The General, The Diplomat, and the Mass Grave

Last week the Associated Press reported the discovery of a mass grave in Putumayo containing the mutilated bodies of 105 people believed to have been murdered by right wing paramilitaries from 1999 - 2001.  The killings took place while Gen. Mario Montoya, now commander of Colombia's armed forces, was leading a massive offensive in the department. Throughout that offensive, the U.S. continued providing weapons, intelligence, training and equipment to the counternarcotics battalions of Montoya's Joint Task Force South despite the fact that the State Department knew those battalions were working closely with Montoya's 24th Brigade -- a unit linked to the paramilitaries responsible for that mass grave.  Anne Patterson, who now oversees most U.S. operations in Colombia as Assistant Secretary of State for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement, served as U.S. Ambassador to Colombia at the time and had been warned of the close collaboration between the paramilitaries and Montoya's troops.  The discovery of the mass grave raises serious questions about Patterson's commitment to breaking the ties between the Colombian military and the paramilitary groups that are responsible for not only the country's worst attrocities but also the production and export of most of the cocaine that reaches the U.S.
MURDERING CIVILIANS

In December of 2000, Robert Collier of the San Francisco Chronicle filed a chilling report from La Hormiga, Putumayo where U.S.-funded counternarcotics troops operated from the same base as the 24th Brigade.  Collier wrote:

They are the government's tacit allies and the nation's most feared killers: the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, whose 8,000 fighters have terrorized vast stretches of the countryside and countless towns and cities. The paramilitaries, as they are known, present Colombian and American officials with a big dilemma. Their death squad-style violence - executions of large numbers of peasant activists, trade union members, student leaders and alleged rebel supporters - has been crucial in helping the Colombian military hold off the guerrillas. But the terror has morally tainted the U.S.-backed war.

Since early last year, when the army started a gradual offensive to try to take back rebel-dominated Putumayo, the paramilitaries have been right behind them, working in silent tandem.  

 

The paramilitaries came to La Hormiga in January 1999. With army troops from the nearby 24th Brigade blocking roads behind them, the gunmen selected 26 people, mostly youths, and executed them on suspicion of being guerrillas. In November 1999, the death squads massacred 12 more people in El Placer, 10 miles away. And over the past year, as many as 100 civilians have been killed in the province, mostly one by one.  

A month later, I visited La Hormiga myself, ferried in by Gen. Montoya himself, who had agreed to allow a human righs delegation into the town in an effort to improve his image.  It was immediately clear that noone entered of left La Hormiga without the consent of the military and the paramilitaries.

Fanning out into the village with a parish priest and a human rights worker who had won the trust of  people often too frightened to speak, we heard whispered stories about went on in La Hormiga.  We were told that every day local saw paramilitary leaders going onto the army base to meet with the officers of the 24th Brigade and coordinate their operations.  We met one woman who had lost five brothers to the paramilitaries.  She had also lost all her money and all her crops when U.S. contractors had sprayed herbicides on the fields of a yucca cooperative she had joined.  She wanted desperately to go to the city to beg for food for her children, but the paramilitaries wouldn't let her leave La Hormiga.

Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International both confirmed high level cooperation between the 24th Brigade and the paramilitaries at the time.

PATTERSON'S SILENCE

Collier reported that as of December, 2000, U.S. officials were very much aware of the links between the parmilitaries and the 24th Brigade:

Human-rights groups in Bogota and Washington complained, government investigators were sent, reports were written. No one has been convicted. Instead, U.S. diplomats temporarily blacklisted the 24th Brigade, barring it from receiving U.S. aid or training.  

However, American assistance is flowing faster and faster to Montoya's regional command these days as the U.S. aid program gets cranked up. Critics call the process a public-relations shell game, in which wrists are slapped yet vast quantities of U.S. aid wind up helping the paramilitaries.  

And Human Rights Watch reported that the U.S. was aware that the counternarcotics battalions it was funding were working closely with the 24th Brigade:

On their first joint deployment in December 2000, these battalions depended heavily on the army's Twenty-Fourth Brigade for support and logistical assistance, particularly with regard to intelligence, civic-military outreach, and psychological operations. Yet there was abundant and credible evidence to show that the Twenty-Fourth Brigade regularly worked with and supported paramilitary groups in the department of Putumayo. Indeed, the Twenty-Fourth Brigade hosted counternarcotics battalion troops at its facilities in La Hormiga--a town where, according to witnesses, paramilitaries and Colombian Army troops were indistinguishable.

A declassified State Department cable from June, 2000 indicates that the U.S. embassy was aware that the counternarcotics troops were "bedding down" with he 24th Brigade in La Hormiga.

Yet, at a meeting in January, 2001 when the human rights delegation I travelled with confronted Ambassador Patterson and her senior staff about what we had learned in La Hormiga, they vigorously denied the possibility that U.S. military aid could be assisting any units with paramilitary links.

Patterson's failure to blow the whistle on the military-paramilitary colaboration in Putumayo clearly constitutes a violation of the spirit if not the letter of the Leahy Law, designed to prevent U.S. military aid from reaching known human rights abusers.  We are just beginning to learn the ghastly consequences of her silence.

Patterson continues to have oversight of U.S. aid to Colombia in her new post at the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs.  This despite the fact the very paramilitary groups that indirectly benefited from the aid she administered as Ambassador to Colombia were responsible for the much of the cocaine trafficking in the country during her tenure.

The 105 bodies in the mass grave in Putumayo are a ghastly reminder of the crimes Anne Patterson allowed to occur on her watch. She needs to be held accountable.