January 2007 Peace Presence Update

published 1/31/07

New website for FOR Colombia!
After lots of tweaking, the FOR Colombia program has launched its new website: www.forusa.org. Check it out! The new site boasts the latest news on the Peace Community of San José de Apartadó, updates on U.S. policy advocacy, and calls to action supporting peace in Colombia. Visit www.forusa.org now!

New Congress, New Policy on Colombia: No More Military Aid to Colombia
Since 2000, more than five billion of dollars of mainly military aid have been transferred under Plan Colombia. Such aid has done nothing but fuel the deadliest conflict of the Western Hemisphere, one that claims the lives of 11 people every day. Most of the deaths and human rights violations are attributed to the right-wing paramilitary armies.

The events of recent months, particularly the parapolitica scandal, have shown extensive infiltration of the Colombian state’s intelligence, legislative, judicial, local government, and military branches of government by paramilitary terrorist agents. Therefore, the United States should cut all military assistance to Colombia. Current mechanisms to end Colombian state collaboration with terrorism and respect for human rights, including the Leahy Law that prohibits assistance to military units with a history of human rights abuses, have so far been ineffective, largely because the ‘budget-busting’ flow of military aid has continued without pause. To be truly consistent with US values of respect for human rights and the goal of ending terrorism, the amount of the cut should go well beyond the amount of military aid in the pipeline, and be enough to:

a) oblige the Colombian state to take seriously the prosecution of officials charged with collaboration with or participation in paramilitary activities;
b) offer real incentives for comprehensive negotiations for an end to the armed conflict with guerrilla forces, fully involving Colombian civil society; and
c) dedicate significant resources to 1) assist internally displaced people and 2) reorient US drug policy toward demand reduction in the United States.

Until this occurs, US military aid will continue fueling Colombia’s armed conflict, by supporting armed forces and a government with such close ties with terrorist paramilitaries.

The timing is right: The Bush administration is expected to submit to Congress its budget for 2007-2008 in February, including proposed funds for Plan Colombia, in the Foreign Appropriations and Defense bills.

February 21st Wake Up Call Demonstration
What you can do to support a new policy on Colombia:
In Washington: Join us in a rally to end military aid
If you are outside Washington: Tell your friends to join us

Wake Up Call Mobilization: End of Military Aid to Colombia
February 21, 2007 12:00PM West Side of Capitol

The event, convened by FOR, Amnesty International, SOA Watch, Witness for Peace, American Friends Service Committee, US Office on Colombia, and Washington Office on Latin America, will also commemorate the second anniversary of the February 2005 massacre in which eight members of the Peace Community of San José de Apartadó were brutally killed.

In addition, on February 22 in Santa Cruz, California, FOR will join the Unitarian Fellowship of Santa Cruz to present “Until the Final Stone,” the feature film about the Peace Community of San José de Apartadó, and a presentation by FOR’s John Lindsay-Poland.

Stay tuned for actions you can take from home to support a new policy on Colombia!

Most Colombians Receiving US Military Training Are Not Vetted for Abuses
The United States gives military training to more Colombians than any other country in the hemisphere — about 10,000 a year. A law known as the Leahy Law (named after Senator Patrick Leahy, who authored it) requires the State Department to investigate, or “vet,” every unit receiving this military training and exclude those with a history of human rights abuses. Not surprisingly, the vetting operation in Colombia is one of the largest in the world.

Although State Department policy is to require vetting of individuals chosen for military training, as well as units, responses to Freedom of Information Act requests to the Special Operations Command, responsible for the large majority of military training for Colombia, as well as State Department officials, indicate that no vetting of the large majority of individual Colombian military students has occurred.

Read the full story here.

New website highlights Tierra y Vida, news from Colombian partner ACA
Part of the purpose of the new website is to highlight the Colombian partner organizations that we work with. Among these is the Asociación Campesina de Antioquia, or ACA, which works with displaced farmers and their families in Antioquia. ACA distributes a quarterly newsletter, Tierra y Vida (Land and Life), translations of which are published on the new FOR Colombia website.

Here is an excerpt from the latest edition of Tierra y Vida, on Food Sovereignty (read the full version here).
“In the final analysis, food security depends on a policy of food sovereignty: however, according to the way it is spelled out in the 1991 National Constituent Assembly, both terms tend to be confused with each other. Just because foodstuffs are offered in the big supermarket chains, which are owned by the big multinationals, doesn’t mean that all of the population is guaranteed to have access to them. In the Assembly’s declaration it’s not clear how these foodstuffs will be made accessible, and this is important more than anything because this is a time when the population’s buying power is declining every day and more taxes are being imposed on goods that are basic necessities. Here we understand food sovereignty as a right of peoples, communities, and nations to define their own agricultural and food policies in accordance with their own ecological, social, and cultural contexts. This obviously implies a right to food and the availability of foodstuffs, but it goes beyond this and is rooted in a democratic vision, where communities and peoples decide and collectively construct ways to maintain and protect themselves in harmony with their own life goals.

For this reason when we speak of food sovereignty we are going beyond a simple proposal of food security. With the consolidation of a model of development that is being implemented in Colombia, hunger becomes a strategic way of guaranteeing the consumption of foreign products that are being imposed at all costs. It is possible that thanks to the reality of hunger brought on Colombians by these policies, at some moment we may just settle for the idea that is sufficient enough to guarantee food security—.”

Join FOR and 25 other organizations that are organizing the:
International Conference for the Abolition of Foreign Military Bases
in Quito and Manta, Ecuador
March 5-9, 2007

A critical facility for the operation of Plan Colombia is a military base in Manta, on the coast of Ecuador, run by the US Air Force. Last August, the US military commander in Manta, Javier Deluca, said the base there was “very important” for Plan Colombia. Just three months later, Ecuadorians elected as president Rafael Correa, who pledged to close the base when its lease is up for renewal in 2009, setting the stage for a struggle between those seeking to militarize the hemisphere and the social movements working for an end foreign military bases.

Ecuador is thus the perfect setting for this conference, which will bring together a stunning variety of individuals and organizations from around the world working in campaigns to close and clean up foreign military bases. The conference will also include grassroots and women’s organizations; indigenous rights groups; environmental, faith-based, and youth organizations that support such struggles and international coordinated efforts. The conference aims both to highlight the political, social, environmental and economic impacts of foreign military bases and the grassroots movements that oppose them, as well as to formally construct the network, its strategies, structure and action plans. President Correa is expected to address the conference opening ceremony.

After three days of events in Quito, the conference will travel by caravan on International Women’s Day to the coastal city of Manta, where the conference program will support the local movement that is challenging the U.S. base there. You can register online at www.no-bases.net.

In addition, FOR joins Global Exchange and Marin Interfaith Task Force to sponsor a delegation to Ecuador, including participation in the No Bases conference and a trip to Ecuador’s Amazon interior led by the Amazon Defense Front, from March 1 to 11. For information on this trip, go to www.globalexchange.org/tours/852.html.

Letter From the Field: When it Rains, it Pours: Political Scandal and Corruption
By Amanda Jack

Living and working in the Peace Community of San José de Apartadó can tend to be a bit like living on a desert island with one temperamental phone line to the outside world. It is easy to lose track of newsworthy happenings back home and even here in the rest of Colombia as we immerse ourselves in every minute detail of the Peace Community. However, so much is happening lately that is demanding my attention. It is no surprise that the Colombian government continues to be full of scandal and political maelstrom, as government and corruption seem to be synonymous in any language. Recently, the true face of the unabashedly named Colombian Law of Justice and Peace (Ley de Justicia y Paz) is finally being unveiled in all of its ironic grandeur to the public at large.

Back home I hear that President Bush has figured out how to fix the humanitarian disaster we have created in Iraq by sending in more troops. I am not surprised. The US has been “helping” Colombia in the same manner for years. Not too long ago, we were lucky to attend a community workshop on the International Criminal Court given by a human rights lawyer from Bogotá. The lawyer spoke about the creation, advantages and disadvantages of the court and the status of the Peace Community’s case with the ICC. At one point he referred to the US as a “bad neighbor” who instead of throwing water on the burning house that is Colombia has elected to throw gasoline. I cringed in agreement and thought about the millions of dollars sent to sustain this never-ending war and the stamp of “US Army” that I notice on the belts, uniforms and weapons of Colombian soldiers.

At the end of the workshop he also talked about the aforementioned “Ley de Justicia y Paz,” established to provide a legal and just way to demobilize illegal armed forces. According to the government, paramilitary demobilization has now been achieved, never mind that most commanders remain unpunished and that many of the more than 30,000 troops who turned in their guns have been reformed into new groups all over the country. Here in our zone, the Aguilas Negras now roam where the Bloque Bananero and Bloque Elmer Cardenas once terrorized communities.

The first of the detained paramilitary leaders to give official testimony, Salvatore Mancuso, has so far listed 336 people whom he had ordered killed or kidnapped. He has admitted to ordering the Pichilin massacre (in 1998, in which 70 people were killed), for which he was previously found innocent by the Colombian judicial system. He has named Colombian military personnel as complicit in many of these killings and massacres, and said that his group had a monthly budget of $400,000 to pay off Colombian police and military. This official testimony serves to corroborate the obvious links between paramilitary and military forces. However, the men Mancuso has named are already dead or imprisoned. It remains to be seen if any active military commanders will be accused in his continuing testimony. While current military officials are yet unnamed, politicians are not so lucky, as Mancuso has handed over evidence that four senators, seven representatives of Congress, two governors and five mayors participated in a 2001 agreement with the AUC [paramilitary group] to “re-establish the nation”.

This all comes on the heels of the Supreme Court’s year-end orders to arrest three current members of Congress (all supporters of President Uribe) for ties to the paramilitaries, while six more remain under investigation. This was a major scandal as the new year arrived because it added to the continuing scandal involving the former head of DAS (the Colombian FBI), Jorge Noguera, who has been implicated in crimes of collusion with paramilitary leaders, especially in the murders of trade unionists and academics, taking bribes and making deals to personally benefit his financial gain. Nonetheless, Noguera continues to serve in his government post in Italy.

Outside of Colombia, the situation has not been much better as the newly elected left-wing President of Ecuador, Rafael Correa, threatened to cease diplomatic relations with Colombia if aerial fumigation along the Colombia-Ecuador border was not stopped. All in all it has been a tough second term for President Uribe. He and the similarly maligned President Bush can be consoled in the other’s political plight as they continue their militarized friendship and look to solidify the ominous Colombia — U.S. Free Trade Agreement.

Here in Colombia, Mancuso’s testimony continues to be carefully monitored by victims and victims’ advocates. Under the “Justice and Peace Law” Mancuso is eligible to receive a maximum sentence of eight years for all the horrific crimes he claims responsibility for as well as remain safe from extradition to the US for narco-trafficking charges. Eight years! As Semana magazine said in its year-end issue, “If corruption had a face, it would easily be the best candidate for the magazine’s Person of the Year”.

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January 2007 Peace Presence Update

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End U.S. Military Aid to Colombia

FOR Colombia Peace Update