U.S. Elevates River-Combat Role in Colombian 'Counter Narco-Terrorist' Ops
The acquisition of these 36-foot armored boats comes at a time when the U.S. Marine Corps is stepping up its involvement in Colombian “riverine” counterdrug operations. Earlier this year the U.S. Marines launched a recruitment campaign for a privately contracted “Riverine Plans Officer,” a role which serves as the primary operations advisor responsible for overseeing strategic and tactical operations conducted in and around Colombian waterways. The Corps established the new position to directly support the U.S. Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) Theater Security Cooperation Plan, thereby requiring the candidate to coordinate efforts among U.S. Dept. of Defense and law enforcement agencies, multinational and interagency Global War On Terrorism (GWOT) operations, and Colombian police and military forces.
Plan Colombia and the subsequent Andean Ridge Initiative have elevated the volume of security assistance material, equipment, and training that the U.S. has provided to the Colombian military, the document says. Plus, the support needed to sustain U.S. forces in Colombia has “created a significant increase in the missions/responsibilities of the USMILGP and U.S. Marine Corps Forces, South,” related to SOUTHCOM and other operations.
In addition to providing combat and tactical training and operations coordination, the Riverine Plans Officer is tasked with incorporating human rights and Geneva Convention instruction into Colombian Marine Corps training. The objective of such training is to ensure that “they are knowledgeable of the legal aspects of search and seizure and adhere to high standards during the prosecution of their war on terrorism.”
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'Apparent' Contractor Picked
Submitted on March 22nd, 2006 by Stephen PeacockThus far, I cannot find a trace of such a "company," despite conducting numerous name/phrase variations via Google and Yahoo! searches.
A Google satellite search did indeed pinpoint the address listed in the "special notice," which appears to be a house located in the midst of residential neighborhood.
I would encourage anyone with any information on this company to please follow up with a comment or even another story.
Contract clue
Submitted on March 22nd, 2006 by Bill ConroyAnyway, at least this clue might lead to more clues.
Hoovers reveals the following information about a company with the same name in Amarillo:
Berger, Steven W (dba "Products & Services Of America") Amarillo, Texas
Mystery Solved: Contractor Speaks to Narco News
Submitted on March 23rd, 2006 by Dan FederThe 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.
Officers, Human Rights, and Killing Words
Submitted on March 23rd, 2006 by Sean DonahueBerger's echoes the words of a former SOA human rights instructor I met in Barrancabermeja. In a 2004 article for SOA Watch I wrote:
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:
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.
The U.S. and "river combat" in Colombia
Submitted on March 23rd, 2006 by Dan FederAccording to Ignacio “Nacho” Gómez’ celebrated investigative report on the incident published in the Colombian newspaper El Espectador in 2000, the surrounding area was crawling with U.S. military personnel at the time. The gringos were busy with an intensive program training the same Colombian military officers involved in planning the massacre in “river combat” techniques. While only the U.S. soldiers’ Colombian students have been directly implicated, many believe U.S. Green Berets were on the river while the paramilitary boats were besieging the town and were aware of what was happening.
Gómez began receiving death threats after looking into these events and was eventually forced to leave the country for several years.
From his article in El Espectador: