It turns out that “Products and Services of the Americas” is indeed, as Bill and Stephen’s research suggests, a one-man company. I’ve just had a very interesting conversation with Steven Berger, the company’s sole proprietor, whose Texas phone number reroutes back to a phone in Bogotá. Berger says he served for nine years with the U.S. military in Colombia, and this is his first job as a private contractor.

The Riverine Plans Officer position, says Berger, will consist of “more training to the Colombian Marine Corps than anything else; making sure they understand things like human rights.” He said he had not received any human rights training other than what is given to all U.S. military personnel.

Berger said that he had worked almost exclusively with the Colombian Marines during his time in the country and was not as familiar with the Colombian army, which is much bigger. It is the army that comes under attack most often for human rights abuses.

In terms of the Colombian military’s record on human rights, Berger was quite optimistic. He cited the example of a farmer who came forward to denounce human rights violations, and whose complaint turned out to be that a soldier had stolen one of his chickens. In general, he felt that abuses were uncommon and that the military was becoming increasingly disciplined and professional thanks to U.S. training. The bigger problem, he said, was that commanders who are scoring big victories over the FARC or ELN guerrillas are pulled out of action because someone has denounced them of some human rights violation, often without any evidence.

Surprisingly, he added, “you hear all this stuff about the Colombian military and collateral damage, but how many more civilians are our own soldiers killing in Iraq?”

He rejected the view that U.S. aid is going to help an army that works with paramilitary death squads, saying “U.S. marines have been killed in combat with paramilitaries.”

Berger’s relatively rosy view of the Colombian military’s record clashes greatly with the stories that rural Colombians tell with incredible consistency in many different parts of the country. In a trip to eastern Antioquia (near Medellín) I took just last month, peasant farmers in every town we went to spoke of similar acts of violence against them. They spoke of soldiers coming into town, accusing community leaders of guerrilla sympathies or participation, and shooting them on the spot. In the town of San Luis, people spoke of soldiers they recognized by face disguising themselves as civilians or guerrillas and threatening or shooting townspeople.

Human rights groups such as CIP have repeatedly pointed out the culture of impunity that leads to very few prosecutions of high-level officers despite mountains of evidence against them. As Sean Donahue reported earlier this week, the new top commander of the Colombian Armed Forces is widely believed to have participated in paramilitary groups in the late 1970s, and since becoming an officer has accumulated a list of accusations of paramilitary collaboration and brutality too long to ignore.

Despite his biased view of U.S. military programs’ positive impact on the country, Berger has been in Colombia long enough to develop a certain cynicism about the U.S. role here. The answer to the conflict, he said, is not a purely military one. But he called the non-military aid that comes in through USAID a “self-licking ice cream cone” – more about maintaining the status quo and keeping certain U.S. companies in business than really working for solutions. Unless living conditions in rural areas improve, he said, the conflict will never end. “It irritates the hell out of me,” he said, “when I go to Zona Rosa (a ritzy Bogotá neighborhood) and see people spending so much money on fancy restaurants when so much is needed out there.”

Many people fighting the war on drugs, he said, have more of an interest in seeing it continue than really ending it. He also said he was aware of the accusations of corruption against the DEA. Nevertheless, he was generally uncritical about the strategy of using drug crop fumigations to “cut off sources of funding” to rebels.