Month: May 2018

Last Week in Colombia’s Peace Process: Week of May 13-19

Transitional Justice System Suspends Santrich Extradition

The case of FARC leader Seusis Pausias Hernández alias Jesús Santrich, arrested on April 9 with the possibility of extradition to the United States for narcotrafficking, grew more complicated this week. The Review Chamber of the new Special Peace Jurisdiction (JEP, the transitional justice system set up by the peace accord) ordered his extradition suspended. Other entities within Colombia’s government contended that the Chamber doesn’t have the right to do that.

Santrich, a hardliner who represented the FARC at the negotiating table during the entire Havana process, is currently confined at a Bogotá facility run by the Catholic Church’s Episcopal Conference. His health is precarious, as he has been on a hunger strike since his arrest. Santrich is charged by a grand jury in the Southern District of New York with conspiring to send 10 tons of cocaine to the United States.

As he allegedly committed the crime after the peace accord went into effect, Santrich’s case could go to Colombia’s regular justice system, where he would face long prison terms or extradition. First, though, the JEP must determine that the crime did indeed take place after the peace accord’s December 1, 2016 ratification.

That is the task of the JEP’s Review Chamber, which must fulfill it within 120 days. This chamber contended, by a unanimous vote, that fulfilling its duty required a temporary suspension of Santrich’s extradition. The Chamber asked for more evidence of the allegations against the FARC leader, and instructed the “regular” justice system’s Prosecutor-General’s office (Fiscalía) to provide, within five days, information about the extradition process.

Prosecutor-General Néstor Humberto Martínez responded with a strongly worded 16-page letter alleging that the JEP has no authority to freeze an extradition process, adding that the newly formed body’s action “has left democratic institutionally threatened.” And in fact, the director of another body of the JEP, its Investigations and Accusations Unit, tweeted “I separate myself from the extradition suspension decision.”

The Colombian government’s Justice and Interior Ministries responded with a communiqué arguing that the JEP could not suspend Santrich’s extradition because the United States had not formally requested it yet. Colombian law gives countries requesting a citizen’s extradition 60 days to issue a formal request after that citizen has been detained. That would give the U.S. government until June 8 to issue the request. It has not done so, perhaps out of a desire not to appear to be influencing the May 27 presidential election campaign.

The JEP Chamber, however, stated that in its view, “the extradition process has already begun, because a detention for extradition purposes has been requested.”

There is no sense of when the Chamber may issue its determination of when Santrich committed a crime, or whether the Chamber may seek to determine whether there is even enough evidence that a crime took place. “Still, the political effect of the decision is immediate,” wrote Juanita León, director of La Silla Vacía.

Above all when the JEP issues it a few days before elections in which the candidate with the best chances of making it to a second round and reaching the Presidency [Iván Duque of the right-wing Centro Democrático party] proposes to make “adjustments” to the JEP that, in practice, would do away with it.

Debate over whether to extradite Santrich continues. Rodrigo Uprimny, founder of the judicial think-tank DeJusticia, believes Santrich should be tried in Colombia so that he may answer to his victims. An analysis in Semana magazine worries about the effect on ex-guerrillas’ desertion:

In the end, the consequences won’t be those of an ideal transition to peace or a return to the open war of the last decades. The scenario in play is intermediate, and has to do instead with the size of the dissidences that may return to the jungle. In other words, if Santrich’s possible extradition creates uncertainty among guerrillas that increases the number of dissidents, it may be best to allow him to serve his sentence inside the country.

An El Tiempo editorial contends that “rules are rules,” despite Santrich’s victims’ right to learn the truth from him.

It could be proposed that, without leaving aside at any moment the importance of the truth, the precept must come first that whoever doesn’t comply with the agreed rules must pay for it.

This, the editorial clarifies, only applies if the evidence against Santrich “leaves no doubt about his criminal conduct.” If so, “there would be no reason to insist that this [his extradition] poses an insurmountable obstacle to the implementation of what was agreed in Havana.”

Government Will Miss Its Coca Substitution Target

The Colombian government recognized on May 15 that it will not meet its target, set for this month, of 50,000 hectares of coca eradicated by growers voluntarily destroying their crops in exchange for economic assistance. That was the one-year goal the Presidency had set for its implementation of chapter 4 of the Havana peace accord, which establishes a national crop substitution program.

In fact, the program fell significantly short. Eduardo Díaz, the director of the crop substitution program, announced that families participating in the program had eradicated 36,000 hectares, of which 11,700 have actually been verified by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). The U.S. government measured 188,000 hectares in Colombia in 2016, and media have reported that the U.S. estimate for 2017 could be as high as 230,000. (UNODC’s 2016 estimate was 146,000, and media reports point to 180,000 in 2017.) The government forcibly eradicated 53,000 hectares in 2017.

Díaz blamed security conditions for the shortfall. He told CNN en Español, “In different zones where there are crops, narcotraffickers’ networks have advanced, have killed communities, have killed leaders, have threatened government officials and UN officials.”

Independent analysts place more blame on the slow performance of the Colombian bureaucracy. The idea of the government’s National Comprehensive Illicit Crop Substitution Program (PNIS, the main focus of the accord’s chapter 4) was to provide small-scale coca-growing households with two years’ worth of payments and help with productive projects in exchange for eradicating their coca. The economic benefits for each household would total about US$12,000 over two years. This week, the Ideas for Peace Foundation released a detailed report and dataset (Excel file) laying out the progress of the PNIS program as of March 31. In sum:

  • 123,225 families had signed collective framework community accords agreeing in principle to substitute crops.
  • 62,181 families (50.4 percent of above) had signed specific accords committing to a timetable of voluntary eradication and receipt of benefits.
  • 32,010 families (51.4 percent of above) had received at least one monthly payment.
  • 7,009 families (11 percent of the 62,181) had received any technical assistance to pursue an alternative productive project.
  • UNODC had found (in 2106) 22,025 hectares of coca in the municipalities (counties) where families had begun receiving payments.
  • UNODC had verified and certified the eradication of 6,381 hectares of coca (28.9 percent of above). (This is far fewer than the 11.700 hectare figure that the government substitution program’s Eduardo Díaz had given CNN.)

The report concludes,

The greatest advances of PNIS are found in the signing up of campesinos and the disbursement of payments, while it is falling most behind in technical assistance and in the supply of goods and services. Under those conditions, three months before the end of President Santos’s government, it will be difficult for the program to meet the goal of 50,000 voluntarily eradicated hectares.

The Ideas for Peace report notes that while homicides across Colombia have increased by a troubling 8 percent over this time last year, they are up by a very alarming 57 percent in the municipalities with crop substitution programs.

The Verdad Abierta website visited Briceño, Antioquia, where the PNIS began as a pilot project in 2015. In the coming weeks, the national government is to announce that the municipality’s residents will have eradicated all of their coca, about 567 hectares.

However, Briceño’s farmers told the site that “the campesinos complied, but the government has not.” While monthly payments have come on time, assistance for productive projects has hardly begun. “They did give us the payments, but in the agreement it said that as the payments arrived, then the productive projects to implement them would also arrive, so that we wouldn’t end up the way we are now: with our arms crossed and worried because the money has run out,” said a Community Action Board president.

“The state has a great responsibility with respect to the families who expressed their will to abandon the coca crops and who took part in the substitution process,” the Ideas for Peace report reads. “In the zones where the PNIS began to be developed, the link between populations and the state has been re-established. However, the lack of compliance with what was agreed not only has implications for institutions’ trust and credibility, it generates a risk of re-planting and a possible increase in hectares of coca.”

ELN to Cease Fire During Presidential Voting

The ELN announced that it will cease military activities for five days, from May 25-29, “to contribute to favorable conditions that might permit Colombian society to express itself in the elections” that will take place on May 27.

This raised hopes for a more permanent bilateral cessation of hostilities between government and guerrillas. However, the ELN’s chief negotiator in Havana, Pablo Beltrán, intimated that the group would be unlikely to agree to a ceasefire as long as social leaders continue to be killed at a rapid pace around the country: “We are fully disposed to do a cessation, but what about all the others? It’s not just a call on the military forces, but on paramilitarism, on all these attacks that different popular sectors are receiving.”

Asked about President Juan Manuel Santos’s hope that the ELN talks will leave behind a framework agreement—which, for the next president, would increase the cost of pulling the plug on the talks—Beltrán said that the ELN wants “to leave the accords at such a point of consolidation that any incoming government would have to respect them.” Any advancement, Beltrán added, would have to include more civil society participation; he did not specify what that might look like.

Timoleón Jiménez to Uribe: Let’s Go To the Truth Commission Together

Maximum FARC leader Timoleón Jiménez alias Timochenko published a lengthy communiqué about the status of the peace process on the eve of Colombia’s presidential election. “The peace accord is shielded,” it reads.

That’s what the Constitutional Court understood when it upheld Legislative Act 02 of 2017. The UN Security Council recognizes it. The community of nations accepts it and applauds it. We’re not going to force absolutely anything, the issue is simply to honor what was agreed when the Colombian state and our former insurgency gave our word. The beautiful dream of peace could be an irreversible reality if you [President Santos] decide to act.

Timochenko’s tone contrasts with that of the FARC’s de facto number-two leader, Iván Márquez, who said that if his close collaborator Jesús Santrich dies of a hunger strike while awaiting a possible extradition, his death “would also be the death of the peace process.”

In his statement, Timochenko asked forgiveness of Ingrid Betancourt, Clara Rojas, Sigifredo López, and other civilians whom the FARC held hostage for years. He called on former President Álvaro Uribe to join him in appearing together before the newly established Truth Commission to show the country “what the search for truth and the clarification of the truth look like.” Uribe led an intense military offensive against the FARC during his 2002-2010 presidency, and enjoyed the political support of many backers of right-wing paramilitary groups.

The presidential candidate of Uribe’s party, poll frontrunner Iván Duque, rejected the FARC leader’s invitation. “He can’t come here like a shameless person trying to appear as the equal of a good citizen. Instead, they should give reparations to their victims, tell all the truth, and pay their penalties.”

Military Operations Against FARC Dissidents

A joint Colombian Army-Air Force-Police operation killed 11 members of the FARC’s 7th Front dissident group in Putumayo. Among the dead was a commander named alias “Cachorro,” reportedly a close collaborator of Edgar Salgado, alias “Rodrigo Cadete,” who commanded the FARC’s 27th Front and abruptly abandoned the demobilization process last September. The 7th Front dissidents are a recent presence in Putumayo; they have been most active in Meta and Caquetá.

In Bello, just north of Medellín in Antioquia, an operation carried out by the Army and the Fiscalía captured Henry Arturo Gil Ramírez alias “el Feo” (the Ugly One), a top commander of the 36th Front dissident group.

In-Depth Reading

Tags: Drug Policy, ELN Peace Talks, Extradition, Weekly update

May 26, 2018

Last Week in Colombia’s Peace Process: Week of May 6-12

ELN Talks Restart in Havana

Government and ELN negotiators relaunched peace talks in Havana, Cuba on May 10, continuing a fifth round of negotiations that had begun in Quito, Ecuador on March 15. The process was interrupted on April 18 when Ecuador’s President, Lenin Moreno, suspended the country’s hosting of the negotiations. Moreno’s decision reflected a darkened national mood in Ecuador toward Colombian armed groups, after a FARC dissident group kidnapped and killed two journalists and their driver in March near the Colombia-Ecuador border.

This round of talks is covering three issues: the terms of a new bilateral cessation of hostilities, measures to shield communities in areas of combat between the ELN and other illegal armed groups, and a model for civil society participation in future rounds of talks, as envisioned in the negotiating agenda. “In the immediate term, this cycle will dedicate itself to agreeing on a new bilateral, temporary, and national ceasefire that is better than the last one,” said ELN chief negotiator Pablo Beltrán, referring to a 100-day bilateral ceasefire that was not renewed after it expired on January 9.

Negotiators are under pressure to come up with tangible results. In three months, Colombia will inaugurate a new president after electing a new one on May 27 (and probably after a runoff vote on June 17); most candidates have said they are unwilling to continue the peace talks in their current form. President Juan Manuel Santos and the Colombian Congress’s Peace Commission have both cited the need for a “framework accord” to lock in the talks before the next president takes office. While he realizes that he will not be the one to sign an accord with the ELN, Santos said his goal is to hand off to his successor “something that is on the right track.”

At a May 9 session of the congressional Peace Commission, diplomatic representatives from the Netherlands, Switzerland, Germany, Italy, Sweden, Norway, Brazil, and Cuba expressed support for the ELN dialogues’ continuation. Most called on both sides to make swift progress. The European Union’s high representative for foreign affairs and security policy, Federica Mogherini, gave a statement of support and called on both sides to reach a ceasefire, “which would significantly improve the humanitarian situation in the areas most affected by the conflict.” At the congressional commission hearing, government negotiator José Noé Ríos declared a goal of May 25—two days before the presidential elections’ first round—for reaching agreement on a ceasefire.

In an apparent move to ease a ceasefire, President Santos signed a decree green-lighting a case-by-case review of people imprisoned on charges having to do with social protest. The idea is to identify individuals who could be amnestied, or have their sentences commuted. This would be a goodwill gesture responding to a longtime ELN demand that the government release people involved in protests.

In opening comments in Havana, ELN leader Beltrán said the government’s poor compliance with commitments in the FARC peace accord, along with an increase in killings of social leaders, have heightened the ELN’s distrust. He added the view, though, that “the only road for Colombia, for a political solution, is that this way of dialogue goes ahead.”

The Colombian government’s chief negotiator, former vice-president Gustavo Bell, voiced hope that this round of talks would bring not just a bilateral ceasefire but an ELN commitment to cease all hostilities, like “kidnappings, extortions, child recruitment, or attacks on infrastructure.” Obstacles to a cessation of hostilities include which illegal activity would be included; how to verify it without cantonment of fighters; how the ELN would confront other illegal armed groups; and how to guarantee that all ELN leaders agree to observe it.

Negotiators are also talking to social organizations from areas hit by conflict between the ELN and other groups, which wouldn’t so clearly feel the impact of an ELN-government ceasefire, to discuss commitments to observe international humanitarian law. Ethnic, victims’, and women’s organizations in Chocó, where fighting has raged between the ELN and the Urabeños organized crime group, have called for respecting ethnic territories, de-mining, stopping recruitment of minors, halting killings of social leaders, ending displacement and confinement, and curbs on illicit crops and illegal mining. In Nariño, where many small armed groups operate, civil-society organziations have been calling for more action on de-mining. In Catatumbo, groups are calling on the ELN to keep the civilian population out of its worsening conflict with the EPL (Popular Liberation Army, a small but regionally strong guerrilla group), which has displaced almost 9,000 people since fighting worsened on March 14.

Jesús Santrich Case

FARC leader Seusis Pausias Hernández alias Jesús Santrich was moved from Bogotá’s El Tunal hospital to the Fundación Caminos de Libertad, a facility run by the Episcopal Conference of Colombia’s Catholic church. Santrich, one of the FARC’s main negotiators in Havana who expected to assume a seat in Colombia’s Congress in July, has been on a hunger strike since his April 9 arrest. He was indicted by a U.S. court for allegedly conspiring to send 10 tons of cocaine to the United States in 2017, after the FARC peace accord was signed, and faces possible extradition.

Santrich’s health is flagging after a month of consuming only water and epilepsy medication. Still, he has turned down entreaties to abandon his hunger strike, including an open letter from longtime informal mediators Sen. Iván Cepeda and former mining minster Álvaro Leyva. The ex-guerrilla, a political hardliner, has said he would rather die than go to a U.S. prison.

Some voices have called for Santrich to be tried in Colombia, where he would face his victims, rather than be extradited. These include former government negotiator and current presidential candidate Humberto de la Calle, Human Rights Watch Americas Director José Miguel Vivanco, and Colombian jurist Rodrigo Uprimny, co-founder of the DeJusticia think-tank. “To extradite FARC commanders before they are processed for their crimes could cause an irreparable harm to victims, to the extreme that they might evade responsibility for the atrocities they committed,” wrote Vivanco in an El Tiempo column. Both Vivanco and Uprimny, writing in El Espectador, cited the experience of 14 paramilitary leaders whom then-president Álvaro Uribe extradited en masse in May 2008. “The paramilitaries’ extraditions have made it almost impossible to know the truth about their crimes,” wrote Uprimny. “For these same reasons, I think Santrich should not be extradited.”

For their part, the two candidates leading polling for the May 27 presidential elections have both said that they would extradite. Rightist Iván Duque, the candidate of Uribe’s party, has said he would sign the extradition order immediately. Leftist Gustavo Petro, said that the transitional justice system agreed by the peace accord (Special Peace Jurisdiction, or JEP) should first consider all the evidence against Santrich. “If the JEP confirms the acts were committed after the accords’ signing and I am president,” Petro tweeted, “Mr. Santrich will be extradited.” Petro’s position is similar to that of President Santos.

Setback to Land Grants for Demobilized FARC Members

The Colombian government and the FARC have been casting about to find a way to reintegrate guerrilla ex-combatants by giving them land to cultivate. This, surprisingly, was not foreseen in the peace accord. The Santos administration had been close to issuing a decree allowing titling of lands for former fighters’ cooperative agricultural projects. The decree has run into trouble, though, over objections from the country’s principal federation of landholders.

A year ago, while demobilizing FARC fighters were concentrated in 26 village-sized disarmament sites around the country, Colombia’s National University surveyed them to gather information about their backgrounds and needs, as foreseen by the peace accords. It found that 66 percent of the 10,015 former FARC surveyed were from rural areas and another 15 were from rural/urban areas, such as towns within overwhelmingly rural municipalities. Sixty percent said they wanted to carry out collective reintegration through agricultural activities.

After meeting with his “peace cabinet” on April 30, President Santos said that “within the FARC there is a conflict: the leaders want everything to be collective, while the base, many of them, want it to be individual. As a result of this conflict, the FARC haven’t approved the individual reincorporation route, and resources for 5,000 ex-combatants’ productive projects are blocked by that dispute.” FARC leader Pastor Alape, a member of the National Reincorporation Council set up by the peace accord, responded, “Reincorporation is being slowed bye the lack of a public policy… and fundamentally, because there isn’t any land for the productive projects” that ex-guerrillas wish to pursue.

The Santos government’s draft decree sought to address this by making possible the delivery of some lands to ex-combatants. It had identified 11 plots of land in 9 departments, totaling about 492 hectares, that could be granted. The Center for Peace Studies (CESPAZ), which worked with the Presidency in drafting the accord, estimates that the amount of land needed to guarantee guerrillas’ reintegration would be 37,657 hectares, an amount smaller than many Colombian cattle ranches and industrial farms.

Nonetheless, the decree has been put on hold after the Society of Colombian Agricultural Producers (SAC), a national association of mostly large landowners, criticized it. “At no point does the accord mention giving land to the former members of this terrorist group,” said SAC President Jorge Enrique Bedoya, “and the draft decree that the government submitted for citizens’ consideration is giving prevalence to this specific group over landless farmers.”

The above information comes largely from a May 7 report from the investigative website Verdad Abierta. The site later posted this addendum to the report:

After this article’s publication, the Office of the High Commissioner for Peace (OACP) communicated with VerdadAbierta.com to inform that the national government decided to resolve the need to adjudicate lands to ex-combatants through the promulgation of Decree 756 of May 4, 2018. The document contains one article, which opens the door for the National Land Agency (ANT) to adjudicate lands directly to “associations or to cooperative organizations.”
The text does not correspond to the draft decree described in this story, nor does it align with the terms that the government and FARC negotiated in the National Reincorporation Council (CNR) to guarantee economic reincorporation. With regard to that, the OACP source who communicated with this site responded that the executive branch made this unilateral decision in response to the received critiques.

Truth Commission Formally Launches

May 8 was the official first day of operation for the Truth Commission established by the FARC peace accord. As of that date, the eleven commissioners have three years and six months in which to produce a report about what happened in the armed conflict, to promote recognition of victims, and to help generate conditions for “a culture of respect and tolerance.”

President Santos swore in the commissioners, led by Commission President Father Francisco De Roux, before a room full of high court officials and government ministers. De Roux and his colleagues had been working to lay the groundwork for the commission’s functioning, thanks to a UNDP grant, since they were chosen in November.

Over those months, the Commission held 22 workshops with victims and human rights defenders, as well as dozens of meetings with other stakeholders. It will now establish teams to cover 10 regions from 26 different offices. They hope to finish their report well before the deadline in order to spend the rest of their period educating about its content and promoting social reconciliation.

El Espectador asked De Roux, a Jesuit priest with a long record of heading human rights efforts, “What was the most serious thing that happened” in the conflict? He replied,

Human dignity was profoundly damaged by this conflict. Society’s silences, and lack of reaction, against the barbarity that we were living through. We just saw all of Ecuador stirred up by three journalists [killed by a FARC dissident group near the border]. We saw barbarity after barbarity happen, without doing anything, which is evidence of a very deep humanitarian crisis. Not just for the people who died, but for the lack of understanding, as a society, that the death of an indigenous person or an Afro-Colombian is the death of all of us. It is the undermining of our value as human beings and Colombian citizens. That’s where the wound is deep.

JEP Excludes “Para-Politicians”

The Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP), the transitional justice system set up by the peace accord to judge war crimes, rejected the applications of two politicians currently serving sentences for aiding paramilitary groups. Senator Álvaro Ashton and ex-senator David Char, the JEP’s “Chamber for Definition of Legal Situations” determined, did not commit crimes that could be considered “grave conduct related to the conflict.” As a result, they are not entitled to the maximum sentence of five to eight years of “restricted liberty” that the JEP would hand out in exchange for full confessions and reparations to victims.

Ashton and Char are among several dozen political figures who ended up before courts and in prison during the 2000s for aiding and abetting paramilitary groups that killed tens of thousands of Colombians. The scandal was known as “para-politics.” The JEP chamber’s decision, which can be appealed, reads, “The majority of members of Congress investigated and sentenced for conspiracy (the basic charge of ‘para-politics’) associated themselves with paramilitary structures neither to support them nor to win the war, but as a means to pursue their personal political interests.”

The chamber’s magistrates made clear that, in order to get a chance at a lighter penalty within the JEP, each crime’s relationship to the armed conflict must be clearly demonstrated. “It is not enough to say that something happened in the general context of violence,” El Espectador reported.

The JEP at some point will have to consider a petition from Jorge Luis Alfonso López, a para-politician who is the son of Enilse López, a Bolívar-based paramilitary sponsor named “La Gata” who has run the lottery gambling business in much of Colombia’s coast. Her son says “he has been directly and indirectly involved in the armed conflict” and wants to give information about politicians his family has financed, as well as military and police officers who worked with paramilitaries.

Universal Periodic Review in Geneva

It was Colombia’s turn this week for regular consideration of its human rights record before the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva. Colombia’s Interior Minister, Foreign Minister, and some human rights defenders were on hand for a Universal Periodic Review (UPR), which occurs about every five years.

Representatives of 95 governments offered comments about Colombia’s human rights situation. Nearly all of them said something about the rising number of social leaders and human rights defenders being killed in the country. The last time Colombia was subject to UPR, in 2013, the country’s human rights ombudsman’s office (Defensoría) counted 35 such murders. Between 2016 and now, it has counted 261.

The U.S. representative’s message was helpful, expressing concern about low levels of accountability for these murders, and noting targeting of ethnic and labor leaders. Though recognizing that about half of these cases have seen some advance in investigations or prosecutions, the U.S. representative said that they needed to be brought fully to justice.

The Colombian government responded that many of the killings owe to criminal groups’ violent efforts to take control of territories so that they may dominate illegal businesses like drug trafficking, precious-metals mining, and extortion. Colombian officials told the Council that it was carrying out a protection plan, and that in some way this plan was covering 4,000 social leaders, 60 percent of them in rural areas.

Colombian human rights organizations presented a joint report in Geneva. While they praised the government for the FARC peace accord and for making commitments on human rights, they criticized its lack of follow-through. “The Colombian state ends up adopting the [human rights] norm, but later it doesn’t implement it, or doesn’t put up enough resources to put it into practice,” said Ana María Rodríguez of the Colombian Commission of Jurists. Organizations present noted that the Council’s deliberations paid little attention to the paramilitary phenomenon, the responsibility of some businesses for human rights abuses, and the violations of privacy committed by Colombian intelligence agencies.

Attacks on “Rios Vivos” Movement in Antioquia

Luis Alberto Torres was killed in rural Puerto Valdivia, Antioquia, while mining by a riverside on May 8. Just eight days earlier, in the same municipality, gunmen killed Hugo Albeiro George in a local shop. Both men were members of the “Ríos Vivos” movement, formed to protest HidroItuango, a massive hydroelectric dam project underway in northern Antioquia.

“We hope that, in response to these acts, the Antioquia Police do not focus on dismissing and ignoring the leadership and human rights and environmental defense work that all of us members of Rios Vivio carry out,” read a statement from the organization. “Instead, we expect decisive action.”

Meanwhile, the Hidroituango dam project is in crisis. Since April 28, one of the tunnels used to divert the Cauca river has been blocked, raising the river’s level and forcing families to evacuate.

Response to Killing of FARC Member in Arauca

Unknown assailants killed Juan Vicente Carvajal alias “Misael,” a former FARC leader in the conflictive department of Arauca, about 4 kilometers from the FARC demobilization site in the village of Filipinas, Arauquita. As of early April, 52 FARC members had been killed nationwide since 2017.

Carvajal was among FARC leaders whom the U.S. government wanted in extradition for past narcotrafficking, and he led a FARC column during a bloody 2008-2010 conflict that the FARC and ELN fought in Arauca. This makes the ELN, which remains dominant in much of rural Arauca, a prime suspect in the murder.

Carvajal had left the Filipinas demobilization site, and had used his own resources to start a farm and run a discotheque in Arauquita. The security forces stated that they did not believe he was involved in criminal activity. He was living at his farm when he was murdered.

In a missive to FARC members, the ex-guerrillas’ maximum leader, Rodrigo Londoño alias Timochenko, warned them about going off on their own, as Carvajal had. While the ex-guerrilla’s homicide was “truly alarming,” Londoño said that it doesn’t mean that all former combatants are “condemned to total extermination.” Leaving the other ex-combatants and living by himself put him “in a high risk situation. …Discipline was always necessary… for the war, and I don’t know why some think that they don’t need it during reincorporation.”

In-Depth Reading

Tags: Demobilization Disarmament and Reintegration, ELN Peace Talks, Transitional Justice, Weekly update

May 15, 2018

Last Week in Colombia’s Peace Process: Week of April 29-May 5

Dire Warning from Former Chief Negotiator De La Calle

Humberto de la Calle, a respected former vice president and the Liberal Party’s low-polling candidate for May 27 elections, led the Colombian government’s team for all four years of peace talks with the FARC in Havana. On the campaign trail, he has been largely silent on the government’s subsequent implementation of what the accords promised. This silence ended April 29, when he published a brief statement to his website entitled “They’re throwing away peace.” An excerpt:

They’re throwing away peace. That’s it, in plain Spanish, without hypocrisy. They’re throwing away peace.
First, [former president Álvaro] Uribe and [Ivan] Duque [the presidential candidate of Uribe’s Democratic Center party] have been building a fabric of fallacies and hatreds that have brought much of the population into a nostalgia for the war.
The Constitutional Court opened the door for Congress to betray and slow down the accord. Cambio Radical [the party of right-of-center candidate German Vargas Lleras] joined with the Democratic Center in this task, with the support of Dr. Vargas’s vacillations. The FARC have also failed to take the step of showing enough empathy for Colombians.
And implementation has proved to be too much for the government.
This is a call on the nation. As we’re going, we’re heading into war with our eyes closed.

President Juan Manuel Santos emphatically rejected De la Calle’s assertion that his government has dropped the ball on accord implementation. Talking to reporters after a meeting with his “post-conflict cabinet,” Santos contended that their “exhaustive” review of what the government has done brought a “positive evaluation.” Critics of the process, he added, “can’t come and tell us now that the peace accords’ implementation is failing.”

Even though the armed forces have estimated that dissident guerrilla groups’ membership now totals 1,200, Santos insisted that the majority are the result of “forced recruitment.” The real proportion of guerrillas who have dropped out of the process and rearmed, he said, is “7 percent.”

Nearly a year and five months after the accords’ ratification, Santos said that the government has complied with 70 percent of the 80 indicators it had laid out for itself for the first two years of the post-accord period. He noted that by the end of May, the illicit crop substitution program carried out to fulfill the accords’ fourth chapter would bring about the voluntary eradication of 30,000 hectares of coca. The original goal for this program’s first year, Santos did not mention, was 50,000 hectares.

Aftermath of Jesús Santrich Arrest

FARC leader Seusis Pausias Hernández alias Jesús Santrich was moved from Bogotá’s La Picota prison to its El Tunal hospital for “preventive care,” as he has been on a hunger strike since his April 9 arrest. Santrich was indicted April 4 by a grand jury in the Southern District of New York on charges of conspiring with Mexican traffickers to transship ten tons of cocaine. Colombian judicial authorities are awaiting an extradition request from the U.S. government.

The Wall Street Journal reported late on April 28 that the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) has evidence pointing to a more senior FARC commander. Luciano Marín alias Iván Márquez, who served as the guerrillas’ chief negotiator in Havana and is often regarded as the FARC’s number-two leader, apparently appears in a cellphone video speaking “to an associate of a known Mexican trafficker.” The video was recorded after the peace accord went into effect, a source told the Journal.

[T]he video in which he speaks was intended as a message to reassure Mexican gang contacts following the seizure in Miami of an alleged drug payment. The Drug Enforcement Administration seized $5 million in Miami that the officials said was an alleged payment for a shipment of cocaine. The date of that seizure remains unclear.

After Santrich’s arrest, Márquez—a close Santrich ally within the FARC—abandoned Bogotá for an ex-guerrilla concentration site in his home department of Caquetá, in southern Colombia. From there, Márquez charged that Colombia’s Prosecutor-General (Fiscal General), Nestor Humberto Martínez, was behind the Journal report. (Martínez has been critical of aspects of the peace accord.) Martínez, however, announced that his office “is not working on any investigation against Mr. Iván Márquez with regard to narcotrafficking or actions that took place after peace was signed.”

While Colombian prosecutors may not be working a case, the U.S. Spanish-language outlet Univisión confirmed what the Wall Street Journal reported: that the DEA appears to have incriminating evidence.

The U.S. anti-narcotics agency (DEA) is investigating a high member of the Venezuelan government and one of the maximum leaders of the demobilized FARC Colombian guerrilla group, Luciano Marín alias Iván Márquez, for drug trafficking, U.S. government sources confirmed to Univision Noticias. The identity of the Venezuelan official remains confidential so as not to affect the investigation’s advance.
U.S. authorities are investigating a video of the 62-year-old ex-guerrilla leader in which he presumably speaks with someone presenting himself as a collaborator of the Mexican capo Rafael Caro Quintero, in a meeting that happened after the peace accord went into effect.

From Caquetá, Iván Márquez said that he would not take his seat in the Colombian Senate on July 20, when the new legislative session begins, if Santrich is not freed. (The peace accord gives the FARC five automatic seats in Colombia’s Senate and House during the 2018-22 and 2022-26 congressional periods.) FARC leader Carlos Antonio Lozada said that the ex-guerrillas are asking Márquez to reconsider. Because Márquez served briefly as a congressman during a failed 1980s peace process, Lozada said, “He has parliamentary experience and this would be extremely helpful to us.”

When the FARC met in late August and early September to launch its political party and choose its leadership, the delegates in attendance gave Iván Márquez the most votes. Though Márquez has not explicitly threatened to do so, should he abandon the process, because of this internal popularity he would be likely to take many ex-guerrillas with him. La Silla Vacía spoke with several former mid-level leaders who are seriously considering a return to clandestinity.

The same La Silla article analyzed how the Santrich case is exacerbating divisions within the ex-guerrillas. While Márquez has taken a hard line and insisted that his friend’s arrest is a “setup,” maximum leader Timoleón Jiménez and other moderates have stated that those who violate the law in the post-accord period must face consequences as agreed. These divisions existed during the peace talks, the article continues.

From Havana, while the negotiations were occurring, two sources told us separately that his [Santrich’s] sharp tongue and intransigence not only bothered the government’s negotiating team. Within the FARC team they also began to feel that he wasn’t allowing the discussions to advance, to the point at which they once said that it would be better if he returned to Colombia.
“Iván defended him and said that if Santrich went, he would go too,” one of the sources told us.
Later, during the convention from which the party emerged in September of last year, “Santrich and his people, most of them academics who had helped us from clandestinity, questioned Timo’s [Timoleón Jiménez’s] command. They said that it was the moment to renew and have civilian commanders, with more time and youth ahead of them, instead of military commanders. Some were quite rude to him,” a source who is part of the FARC party and attended those meetings told us.

In his missive warning about “throwing away peace,” former government negotiator De la Calle urged Colombia’s justice system to try Santrich in Colombia, rather than swiftly extraditing him to the United States. “His victims have the right to know the truth; don’t cast them adrift, as occurred with the extradited paramilitaries’ victims.” El Tiempo reported that De la Calle’s proposal was not catching on in Bogotá political circles.

Meanwhile, El Espectador reminds that the U.S. government continues to offer a US$5 million reward for information leading to the capture of Timoleón Jiménez or Iván Márquez, who are both wanted on charges of narcotrafficking that took place before the peace accord.

Alleged Irregularities in Management of Peace Funds

Colombia’s Prosecutor-General’s Office (Fiscalía) continues to investigate allegations of malfeasance in the awarding of contracts to implement programs to fulfill the peace accords. The Fiscalía is now looking at 12 people who may have served as intermediaries, receiving kickbacks in exchange for steering contracts to businesses or individuals. Prosecutor-General Néstor Humberto Martínez says that evidence includes 80,000 telephone records.

A key witness in this investigation is Marlon Marín, a nephew of FARC leader Iván Márquez, who also happens to be a key witness in the case against Jesús Santrich. Marín went to the United States on April 17, where he has agreed to give evidence against Santrich. The Fiscalía has also reached an agreement with U.S. authorities to allow them to question Marín about misuse of peace funds. Marín gave Colombian prosecutors hours of testimony about this before leaving the country. In a recording, Marín can be heard asking a would-be contractor for a 5 percent kickback, instead of the 12 percent “that traditional politicians ask for,” and said that his ties to the new FARC party’s leadership would be useful in securing contracts.

Colombia’s Treasury Ministry has hired the accounting firm Ernst and Young to review contracts granted by the Colombia in Peace Fund, the mechanism channeling hundreds of millions of dollars in funds from many international donors and from Colombia’s national budget.

Two Afro-Colombian Leaders Remain Detained

Prosecutors released several of 33 social leaders from southwest Colombia who had been arrested the previous week to face charges of collaborating with the ELN. However, two women leaders from an Afro-Colombian community along the border with Ecuador, in the Alto Mira region of Tumaco, Nariño, remain in custody.

In a Cali court, Sara Quiñones of the Alto Mira Community Council and her mother, Tulia Marys Valencia, were among a group of 11 local leaders being charged. Two of this group were freed, and one confined to house arrest. The other eight, including the two women, remain in custody. Prosecutor Roberto Gordillo demanded this because they are “a danger to society,” asking that they be charged with sedition and aggravated conspiracy to traffic drugs.

According to Verdad Abierta, “Several sources consulted, who for security reasons asked not to use their names, contended that Gordillo, the number 11 Specialized Prosecutor Against Organized Crime, made serious discriminatory, racist, and condemnatory references.” The prosecutor reportedly referred to Colombia’s Pacific coast as “a nest of criminals” inhabited by an “extremely violent” population. He went on, “attacking human rights defenders by saying that we mask ourselves in subversive activities and narcotrafficking,” a source told Verdad Abierta.

Presiding judge Moisés Malaver was apparently convinced by the prosecutor’s arguments, as he sent Quiñones and Valencia to await trial in the Jamundí women’s prison outside Cali. “Although the decision was appealed,” Verad Abierta reported, “its resolution could take two months.”

Tumaco Violence Degrades Further with “Casas de Pique”

Nearly 20,000 people marched in the Pacific port city of Tumaco, in Nariño near the Ecuador border, on April 27 to demand an end to violence between an assortment of dissident guerrilla bands, the ELN, and organized crime groups. La Silla Vacía noted that the march was organized mainly by the mayor’s office, the Catholic church, and the local Chamber of Commerce, with little participation of civil-society groups.

Tumaco’s police had been celebrating a streak of 25 days without a homicide in the city’s urban core (population about 100,000), even though it sits along the busiest cocaine trafficking route in Colombia. Local Police Chief Col. José Palomino credited a security crackdown including 24-hour military patrols of neighborhoods.

However, La Silla reported, “other sources don’t dismiss the possibility that homicides have been replaced with disappearances that, according to three sources, have shot upward.”

Many of the disappeared, it seems, are being tortured and dismembered alive in so-called “chop houses” (casas de pique) in the midst of Tumaco neighborhoods. This is a return to a practice that horrified many circa 2014, when reports emerged of gangs and paramilitaries using casas de pique in the larger Pacific port of Buenaventura.

The grisly news comes from the government Internal-Affairs Office (Procuraduría), whose Land Restitution unit issued an as-yet unpublished report documenting the existence of at least seven such houses in Tumaco. At least one may be operated by the “United Guerrillas of the Pacific,” a FARC dissident group headed by alias “David,” and at least one more by the “Oliver Sinisterra Front” dissidents headed by Walter Artizala alias “Guacho.” After disappearing and chopping up their victims, the groups take the bodies onto boats and dump them in the open sea.

“It’s a strategy to discipline people,” Internal Affairs chief (Procurador) Fernando Carrillo said. A Tumaco-based investigator told La Silla Vacía that most victims are “snitches” who gave information about the criminal groups, or people who didn’t make extortion payments.

Meanwhile in rural Tumaco, or perhaps just over the border in Ecuador, the dissident group headed by “Guacho” continues to hold two Ecuadorian citizens hostage. The group also continues to hold the remains of two Ecuadorian journalists and their driver, whom it kidnapped and killed in March. Ecuador’s government received an apparent message from Guacho early in the week asking that security forces pull out to create a “humanitarian corridor” to allow the group to free its captives and hand over the bodies.

Nothing has since happened, though. By the end of the week, Ecuador’s presidency secretary, Juan Sebastián Roldán, told a local television outlet, “We don’t have contact with the criminals,” and said that the situation of the two kidnapped people is in Colombian hands because they are not on Ecuadorian soil.

Violence in Catatumbo

Transportation and commerce resumed in the Catatumbo region of northeastern Colombia on April 30 after the Popular Liberation Army (EPL), a small but locally strong guerrilla group, lifted an “armed stoppage” that prohibited vehicles from transiting and businesses from opening for at least two weeks. The situation in the region remains tense, though, as the EPL and ELN, which have been in open combat since mid-March, continue to fight.

Norte de Santander human rights ombudsman Nélson Arévalo told El Colombiano that the historically conflictive coca-growing region had returned to “a semi-tranquility …because the conflict between those two illegal groups continues and may generate more displacement. For example, in the last several hours new combats have been reported.” Arévalo said that many of the thousands of people displaced by lack of food during the armed stoppage might now return to their homes, but that those who displaced for humanitarian reasons might remain in their places of refuge.

In a report for The Guardian, reporter Mathew Charles visited the region, and noted that much of the fighting seeks to occupy parts of Catatumbo abandoned by the FARC’s 33rd Front, which demobilized in early 2017.

Down the road, in the town of El Tarra, a group of locals gathered in the midday heat to call for peace. “The guerrillas should be fighting for the people, not against us. With Farc, we knew where we stood. They had their laws and they’d sort out any problems we had. Since they’ve gone, it’s just got worse,” said one woman.
Hovering above the protest is a Colombian army helicopter. “This is as close as the government gets,” said Álvaro, 22, pointing upwards.

Defense Minister Luis Carlos Villegas, visiting the Catatumbo municipality of Tibú, said that security forces there continue to carry out a campaign called “Sparta,” begun since January. Villegas said that security forces in that time have captured 168 members of the ELN and other groups.

The two presidential candidates who are furthest to the right on the political spectrum, frontrunner Iván Duque and Germán Vargas Lleras, have both paid recent visits to Catatumbo, a region where voters overwhelmingly supported the peace accord in a October 2016 referendum.

Vargas advised the region’s armed groups “to take full advantage of the three months they have left, because on August 7 [inauguration day] we’re going to fight them like they’ve never imagined.” Duque promised that “I will hold my first security council meeting in Tibú.” Both spoke as well about infrastructure investments. Neither mentioned forced eradication of coca, including aerial herbicide spraying, an option that both strongly favor. Past eradication campaigns have drawn fierce protests from organized farmers in Catatumbo.

In-Depth Reading

Tags: Weekly update

May 9, 2018

Last Week in Colombia’s Peace Process: Week of April 22-28

Jesús Santrich Case

Arrested FARC leader Seusis Pausias Hernández alias Jesús Santrich remains in Bogotá’s La Picota prison, where he is continuing a hunger strike that began after his April 9 arrest. He agreed to receive medical attention, but only from “trusted personnel.”

Colombia’s judicial system—both the transitional system set up by the FARC peace accord and the regular criminal system—are awaiting a formal request for Santrich’s extradition from the U.S. Justice Department’s Southern District of New York. That is where Santrich was indicted on April 4 to face charges of conspiring with Mexican traffickers to send 10 tons of cocaine to the United States.

The Colombian investigative website La Silla Vacía reported that three people with whom the site consulted,

(a journalist who has covered narcotrafficking for decades, an investigator who is an expert on the issue, and a lawyer who used to defend narcos), said that upon viewing the evidence, they were convinced that the case is not a fake setup.
… What they do believe is that it looks like “entrapment” by the DEA, which over several months put together an operation with undercover agents in order to catch someone in the act who believed he was negotiating with narcos.

Santrich’s closest ally in the FARC leadership, Iván Márquez, told an interviewer that until the jailed ex-guerrilla leader is freed, Márquez will not take his seat in Colombia’s Senate. (The peace accord gives the FARC five seats in each chamber of Colombia’s Congress for eight years, starting when the new session begins in July.) “How can I go on July 20 and be a senator… when they could go and tell me I’m a narcotrafficker? …What I’m saying is very hard because it means the failure of the peace process in Colombia.”

Márquez, who was the FARC’s lead negotiator in the Havana peace talks and is often referred to as the group’s number-two leader, was elected to Congress and served briefly during a failed 1980s FARC process. He left Bogotá in mid-April, relocating to a former demobilization site in a rural zone of his native department of Caquetá. If Márquez does not serve in the Senate, his seat will go to Israel Alberto Zúniga alias Benkos Biojó, the former commander of the FARC’s 34th front in Chocó and Urabá.

Márquez’s angry statements about the Santrich situation contrast with calls from other top FARC leaders, who have called for calm. “The moment we signed the accord, we accepted the constitution and the laws,” reads a statement from top FARC leader Timoleón Jiménez, “and it is our duty to act according to them. Whoever does not should prepare for the consequences, and it would be difficult for them to ask the [FARC] party’s solidarity.” A source in the FARC told El Tiempo of “alarm” within the organization about apparent divergence between the group’s hardliners, like Márquez, and moderates.

A key hardliner, Hernán Darío Velásquez alias “El Paisa,” abandoned the Caquetá demobilization site where he was living (Miravalle, the same site where Márquez is now), conditioning his return on Santrich’s freedom. During the conflict, Velásquez headed one of the FARC’s most deadly and powerful units, the Teófilo Forero Column active in south-central Colombia and occasionally in cities. According to La Silla Vacía, this unit carried out the 2003 El Nogal bomb attack in Bogotá, which killed 36 people; the 2001 kidnapping of 12 from a building in Neiva, the capital of Huila; the 2003 “house bomb” that killed 6 in Neiva; the 2000 assassination of congressman Diego Turbay; the 2002 airplane hijacking and kidnapping of a senator that triggered the end of the 1998-2002 peace process; and the 2012 bomb in Bogotá targeting former interior minister Fernando Londoño.

Interior Minister Guillermo Rivera pointed out that “El Paisa” is free to leave anytime. “The Territorial Training and Reincorporation Spaces are not a prison. People can come and go freely.” This is true at least until they are called to stand trial for war crimes in the new transitional justice system, the Special Jurisdiction for Peace.

“Alias ‘El Paisa’ was always resistant to the peace process,” Angela Olaya and James Bargent of the Colombian Organized Crime Observatory told La Silla. “It wouldn’t be strange if he finally dropped out of the process.”

“Of course he is in the process,” Iván Márquez told an interviewer.

Don’t you see how he’s working? I’m going to take his place while I’m here [at the demobilization site]. …I would like to keep seeing “Paisa” in this situation, and not in another, not in a confrontation. He isn’t thinking of war, he’s not thinking about being a dissident. He’s thinking of Santrich being freed and in resources coming to finance productive projects.

Local Leaders Swept Up in Wave of Arrests on Charges of ELN Collaboration

On April 20 and over the following weekend, Colombian authorities arrested between 33 and 42 individuals, including social leaders and former municipal officials, in the southwestern department of Nariño and the city of Cali. The Prosecutor-General’s office (Fiscalía) is charging many with being part of the ELN or its support network. Some have been released for lack of evidence.

Perhaps the best known of the arrested was Harold Montúfar, who served between 2004 and 2007 as mayor of Samaniego municipality in Nariño. One of several former Samaniego mayors or officials arrested, Montúfar was known as an active promoter of peace during, and since, his tenure. Samaniego has long been an ELN stronghold, and is notorious throughout the country for the large number of guerrilla-laid landmines scattered throughout its territory. Montufar has led efforts to make humanitarian demining possible, an effort that requires dialogue with local ELN leaders. In addition, he promoted a Local Peace Pact that brought important reductions in violence to the Samaniego region. Montúfar had traveled to Quito, where the government’s peace negotiations with the ELN until recently were taking place, to promote the idea of reviving the Pact.

“Activists who know Montúfar’s social and political trajectory” told Verdad Abierta “that at least since 2000, authorities have tried to link him to the ELN guerrillas.” Samaniego priest Jhon Fredy Bolívar told La Silla Vacía,

“Here anybody who doesn’t have a link to those people [the ELN] can’t live in Samaniego, because they enter houses, demand things, take food and basic goods, it’s part of the dynamic of the conflict we’re living through. Farmers, church, officials, everyone ends up getting tied to the conflict in some way because you help, or if you don’t help you must prepare for the consequences.”

Montúfar was freed later in the week.

Still in custody is Sara Quiñones, a leader of the Alto Mira y Frontera Community Council, an Afro-Colombian community settlement in Tumaco, Nariño, along the Ecuador border. She was arrested in Cali, where she had been taking refuge from death threats, along with her mother, Tulia Marys Valencia, who was also arrested. The Fiscalía accused Quiñones of being an ELN member since 2013, “in charge of financial tasks directed at subversive activities and narco-trafficking.” It accused her mother of being a presumed “guerrilla militia member” since 2013 “who has used her social work to carry out intelligence and recruitment tasks.”

Quiñones’s and Valencia’s arrests come just weeks after the Inter-American Human Rights Commission, on March 11, ordered protective measures for Quiñones and other members of the Alto Mira y Frontera leadership. Verdad Abierta reports that they are now being subject to cruel treatment.

Those present at this judicial hearing expressed their concern about the poor treatment that Sara Quiñones and her mother are receiving: “They’re strong, but they want to break them with the conditions. While some women are placed in a jail in the south that is newer with better conditions, they ended up in a station in the center of Cali, the most disgusting of all.”

The chief of the Fiscalía’s organized crime unit, Claudia Carrasquilla—who has a past record of going after paramilitary organizations—responded to questions with tough talk, as Verdad Abierta reported.

“It’s an investigation that had been ongoing in the Organized Crime Directorate against the ELN’s Southwestern War Front, in which it was evident that some former public officials and leaders were possibly at the ELN’s service, above all in the management of support networks and finances,” Carrasquilla explained.
“We knew that this was a complex process, that was going to generate what it is generating, the disagreement of the majority of human rights collectives, precisely because the majority of the arrest orders went against that type of people. But we wanted to go very strong, with very compelling elements, to be able to try them.”

The Black Communities Process (PCN), a grouping of Afro-Colombian organizations especially active in the Pacific region, condemned the arrests of Quiñones and Valencia as “judicial false positives.” PCN leader Charo Mina told Contagio Radio, “It’s a criminalization process, and it’s what we’re used to seeing from the Fiscalía, showing its opposition to the ELN dialogues.”

Procedural Law for Transitional Justice System Introduced in Congress

The transitional justice system set up by the peace accords to try war crimes, the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP), took another step toward being able to function fully. The last piece of legislation needed to establish it is now before Congress. Justice Minister Enrique Gil Botero presented a 76-article bill, drafted with input from the new system’s judges, that would become the JEP’s Procedural Law.

This is the third piece of needed legislation. Colombia’s Congress approved the first, a constitutional amendment, in May 2017, and it received Constitutional Court approval in November. The second, the statutory law governing the JEP’s functioning, passed the Congress in late November and the Constitutional Court is still reviewing it. Congress will also have to pass the new bill—which is far from guaranteed before the next session begins on July 20—and it will probably have to undergo court review.

These long delays occur while 6,094 former guerrillas, 1,792 current and former armed-forces members, 44 former civilian officials, and 6 private citizens await judgement in the JEP for alleged involvement in serious human rights crimes. Still, even without all laws in place, the JEP has been able to start working, getting established and beginning written reviews of case files. It has stumbled in recent weeks, though, as internal disagreements over structure and procedure turned nasty, resulting in the April exit of tribunal administrator Nestor Raul Correa.

Army Patrols Medellín’s Troubled Comuna 13

Comuna (Ward) 13, a complex of poor neighborhoods on Medellín’s western edge, became nationally known in 2002 when recently elected president Álvaro Uribe ordered an intense military offensive there against guerrilla militia groups. Operations Mariscal and Orion ejected the militias (essentially, guerrilla-tied gangs) with significant loss of life, only to end up replacing them with paramilitary-tied gangs, some of whom participated in the operations alongside the troops.

The Army was back in Comuna 13 this week, amid a crime wave. 300 soldiers are patrolling the neighborhoods in an effort to weaken violent gangs that residents call “combos” and local officials call “ODINs” (Organizaciones Delincuenciales Integradas al Narcotráfico, Narcotrafficking-Linked Criminal Organizations). Fighting between gangs in recent days had killed four people, confined people to their houses, and shuttered schools.

El Espectador explains the complicated situation:

As Medellín Security Secretary Andrés Felipe Tobón explained it, two illegal groups are present in the Comuna: La Agonía and El Coco, which have not only occupied territory for years, but are also aligned with two other larger, more powerful armed structures: the ODIN Caicedo and the ODIN Robledo. Carlos Pesebre formed part of the second group, and until recently it was under the command of Cristian Camilo Mazo Castañeda, alias Sombra, who was captured last Saturday in El Peñol municipality. As a result, the authorities’ conclusion is that the fighting this week responds—in large part—to ODIN Caicedo taking advantage of the momentary lack of leadership in ODIN Robledo to attack its structures.

Transportation companies—which are routinely extorted by gangs—have been especially targeted. A public bus was set on fire in the Calasanz neighborhood. Medellín Mayor Federico Gutiérrez blamed “Juancito,” the 45-year-old leader of the “Betanía” combo, for the threats and attacks on bus companies.

Authorities dismissed as fake several flyers circulating in parts of the city declaring a curfew enforced by the “Gaitanistas,” one of the names used by the Urabeños neo-paramilitary group. Still, residents of the marginal neighborhoods tell reporters that they are restricting their movements.

Medellín Police commander Gen. Óscar Gómez Heredia told El Colombiano that his force has 320 men patrolling the neighborhoods, in addition to the soldiers. But a reporting team from the Medellín daily wrote, “We passed through eight neighborhoods of Comuna 13 yesterday morning. In all of the zone, El Colombiano only found two police patrolling in the La Torre sector, and several soldiers posted alongside a military base.”

EPL “Armed Stoppage” Pauses in Catatumbo, Violence Continues

A humanitarian crisis continues in the Catatumbo region of Norte de Santander department, near the Venezuelan border. Home to the country’s second-largest concentration of coca crops, this neglected territory has strong social organizations and a historic presence of FARC, ELN, and EPL guerrillas.

The latter group (Popular Liberation Army), which is only active in Catatumbo, has been enforcing an “armed stoppage” for about two weeks, preventing road travel, confining people in their communities, and forcing businesses and schools to close. In the face of emphatic protests from communities faced with the possibility of running out of food, the EPL announced a 60-hour pause in its stoppage, from the morning of April 24 to the evening of the 26th.

The April 23 announcement read, “our guerrilla organization is open to dialogue to solve the differences between the two guerrilla organizations.” This refers to fighting that broke out between the EPL and ELN around March 14, and has since killed about 30 people and forced over 4,600 to displace.

The government calls the EPL “Los Pelusos,” and considers them a regional organized crime structure. The organization calls itself an insurgent group, organized as the Libardo Mora Toro Front, that can trace its lineage to a Maoist guerrilla organization that mostly demobilized in 1991. The EPL remnant has been growing, and estimates of its current size range from 130 to 400-500 combatants, which would make it at least as large as the ELN contingent active in Catatumbo. The EPL is also regarded as the wealthiest illegal group in Catatumbo. Its longtime leader alias “Megateo”—killed by the security forces in late 2015—built a vigorous operation trafficking cocaine across the Venezuelan border.

Verdad Abierta explained the EPL’s origins in a lengthy article published this week. It reports that the Libardo Mora Toro Front has been in Catatumbo since early 1982, where it coexisted alongside the FARC’s 33rd Front and two ELN fronts. As soon as it decided not to participate in the EPL’s late 1980s-early 1990s peace process, the Front involved itself in drug trafficking. After the 2015 killing of “Megateo,” alias “David León” took over leadership. He emphasized ideology and growth through recruitment until his September 2016 capture.

Since then, the EPL’s leadership has been in flux. “It’s gotten so that very young people arrive in power, who don’t have enough political education and who are more contaminated by narcotrafficking,” Wilfredo Cañizares of the Cúcuta-based human rights group Fundación Progresar told Verdad Abierta. “At least, that’s what the ELN members say: that they want to get the EPL out of the region because they’re tired of their mafioso way of acting, that they’ve lost their revolutionary vocation.”

Until recently, Verdad Abierta notes, “ELN guerrillas and members of the Libardo Mora Toro Front walked together through the same Catatumbo hamlets as though they were members of the same family, or at least the same organization.” They patrolled together and fought the military or paramilitary groups together. “Here in the region there were accords between guerrillas, and between guerrillas and the community: for example, not to use weapons or wear camouflage in the town centers; respect the work of social organizations; respect international humanitarian law; respect each armed group’s boundaries,” a resident of the central Catatumbo town of El Tarra told Verdad Abierta. “But the ELN and EPL mutually accuse each other of having violated those accords, of not respecting community work, of not respecting boundaries.”

The same source says much disagreement centers on the marketing of coca paste that they purchase from the region’s growers. The FARC had controlled much of this business until its late 2016-early 2017 demobilization. Competition between the ELN and EPL intensified.“The ELN pay COP$3.2 million or COP$3.1 million [just over US$1,100] per kilo of coca paste, two, three, four months at a time. On the other hand, “The Pelusos,” to win people over, started paying COP$3.5 million per kilo [US$1,242], all at once. And the ELN didn’t like that at all.”

Verdad Abierta reports that the situation has grown still more complicated with the presence of another actor in the region: intermediaries from Mexican cartels. “The Sinaloa Cartel is buying the majority of coca that’s coming out of Catatumbo. They are in the territory,” said Cañizares of the Fundación Progresar. Today, “we’re not talking about campesinos with three or four hectares, we’re talking about campesinos with more then 10 hectares of coca leaf.”

Criminal groups also make money by trafficking cheap gasoline from Venezuela, precursor chemicals, and weapons. Some specialize in refining a crude gasoline from oil siphoned from the Caño Limón-Coveñas pipeline, which passes through Catatumbo’s center. This gets used to refine coca paste from the dried leaves.

After a March 14 meeting between the two groups erupted in violence, ELN-EPL fighting has raged unabated. According to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), at least 90,000 Catatumbo residents have seen their ability to travel in the zone reduced or curtailed, in some places resulting in total confinement. At least 80 schools have closed their doors, leaving 45,000 kids without classes. OCHA also notes that armed-group pressure has 10 social leaders to abandon their organizations.

A leader of CISCA, a Catatumbo campesino network, noted to Verdad Abierta that some of the most violent communities are those that the Colombian government had pinpointed as priorities for implementing the FARC peace accord. “But, what has been done? Nothing. Neither crop substitution nor Territorially Focused Development Plans (PDETs). Nothing. Later, they’ll say they couldn’t do it because of the violence, even though the Accord was signed two years ago and this violence got worse only a month ago.” Cañizares of Fundación Progresar held a similar view:

“The FARC concentrated in Caño Indio [the demobilization site in Tibú municipality] and the Santos government said: now the state will arrive. And nothing. Before [2004], when the paramilitaries demobilized in Campo Dos [Tibú], the Uribe government said: the state is arriving. And nothing. When the EPL concentrated in Campo Giles [Tibú], the Gaviria government committed to building an aqueduct for that township. Today there is no potable water. The state never arrived, but those who did come quickly were the illegal armed actors.”

This week, in response to the crisis in Catatumbo, Mariana Escobar, director of the Territorial Renovation Agency—the new entity that implements the PDETs in compliance with Chapter 1 of the Havana accord—promised to present within 10 days a “road map” for structuring PDETs in the region. And a group of 2,000 soldiers from the Army’s Engineering Brigade arrived with promises to help meet infrastructure needs in the areas of ELN-EPL fighting. Vice-President Óscar Naranjo, visiting the city of Ocaña at Catatumbo’s periphery, said that 12,000 members of the police and military are already deployed in the region.

However, Defense Minister Luis Carlos Villegas and Army Commander Gen. Ricardo Gómez Nieto angered some in Catatumbo by insisting that conditions in the zone were calm. Villegas questioned the Norte de Santander governor’s decision to suspend classes in the region’s schools, and Gen. Nieto said that after a visit he saw little evidence of war.

According to La Silla Vacía, “part of the complexity of combating both the ELN and the EPL is that their men, in their majority, are born and bred in the region.”

They were recruited there and are relatives or friends of the zone’s inhabitants. So networks of paid informants don’t work as well here as in other regions. In addition, since both groups’ guerrillas spend much of their time dressed in civilian clothing, it is very hard to identify them. And as they’re in a border zone, when they’re chased, they go to the Venezuelan side.

Somos Defensores Reports on January-March Attacks on Social Leaders

The non-governmental organization Somos Defensores, which monitors attacks on human rights defenders and social leaders, published its latest quarterly report. It documents a dramatically worsening situation.

Forty-six rights defenders or local leaders were murdered during January through March: one every two days. That is up from 20 in the same period of 2017. Somos Defensores categorized their work as follows:

  • Community Action Board leader: 13 victims
  • Community leader: 11 victims
  • Campesino or Agrarian leader: 8 victims
  • Indigenous leader or rights defender: 7 victims
  • Economic, Social, Cultural rights defender: 3 victims
  • Afro-Colombian leader: 3 victims
  • Victims leader: 1 victim

Leaders of Community Action Boards (Juntas de Acción Comunal), hamlet or neighborhood-level advisory bodies first established in the 1960s, are heavily represented because many of their members are independent local leaders. Nine of the dead were members of a cross-cutting category: participants in coca substitution programs established by Chapter 4 of the Havana peace accord.

In 11 of the homicide cases, the report identifies the group presumed responsible. The security forces appear four times, paramilitary/organized crime groups three times, FARC dissidents twice, and the ELN twice. Thirty of the forty-six murders took place in just five departments: Cauca (8), Antioquia (7), Norte de Santander (7), Arauca (4), and Córdoba (4).

As Colombia’s slow-moving government apparatus struggles to respond to the problem, the Interior Ministry promulgated a decree that would make possible more collective protection measures for entire communities. According to Contagio Radio, the decree “seeks to create and implement an Integral Security and Protection Program for Communities and Organizations in the Territories, and define necessary measures that protect communities in an comprehensive manner.”

President Santos Visits U.S. Southern Command in Miami

While briefly in Miami, President Santos paid a visit to the headquarters of U.S. Southern Command, the Defense Department body responsible for U.S. military activities in all of Latin America except Mexico, the Bahamas, and Puerto Rico. In remarks, he effusively thanked those in attendance for 18 years of military assistance since Plan Colombia was launched in 2000. He also talked up the peace process using defense-friendly language.

Any asymmetric war today ends in a negotiation, regardless of what ends up being negotiated. And that’s what we did: a negotiation that from our point of view was a cheap negotiation. With regard to what we sacrificed, compared to what they were demanding at the beginning of the process, it was practically free of cost.
…That’s something the world is applauding, admiring, and studying, and this is something that was possible thanks to the very special relationship we’ve had with the Southern Command.

Meanwhile, while testifying in Colombia’s Congress about a military corruption scandal, Defense Minister Luis Carlos Villegas and Armed Forces Chief Gen. Alberto Mejía mentioned that during the previous week, they signed a 5-year cooperation agreement with the U.S. government to combat narcotrafficking.

In-Depth Reading

Tags: Human Rights, Human Rights Defenders, Transitional Justice, U.S. Policy, Weekly update

May 3, 2018