by other armed services within the Joint Caribbean Command, police in the towns, and three 150-man police carabinero units in the countryside — face little violent opposition in Montes de María.

Still, illegal activity remains common. Coca (the plant used to make cocaine) is not cultivated, but large quantities of cocaine continue to pass through on their way to the Caribbean. “New” paramilitary groups, especially the Rastrojos and Urabeños, are present especially in the northern and western part of the region.

Montes de María, meanwhile, gained notoriety throughout Colombia for the linkages between its political machines and the AUC paramilitary group. Colombia’s “para-politics” scandal hit the local political class very hard, sending governors and senators to jail. Their patronage and influence networks remain intact, however, as the same political groups remain in control in most municipalities following October 2011 mayoral and gubernatorial elections. The newly elected governor of Sucre department, reported Colombia’s most-circulated newspaper El Tiempo, comes from a “caste that has governed for years in spite of ‘paramilitarism.’”

Though they won a majority of votes, local politicians were the targets of most of the anger we heard from citizens in the region. Corruption remains at epic levels. The largest municipality in the region, El Carmen de Bolívar, went through about three dozen acting mayors in 2009. Residents of San Onofre said that it costs about US$2 million to run a successful campaign, using funds of unclear provenance, to win the impoverished municipality’s mayorship.

With lower violence, and some displaced people seeking to return, Montes de María is hosting some flagship government projects supported by the international community. These include the land restitution program initiated by a law passed in June 2011; a European Union-backed “Peace Laboratory” of social and economic development programs; a proposal to declare much of the region a “Campesino Reservation Zone” in which sales of small landholdings would be restricted; and, of course, the National Territorial Consolidation Plan.

The Consolidation Program in Montes de María

The Colombian government launched the PNCT in Montes de María in mid-2007, making it the second zone (after the La Macarena region of south central Colombia) to receive significant investment coordinated by a national Center for Coordination of Integrated Action (CCAI). At first, the program was headed by an active-duty military officer, a Marine general who was known in the region for breaking with precedent and confronting the paramilitaries.

The Montes de María effort counted with advice and support from U.S. Southern Command, and starting in early 2008, with resources from the U.S. Agency for International Development’s Office of Transition Initiatives (OTI), a unit designed to carry out smaller “quick-impact” development projects in a more agile, shorter-term and less bureaucratic manner. Southcom and OTI supported the creation of a “Fusion Center,” later renamed a “Coordination Center”: an office in Cartagena at which military, police and civilian development representatives would work together in the same space to coordinate the PNCT’s management. The Coordination Center, managed by the Colombian Presidency’s “Social Action” office, opened its doors in early 2009. (For a thorough look at the Montes de María Consolidation program as of mid-2009, see CIP’s “After Plan Colombia” report published that year.)

View of San Juan Nepomuceno, BolívarThe OTI program (whose missions are designed to be short-term) ended in mid-2010, with USAID’s role shifting to management of a five-year, $32 million project to support the Consolidation effort in Montes de María. The contract for this project was awarded to CHF International, a Washington, DC-area corporation. CHF worked with the Coordination Center on a set of assistance and capacity-building programs for the four municipalities chosen for “Consolidation.”

The CHF-supported programs, which bear the highly visible name “Colombia Responde,” started work during the second half of 2010. Colombia Responde seeks “to work collectively with multiple actors and in coordination with local and regional governments to establish a sustainable state of peace and security” in Montes de María.

In 2009 the Consolidation program’s main goal in Montes de María was to help a small number of returning communities of displaced people recover land and improve their economic conditions. While that is still a component, the Colombia Responde mission is broader. The program now has two objectives: to strengthen local government and civil society capacities, and to increase economic opportunities.

Colombia Responde staff, along with consultants working as public policy advisors, put a heavy emphasis on capacity-building, offering frequent training and workshops on subjects like management, planning, participation and transparency. Under a project called Participatory Action for Community Engagement, the program works with communities on short-term plans for development, and community leaders are trained to develop realistic plans and budgets. Twenty such community plans had been presented to mayors’ offices, where co-financing is expected, as of late 2011. Further training aims to equip local governments and community leaders to guarantee transparency over how money is spent.

Colombia Responde’s income-generation activities have included some “quick-impact” infrastructure projects, especially improvements to sections of tertiary roads linking farmers to markets. However, the bulk of primary road-building has been carried out by the Colombian Marines. Instead, the Colombia Responde program sponsors “productive projects” — agricultural development programs — with recipient communities, most of whom include formerly displaced people who have returned. Participants in productive projects, we were told, are consulted about what they wish to produce, and receive technical support, food security assistance and credit. If the crop in question takes a few years before the first harvest (like cacao, a frequent choice of communities), growers receive a subsidy equivalent to minimum wage from a fund that will be replenished from the eventual profits of their production.

View from the roadColombia Responde manages a project for formerly displaced farmers called “Return to My Land,” which accompanies their return to their communities of origin by providing for basic needs. As part of that project, some farmers are to receive assistance in obtaining clear title to their landholdings. This land formalization process — which is parallel to the land-restitution program just getting underway throughout the country — is excruciatingly slow and complicated. In Ovejas municipality, for example, Colombia Responde expects to title over 300 landholdings, but as of November 2011 had only managed 25.

For its part, the Colombian military and police forces’ participation in the Consolidation program, with a modest but unknown level of U.S. support, has been large and at least as visible as Colombia Responde. The Marines and police have focused on providing security, building roads and other infrastructure, and meeting regularly with communities.

Evaluations of the PNCT in Montes de María

At a Bogotá gathering of campesino leaders to discuss the Campesino Reserve Zones proposal, we had an opportunity to talk separately with representatives of communities from San Onofre, El Carmen and Ovejas participating in Colombia Responde programs. Even without Consolidation officials present, the group was effusive in its praise of the program. In particular, they noted the rapidity with which assistance arrived, the way the process was taking their input into account, the armed forces’ improved relations with the population, and the fact that this was the first time Colombian government institutions had treated them with respect.

On the minus side, they admitted that land titles had been slow to arrive and that trust in the local governments (mayors’ offices) remained low. They also felt estranged from nearby communities that were not receiving assistance from the program.

Most concerns and critiques about the program came either from communities not participating in the program (including some from outside the PNCT’s four municipalities in Montes de María) and from campesino activists, analysts and development workers not affiliated with the program. The principal critiques we heard were the following.

  • The program’s limited geographic scope, which excludes much of the Montes de María region: “How can you only work in four out of 15 municipalities?” the head of another development program asked. “It’s like a mother of 15 favoring four of her children.”

  • Planning, either not enough of it or too much: During the PNCT’s initial phases in Montes de María (2007-2010), an official with program responsibilities told us, the Cartagena-based Coordination Center came under some criticism for a lack of a detailed workplan. The office’s small staff (a military representative, a police representative, and two representatives of the Colombian Presidency’s Social Action office) had a set of programmatic objectives and the outlines of actions to take. But its project plan did not go much further. “They had a proposal. But a proposal is not a workplan,” this official said. CHF — which reports directly to USAID, not the Colombian government — endeavored to make more thorough and professional planning a priority once it began work in 2010.

    On the other hand, we heard sentiment from some communities that planning was getting so much emphasis that it appeared to be a substitute for action. “We see a lot of workshops and meetings, but not enough results,” said a community leader from Ovejas participating in a training workshop. While this may simply be impatience with non-immediate payoffs, these sentiments are a concern because a perception of inactivity could hurt the program’s credibility among the population.

  • The military’s outsized role: Military and police representatives of the Coordination Center assured us that, in the field, the PNCT presence is “fundamentally civilian.” As elsewhere in Colombia, however, the PNCT involves military personnel playing roles that have little or nothing to do with combat or protecting the population, and that could, under adequate security conditions, be played by civilians. These include building infrastructure, especially what will be the only paved east-west road crossing Montes de María. Some interviewees criticized the quality and slowness of this road’s construction — it was being built when we visited in 2009, and is not finished yet — alleging that the Transportation Ministry could have done a better job than the Defense Ministry. Others, however, acknowledged that damage elsewhere from severe flooding since 2010 caused both civilian and military road builders to be called to fix highways elsewhere.

    Other unusual military roles we heard about were soldiers providing health services, training schoolchildren in avoiding domestic abuse, and forming Campesino Leaders’ Associations to work with the PNCT. In a related concern — a charge we have been unable to corroborate — leaders from Ovejas told us that active-duty military officers have been buying up land from campesinos in their municipality.

  • An alleged unwillingness to work with existing organizations and processes: “We didn’t come here to divide people,” the Coordination Center’s staff told us. But elsewhere, we heard repeated concerns about the arrival of a large, well-funded program in a zone that — unlike the remote agricultural frontier of the La Macarena region — already has a number of social organizations and development programs. “Colombia Responde has an ‘Adam complex,’” a campesino leader in El Carmen said, accusing the program of acting as though nothing had come before it. A leader from Ovejas complained that the program is “creating unnecessary alternative networks.” Others charged that Colombia Responde was not hiring existing businesses and organizations to carry out projects, that contracts were instead being given to outside groups, or to newly formed groups.

    Some whom we interviewed clearly see the PNCT as competition, while others, somewhat conspiratorially, see a conscious divide-and-conquer strategy. “For the viejos of the ANUC, it really pains them to see how the group is being divided,” an activist in El Carmen told us. An official from an existing development program that follows a slower, more process-oriented methodology worried that the PNCT’s quick-impact projects were changing the local culture: “people want to see the money first before they work with you.”

  • A lack of focus on the justice system: The Consolidation program intends to strengthen the presence of civilian government institutions in zones that have historically seen very little such presence. In Montes de María, where the security situation does not prevent civilian government agencies from operating, that civilian presence has increased at least slightly. The justice system, however, lags badly behind. Residents of El Carmen de Bolívar told us that their town, the largest in the region, has only three judges. San Onofre has only one judge and one prosecutor. This is simply not enough to adjudicate cases of violent crime, corruption, human rights, land fraud, and other issues of central importance to the success of “Consolidation.”

  • Concern about local political leaders’ ethics and interests. The PNCT places a strong emphasis on working with local governments, which channel significant resources from the central government, command police, and share responsibilities for managing issues like land tenure and assistance to displaced people. Some mayors and governors of Montes de María ran into serious trouble in the “parapolitics” scandal. While current officials do not face accusations of the same gravity, we repeatedly heard strong opinions about disorganization, influence-peddling (“politiquería”), clientelism, and corruption among departmental and municipal officials who are meant to be the PNCT’s principal partners. We also heard concerns that elected officials, even when not accused of corruption, are likely to protect the interests of their largest campaign contributors: the large landholders and agribusinesspeople who have been accelerating their acquisitions of farmland in Montes de María region in the past few years.

A troubled context: land tenure and victims

It is this issue — the land, who controls it, who is buying it, who is selling it, and who is being forced off of it — that hangs over Montes de María like a storm cloud. Land tenure is the central concern in this unusually fertile and strategically located region. The Consolidation and land-restitution programs, under the leadership of apparently well-intentioned officials, are seeking to address this concern. But they are coming online within a complicated context of competing agendas and growing tensions over land ownership.

By 2007, the FARC’s eviction from the area and the military’s policy of confronting paramilitary violence brought a period of calm — and with it, a very sharp rise in agricultural property values. Wealthy investors and shadowy corporations — their partners’ identities a closely held secret — have since been scouring Montes de María for land to buy, and increasing the region’s already unequal landholding.

Colombian journalist Alfredo Molano names some of the mysterious companies, whose names we also heard during our visits: “Tierras de Promisión, Arepas Don Pancho [or “Don Juancho”], Agropecuaria El Carmen, and Agropecuaria El Génesis.” Some encourage land sales while cloaked in the guise of development aid associations. Names frequently cited include the “Federation of Leaders of Montes de María” and the “Friends of Montes de María Corporation.” The latter group identifies itself, down to its logo, in a way that makes it closely and confusingly resemble the Montes de María Peace and Development Foundation, the non-profit organization that manages the European Union’s “Peace Laboratory” projects.

Comparing the logos of the Foundation and the land-buyers

They have many potential buyers among the region’s remaining smallholding campesinos, many of whom received their parcels from the government after the land movement activism of the 1960s and 1970s. Some are selling to the newcomers because the offers appear generous. Some are selling because, years after being displaced to cities like Cartagena and Sincelejo, they no longer wish to live in the countryside.

Many more, however, are selling because they see no other choice. Of these, some owe unsustainably large amounts on the government loans they used to purchase their properties — loans they could not pay after being violently displaced a decade ago. Others are selling because the recently arrived land purchasers are buying up all of their neighbors’ parcels, leaving them surrounded by private holdings, at times even cut off from access to roads and water. Many of those forcibly displaced have seen their land titles stolen out from under them by criminals colluding with corrupt land-registry officials. And still others, discussed below, are selling in the face of threats and intimidation. Data gathered by the Colombian NGO ILSA (Latin American Institute for Alternative Society and Law) have shown a strong correlation between areas of massive land purchases and areas of greatest displacement in Montes de María.

The buyers are not all shady speculators. Some of Colombia’s largest companies — Argos, Monterrey, Colanta — have launched agribusiness projects in Montes de María within the past few years. Crops that have been massively planted include teak trees, sugar cane (mainly for biofuels) and African oil palm (for food and biofuels). These vast areas of monoculture are profitable, but employ few people: palm oil, for instance, requires about one employee per hectare.

Palm processing plant in María La Baja, BolívarOne of the pioneers of African oil palm monoculture in Colombia is Carlos Murgas, a former agriculture minister. Murgas has invested heavily in oil-palm cultivation around the site of a processing plant in María La Baja municipality, which borders two of the municipalities chosen for the Consolidation program. (We requested a meeting with directors of the processing plant, but were turned down.) Local leaders told us that unlike other investors in big monoculture projects, Murgas is not massively buying up property: his company is instead encouraging — some said pressuring — nearby communities to grow palm for the oil-processing plant. “Murgas is a great expert in agricultural economy,” writes Alfredo Molano, “which allowed him to see clearly that the true business is not in owning land, but in controlling its use.” Or as one development expert more succinctly put it, “Why have more property if you’re Murgas?”

The region’s remaining smallholding campesinos are organizing to respond to the concentration of land. In 2010, the government of Juan Manuel Santos surprised many by agreeing in principle to a longstanding request of the region’s campesino groups: the establishment of a “Campesino Reservation Zone” in which sizes of parcels and sales of land would be limited. The idea of creating such a zone — a figure established by a 1994 law — had gone nowhere during the 2002-2010 government of Álvaro Uribe, who favored an unfettered free market in the countryside and publicly associated the Reservation Zones with the guerrillas’ agenda. The process of creating such a zone is advancing, with one nearing approval and demarcation in Montes de María.

Campesino groups want a larger zone than what the government has proposed. On the other side, some in the government — including officials with responsibility for the Consolidation program — are concerned that the Reservation Zone will go too far in restricting the market for land, depressing values and thus making it impossible to obtain credit. Supporters of the Reservation Zone proposal, in turn, voiced suspicions that the Consolidation program “goes in the other direction,” as communities that benefit from the PNCT may be less willing to participate in the Zone. Needless to say, the investors who are busily buying up land in the region are staunchly opposed to the creation of a Campesino Reservation Zone, and by some accounts are scrambling to accumulate as much territory as possible before the Zone is officially declared.

Tensions and Threats

With this array of forces, and the big land-restitution program on the way, tensions and threats increased in Montes de María in 2011. We were alarmed by the frequency of violent acts against campesinos in the region. We are concerned that these may be the first signs of a violent landowner backlash.

Large landholding south of San Onofre, SucreWhen discussing threats against them, communities generally did not refer to the “new” paramilitary groups active throughout much of northern Colombia, especially the department of Córdoba immediately to the west. While groups like the “Rastrojos” and “Urabeños” are present in the area, they said, they have mainly confined their activities to narcotrafficking. “They make their shipment and then leave,” a San Onofre resident told us.

Instead, local leaders referred most often to armed men — “hombres armados” — as those responsible for acts of violence and intimidation. Some intimated that they may be linked to large landowners and land purchasers.

At least four leaders of groups that have received land, or are petitioning for land, were killed in the Montes de María region between May 2010 and June 2011. Most were killed in San Onofre, the municipality where paramilitary leader “Cadena” located his headquarters at the height of the 2000-2002 violence.

  • On May 18, 2010, Rogelio Martínez was killed near the La Alemania farm in San Onofre. La Alemania is a well-known case: a 550-hectare farm that the government granted to 52 organized families in 1997, only to have it stolen by AUC paramilitaries.
  • Óscar Mausa, a displaced leader trying to recover his original lands in Antioquia department, was killed on November 24th, 2010 in San Juan Nepomuceno.
  • Éder Verbel was killed on March 23, 2011 in San Onofre. (For its activism on behalf of victims, the Verbel family was featured in a 2005 New York Times article about San Onofre.)
  • Antonio Mendoza, a displaced-community leader and town councilman from the left-of-center Polo Democrático party, was killed on June 20, 2011 in San Onofre.

San Onofre victims’ movement leaders said that the second half of 2011 was a bit calmer, though threats continue to arrive frequently. In Ovejas, meanwhile, tensions continue around the efforts of 113 families to recover La Europa, a farm granted to them in 1969 from which they were displaced by paramilitaries. Upon returning to the area, the families discovered that much of their farmland had been purchased by a shadowy company called “Arepas Don Juancho.” Campesino houses on the La Europa farm were torn down, or burned down, by “unknown men” on at least two occasions in 2011. In San Jacinto, residents’ commemoration of the 1999 Las Palmas massacre hosted an uninvited guest: men taking pictures from an SUV parked nearby. When they investigated the vehicle’s license plate, they found that it belonged to “señores de la compra de tierras” (men involved in land purchases).

Some of the most troubling recent incidents are occurring in María La Baja, the municipality with the region’s most extensive oil-palm cultivation. We heard recent accounts of groups of armed men entering hamlets in areas where land values are high, especially because of access to irrigation. With lists in hand, they threaten and interrogate community members, demanding information about their economic activity and resources they receive from the municipal government.

Most alarming of all, María La Baja leaders said they had counted 11 cases of rape by armed groups in September and October. The sexual violence appears to follow a pattern in which the armed men invade a house, threaten the male owner, and attack the owner’s wife, not his daughters or any other women present. The armed men then leave, and in most cases the family abandons the land.

Fear is increasing, especially in areas where land purchases are greatest. These threats are a huge limit on campesino organizations’ work. Memories of the bloodshed of 10 years ago are still very fresh, and it does not take much to dissuade people from organizing and pressing for land claims. “You have to be careful,” Ovejas community leaders told us. “You can’t use words like ‘social mobilization’ or talk about human rights.”

A reorganization at the top

It is within this context that the U.S.-backed Consolidation program, and the Colombia Responde program, must operate. On one side are small farmers claiming their land, fearing dispossession, and promoting measures like Campesino Reservation Zones. On the other are large landholders and their backers in the local political system.

View of Zambrano, BolívarThe PNCT is in an uncomfortable position: its mandate requires it to work with the small farmers on land titling (and land restitution) and productive projects. But its mandate also requires it to work with local governments, increasing the capacities of institutions that have shown little interest in protecting small farmers and that have even collaborated with the dispossessors.

In order to confront local resistance and protect their beneficiaries, the PNCT and Colombia Responde — as well as the agencies that will carry out land restitution — will need clear, strong, visible backing from the central government in Bogotá. But the messages from the capital are mixed.

For most of 2011, the Santos administration appeared to have placed the PNCT on the back burner. The program was undergoing a “rethinking” and reorganization process, with 15 thematic working groups involving 60 government agencies. Results of this review were to be announced with a formal launch expected last June, then postponed until after the October local elections. But no formal announcement of a new strategy has come.

Instead, the Colombian Presidency has reorganized its well-resourced social development agency, previously known as “Social Action,” in a way that appears to place the Consolidation program on a more prominent, autonomous and perhaps less military-heavy footing.

In November, “Social Action” was replaced by an even larger agency in the Colombian presidency, known as “Social Prosperity.” This agency has four programs, of which one — Territorial Recovery and Development — includes the Consolidation program. The head of this program, Álvaro Balcázar, previously ran the Consolidation effort in the La Macarena region. Balcázar told us that the Colombian government is committing US$1.5 billion to the PNCT nationwide between 2011 and 2014.

Now that Bogotá has finished rearranging things, the central government will have to do more to make its presence felt in Montes de María. Helping the campesinos of Montes de María win the right to remain on their land and enjoy greater economic prosperity may prove to be difficult, especially as the restitution program gets underway. If this is truly the mission of the Coordination Center and the Colombia Responde program, then these entities will need more resources and more direct political backing from “Social Prosperity.” Their recipient communities will also need more protection from the national security forces.

Recommendations

Based on our observations of Montes de María, we recommend that the Consolidation program adopt the following adjustments on an urgent basis.

  1. Do more to protect campesino communities in the four municipalities, whether or not they are direct recipients of PNCT assistance. This means improving response times and the quality of investigations after threats are issued. In rural zones, it also means having procedures in place to determine whether the response should fall to the armed forces or to the police, which (other than specialized units) normally do not operate outside of town centers. The absence of guerrillas alone does not mean that Montes de María is now a zone of social peace. The security forces must work to eliminate the presence of “new” paramilitaries and other criminal groups. The justice system must do more to confront the tackle elements of the state on which these criminal groups, and the region’s illegal land purchasers, depend.

  2. In order to do so, the justice system must be present in Montes de María in the first place. Numbers of judges, prosecutors and investigators must increase, and their offices will need modern equipment, particularly databases and technology necessary to adjudicate land claims. Cases of murdered land-rights leaders need to result in rapid, visible verdicts against those responsible. Curtailing impunity is the best way to prevent future murders.

  3. Actions must assure campesinos that “Consolidation” will not dispossess them. We repeatedly heard fear that a greater presence of the state will mean pressures to get small farmers off of their land. In the minds of many, the state is equivalent to large landholders, including those currently making massive purchases. The PNCT needs to break with that, demonstrating through actions that the program intends to help farmers remain on their land — and to do so without pushing them into a monoculture economy. Titling of land is the action that offers the clearest assurance that “despojo” is not forthcoming. The security forces must ensure that protecting campesino lands and communities is a priority, which would be a historic change. And leaders in Bogotá need to be present in the zone frequently, both to accompany campesinos receiving land, and to stare down opposition from those accumulating and concentrating land.

  4. Work with local officials will remain challenging, given ongoing complaints about clientelism, corruption, and favoring of large landholders. This is crucial because in the population’s eyes, local officials’ behavior can either uphold or destroy the credibility of the entire Colombia state. The main recommendation here is that the Consolidation program continue to do what its officials say it is doing: building management capacities and focusing resources especially on local-government officials who, in the program’s judgment, appear to be most capable and honest. If PNCT officials encounter evidence of local authorities’ corruption, then they must ensure that the justice system investigates and punishes that corruption. Another area worth exploring is the encouragement and protection of whistleblowers within local government.

  5. A frequent request we heard from communities is that the PNCT place more emphasis on building roads, which are necessary to the economic success of the “productive projects” the PNCT is supporting. We second this recommendation, despite the reality that roads are very expensive, and that the damage from flooding since 2010 has been significant.

  6. We also heard requests that PNCT development planning work with campesino and displaced organizations that already exist, rather than create new structures. While we were unable to determine the extent to which the PNCT is actually doing this, we relay this recommendation because we heard it several times.

  7. Finally, as elsewhere, the Consolidation program needs to ensure that its military component relinquishes non-security duties to civilians as quickly as possible. A greatly increased military role in civilian life, with soldiers as road-builders and community organizers, must not be a permanent legacy of the Consolidation program in Montes de María.

Thursday, January 26, 2012

Pentagon-funded base construction in 2009-10

Every year, at least until 2013, the Defense Department must report to Congress about how it uses its rather untransparent counter-narcotics budget to give aid to other countries' militaries and police. We endeavor to obtain those reports, and usually succeed (they are here.)

We recently got a copy of the report covering aid in 2010. One of the types of aid the Defense Department can provide is "The establishment ... and operation of bases of operations or training facilities for the purpose of facilitating counter-drug activities," including facilities "of a foreign law enforcement agency outside the United States." In other words, building military and police bases in other countries.

As in previous years, the report lists the sites where the Defense Department used its counternarcotics budget to build or maintain bases. This map, created with major help from WOLA Intern Carlos Hasbún, shows where these construction sites were in 2009 and 2010.


View Defense Department Counter-Drug Construction Projects in a larger map

This map should not be read as a map of "U.S. bases" in the region. We do not know if U.S. personnel are present at any of these sites, or even whether they regularly get permission to visit them. (However, the fact that they spent significant amounts of money to build facilities at these bases probably confers some privileges on U.S. personnel.)

A few highlights:

  • Note the $754,000 spent in 2009 to build an operations center and barracks at the Poptún headquarters of the Guatemalan Army's special forces, the Kaibiles. This is despite a ban on using foreign aid (but not Defense) funds to support the Guatemalan Army because of longstanding human rights concerns. It is also despite the Kaibiles' notorious reputation as the perpetrators of some of the bloodiest massacres in Guatemala's civil war, as well as the widely alleged presence of many ex-Kaibiles among Mexico's Zetas organized crime group.
  • Note the large contracts for helicopter facilities and fuel for Colombia. Amid shrinking U.S. assistance and an effort to "Colombianize" U.S.-supported aid programs, the report tells us that fuel support for Colombian Navy riverine operations was to end in 2010.
  • Note the profusion of maritime base construction in Central America, an evident attempt to improve local forces' ability to curtail the constant arrival of narcotraffickers' boats to Central American shores.
  • Despite their leaders' fiery criticisms of U.S. foreign policy, base construction and maintenance continued in Ecuador and Nicaragua.

Friday, January 20, 2012

Latin America provisions in the 2012 foreign aid bill

Just before Christmas, the U.S. Congress approved, and President Obama signed into law, a big 2012 budget law that included funding for the State Department and official foreign aid. Here are some highlights of how the 2012 budget law affects assistance to Latin America and the Caribbean.

  • The State Department and Foreign Operations law, “Division I” of the 2012 Consolidated Appropriations Act, can be read here.

  • The House-Senate Conference Committee, which reconciled differences between both chambers’ versions of the bill, issued a narrative report in December (PDF) that gives specific instructions about how some aid is to be spent.

Colombia

  • As in past years, the law freezes some aid to Colombia’s armed forces until the State Department certifies that (1) their members alleged to have committed human rights violations are being suspended and tried in civilian courts, and the military is cooperating with investigations; (2) links between the government and paramilitary groups are being severed through “all necessary steps;” (3) paramilitary networks are being dismantled and those who help them are being prosecuted; and (4) the government is respecting the rights of human rights defenders, journalists, unionists, afro-Colombian and indigenous communities, and other activists, and the armed forces are distinguishing between civilians and noncombatants.

    The amount of aid frozen pending certification is 25 percent of all aid the law approves for the armed forces, not counting the $15-20 million “Critical Flight Safety” aircraft-maintenance program managed by the State Department’s narcotics bureau. Removing police aid and “Critical Flight Safety” aid, we estimate that this “frozen” 25 percent likely adds up to about $20 million on hold. As this blog noted in December, Colombia’s recent moves to weaken civilian courts’ jurisdiction over military human rights abuse might make it impossible to “un-freeze” this aid.

  • The law also requires the State Department to issue a report on any aid since 2002 to the Colombian government’s notoriously abusive, now officially defunct, intelligence agency (the DAS).

  • Approximately 54 percent of aid to Colombia in this law would now go to non-military aid programs. (The entire U.S. package for Colombia is still majority military, however, as additional military and police aid flows through the Defense Department’s counter-drug budget.) It will look something like this:

Military and Police Aid - $176.1 million

- International Narcotics and Law Enforcement $130.6 million

- Foreign Military Financing $39 million

- Nonproliferation, Antiterrorism, Demining and Related $4.75 million

- International Military Education and Training $1.75 million

(- Defense budget assistance estimate: an additional $95.9 million)

Economic and Institution-Building Aid - $209 million

- Economic Support Fund $179 million

- International Narcotics and Law Enforcement $30 million

  • The law meanwhile takes a troubling step away from transparency over aid to Colombia. A brief section [7034(n)] quietly eliminates several required reports to Congress about foreign aid. One of these was a very useful document and will be sorely missed: the annual report on contractors hired to deliver military and police aid to Colombia. This report, which our project has managed to obtain on three occasions, named the companies operating in Colombia and described, in general terms, the often risky jobs they were carrying out, from aerial herbicide fumigation to intelligence gathering.

    In 2009, this report told us, 14 companies operating in Colombia received $216.7 million. But now this report no longer exists. We understand that this report (required by section 694(b) of the 2003 Foreign Relations Authorization Act) was eliminated by the Senate Appropriations Committee in response to a State Department request. We are perplexed that Congress would choose to know less about a risky, controversial and rapidly growing practice like using contractors to deliver aid in a conflictive country. Instead of abolishing this informative report, we strongly recommend that it be revived and applied to additional countries.

Mexico

  • Human rights conditionality also applies, once again, to aid to Mexico. 15 percent of aid to Mexico’s military and police in the law — approximately $15 million — is frozen until the State Department “reports in writing” that (1) military and police rights violators are being investigated and tried in Mexico’s civilian justice system; (2) prohibitions on the use of testimony obtained through torture are being enforced; and (3) Mexican military and police are cooperating with civilian judicial authorities on human rights cases. Last July, Mexico’s Supreme Court ruled that human rights cases must be tried in the civilian justice system, but the transfer of such cases out of the military courts remains rare.

  • The conference committee’s report has some strong language about Mexican law enforcement and justice capabilities, and calls for a report on U.S. aid in this area.

The conferees … note efforts by the Government of Mexico to implement constitutional reforms. The conferees are concerned, however, with the steadily increasing drug-related violence in Mexico and credible reports of a pattern of abuses by Mexican police. The conferees are also concerned with ongoing gender-based crimes in Mexico and encourage the Department of State to provide forensic equipment and training to Mexican states and localities that have the highest rate of homicide and other violent crime to ensure local law enforcement agencies have tools to solve and prosecute these cases. Additionally, the conferees direct the Secretary of State to provide a report, not later than 90 days after enactment of this Act, on how programs funded under this heading are achieving judicial and law enforcement reforms in Mexico. The report should include objectives to be met, benchmarks for measuring progress, intended results, and the extent to which such programs are coordinated with the federal and state governments in Mexico.

  • The House-Senate conference committee also calls on the State Department “to develop and implement a coordinated border security strategy” with Mexico. Such a strategy, which would most likely require input from the departments of Homeland Security, Justice, Defense and others, does not exist today.

  • Mexico language in the Senate Appropriations Committee’s report on the law, which appeared in September, is quite pessimistic.

The Committee notes that its attempts to obtain reliable information from the Mexican Ministry of Defense on the status of investigations or prosecutions of military personnel for human rights violations have been unsuccessful. The Committee is concerned that since the start of the Merida Initiative more than 36,000 Mexicans have been killed as a result of drug and gang-related violence and there has been a spill-over of drug related crime into Guatemala and Honduras. With no evidence that the violence is abating or that the flow in drugs to the United States from Mexico or guns from the United States to Mexico are being appreciably reduced, the Committee questions whether the current strategy can be sustained.

Not counting military aid in the Defense budget, and possible adjustments that may occur to counter-narcotics aid, we estimate that funding for Mexico in 2012 in this law will be about 31 percent military and police aid. It will look something like this:

Military and Police Aid - $102.22 million

- International Narcotics and Law Enforcement $88 million

- Foreign Military Financing $8 million

- Nonproliferation, Antiterrorism, Demining and Related $4.5 million

- International Military Education and Training $1.72 million

(- Defense budget assistance estimate: an additional $76.7 million)

Economic and Institution-Building Aid - $230.81 million

- International Narcotics and Law Enforcement $160.5
- Development Assistance $33.35 million
million

- Economic Support Fund $33.26 million

- Child Survival and Health $3.7 million

Guatemala

  • As in the past, aid to Guatemala’s armed forces is limited to the country’s Air Force, Navy, and Army Corps of Engineers. The Army can only receive training through “Expanded IMET,” which funds courses in human rights, defense resource management, civilian control of the military and similar topics. This is despite some administration officials’ calls to engage more with Guatemala’s army, despite ongoing impunity for past human rights abuses, to confront escalating organized crime-related violence. (The ban on Guatemalan Army aid, however, has not stopped U.S. Marines from occasionally using Defense-budget funds to “sweat it out” with Guatemala’s notorious Kaibiles special-forces unit.)

    The House-Senate conferees say they will “consider” a 2013 request to fund Guatemala’s army “if the army has a narrowly defined mission focused on border security and external threats, is implementing a reform strategy that has broad support within Guatemalan society, is respecting human rights, is cooperating with civilian investigations and prosecutions of cases involving current and retired officers and with the CICIG, and is publicly disclosing all military archives pertaining to the internal armed conflict.” Newly inaugurated Guatemalan President Otto Pérez Molina’s pledge to give the Guatemalan Army a greater internal security role appears to run against the first of these stipulations.

  • The law gives $5 million in new assistance to the International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG), a UN body that aims to strengthen prosecutions of organized crime and related corruption.

Honduras

  • For the first time, 20 percent of funding for Honduras’s security forces is frozen until the Secretary of State reports that (1) the Honduran government is implementing policies to protect freedom of expression and association, and due process; (2) military and police personnel accused of violating human rights are being investigated and prosecuted in Honduras’s civilian justice system; and (3) the Honduran security forces are cooperating with civilian justice in human rights cases.

Bolivia

  • The law holds up all International Narcotics Control and Law Enforcement funding for Bolivia’s military and police until the State Department “determines and reports to the Committees on Appropriations that such funds are in the national security interest of the United States.”

Leahy Law enforcement

  • The so-called “Leahy Law,” which prohibits U.S. aid to military and police units that violate human rights with impunity, is somewhat clarified and strengthened. The State Department must keep a list of security-force units receiving U.S. assistance. It must do more to avoid training “clean” individuals from notoriously abusive units. It must (“to the maximum extent practicable”) stop classifying the idenities of units that receive U.S. assistance. Report language recommends $2 million for the State Department’s Democracy, Human Rights and Labor bureau to improve Leahy Law compliance.

Inter-American Commission on Human Rights

  • The Senate Appropriations Committee’s September report offers strong words of support for the OAS Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, which has come under fire last year from some governments in the region.

The Committee notes the invaluable role of the IACHR in providing justice for victims of human rights violations and protecting fundamental freedoms in the Western Hemisphere, where many local justice systems are antiquated, under-funded, and compromised by corruption. The Committee is concerned with reports of efforts at the OAS to weaken the authority of the IACHR in ways that would limit its autonomy and effectiveness, and recommends $1,500,000 for a U.S. voluntary contribution to the IACHR in fiscal year 2012.

The final conference committee report increases this recommended amount for the IACHR to $2 million.

Ecuador oil pollution

The conferees recommend $500,000 in Development Assistance funding for health and water projects in parts of northern Ecuador affected by contamination left decades ago by U.S. oil companies.