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Reporter's Notebook: Stephen Peacock

U.S. Elevates River-Combat Role in Colombian 'Counter Narco-Terrorist' Ops

Posted by Stephen Peacock - March 15, 2006 at 5:19 pm
U.S. government “counter narco-terrorism” forces in Colombia are heightening their ability to conduct river-based missions, the most recent step which involves the planned shipment of “mini armored troop carriers,” or MATCs, to Bogota. The U.S. Navy is arranging to deliver up to 10 of the titanium-reinforced, 14-troop capacity MATCs, beginning with four of the watercraft this year and possibly another six by 2007, according to a recently obtained procurement document.

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.”  

About Stephen Peacock

Biography
I'm a former Washington, DC, journalist (1998-2003) who most recently worked for Communications Daily and Washington Internet Daily (WID), investigative newsletters that cover the telecommunications, broadcast and Internet industries. Following the 9/11 attacks, my news beat expanded beyond Capitol Hill telecom/TV/IT policy and began to include technology-policy coverage at the Pentagon and Dept. of Homeland Security. I've written over a thousand articles about government and industry affairs, and I'm pleased to say that I was the reporter who broke the story about the Total Information Awareness surveillance/data-collection initiative of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. I've written articles for publications including NACLA Report on the Americas, Drug Enforcement Report, Corrections Journal, SoJo Mail (Sojourners), and the Tampa Tribune. I've also written a memoir about my former career as a plainclothes security officer of the Helmsley Palace hotel in New York City, Hotel Dick: Harlots, Starlets, Thieves & Sleaze. I look forward to contributing to the fine work being done here at NarcoSphere.

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'Apparent' Contractor Picked

Submitted March 22, 2006 - 11:49 am by Stephen Peacock
Several days after I reported these two developments, the Dept. of Defense issued an uncommon "pre-award notice, advising potential contractors that the "apparent successful offeror" responding to the Riverine Plans Officer position is not a person, but a mysterious company that it identified as "Products & Services of the Americas" of Amarillo, Texas.

Thus 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 March 22, 2006 - 10:12 pm by Bill Conroy
A search of Hoovers' free online company database does produce one clue for the company in question. However, to get more information, you have to purchase the Dunn & Bradstreet report, which in my experience doesn't yield a whole lot more detail beyond generic name, rank and serial-number data for small sole-proprietor firms like this.

Anyway, 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 March 23, 2006 - 12:39 pm by Dan Feder
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.

Officers, Human Rights, and Killing Words

Submitted March 23, 2006 - 1:39 pm by Sean Donahue
Dan Feder reports that:

"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.

The U.S. and "river combat" in Colombia

Submitted March 23, 2006 - 10:08 am by Dan Feder
“Riverine” operations and the U.S. military have a dark history in Colombia. One of the worst atrocities in the last decade of the Colombian civil war was the infamous Mapiripán massacre of 1997. For five days a force of 100 paramilitary fighters, coordinating with high-ranking officers in the Colombian military, terrorized the town of Mapiripán on the banks of the Guaviare river. (The river separates the departments of Guaviare and Meta and lies in one of the most important coca-producing areas of the country.) The paramilitaries systematically killed at least 30 townspeople over the course of 5 days. Carlos Castaño, the founder of the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, organized the operation and was present; he later admitted that he and his men killed 49 people. Some claim the death toll was even higher; many of the bodies were dumped into the Guaviare River and never found.

According 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:

For eight months starting in May 1997 the Green Berets' center of operations was the Army Special Forces School, five minutes away by boat or car from the Counternarcotics Base at San José del Guaviare and "headquarters" for the State Department programs for the eradication of coca plantations. The name of the locale is Barrancón; it is an island formed around a rock in the bed of the Guaviare River; from its heights the river and the Sabanas de la Fuga, a historic "sanctuary" for the Farc, can be seen.

When Senator Leahy requested information on those activities, Solic's director, Brian Sheridan, explained that the course that began on May 14 in Barrancón dealt with "mission planning and military decision making" and other specific matters related to "light infantry."

Colombian reports indicate that the unit being trained was commanded by Colonel Lino Sánchez. The Counternarcotics Police Intelligence Office gave the State Department and the federal prosecutor's office a report according to which, in those days, Sánchez pioneered a plan to introduce paramilitary forces in the sprayed areas, within the framework of U.S. programs and announced that some aid had arrived that would enable him to "teach the guerrillas a lesson."

The federal prosecutor's office discovered that on July 12, 1997, a group of fifteen men personally chosen by Carlos Castaño Gil, flew in two planes from Urabá to San José del Guaviare Airport, which is shared by the Counternarcotics Police and the garrison in which Sánchez had his office. On the Barrancón road, Castaño's group joined the paramilitary forces of Casanare and Meta, and from there they went by truck to Charras, on the opposite bank of the Guaviare River, across from Mapiripán.

The boats on which they all crossed the river encounter no problem when they passed the Marine Infantry post in Barrancón, built by the Americans and in which "river combat" training took place. The paramilitary forces, more than 100 men, remained in Mapiripán from July 15 to 20, and were at no point challenged either by civilian or military authorities.

These dates coincide with three Special Forces deployment dates mentioned in the report to the U.S. Congress, but none of those listed by Sheridan occurred during the massacre days. However, the federal prosecutor's office and other officials say they crossed paths with U.S. military in San José, when they traveled to Mapiripán to aid the massacre survivors and open their investigation.

Government files include five reports from five military commands, including General Bonett's, mentioning the maneuvers that took place at that time in Barrancón to celebrate the closing of a "special forces course".

But they only indicate the presence as guest of honor of General José María Balza, Commander of the Argentinian Military Forces.

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