"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."

Berger's echoes the words of a former SOA human rights instructor I met in Barrancabermeja. In a 2004 article for SOA Watch I wrote:

"In August of 2002, I met Col. Andres Rodriguez, commander of an infrastructure protection battalion of the Colombian army in Barrancabermeja, and a former SOA human rights instructor. Rodriguez’s understanding of human rights seemed to be confined the narrow framework of proper arrest procedures, which he used to explain why he couldn’t arrest members of the paramilitaries.

"On the other hand, he showed slides of damaged gates at an oil refinery as evidence that the oil workers’ union had been infiltrated by terrorists – the new code word for guerrillas. Calling someone a terrorist or guerrilla sympathizer in Colombia signals to the paramilitaries that they are a 'legitimate target.'

"He then showed us several slides of urgent action appeals from U.S. and Colombian human rights groups and explained to us that these groups were all guerrilla fronts, and that the guerrillas were seeking to discredit military officers by accusing them of human rights abuses."

Similar sentiments led Gen. Mario Montoya, then commander of the Fourth Brigade, filed a libel suit aganst Father Jesús Albeiro Parra of the Diocese of Quibido in Choco for denouncing the General's failure to respond to a paramilitary assault on the town of Bojaya. When the army failed to respond the FARC did, and ended up launching a misguided gas canister bomb that blew up a church where children were hiding.  In a report issued on February 24, 2003, the United Nations High Commission on Human Rights denounced Montoya's suit, saying that:

"This device of suing complaintants, used by high ranking members of the Armed Forces, is worrying insofar as it hinders the task of reporting human rights violations and breaches of international humanitarian law, which is a basic element of human rights defenders' work."

Rather than criticizing Montoya and other officers for using this tactic, President Uribe escalated the rhetoric in speeches on September 8 and 11 of 2003 in which he denounced the "traffickers of human rights" as terrorist front groups -- essentially declaring open season on human rights workers.

The U.S. State Department has given tacit support to these views by repeatedly certifying that Colombia meets the basic human rights standards required to qualify for military aid despite reports presenting solid evidence to the contrary from Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the United Nations High Commission on Human Rights, and even the State Department's own human rights division.

The situation is likely to get worse given that the U.S. House of Representatives recently voted to give Colombia $27 million in "emergency counter-narcotics aid" -- a move that followed questionable elections in which paramilitary-linked candidates claimed over a third of the seats in Colombia's Congress.