March 2007 Peace Presence Update

30 March 2007

• Colombian Army Chief Accused of Paramilitary Ties
• Chiquita Banana Charged with Funding Paramilitaries
• Justice in Peace Community Massacre?
• Peace Community Marks 10-year Anniversary
• Report from No Bases conference in Ecuador
• Announcements: New team members sought; August delegation; New FOR director
• Letter From the Field: Bush's Colombia Visit

CIA Links Army Chief to Paramilitary Groups
The series of revelations of collaboration between the Colombian government and paramilitary terrorist groups reached higher on March 25, when the Los Angeles Times, in a front-page article, disclosed a CIA report linking the chief of the Colombian Army, General Mario Montoya Uribe, with paramilitary activity.

The CIA report was based on information from an unproven source in an allied intelligence agency, but the document also cited the U.S. military attaché in Bogotá, who said that the report “confirms information provided by a proven source” and that information from the source “also could implicate” armed forces chief Freddy Padilla de Leon.

Montoya rejected the report, and a Colombian government statement said that Montoya had received the blessing of the United States when he was posted in southern Colombian in a US-financed base known as Tres Esquinas. However, the statement did not directly deny that the military carried out Operation Orion together with paramilitary groups.

Yet General Montoya’s history of paramilitary collaboration apparently goes back much further. When Montoya commanded a unit in southern Putumayo department in 2000-01, soldiers under his command “bedded down” and shared intelligence with the 24th Brigade, a unit banned from receiving U.S. aid because of its reputation for paramilitary collaboration, according to a U.S. Embassy cable. “With army troops from the nearby 24th Brigade blocking roads behind them,” the San Francisco Chronicle reported in December 2000, paramilitary “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. Human-rights groups in Bogotá and Washington complained, government investigators were sent, reports were written. No one has been convicted.”

Two years later, Montoya was commanding the Fourth Brigade in Medellí, known most recently for “false positives”: body counts that the army attributes to combat with guerrillas but turn out to be civilians killed by soldiers. On orders from President Uribe, Montoya commanded operations to sweep guerrillas out of Comuna 13, a densely populated hillside barrio of some 100,000 poor residents. The most brutal of these was Operation Orión in October, in which at least fourteen people were killed. In November 2002, an FOR delegation visited a neighborhood women’s group in Comuna 13 whose members were in grief over the apparently illegal detention of three of their leaders two days before. The residents recounted Operation Orión, only one of 17 operations in Comuna 13 that year. The delegates wrote:
Walking back down from our meeting, we noticed the flag of Colombia was flying from the front of almost every shop. Residents told us that everyone has been pressured to fly the flag as a show of support for the military that is now occupying the neighborhood. At night, they said, the paramilitaries are running through the streets shouting, "we're in control now!"

In addition to receiving military training and later serving as an instructor at the U.S. School of the Americas, Montoya was assigned as commander of Joint Task Force South, the premier mission of Washington’s $1.3 billion spending on Plan Colombia in 2000-2001, and promoted to head the Colombian Army in 2006.

The CIA report and earlier documentation of General Montoya’s collaboration with paramilitary terrorist groups raise serious questions, not only about the Unites States’ “vetting” process to screen out human rights abusers. If the chief of the principle institutional beneficiary of Plan Colombia has such a long history of supporting terrorists, how can Congress even consider continued funding for the Colombian Army?

More information:
Sean Donahue, “The Life and Crimes of General Montoya Uribe”

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Chiquita Banana: U.S. Company Accused of Supporting Paramilitaries

Just one day after the U.S. government fined Chiquita Banana $25 million for financing a Colombian terrorist group, the Colombian attorney general, Mario Iguarán, formally requested documents from the U.S. Justice Department about the payments and Chiquita’s potential involvement in arms trafficking. He also said he will seek to extradite eight Chiquita employees.

On March 19, Chiquita admitted in federal court to paying $1.7 million over seven years to the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC, by its Spanish initials), a group the U.S. labels a terrorist organization. The payments began in 1997 by the Chiquita subsidiary Banadex; Chiquita sold Banadex in 2004.

Chiquita says the payments were to protect workers, but Iguarán said that “the relationship was not one of the extortionist and the extorted but a criminal relationship. It's a much bigger, more macabre plan.” This view is bolstered by a 2004 report by the Organization of American States (OAS) indicating that in 2001 Banadex helped divert 3,000 AK-47 rifles and millions of rounds of ammunition from Nicaragua to the AUC. “During the period in which payments were made, thousands of individuals were killed by the AUC, many of whom were banana workers that the payments supposedly should have protected,” the Colombian weekly Semana reported.

Chiquita, once known as United Fruit Company, has a long history of human rights abuses in Latin America. One of the most famous is the Santa Marta massacre in the town of Ciénega, Colombia in 1928 in which dozens of strikers were killed.

Chiquita is not the only foreign company to have collaborated with and/or made payments to paramilitary groups in Colombia. Coca Cola, Drummond and British Petroluem have also been accused of supporting the AUC, though no other company has been charged. It remains to be seen whether Chiquita is made into a scapegoat or is the first of many companies called to account for facilitating violence in Colombia.

Further resources:
“Colombia seeks eight in Chiquita terrorist scandal,” Christian Science Monitor, 2/22/07
“Colombians seek Chiquita extradtions,” Washington Post, 3/21/07
“Banana para-republic” Semana, 3/17/07
“Los mismos gringos de la Masacre las Bananeras—”, Ignacio Gómez, 5/6/06

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February 2005 massacre: Justice, is that you, really?

Recent advances in the investigation of the February 2005 massacre in San José de Apartadó that point towards the Army have generated political turmoil. Timely international pressure has ensured that the criminal investigation continues.

On the second anniversary on the Peace Community massacre of February 2005, Colombian media disclosed news that Colombian prosecutors are considering 69 members of the Army’s 17th Brigade as suspects for the massacre, and have formally initiated an investigation against them.

The news was apparently good — after all, it vindicated the credibility of the Peace Community, which had from the beginning accused army soldiers as responsible for the massacre. But given the timing of the announcement, the Peace Community and human rights groups remain skeptical. The announcement came only two weeks before President Bush’s visit to Colombia, in which he would announce his support for Phase II of Plan Colombia. Progress in the investigation of the 2005 massacre could easily be interpreted as a sign that the Colombian judicial system works, freeing the way for the release of military aid that has been suspended for more than six months and for approval of the new package. “The government is worried that it may lose its military aid if it doesn't make a show of looking like it's investigating,” Jesús Emilio Tuberquia, a community leader said.

The Defense Ministry, with the backing of a high-ranking official in the Attorney General’s office, quickly discredited the information and again advanced the thesis that FARC guerrillas were responsible for the massacre. Such blunt lack of support within the attorney general’s office led the prosecutor leading the case, Nelson Casas, and the chief of the human rights unit in the Attorney General’s office, Leonardo Cabana, to resign. If these had been accepted, it would have almost certainly meant the end of the investigation. But international pressure rapidly mounted on Attorney General Iguarán, who ended up backing Casas. Cabana and Casas stayed.

President Bush came to Colombia and left. The State Department did not issue a last-minute certification of the pending military aid, as some had feared. Domestically, the Colombian army took a lot of heat for the accusations of their role in the 2005 massacre, which Semana magazine called “one the worst human rights violations of Colombia’s history.” But there is still a long way to go before the criminal investigation brings justice in the case.

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Peace Community Celebrates 10-year Anniversary on March 23
With Introduction from team member Janice Gallagher

In the short time I have spent in the community, I have become accustomed to seeing members of the community on an everyday basis. I talk with them about their cacao harvest, their health and how their children are. Sometimes people tell me their stories of what they have been through during the war, giving me one person’s perspective through which to see the community’s history of nonviolent resistance. Our awareness of this history in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds has brought me, to some extent, to Colombia to do this work.

During the international celebration of the 10th anniversary of the peace community, however, this history lived in a way which I have not seen before. The community came together and invited the participants to join them in remembering ten years full of both triumph and almost unimaginable loss and violence. They held a silent march through downtown of Apartadó, an eight mile walk from the community. On this march, each community member and some internationals carried small coffins with the name of one of the 178 community members that has been killed in the last ten years, which they left at the door of the Attorney General’s office in silent protest of the lack of punishment for these murders. The night before, they held a mass and candlelight vigil over these coffins. On the return from the march, the 50 or so internationals and the other Colombians, together with the community members, mounted crosses along the road from San Jose to Apartadó to mark places where community members had been killed.

Along with memorializing those that have died in this struggle, the Community imagined what the future will hold. During the 5-day event, they talked about how they, together with 15 other communities who are committed to non-violent resistance to the armed conflict, will continue to build the “Universidad Campesina” which will focus on developing an educational model that liberates the children of these communities and sharing best practices around agricultural production, the possibilities of producing for the fair trade market, and other topics. And they talked to the representatives from Colombian indigenous communities, to the Belgian government officials, to the international accompaniers, and to the other rural communities, about how to build on what they had already accomplished.

The team felt that we were privileged to be accompanying this event, and also to be part of the process of thinking through how we will continue to support the project of the Peace Community of San Jose de Apartadó in the future.

What follows is excerpted from the community’s statement on this powerful event:

In celebration of the 10th anniversary of the Peace Community of San José de Apartadó, we gathered with delegates from different communities in the area of La Unión and San Josecito in the municipality of Apartadó, various Colombian peace and human rights organizations, and 27 international delegates from 14 countries including Germany, Belgium, the United States, France, Mexico, and Spain. The commemoration of this 10th anniversary was a place for exchanges of solidarity and a path toward dignity and remembrance.

The silent march on March 23 that traversed the streets of Apartadó passed through a city whose leadership and even some of its people have been co-opted by a paramilitary culture that has turned large sections of the population into unfeeling beings in the face of the suffering and the destruction of human life. During the march 178 symbolic coffins were left in front of the Attorney General’s office in order to remind them that they have once again failed in their constitutional function of ending the impunity for the hundreds of crimes perpetrated over more than ten years.

Every day there are more communities and national and international organizations that support and join with the Community. We hope that these national and international accompaniment projects are allowing the world to eradicate these forms of violence, and that the Colombian state begins to establish the truth, sanction those responsible, provide reparation for the victims, and reconstruct all that has been destroyed.

The Peace Community of San José de Apartadó, backed by the Network of Communities of Resistance and the international accompaniers, has reaffirmed its declaration of peace of March 23, 1997, reaffirmed both its original principles and the decision to continue working for the right to a life of dignity in the midst of social and armed conflict.

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An Anti-Bases Network Finds its Base

The consolidation of an international network for the abolition of foreign military bases marks an important advance for the global peace and justice movement

A key piece of infrastructure that sustains U.S. military policy in Colombia is the U.S. military base in Manta, Ecuador, established in 1999 when U.S. military bases in Panama closed in compliance with the Panama Canal Treaties. FOR has continued to participate in the growing international network to close all foreign military bases. That network held its inaugural global conference in Ecuador this month. Here is a report by key organizer Herbert Docena of Focus on the Global South.

On the perimeter fence of the Eloy Alfaro air base in Manta, Ecuador hangs a sign, “Warning: Military Base. No Trespassing.” Since 1999, the base has been used as a “forward operating location” by the US military — just one of over 737 US military installations currently scattered in over 100 countries around the world.

On March 9, about 500 visitors showed up at the base’s main gate. One of them walks up to the fence and pastes a bright blue and red sticker saying “No Bases!” on the warning sign, a broken rifle forming the diagonal line with the letter “o” to make the universal sign of prohibition.

It is a small, symbolic act of trespassing for a newly formed international network with a big goal: the closure of all such military bases worldwide. But with the successful convening of a conference that launched the International Network for the Abolition of Foreign Military Bases (No Bases) in Quito and Manta, Ecuador from March 5 to 9, 2007, that goal has become a little closer to reality.

Perhaps the largest gathering against military bases in history, the conference drew over 400 grassroots and community-based activists who are at the forefront of local struggles from as far away as Okinawa, Sardinia, Vieques, Pyongtaek, Hawaii, and dozens of other places from more than 40 countries. There were environmentalists, feminists, pacifists, war resisters, farmers, workers, students, parliamentarians, and other activists from social movements, human rights groups, faith-based organizations, and various regional and global networks and coalitions.

But even the final tally of those present probably underestimated the extent of participation in the conference.

[Read the rest of this article here]

For further accounts:
A New Network Forms to Close U.S. Overseas Military Bases, by Medea Benjamin

No Bases Network born in the Middle of the World, by Helga Serrano Narváez

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Announcements:

• Colombia Team Openings and Training
  The Fellowship of Reconciliation is seeking qualified applicants for its field teams in Bogotá and San José de Apartadó, for openings in late 2007 and 2008. Team members must be committed to nonviolence and the goals of the FOR Colombia program, speak Spanish with fluency, and be prepared to serve for at least one year.

  Team members in San José provide protective accompaniment to community members and document events of the armed conflict. Team members in Bogotá work with other nonviolent initiatives, support the team and community of San José, and organize delegations.

  All applicants must complete a full application, have an interview, and participate in a six-day training from August 28 — September 2, 2007. Click here for information and application, or call 415-495-6334. Applications are due June 29.

• August Delegation
  Join us from August 4-18, 2007 as we visit Colombian peace movements, including the Peace Community of San José de Apartadó, the Youth Network of Medellin, Antioquia Peasant Association, and more.

  By participating in this trip, you come to have a greater understanding of the peaceful resistance growing in Colombia, the "drug war", and U.S. military intervention. The August delegation will inaugurate new efforts in civilian diplomacy by the Colombia Program, including on-line and teleconference sessions for the month previous to the trip. Our permanent accompaniment work allows FOR to assemble a unique and rich delegation experience. Your chance at meaningful formation awaits you!

  Cost is $1400 from Bogotá.
  For more information/applications, contact: FOR, moira(a)igc.org, 415-495-6334

• Mark Johnson starts as Executive Director
  On March 1, Mark C. Johnson joined Fellowship of Reconciliation as its new Executive Director. Mark brings to FOR much experience and many skills. He has a long history in peace and social justice issues, including extensive experience in the Middle East. A conscientious objector during the Vietnam War, Johnson fulfilled his alternative service in Beirut, Lebanon and lived in Lebanon for six years. He has worked for many years for the YMCA at the local and national levels.

  For the past four years Mark has been an officer of FOR's Chicago Area chapter. He also currently serves as special events chair of the Alliance for Middle East Peace, a coalition of U.S., Israeli, and Palestinian NGOs engaged in conflict transformation work. During his years with YMCA of the USA, he was very involved in the work of the Jerusalem International Y and developed a series of programs bringing young adults from Israel/Palestine to the United States to acquire conflict transformation skills.

  Mark Johnson earned a bachelor's degree in English and history from the College of Wooster (Ohio), a master's in philosophy from Columbia University, and a doctorate in sociology from Columbia. He is an ordained elder of the Presbyterian Church and a current member of First United Methodist Church/ Chicago Temple.

  Mark can be reached by email at mjohnson(a)forusa.org

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Letter from the Field: Bush’s Visit to Colombia

President Bush recently completed a week-long tour of Latin America, making a quick stop in Colombia. In this excerpt from her blog, Pedaling for Peace, FOR team member Janice describes her experience of Bush’s appearance in Colombia on March 11:

Bush came to Colombia today for six hours to meet with embattled Colombian President Álvaro Uribe. In the midst of scandal over many Uribe political allies' involvement with paramilitary groups, who are accused of horrendous human rights violations, Bush met with Uribe to discuss the Free Trade Agreement pending in Congress and the "progress" that has been made under Plan Colombia.

Bogotanos, in return, took to the street. From Wednesday through today protests took place throughout the city against Bush's visit. This week has demonstrated to me the broad-based opposition to Bush's policies in Colombia, and also brought into sharp relief how a small number of violent (anti-Bush) protestors can undermine and endanger collective peaceful resistance. What perhaps you have already seen on the news are the images of protestors kicking, throwing things, etc. What I saw today were about 2,000 non-violent protestors, including kids with their mothers, a man who is about to lose his job at a telephone company because of neoliberalism, a 24-year old who talked to me about the natural and cultural richness of her country, and a high school teacher who objects to Uribe, Colombia's president, being put into power by paramilitary forces and the US, not by the pueblo — the people. There were also a 100 or so violent youth throwing rocks amidst the rest of the non-violent protestors. As a result, police dispersed the protest after less than two hours with tear gas, and then later water hoses.

[On a previous day, Janice observed students protesting outside of the National University:]

It is intense, and I would say inspiring to see so many students out protesting (though the rock-throwing is, well, the opposite of inspiring). The vast majority of students attending the rally were peaceful, and unlike some protests I've been to in the US, when I "interviewed" protest onlookers for this blog, all students at the National University, they all knew why they were there, and wanted to let me know. Some excerpts:

“We are here protesting the TLC (the pending Free Trade Agreement with Colombia) because it will destroy our economy, use up our natural resources, and eliminate indigenous communities.”

“We know that Plan Colombia is really a counter-insurgency plan more than having anything to do with helping our country out socially. The money goes to help the armed forces, who a year ago killed a student, Oscar Salas, in one of these demonstrations. We are indignant that Bush is coming to a place where he is just destroying society, which is what the U.S. has always done here.”