A murderous democracy
Fellner, Jamie
PRIVATE JUSTICE IN COLOMBIA A MURDEROUS DEMOCRACY CHAPTERS FROM A DIRTY WAR Newly revived hopes for peace in Central America are focused on the Arias plan and government-guerrilla negotiations....
...Americas Watch believes it is premature to conclude that the high command has authorized the political killings and disappearances...
...The security forces are at best indifferent to the murder of "subversives...
...Who employs the unidentified killers who pull up on motorcycles, shoot their victims, often before stunned witnesses, and disappear into the traffic...
...Some of the UP murders are the work of peasants and ranchers settling, scores with the FARC...
...The far right-frustrated by government policies which mandated dialogue, not war, with the guerrillas and unwilling to permit' 'subversives" to gain political power even by lawful means- turned to assassinations and disappearances...
...The government secured legislation that would open up Colombian politics, including, most importantly, the popular election of mayors...
...The peace process, in effect, gave birth to the dirty war that now exists in Colombia...
...Colombia's new Assistant Attorney General for the Armed Forces is one of the few bright spots in an otherwise bleak panorama precisely because he has managed, in a few cases at least, to break the previously unbroken and staggering record of impunity...
...Hec-tor Abad Gomez...
...But unlike the other homicides, Colombia's political assassinations seem to be part of a deliberate and organized effort...
...Colombia has aptly been called a murderous nation...
...Unable to find the guerrillas, they kill the more easily located UP party members...
...Dozens of Colombians have gone into voluntary exile in fear for their lives...
...It has failed to exercise sufficient control over its subordinates...
...There is much that is idiosyncratic about political violence in Colombia...
...Colombia is not Argentina or Chile...
...Some of the murders also originate in turf battles between the FARC and drug traffickers...
...A doctor, university profes-sor, Liberal party mayoral contender, and noted human rights activist, Dr...
...The most recent victim is Dr...
...Leal, the party president...
...According to police statistics, there were fifteen thousand voluntary homicides in Colombia last year...
...Colombia is a long-standing constitutional democracy...
...Colombians believe the hit list is evidence that the dirty war has widened to include the so-called ' 'periphery of subversion"-democratic sectors whose opposition to human rights violations must be silenced...
...Right-wing civilians-businessmen, landowners, drug dealers-create and arm death squads, employ and direct individual "sicarios" (contract killers...
...Most of these killings are street crimes, isolated ad hoc acts...
...Contradictory signals from the guerrillas also strengthened right-wing opposition...
...Few independent observers, and few persons with good contacts with the left- including with the guerrillas- find this thesis credible...
...Periodic skirmishes between the FARC and the military took a sudden turn for the worse last June when the FARC staged an ambush which left twenty-seven soldiers dead, forty-two wounded...
...Colombia endured decades of low-intensity guerrilla warfare...
...But even when acting independently, civilians act with impunity...
...The Colombian government claims, for example, that the president of the UP was killed by assassins hired by an important drug trafficker...
...On the other hand, they continued to extort and kidnap, undertook some offensive military actions, and, most seriously, seemed unwilling to advance beyond the terms of the original armed cease-fire...
...These lists, plus countless individual threats, delivered by phone or mail, have created a widespread climate of terror...
...In September 1987, the recently-appointed Assistant Attorney General for the Armed Forces, Omar Henry Velasco (the first civilian to hold that post), announced the interim results of his investigations into fourteen of the several dozen cases in which the UP had accused individual military officers of criminal abuses - including murder-against its members...
...No one knows for sure...
...In 1986, the UP earned 4 percent of the votes in national presidential elections, elected fourteen congressional candidates, and established itself as a serious political player...
...Jaime Pardo Leal...
...According to this thesis, the ultra-left is committing these murders so as to be able to accuse the right of authorship, tarnish the reputation of the armed forces, justify armed insurrection, and destabilize the country...
...First, negotiations with guerrillas cannot succeed when the civilian government does not firmly control or cannot persuade the military to adhere to its policies...
...In Colombia, the quantity of political homicides is staggering, but perhaps more ominous is the apparent inability of the government to do anything about it...
...Dirty-war victims also include eminently re-spectable liberal democrats, such as Dr...
...Impunity protects-and encourages-Colombia's assassins...
...The more probable thesis-and one accepted even by some high officials within the -government-is that Colombia's ultra-right is responsible...
...investigations will continue in several others...
...Members of the Colombian military are unquestionably involved in the dirty war...
...Determined to end the bloody stalemate in his country, in 1982 President Betancur began a "peace process" unprecedented in the hemisphere...
...There is some debate within Colombia as to the responsibility of the military high command for the dirty war...
...But not all Colombians have been enthusiastic about the UP's appearance on the political stage...
...Pardo Leal, former presidential candidate and leader of the left-wing Patriotic Union (UP), was assassinated on October 11...
...When assassins can kill at will, the difficult process of incorporating guerrillas into civilian life may prove impossible...
...But it is one in which two parties have monopolized political power for thirty years and have relied on state-of-siege powers and the military to maintain that control...
...The growing political violence in that country carries lessons of hemispheric importance...
...The killers are rarely detained...
...The FARC has recently joined with all the other active guerrillas in Colombia to form the "' Simon Bolivar National Guerrilla Coordinator," which is responsible for the November bombing of a cement factory...
...It is apparent, however, that the high command has done little to stop them...
...they cannot produce the ideal...
...Negotiations are a quest for the possible...
...But who is making these deadly calculations...
...these are done by people with authority, [members of the] security forces of the state, soldiers, and policemen...
...Other high-ranking government officials have also-publicly as well as privately- confirmed military complicity in human rights violations...
...According to Colombian human rights organizations, there were 3,547 political homicides between 1981 and 1986...
...The government claims there is nothing further to negotiate except the FARC's permanent disarming...
...There are over seven hundred reported disappearances...
...In the past few months, numerous new death lists have come to light...
...it has failed to seek out right-wing paramilitary groups with the same vigor as it proceeds against left-wing guerrillas...
...To date, the United States has ignored the Colombian experience...
...Nevertheless, Central America can draw at least three key lessons from Colombia's experience...
...They reveal a national predilection for settling accounts-be they personal, commercial, drug-related-with violence...
...coldly calculated and coordinated" (El Tiempo, August 27, 1987...
...On the one hand, the guerrillas talked peace, signed the ceasefires, ended most military operations, launched the UP, and negotiated with the government...
...as the respected Colombian newsweekly Semana pointed out in September, 99 percent are leftists or, at the very least, critics of the status quo...
...It is precisely this goal which connects what is happening in Colombia with Central America...
...Abad was gunned down on August 25 last year...
...Few of the victims come from the political center or right...
...and torture...
...the official investigations almost invariably come up empty-handed . No one has been convicted for any of the UP murders...
...Militarism and criminal conduct by the guerrillas fuel militarists on the other side...
...But just south of Central America, in Colombia, a five-year effort to negotiate a lasting peace with that country's guerrillas lies gravely wounded, victim of a dirty war that has killed thousands of Colombians...
...The wave of attacks against the left is...
...The will and capacity to use violence is widely dispersed throughout Colombian society...
...a murder rate roughly five times as high as the United States...
...Their apparent goal is to sabotage the negotiations with Colombia's guerrillas and the concomitant opening up of Colombia's political system initiated by former president Belisario Betancur (1982-86) and continued today by President Virgilio Barco...
...estimates for 1987 range between a thousand and two thousand...
...Members of the UP who have been killed include four elected congressmen, two mayors, and twenty-two council members, in addition to Dr...
...The government has repeatedly pointed to the UP as proof of the resilience and promise of Colombian democracy...
...Even before the assassination of Leal, Colombians who supported the peace process were extremely pessimistic about its prospects...
...The military high command must also be prepared to restrain, and if need be punish, subordinates who dissent from official peace-oriented policies...
...Sufficient evidence existed in six cases to initiate formal disciplinary'or penal proceedings against military officers for abuses against civilians...
...Second, violence will continue if the guerrillas do not unequivocally demonstrate their commitment to peace...
...It can do so no longer...
...Any given death of a political figure may be the result of any number of different factors...
...As noted Colombian columnist Enrique Santos Calderon points out: "What is happening is neither by chance nor accidental...
...at worst, they actively assist...
...Over three years ago, then-Attorney General Carlos Jimenez Gomez denounced the participation of fifty-nine members of the army in MAS, Colombia's most infamous death squad...
...In 1984 cease-fire agreements were signed with all but one of Colombia's major guerrilla organizations...
...The de facto exclusion of opposition forces from the political system, coupled with grave social and economic inequalities, nurtured-and to some degree legitimated-armed insurgency...
...Pardo Leal produced at least one retaliatory murder by the guerrillas, plus eleven deaths in violent confrontations between police and outraged citizens in the two days following the assassination...
...There are those, principally within the military and in certain right-wing sectors, who believe the deaths respond to a Machiavellian plan of the armed left...
...Americas Watch and Amnesty International have both charged members of the Colombian military with human rights abuses, including assassinations, disappearances...
...And the sources of violence overlap, interact, and mutually reinforce each other with an ever-increasing rise in the body count...
...If it is clear that elements within the military are deeply involved in the dirty war, it is also clear they are not its sole participants...
...Assassins have also killed nearly 300 other UP members and sympathizers since the party was founded in 1985...
...it has failed to ensure effective and impartial criminal prosecutions by military judges...
...again, UP members suffer because of their association with the FARC...
...The interaction of civilian guerrilla and military crime in a national context of rampant violence and "private justice" makes the dirty war in Colombia extremely complicated...
...Moreover, guerrillas must seek to balance common sense and political realism against ideological goals...
...The government's policy was to reach agreements whereby the guerrillas would lay down their weapons-but not surrender-being able to participate in civilian politics, and eventually dismantle their military apparatus...
...Although several guerrilla groups returned to open combat within a year, the FARC-Colombia's oldest, largest, and best organized guerrilla organization-continued to respect the cease-fire...
...The murder of Dr...
...In Colombia, guerrilla insistence on maintaining the capacity to wage war until the armed forces are "purified" is an insistence on violence...
...Hardliners within the guerrillas believe their intransigence has been vindicated by the repeated military attacks on and assassinations of FARC and UP members...
...Colombia proves yet again that political peace and respect for human rights are inextricably entwined...
...JAMIE FELLNER Jamie Fellner is a consultant for Americas Watch...
...They do so independently of, as well as in association with, members of the military...
...Many analysts believe the creation of the Coordinator augurs ill for peace...
...The rule of law must exist in deed as well as word...
...Third, the pursuit of peace will be frustrated if political crimes, such as assassination, go unpunished...
...But most of the murders, it seems, stem from fierce political intolerance...
...The FARC refuses even to discuss abandoning its arms as long as the government does not disband the country's death squads, "purify" the military, and put an end to the murder of UP members...
...From the outset, influential military and civilian sectors opposed a negotiated peace with the guerrillas, distrusted their commitment to peace, and were unwilling to accept participation by the legal far left, the UP, in Colombian politics...
...In exchange, the government would offer political and social guarantees to allow ex-guerrillas into the political system and would promote much-needed political, social, and economic reform...
...Judicial systems must function, criminals - guerrilla, civilian, or military - must be caught and prosecuted...
...Guerrillas have killed civilians, and they have even killed left-wing civilians, but they are not responsible for the assassinations plaguing Colombia's left...
...In 1985 they created the Patriotic Union (UP), a legal left-wing political party which would test Colombia's willingness to embrace new political forces...
...Never strong enough to seriously threaten the government, the guerrillas proved resilient and resourceful enough to resist elimination...
...In 1986 Gomez proclaimed: "in Colombia there is killing, there is torture, there are disappearances...
...His name had appeared on a deathsquad "hit list" of thirty-four noted politicians, journalists, artists, professors, and members of human rights organizations...
Vol. 115 • January 1988 • No. 1
