Articles by Robin Kirk
- In Her Own Words - Through Online Journal, She Talked Turkey - Special to The Washington Post - Sunday, June 17, 2007; P08
When we told my 12-year-old daughter, Frances, that our family would be living in Istanbul for four months, the howls of dismay could be heard two blocks from our Durham, N.C., home. "And leave my school?" she cried. "My friends?" ...
- Human Rights as a Contest of Meanings - Human Rights, Democracy, and Islamic Law (Volume I, Dossier 1) - Fall 2004
Not since the civil rights era have human rights been so much a part of public debate within the United States, about the United States, and among American institutions, the media, and the public. The events of September 11 changed many things, among them attitudes about and conduct in human rights. Much of the change has been disturbing, if not shocking. However, it has also revealed important inconsistencies and divisions within the human rights rhetoric that many took for granted. ...
- Colombia and the “War” on Terror: Rhetoric and Reality - The World Today - March 2004
The Islamic fundamentalism that inspired the September 11 2001 attacks on the United States is unknown in Colombia. Yet the aftermath has changed the country’s relationship to the world and especially America. Colombia’s decades-old internal armed dispute is now described and understood differently, through the newly energised rhetoric of a global ‘war’ on terrorism. ...
- Call Colombia's human rights bluff - The Observer - Saturday February 7, 2004
Colombian president Álvaro Uribe arrives in Europe this week. It is his first visit since signing a UK-brokered deal last year under which he pledged to improve his country's track record on human rights in exchange for more European Union aid. ...
- Recorded in Stone: The women of Peru’s Shining Path, revisited - University of London Institute of Latin American Studies - October 16, 2003
Using the story of Betty, a former Shining Path fighter in Peru, I open a discussion of her memories of being an agent of violence in Peru as well as her unusual position as a story teller speaking as someone who committed atrocities – and admits it. ...
- Colombia: 'Checkbook Impunity' for Murderers - Colombia may let paramilitary thugs buy their way off the hook - Published in the Los Angeles Times - September 14, 2003
Colombian President Alvaro Uribe has presented a bill to his Congress that would allow paramilitary members who have committed atrocities to skip prison for a fee. Among them are men the United States has identified as terrorists for their willingness to massacre Colombian civilians. ...
- Colombia's Mortal Paradox -- Exporting Drugs Means Importing Chaos - January 26, 2000
A billion dollars seems like a lot to spend for guilty pleasure.
But that is what the Clinton Administration proposes in Colombia -- a billion dollars to fight drugs this year, and another half billion in 2001. ...
- Sanctioning brutality in Colombia - Washington Times - Commentary - August 19, 1999
Colombia's military and its Washington admirers claim that the most abusive army in the hemisphere has turned over a new leaf. Soldiers, they say, have purged human rights violators within their ranks and are pursuing the paramilitaries that have converted much of the country into a killing ground. ...
- Lori Berenson's Grim Future -- Prison Life For Guerrillas Worsens Under Fujimori - January 16, 1996
Twenty-six-year-old Lori Berenson has just begun a life sentence in Peru for supporting an obscure rebel group. Photographed before her conviction as she shouted defiantly, I wondered if she yet grasped what price she and her family will pay for her beliefs. ...
- Dispatches From a Forgotten Front - Peru - Commando-Style Journalism - Colombia Journalism Review - May/June 1991
It was at the desolate, wind-swept army base called Castropampa that I saw first-hand what a thorn in the side La Republica's investigative unit, Unidad de investigacion, is to the powerful in Peru. La Republica got its start as a sensationalist crime tabloid in 1981. Since then, it has turned into a serious paper, and its combative, muckracking style has won its second place in Peru (circulation 105,000), not far behind the leading paper, the staid El Comercio. ...
In Her Own Words - Through Online Journal, She Talked Turkey
By Robin Kirk
Special to The Washington Post
Sunday, June 17, 2007; P08
When we told my 12-year-old daughter, Frances, that our family would be living in Istanbul for four months, the howls of dismay could be heard two blocks from our Durham, N.C., home. "And leave my school?" she cried. "My friends?"
Assurances that such a trip would be "fun," "an adventure" and even "educational" did not convince her. While my husband, Orin, and I busied ourselves with renting the house, stashing the cars and finding temporary homes for the pets, we worried about Frances. Would the next four months be unalleviated pain for her? Would every sight go unseen through a veil of tears and tantrums? Was it really, in the end, worth it?
Enter the Internet. A former student of Orin's, now a professor at Istanbul's Sabanci University, had been our inspiration for applying for Fulbright grants to teach in Turkey, and she quickly proposed a cure: a Turkish friend to exchange instant messages with. She arranged for a 12-year-old girl named Defne to message Frances, with promises of outings and other attractions attuned to a preteen sensibility.
The transformation was instantaneous. The most famous sites of this ancient city -- the monumental Hagia Sophia church, the ruins of castles and aqueducts, the museums and incense-filled churches -- were of no immediate interest to our daughter. Instead, Frances's new friend promised a roller coaster ride inside Cevahir, Europe's largest mall; movie theaters with recliners and intermissions for snacks; and concerts by A-list pop stars, including a September performance by Pink, a favorite.
To capitalize on this Internet interest, I set up a blog for our family to post to during our trip. Once we were in Turkey, the blog ( http://www.kirkstarn.blogspot.com) became the main way we kept in touch with friends, grandparents and neighbors. The blog also eliminated the need of sending lots of repetitive e-mails. But the best part was that it inspired Frances to look forward to Turkey and enjoy it while we were there, writing about her experiences for an audience.
The blog, Turkey Adventures, did not just list the famous places we visited. More important, it was a way to share what "normal life" was like and to give Frances a way to chronicle her unique perspective.
She began posting even before we left. While her trepidation was obvious, it also became clear that part of her was looking forward to the trip:
I'm kinda scared, yet I'm anticipating it greatly. I know that I'll miss everything so much . . . I'm eagerly awaiting my penpal to write me, I hope I can have some pre-connection to Turkey. I think it's going to be cool cause I am going to get to communicate with the 7th graders (currently 6th graders) and e-mail them pictures and such about my Adventures. =]]] . . .
I think that it is going to be hard for my emotions because I have so many great friends in the states, I just want to be able to communicate with them one on one, beyond e-mail. . . . E-mail just takes so long.
Indeed, after we arrived in Turkey, Frances spent many late nights messaging her friends back home and despaired of finding Istanbul buddies. That soon resolved itself, however, when school started -- a private international institution that had Turkish students as well as a polyglot of Europe and the Turkic diaspora. Within two weeks, Frances was getting around the city on her own with her new friends.
Frances began to use the blog as a way of appreciating the historical sites that would have otherwise been so "boring" for her. During one outing to Hagia Sophia and the Basilica Cistern, she took over the camera and shot the pictures we uploaded to our blog. As we prepared to return home, the one place she wanted to visit again was not the shopping mall but the Hagia Sophia, with its mysterious graffiti and mosaics that seem to glow with light. Above all, the idea that other people cared about what she was doing and would read her opinions convinced her that spending a bit of time away from home was actually fun.
The posts I relished most had nothing to do with history, however. They were about school, friends and living far from familiar things.
It was sometimes a chore to remind Frances to write, but it took little encouragement once she began seeing comments from her audience. Midway through our stay, she was clearly beginning to enjoy herself, against her will:
Istanbul is getting to be home, the bus to and from school is horrible . . . and school is tiring. Just like home. :) But, I actually like it here. I like my room, friends, the pets across the street. It's becoming . . my city. Just like Durham is my town. I have exams in almost all of my subjects coming, which is kind of scary . . .
I'll tell you about Akmerkez. I know that's what you have wanted to hear about since the day you were born. Shopping malls. :) So, Akmerkez is huge, huge, huge. 5 stories, everything from pets shops, cds stores, and even a cinema. And, of course, a starbucks. . . .
And lots, lots, lots of clothing stores. Two adidas & nikes. . . . Akmerkez is a 3 or 4 stop bus ride & 7 minute walk from Selins house. Can you say a home away from home?
Blogs represent a new way to travel and experience the world. Frustrating moments are captured as they happen, putting the lie to any notion that living in another culture, even one as welcoming as Turkey's, is easy. But as we prepared to return to our "normal" lives, looking over our blog made me appreciate how busy we had been -- and how much Frances had, despite her initial misgivings, absorbed this adventure.
Consider one of her final posts:
I am happy to say that with all of the goodbyes I've had to say this past week, it might all pay off when I get to go to school in NC and say "Hi! I missed you." But when I look at my brother (who was the victim of a very tragic haircut), I can only hope that he'll remember Istanbul for more than the picturesque scenes in Aya Sofia, and the amazing statues in the Archeology Museum. I can only hope he'll remember the sound of the street-vendors pushing their carts up and down the hill yelling "SARINGE." I can only hope he'll remember the names of all the cats in the parking lot across the street, and the feeling of the cold wind or rain drumming on our hair at 7:22, 7:10, or 7:19am when we waited for the BSTC #55 bus to take us to school. But most importantly, I hope he'll remember the names of his friends, teachers, and school, so if he looked at a picture of it one day, he can say, "Yes, I was a student there. I remember very well."
Wow, that was . . uh, adultlike. I gotta stop those moments.
Much Love,
Frances
Robin Kirk, the author of three books on Latin America, teaches at Duke University.
Colombia and the “War” on Terror: Rhetoric and Reality
By Robin Kirk
Published in The World Today, a publication of the Royal Institute of International Affairs
March 2004
The Islamic fundamentalism that inspired the September 11 2001 attacks on the United States is unknown in Colombia. Yet the aftermath has changed the country’s relationship to the world and especially America. Colombia’s decades-old internal armed dispute is now described and understood differently, through the newly energised rhetoric of a global ‘war’ on terrorism.
The political incentive behind such rhetoric is obvious: it allows Colombia to reposition its conflict as worthy of international attention and, with it, financial and military support for government efforts to combat the violence.
But there are other more disturbing consequences. Particularly when terrorism is presented as a phenomenon influenced by or linked to the Middle East, it can mask serious deficiencies or even profound contradictions in the way that Colombia and its allies search for an end to political violence, respond to groups that employ terror, and develop realistic solutions to the country’s problems.
Clearly, Colombia faces serious threats to its democracy. Left-wing guerrillas and right-wing paramilitaries represent a combined force of over forty thousand armed and trained fighters. Both groups pay for war with profits from illegal activities, among them kidnapping, contraband, and the international trade in weapons and narcotics.
Of these, narcotics is the most robust single resource for the illegal armies. The country is the main producer of cocaine and has surpassed Asia in providing American consumers with heroin. The US government estimates that Americans, the largest single group of illegal drug consumers, spend $46 billion annually on the two drugs.
A percentage of this profit goes into the pockets of armed groups, who use it to pay fighters and buy weapons, uniforms, food, equipment, vehicles and munitions. Their main targets are civilians and the preferred method of attack is terror, through massacres, car bombs and indiscriminate violence.
Last year human rights groups registered more than 2,500 killings of civilians as a result of political violence. Each day an average of 650 people were forced to flee their homes. Torture remains commonplace and hundreds, including a former presidential candidate, a senator, a governor, and members of Congress, are held hostage by guerrillas. Survivors of attacks do not hesitate to describe themselves as terrorised.
Robbed of legitimacy
Certainly, Colombia is not new to the term ‘terrorist’. Both the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia-People’s Army (FARC-EP) and smaller Camilist Union-Army of National Liberation (UCELN) guerrillas appeared on the first American list of foreign terrorist organisations in 1997. On September 10 2001, Washington added the United Self-Defence Groups of Colombia (AUC), a paramilitary coalition that represents at least ten regional groups.
Once three years of negotiations with the FARC-EP broke down in February 2002, then President Andrés Pastrana successfully lobbied the European Union to include guerrillas on its terrorist list. Used in this way, the term ‘terrorist’ robbed guerrillas of legitimacy and shifted blame for failed talks onto their shoulders.
Objectively, however, there was little difference between guerrilla behaviour during the talks — when the president rarely used the term terrorist — and their behaviour after negotiations collapsed. Even as guerrilla negotiators sat down with their government counterparts in 1999, 2000 and 2001, fighters kidnapped, carried out massacres and launched attacks against towns, often with catastrophic effects.
With the inauguration of President Álvaro Uribe Vélez in August 2002, the terrorist rhetoric from the presidential palace at once broadened and hardened. More than any previous Colombian president, Uribe has deployed the word terrorist to describe the country’s illegal armed groups and their actions, and has gone so far as to link them to Islamic fundamentalists.
In his inauguration speech, for example, Uribe used terrorism to refer to ‘any violence against [a democratic state]’. As the US prepared to topple Saddam Hussein in Iraq, the president added Colombia to the ‘coalition of the willing’ — the only South American nation to join — and explicitly linked Colombian violence to events in the Middle East.
Colombia, he asserted, was ‘a more serious menace [to the world] than Iraq’. Since nations were mobilising to contain the Iraqi threat, he argued, ‘why don’t they consider an equal, similar deployment to put an end to this problem [in Colombia], which has the potential for such serious consequences?’
Uribe also followed the US example in declaring certain fighters ‘illegal combatants’, suggesting that they are ineligible for rights guaranteed to combatants by international law. ‘I don’t acknowledge [guerrillas] as combatants, but instead call them terrorists,’ Uribe said last June. ‘[It’s necessary to leave behind] this story that we must recognise
their status as combatants.’
In important ways, Washington has reinforced this shift. In 2002, the White House received congressional permission to use military assistance in Colombia to directly engage groups identified by the State Department as terrorists. Previously, this aid could only be used in counter-drug operations. This year Colombia is likely to receive over $680 million in mostly military aid from America, placing it among the top five countries benefiting from US military assistance.
General James T. Hill, head of the US Army’s Southern Command, routinely describes illegal drugs like cocaine and heroin as ‘weapons of mass destruction’ and links drug sales to support for ‘international terrorist organisations such as Hizbollah, Hamas and Islamiyya al Gammat, which have support cells throughout Latin America.’
Dangerous decisions
However, a wealth of studies demonstrate that most of the profits from the sales of cocaine and heroin benefit American dealers, not foreign terrorists. The rhetoric of global terrorism used on Colombia can lead to serious flaws in analysis. For instance, Colombia’s history is nothing like that of the Middle East, with its dominant theme of religious conflict.
Colombia’s fighters, both legal and illegal, are strikingly similar in age, ethnic background, skin colour, language, gender, economic status and religion. With a very few exceptions, the armies target other Colombians, not foreigners, and have even gone to great lengths to exempt or shield foreigners from attack.
Neither the guerrillas nor the paramilitaries have ever launched an attack on the US or Europe — though guerrillas in particular will kidnap the occasional foreigner for ransom. While fighting or refugees have spilled over the border, most of the energy and weaponry is focused on Colombians, not outsiders.
But the problem is not just one of faulty description. The ‘war’ on terrorism rhetoric prepares the way for dangerous decisions that promise to perpetuate political violence well into the new millennium.
For instance, the paramilitaries continue to maintain a clandestine alliance with units of the security forces — particularly the Colombian army — and some economic elites, like ranchers and local politicians. Yet the government does little to suppress this source of terror, cut these links, or root out the corrupt government officials who work with known human rights abusers.
On the contrary, the Uribe administration has avoided challenging paramilitaries in the field, in sharp contrast to its robust campaign against guerrillas. Using the considerable power of the law, the Attorney-General has also blocked or detoured investigations against paramilitaries, meaning that impunity has become the rule in the courts.
Under the guise of demobilisation talks, the government has gone even further. If it prevails against intense international pressure, it will ensure impunity for the paramilitaries who have committed some of the bloodiest crimes in Colombian history.
Take, for instance, the case of AUC commander Carlos Castaño. Currently, Castaño has been convicted of ordering the assassination of one presidential candidate, has admitted to the assassination of a second, as well as a Colombian senator, and was found guilty last year of planning two massacres in 1997 with an estimated 45 victims. There are over forty additional arrest warrants for him related to massacres, killings, and cases of torture and death threats.
Yet under a bill presented to Congress, Castaño could wipe his record clean by making a cash payment, promising to reform, and remaining in a certain region for five years. As the feared warlord has already let it be known, he would then be legally able to pursue a seat in Congress or even run for president.
Paramilitary power
Efforts to dismantle the guerrillas — while leaving paramilitaries virtually untouched — have had dramatic impact in places like Barrancabermeja, in the country’s steaming centre. Long an engine of economic power, the city hosts the country’s largest oil refinery and is a major port along the Magdalena river. For over a decade, the UC-ELN guerrillas profited from extorting the multinational oil companies that pipe crude in and extract marketable fuels.
That changed in late 2000, when a combined assault by paramilitaries working with official tolerance and, in some cases visible support, dislodged the guerrillas from the city’s slums within a matter of months. But instead of reasserting control, the government has ceded de facto authority to paramilitaries, who now set rules, collect extortion, and mete out punishment.
‘The military and police authorities show that they are incapable of exercising authority, which permits [paramilitaries] to maintain their structure and control of the area,’ explains Yolanda Becerra, a human rights defender from the Popular Women’s Organisation (OFP), a Barrancabermeja-based human rights group. ‘Killings continue... The paramilitaries control the job contracts issued by Ecopetrol [the state-run oil company]. They prohibit all protest marches. They force people to support their political candidates. And the authorities claim that they can do nothing against them.’
In January, Becerra narrowly escaped a paramilitary ambush as she escorted representatives of the Norwegian Refugee Council visiting displaced communities.
Silencing critics
The punishment for talking about what is happening can be extreme. On October 16, for example, OFP worker Esperanza Amaris Miranda was dragged from her home by armed paramilitaries. Although her adult daughter tried to stop the abduction and fought with the kidnappers, they forced Miranda into a waiting taxi. Five minutes later, they shot and killed her in front of a school. Though the authorities had been informed of previous threats against Miranda and the paramilitary presence in the area, her murder was carried out with no impediment.
In many regions, prosecutors are simply too afraid to investigate paramilitaries aggressively. Meanwhile, there is a new and disturbing abundance of trumped-up cases against community and human rights leaders who speak out against paramilitaries and their official patrons. The Procuraduría, Colombia’s internal affairs agency, has noted that many of those detained or searched for supposed terrorist ties are government critics, not guerrillas or their supporters.
Uribe himself has attacked human rights groups, accusing them of acting as ‘spokespeople for terrorism… Here there are traffickers in human rights who spend all of their time asking for support from the European Union and other institutions simply to maintain themselves, because they have made a living out of this and because they need resources to stop the state from acting, and this is the way they stop the defeat of terrorism.’
As Senator Antonio Navarro Wolff has said, disregard for the law threatens to weaken democracy with little real gain in the fight against terror. ‘This is not just because the law is the soul of democracy, but because now more than ever the centre of gravity of this conflict is legitimacy.’
None deny that Colombia has for too long been prey to terror. Its citizens need security and to defend themselves from attack. But to do this, all sources of terror — including the state sponsors still hidden within the system — must be pursued. Otherwise, the government risks perpetuating the same sources of violence that have drained the country’s vibrancy and talent for too long.
Call Colombia's Human Rights Bluff
By Robin Kirk
The Observer
Saturday February 7, 2004
Colombian president Álvaro Uribe arrives in Europe this week. It is his first visit since signing a UK-brokered deal last year under which he pledged to improve his country's track record on human rights in exchange for more European Union aid.
Beginning in Brussels on Monday, Uribe will press Europe's leaders to schedule a donors' conference to come up with the cash. But Europe should delay. President Uribe has failed to keep his promise to improve human rights. Until he honours it, further financial aid should be withheld.
No one doubts that Colombia needs help. Left-wing guerrillas and right-wing paramilitaries killed over 2,500 civilians last year. Each day, 650 people on average fled their homes, making Colombia a humanitarian disaster zone. These illegal armies have an inexhaustible source of cash, since Americans and, increasingly, Europeans buy the cocaine and heroin they control.
But help cannot come at the expense of human rights. President Uribe has backed legislation that allows soldiers to carry out arrests and searches without a warrant, inspired by the global trend to suspend rights in the "war on terror." In London last July, Colombia pledged to refrain from precisely such measures.
This was just one of 24 recommendations made by the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights that Colombia agreed to implement, but which the government has so far failed to act on. In addition, units of Colombia's military have yet to sever their ties with deadly paramilitaries. Recently, soldiers raided one paramilitary base - only to discover a sergeant and police officer on site, reportedly helping coordinate operations.
The Colombian authorities, meanwhile, have proposed allowing these killers to elude any real punishment by paying a fee, their crimes essentially erased - cash in return for a "get out of jail free" card. This deal would be yet another blow to victims of their terror. It would also send a message to guerrillas to continue killing, since eventually the government may grant similar terms.
Human rights groups have recorded more than 600 killings attributed to paramilitaries since they announced an alleged ceasefire in December 2002. Only last month, church leaders warned that up to 400 paramilitaries had seized villages along the Opogadó river in northern Colombia. In one, gunmen cut the phone lines and showed teenagers the fistfuls of cash they would get for fighting. As one columnist put it, "people know that the paramilitaries are everywhere, and that they are winning."
President Uribe is, however, betting that Europe will look the other way. Certainly, Bush and Blair have done so. Last month, the Bush Administration "certified" Colombia's performance on human rights, despite evidence that it had failed to meet the conditions established by the US Congress. In other words, Colombia's record on human rights was not deemed an impediment to the allocation of half a billion dollars of US military aid this year.
Whilst the UK claims to support human rights, its resolve fades when real action is called for. Britain, and the rest of the European Union, should be wiser. Real security cannot be won by allowing the paramilitaries to run roughshod over the law, terrorizing millions of Colombians.
Before the donors' conference is scheduled, President Uribe should withdraw the perilous legislation which allows the military to carry out arrests without warrant - an invitation to increases in torture and forced disappearances. He must also move to break the paramilitary stranglehold on the Middle Magdalena valley, where human rights and aid groups are under attack. The EU spends more than 330 million euro on these civil society initiatives, and they are working. But the Colombians who do this work are terrified. They need political support just as much as they need cash.
Only last week, the Bishop of Barrancabermeja, Jaime Prieto, issued a heartwrenching plea: "We are under permanent threat and attack... As long as there is no government authority, we are in the hands of illegal groups. Before it was the guerrillas and now it is the paramilitaries, not only in Barrancabermeja, but across the entire region." No programme, no matter how well-designed or funded, can prosper in a climate of terror. If Uribe's officers fail to take effective action, he should fire them and find soldiers who can.
Agreement will not be easy, as a recent visit to Colombia by EU Commissioner Chris Patten made clear. After Patten suggested that Colombia should live up to its human rights commitments, Uribe's vice-president blasted him for, in his words, treating the country as a "banana republic." One Medellín daily wrote that Patten's brains needed a scrubbing. After Patten left, paramilitaries took pot shots at Norwegian refugee specialists, as their Colombian colleagues escorted them up the Magdalena River.
But, whatever the difficulties, real change is needed. Europe - together with Latin American donors like Argentina, Brazil and Chile - must ensure that its aid comes with strings attached. Failure to take a tough stance would be a disservice to courageous figures like Bishop Prieto and to Colombians who seek to live in a secure country, and who instinctively understand that human rights cannot be a pick-and-choose issue. Human rights abuses are a crime, whoever they are committed by. Only if this point is understood does Colombia have any hope of a stable future.
Colombia's Mortal Paradox -- Exporting Drugs Means Importing Chaos
By Robin Kirk
Date: 01-26-00
A billion dollars seems like a lot to spend for guilty pleasure.
But that is what the Clinton Administration proposes in Colombia -- a billion dollars to fight drugs this year, and another half billion in 2001.
There will be arguments in Congress, but what is really at stake is pleasure, not politics. Americans seek pleasure, and so buy cocaine and heroin in record amounts -- but we are ashamed of what we perceive as a weakness.
Blame the work ethic or our Puritan heritage, TV, boredom. The end result is that even as we buy certain drugs, we make those drugs illegal. For three decades, the United States has spent billions to buy drugs and billions more to wage a "war" against those who sell and use them, prompting us to arm ourselves as no modern nation ever has in peacetime. Yet illegal drugs remain cheaper, more potent, available and popular than ever.
Presidential elections loom, but no candidate acknowledges the utter failure of the "war on drugs." Appearing tough on drugs remains a political necessity. Republicans and Democrats alike share a view encapsulated by Al Gore in a recent speech: cocaine and heroin are on the wrong side of the "fundamental line between right and wrong in our own minds and hearts."
True, Colombia produces most of the cocaine and heroin bought in the United States. But Colombia may have little choice -- the global marketplace wants no more of its coffee, cattle or bananas. As Spanish sociologist Manuel Castells has written, the cyber-empires need little from the likes of Colombia. Criminal activity becomes one of the few ways left to engage in the market -- Castells calls it the "perverse connection."
America's drug warriors want to kill coca and opium from the air. State Department pilots can spray herbicide in the morning and be back in time for cocktails, without touching toe to ground. It's like Kosovo, only here corn and beans suffer collateral damage.
Clinton authorized the flights in 1994. By 1999, anyone with pen and paper could see the United States was losing dramatically -- the area devoted to coca cultivation has exploded and now tops 222,000 acres and rising.
Some argue that this is a direct result of U.S. policy. In the late 1980s, the U.S. cut the air routes that fed Peruvian and Bolivian coca to Colombian refiners. Instead of giving up, traffickers planted in Colombia and opened new areas along the border with Venezuela.
The shift of coca to Colombia also helped strengthen Colombia's irregular armies. The leftist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the smaller National Liberation Army (ELN) make millions off drugs. So do the right-wing civilian irregulars known as paramilitaries who, with the acquiescence and at times open support of the army, control much of northern Colombia, where drugs are refined and packed for shipment.
The resulting war has converted Colombia into what one observer calls an "archipelago of bloody little independent republics." In 1999 alone, Colombian authorities recorded over 400 massacres carried out for political reasons. More than 1.5 million Colombians are internal refugees, double the number of Albanian Kosovars who fled Serbs at the peak of their terror.
In short, the war on drugs has not only failed it has helped push Colombia to the brink of dissolution.
Will more cash help? The proposed plan, far from strengthening Colombia's faltering democracy, calls for opening the floodgates of military aid.
And for the first time, Colombia's abusive military will be our closest allies -- their criminal past is history, according to drug warriors (a conclusion disputed by Colombian and international human rights groups).
Fresh from massive U.S. training and equipped with the latest in weaponry, the military will vanquish the "narco-guerrilla" threat and eliminate illegal drugs forever.
There is of course no mention of the glaring fact that eradication has already failed. Now, it will fail under a cloud of U.S. tolerance for human rights abusers.
Colombia faces a mortal paradox. The only Colombian products that developed countries will pay reliably and well for are cocaine and heroin -- the best customers will continue to punish it for providing exactly what they demand.
As one congressional aide explained to me, Democrats and Republicans agree that the American public wants to see action -- not necessarily results -- on drugs. "And the best way to do that is to say you are going to send money, a lot of money." What actually happens to the money is apparently, at least for the moment, beside the point.
Dispatches from a Forgotten Front - Peru - Commando-Style Journalism
By Robin Kirk
Colombia Journalism Review
May/June 1991
Kirk is an associate editor of Pacific News Service and a correspondent for the San Francisco Chronicle. She lives in Lima.
It was at the desolate, wind-swept army base called Castropampa that I saw first-hand what a thorn in the side La Republica's investigative unit, Unidad de investigacion, is to the powerful in Peru. La Republica got its start as a sensationalist crime tabloid in 1981. Since then, it has turned into a serious paper, and its combative, muckracking style has won its second place in Peru (circulation 105,000), not far behind the leading paper, the staid El Comercio.
The Unidad de Investigacion is two women and four men, who might best be described as journalistic commandos, willing to venture into Peru's most remote and strife-torn areas to get the story.
Since its formation in February 1990, the team has published in depth pieces on such subjects as the Maoist Shining Path guerrillas' brutal campaign to rid the countryside of civil authorities, the spread of killer fevers among Peru's jungle tribes, and a four-part series on "The Other Huallaga," which documented the spread of coca cultivation beyond the Upper Huallaga valley, the focus of U.S. anti-drug efforts. "Added to the 60,000 hectares already being cultivated in the Upper Huallaga," wrote Francisco Reyes, the investigative unit's young specialist on drugs and political violence, "these 50,000 new hectares show clearly the failure of the purely repressive strategy applied by successive American governments."
When Reyes and photographer Virgilio Grajeda joined the Unidad de investigacion, Castropampa was first on their wish list of places to go. The army base overlooks the province of Huanta, cradle of the Shining Path. Their first story on Castropampa was based on interviews with local peasants who said the army was forcing them to join paramilitary units which, in turn, took part in massacres and "disappearances" of people the army said supported the guerrillas.
The story came out last July on the morning that I was interviewing base commander Lieutenant Colonel Alfonso Hurtado, known locally as the "Big Banana." He was not pleased: other newspapers, he said, are content to publish military press releases, and do not go nosing into what is none of their business. "I am the maximum authority in the province of Huanta," he shouted at me, "and I can guarantee you that those [La Republica] reporters will never set foot here again."
Threats from the military are taken seriously in Peru. La Republica correspondent Jaime Ayal, for example, walked into a Huanta navy base in 1984 and has yet to come out.
But despite Hurtado's displeasure, Reyes and Grajeda came back to report a second article, this one focused on "Centurion," a Castropampa sergeant -- and Hurtado aide -- who villagers claimed had directed most of the ninety "disappearances" documented in Huanta in the first six months of 1990. Photographer Grajeda, who speaks fluent Quechua, had, with the help of Quechua-speaking peasant women, even managed to identify and photograph Centurion during a Sunday parade in Huanta's central square.
Such scrutiny is galling to the nation's security forces, which are rarely criticized by anyone in Peruvian society. Although Peru's press is free, there is a strong feeling among its journalists that self-censorship and an open alliance with the security forces play an increasingly important role in shaping what is considered news. For instance, the newsweekly Caretas, which has a long tradition of publishing hard-hitting pieces, recently released a statement on "journalistic principles in covering subversion," which declares that journalists should be "natural and conscious allies of the armed forces and police."
Yet according to Alejandro Miro Quesada, vice-president of the Freedom of the Press committee of the Inter-American Press Association, of the twenty-six journalists killed and "disappeared" in Peru since 1983, seventeen were the victims either of the security forces or of legal and extralegal paramilitary units allied with the government. (Under a state of emergency first declared in 1982 and later expanded several times, the security forces control more than half of Peru's territory.) Unidad de investigacion's structure -- two-person teams that travel to troubled areas but are back in Lima by the time the story breaks -- is designed to reduce the risk of reporting in Peru, says Angel Paez, who runs the unit. "Local correspondents," he adds, "are especially subject to pressure and open threats from all sides -- not to report critical stories or stories that contradict or call into question the official story." Paez is proud of the results: "Before the Unidad was formed, most of what we published didn't go beyond the simple recitation of figures -- how many dead and this many buckets of blood."
Members of the unit grumble about management's delays in printing pieces critical of the left-wing politicos who dominate La Republica's board of directors. They also complain about low salaries -- $ 200 per month -- and the minuscule expense accounts that more than once have left photographers without film and team members stranded in the provinces without bus fare home.
What keeps the investigative unit plugging away is a sense that their work makes a difference in Peru. "People not only read our work, but cit it out and save it," says Reyes. "For me that's a compliment and a sign we're doing our job."
Lori Berenson's Grim Future -- Prison Life For Guerrillas Worsens Under Fujimori
By Robin Kirk
Date: 01-16-96
Life for guerrillas imprisoned in Peru's labyrinthian prisons is decidedly harsher today than it was during the early 1990s. While Lori Berenson will find a sisterhood of revolutionaries behind bars -- women, for example, made up over half the members of Peru's feared Shining Path movement -- she will find few, if any, foreign guerrillas. Nor do guerrillas control their own cellblocks as they once did. PNS correspondent Robin Kirk visited women revolutionaries in Peruvian prisons in 1991 and 1992 when she worked as a reporter in Peru.
Twenty-six-year-old Lori Berenson has just begun a life sentence in Peru for supporting an obscure rebel group. Photographed before her conviction as she shouted defiantly, I wondered if she yet grasped what price she and her family will pay for her beliefs.
During the late 1980s and early 1990s, I covered Peru's war between the government and the guerrillas for American newspapers. Then, the foreign press paid scant attention to the Tu'pac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA), favoring their stronger and more vehement rivals, the Communist Party of Peru-Shining Path. Although extreme in its Maoist beliefs, the Shining Path has clearly defined views. In contrast, the MRTA supports the kind of garden-variety democratic socialism espoused by a handful of legal political parties.
What the MRTA did have were fatigues and Che Guevara-style berets. Their attraction, I suspect, lies in a still-vibrant nostalgia for the 1960s, when Latin rebels cut dashing figures as they fought for utopia.
The MRTA also excelled at flashy media events. For example, in 1990, over 70 convicted guerrillas escaped a Lima prison. Although most were later recaptured, this stylish exit, through a mile-long tunnel that was both ventilated and lit with electric lights at a time when most of Lima was left dark by power rationing, was a slap in the government's face. Like the Shining Path, the MRTA controlled the sections of the prisons where its militants were held, and prison was considered a kind of mandatory "finishing school" for any serious guerrilla.
In 1991, I got permission from the Interior and Justice Ministries to get as far as the door to the Shining Path women's cellblock in Lima's Miguel Castro Castro prison. There, I had to get a different kind of permit, from the women themselves. No guard entered there; all visitors were subject to the rules and regulations imposed by the ranking leaders.
Inside, all was neat and orderly. Meals were served at picnic-style concrete tables, and consisted of food the inmates themselves had purchased and prepared. They had a special room for group activities, where they sang me revolutionary songs, and a sun-filled outdoor patio, where they raised rabbits and chickens and painted huge and colorful murals to their heroes.
The fact that so many women filled the ranks of both the Shining Path and MRTA went largely unremarked in Peru. I found it fascinating, especially since most Peruvian leftists were as hidebound as their conservative enemies about issues of gender equality.
There was one marked difference between Shining Path and MRTA women, though. While the Shining Path women tended to be portrayed as dour, sexless, and blood-thirsty, their MRTA counterparts were viewed as sexpots. And while Shining Path women clearly held positions of command, rare was the MRTA comrade who transcended girlfriend status to assume leadership.
But the political landscape changed in April of 1992, when newly-elected president Alberto Fujimori imposed draconian anti-terrorism laws and vowed to take control of the prisons again. In Peru, massacres of inmates by the security forces are like natural disasters, unpredictable yet cyclical in nature, always looming. In 1981, a riot by common criminals ended in a bloodbath in central Lima. The 1986 prison massacres, after a Shining Path-led riot, ended with the deaths of over 300 prisoners. And in May of 1992, the transfer of Shining Path women from Castro Castro ended with 42 dead, including three guards.
When I visited the women a month later at Yanamayo prison, they were living four to a cell built for one. They were so short on clothing that one cellmate had to remain naked in bed so that another could move about. The impression that remains strongest with me is the smell -- none had been allowed to bathe or brush their teeth since their transfer. As I left, one of the MRTA's most fabled beauties peered at me from behind a filthy curtain, her face haggard, unclean, yet starving for a glimpse of something new.
In 1996, inmates no longer control their cellblocks. Conditions are especially hard for those, like Berenson, convicted of treason. She might be sent to one of the new prisons constructed just for treason convicts. One, near Lake Titicaca, sits at an oxygen-deprived, freezing 14,000 feet.
For the first year of her sentence, Berenson will be allowed no visits. Afterwards, she will be allowed 30 minutes per month, restricted to close family. Food, medical care, water, and clothing are scarce; for twenty-three-and-a-half hours, she will be locked in a tiny cell with two or three other inmates.
Any hope she has of returning home lies in rousing international pressure and enrolling the U.S. Embassy in negotiating a prisoner exchange -- something Berenson has vowed not to do. She will get no support from Peruvians, most of whom support Fujimori's tough laws and feel little sympathy for foreigners who want to prolong what they see as a lost decade of suffering, fear and grief.
When three Chileans were tried for treason in 1994 for their involvement with MRTA, a commission of international jurists questioned the charge, pointing out that foreign nationals owe no allegiance to Peru, a necessary basis for treason. Fujimoro replied that he would get around to drafting a law to include foreigners. He never did; but the Chileans are now serving life sentences. Like Berenson, they may have the rest of their lives to contemplate their support for a guerrilla group whose time seems to have passed.
Recorded in Stone: The Women of Peru’s Shining Path, Revisited
By Robin Kirk
University of London
Institute of Latin American Studies
Historizando un pasado problemático y vivo en la memoria:
Argentina, Chile, Perú
Taller 16-17 de octubre, 2003
Using the story of Betty, a former Shining Path fighter in Peru, I open a discussion of her memories of being an agent of violence in Peru as well as her unusual position as a story teller speaking as someone who committed atrocities – and admits it.
Most often, it seems to me, those who have participated in acts of great violence are loathe to talk about it with any degree of openness, detail or self-awareness. This is particularly true of rank-and-file members: not the leadership, but the foot soldiers, who joined a cause out of conviction, perhaps, but often leavened with a desire for adventure or a sense of boredom with their lives. Therefore, the history of such periods is not, to a large degree, written but the violent, but by the survivors, by the witnesses, or by the political figures who may have wielded violence, but did not take direct part in it.
Who among Arkan’s Tigers has penned a Balkan memoir? Have Foday Sankoh’s henchmen written a chronicle of the violence that tore apart Sierra Leone, and many Sierra Leonians? There have certainly been spirited accounts of atrocities by military men belonging to regular forces –Albert Speer’s Inside the Third Reich (1970) and Spandau: The Secret Diaries (1976) come to mind, followed by tales penned by American soldiers, most recently Anthony Swofford’s Jarhead, an account of his experiences as an American marine during the Gulf War. In 2001, French General Paul Aussaresses published Services speciaux, Algerie 1955-1957, leading to his conviction in January 2003 for “complicity in justifying war crimes” - a press offense with a maximum penalty of five years’ imprisonment and a $41,000 fine. So not only are most people unwilling to record their storied about what happened during periods of violence – they can actually be convicted for formalizing memory, or as Aussaresses put in during his trial, “the duty of bearing witness.”
Certainly, the question of memory remain a controversial and difficult one in Peru as in other countries that have experienced pronounced violence. The violence there was not distant or faceless. It was up close, known, identified. Attackers and victims were neighbors, school mates, teachers, health workers. People knew, and they knew that they knew. Some communities attending Truth Commission hearings have protested the telling of truth, arguing that they have already made peace and do not want to dredge up the past. Others remain convinced that the past remains largely unexamined – and certainly, that atrocities remain unpunished.
Thinking back on my interview with Betty, questions of justice or truth remained far in the future, unthinkable. What she seemed to want to do more than anything else was confess. It was a personal decision, and almost a religious one. Here I was, this stranger, who wanted to hear her story. After it was told, I would vanish. I think Betty need to talk, but without worrying that her words would result in an accusation against her or any kind of punishment. She needed to tell the story, to bear witness. And then she wanted to be left alone to continue with the new life that she had made for herself.
“Before turning the page,” General Aussaresses in the introduction to his book, “it is necessary that the page be read and, therefore, written.”
Betty and her friend were the youngest ever to join their unit. At first, camping out was like a game. Betty had visited farms before, but she was a town girl at heart, used to the nearness of the square and its belled church. Some days, they would march twelve hours up and down the steep gorges. It was exhausting. She fantasized about collapsing beside the streams that cut the trail, sucking in her fill of thin, cold air. But she didn’t.
She studied harder than she ever had in school. They carried no texts, instead noting down passages from Marx and Lenin and Mao and especially President Gonzalo, the Shining Path’s leader, memorized and recited by the more experienced comrades. Betty used her algebra notebook from high school, but wrote in red ink only. Soon, her script was as neat and ordered as a typewritten page.
Criticism sessions were held almost every night. Once, she was criticized for not speaking up. How could she become a true revolutionary if she never opened her mouth? She vowed publicly and in grateful tears to reform. Comrades clapped her on the back. To Betty, it felt like love.
The goal, she was told, was to forge true revolutionaries. The Iron Legions! She was to hide nothing -- nothing! -- from the Party.
Betty learned how to hold a gun and clean it, how to storm a police station and set an ambush. More important than skill was the Thought -- Gonzalo Thought. She would even dream it, their glorious President Gonzalo before her, his shape huge and imposing against a brilliant red dawn. Soon, Betty shouted like the most experienced cadres, her fist clenched and her face filled with love. Love for the Party, love for the people, the comrades, love for battle. President Gonzalo said it could take fifty years. She was ready! It made no difference that she was a woman. They were revolutionaries -- warriors -- equal in the quest for justice.
Betty’s language skills made her indispensable. As a child, she had learned Quechua, the Inca language still spoken throughout the southern Andes. In contrast, the older comrades had never learned more than they needed to understand their servants or swear on the playground. Betty became their interpreter. At night, the comrades would call villagers to meetings.
They would tell them about the People’s War, about rising up. The People’s Army had to kill the wealthy, kill the corrupt, kill the adulterers, kill the thieves. They would fall on the cities, dens of corruption, and destroy with the cleansing fire of revolution. Betty made her sentences ring so that even the ones crouched beyond the veil of light from the lantern could hear.
Betty ended up leaving her unit without permission, and became a traitor in the eyes of her former colleagues.
In the Shining Path universe, treachery is unforgivable. Punishment begins with criticism and self-criticism sessions. It ends only with the accused vanquished, undone, destroyed.
I also interviewed women in the Shining Trench, the name its residents gave to the prison cellblock where women accused and convicted of belonging to the Shining Path were held when I visited in 1991. My reasons for going were simple. What where these women like, I wondered, in a group, at their strongest? It had to do with official versions, not press fancies or Betty’s tragedy. How would they choose to present themselves?
In the prison, most journalists visited the men. But for me, the women were the mysteries: Sybila Arredondo de Arguedas, the wife of the late Peruvian novelist José María Arguedas, the German Renata Herr. At the time, the highest ranking cadre inside was Laura Zambrano, convicted of having ordered six murders and at least twenty-eight bombings while she led the military committee responsible for metropolitan Lima.
Getting official permission to enter the prison was not difficult. Getting permission to enter the Shining Trench was another matter. The women themselves had to decide.
The delegate agreed that discussion was necessary to agree on the terms of a tour. We were shown to a table. What brought us, who sent us? she wanted to know. Who did we work for, what was their stand on the People's War?
Finally, I discuss my conversation with Ruth, a fellow journalist. Ruth’s parents were European who had moved to Peru after her birth, then divorced. Ruth told me a story about Lydia, a senderista commander Ruth had once met. Several years earlier, Ruth and two television reporters had gone in search of the Shining Path. The leader of one column was willing to entertain the possibility of having reporters along. The reporters were to be treated as prisoners of war until the Central Committee decided whether or not they would be granted an interview, something the Shining Path had never done. Lydia, Ruth explained to me, was exceptional. She was nineteen, a high school graduate, whose fondest wish had once been to get a job as a bilingual secretary for an American oil company with wells off the north coast, near Lydia’s home.
At twilight, Lydia would organize volleyball and soccer games between la columna and the masses, area farmers. From the hilltops where they camped, Ruth could see the police and Army helicopters, gun doors open, buzzing the valleys below. Once, bathing at a stream with Lydia, Ruth said a US Drug Enforcement Administration helicopter swung by so close she could see the gunner, his face ant-like with its protective goggles. Lydia’s gun was behind them in the grass. She didn't even reach for it.
“Don't worry,” she told Ruth. “Nos tienen miedo (They are afraid of us).”
Ruth never doubted that if the Central Committee had ordered them killed, they would have been killed. Yet, as she talked on her patio, the memory of Lydia undid her. Every morning before leaving the hut, Lydia would adjust Ruth’s blanket, tucking her in. The column, its frozen logic, existed, Ruth had no doubt. Yet it did not preclude a tenderness Ruth had not known even as a child.
“There was something so admirable, yet so frightening about what Lydia had chosen to make of her life,” Ruth told me. “In some ways, these young people are the best Peru has to offer. And this is what they have chosen. On one level, it requires great respect. On another, I can only contemplate it with fear and repulsion.”
This is also one of the problems with recording memories of atrocities, especially if you are hearing these things from someone who has committed them. How do you manage disgust. Where is your sympathy? How do you listen without disapproval – or should you? Where does recording become complicity, and is it worth it?
The question of who gets to tell the story of violence and the consequences of that story told is one of the great questions for the future. At a time when the world grows smaller for human rights abusers – with dictators on the run, bloody generals faced with real courts, demagogues in shackles brought before their victims and paramilitaries facing the rest of their lives in jail – the ramifications are real. Where do we strike the balance between justice and peace? Is it even right or moral to talk of it as a “balance”? And what happens to the truth-tellers, like Betty, who finally find their voice?
Sharing memories and fixing them in the permanent record is crucial, there can be little doubt. Yet it is facile to stop there. Once the story is told, there must be action taken not only to make that story available, but also to insure that such things can never happen again. In that, there is still much to be done. This paper has no real conclusion, since I hope, through the medium of this conference, to take part in a broader dialogue about what those actions need to be.
Sanctioning Brutality in Colombia
By Robin Kirk
Washington Times
Commentary
August 19, 1999
Colombia's military and its Washington admirers claim that the most abusive army in the hemisphere has turned over a new leaf. Soldiers, they say, have purged human rights violators within their ranks and are pursuing the paramilitaries that have converted much of the country into a killing ground.
A billion dollars rides on the point. A jittery Clinton administration fears Colombia's elected leaders are fumbling a bid for peace. Meanwhile, cocaine pours out of territory ceded to Marxist guerrillas more intent on seizing power than negotiating. Only massive military aid, the argument goes, will save Colombia from falling to "narco-guerrillas" - a term coined by a U.S. ambassador in the 1980s. On the table is training assistance for several thousand troops and at least $1 billion in security assistance. With the death recently of five American soldiers, the costs are clearly more than financial.
Colombia is a mess, it's true. But will pumping money into its army now bring peace? Not until the army breaks long-standing ties to the civilian shock troops known as paramilitaries.
For decades, Colombia's security forces, particularly the army, have used these paramilitaries to fight the hemisphere's dirtiest war. Their methods are simple and brutal. When I interviewed Colombia's most notorious paramilitary leader, Carlos Castano, three years ago, he was unapologetic about murdering teachers, town council members, farmers, children, bus drivers, market vendors, and even a priest. "Most of the people who fall are guerrillas or their base of support," he assured me. "When we take one out, we know we are saving many more who would have been killed in the future."
Mr. Castano's forces are believed responsible for half of the 196 massacres registered by authorities in 1998. Most victims were civilians, not combatants, killed in cold blood and often mutilated. Repeatedly, observers -government investigators, human rights groups, church officials, even police- report that paramilitaries acted with the tolerance and on some occasions open support of the army.
Colombian Gen. Fernando Tapias says that his forces no longer work with paramilitaries and punish officers who engage in atrocities. But there is sparse evidence to support his claim. Only after sustained international pressure did President Andres Pastrana on April 9 finally cashier Gens. Rito Alejo del Rio and Fernando Millan, each facing trial for alleged support for paramilitary atrocities. This long-awaited action was bitterly opposed by army commander Gen. Jorge Mora and has yet to lead to a broader purge.
Gen. Mora continues to shield officers who violate human rights, such as Gen. Jaime Uscategui. For five days in 1997, Gen. Uscategui ignored pleas from a judge in Mapiripan as Mr. Castano's men shot and hacked their way through 30 people. According to prosecutors, soldiers under Gen. Uscategui's direct command had actually helped the paramilitaries unload their weapons at the air base where the United States kept most of its drug-fighting airplanes.
Instead of clapping Gen. Uscategui in irons, the army is maneuvering to keep his case before a military tribunal, whose notorious tolerance of human rights abuses has demonstrated beyond doubt its inability to render justice.
To be sure, dozens of low-ranking soldiers accused of murder and torture have been handed over to civilian courts for trial. Meanwhile, their superiors, who order, plan, and facilitate atrocities, face, at most, a rap on the knuckles. Several, like Gen. Uscategui, have even been rewarded with promotions. According to the Colombian military's own statistics, no high-ranking officer has ever faced trial in a civilian court for a human rights violation.
The recent reform of the military penal code failed to address the problem, including the ability of officers to elude responsibility by arguing that they were simply following orders. Meanwhile, paramilitaries commit massacre after massacre under the nose of an accommodating army.
Certainly, Mr. Pastrana needs the support of the international community to wrest peace from the hounds of war at his country's heels. A modern, law-abiding military must be a part of that peace.
But it is much too early for the United States to climb into bed with a force that continues to violate human rights -or which tolerates those who do. No aid should be sent to units and officers that engage in or support such tactics. And before a penny of the proposed "emergency" package of $1 billion is considered, the United States must demand clear, measurable progress against the paramilitaries, including the arrest of key leaders, a purge of tarnished officers -and the adoption of clear mechanisms to investigate and punish human rights abuses. There must also be a credible plan to combat paramilitary forces in the field.
Without these guarantees, the United States risks complicity in atrocities, covering its eyes and ears to the pleas of Colombia's civilians.
Colombia: 'Checkbook Impunity' for Murderers
Colombia may let paramilitary thugs buy their way off the hook
By Robin Kirk
Published in the Los Angeles Times
September 14, 2003
Colombian President Alvaro Uribe has presented a bill to his Congress that would allow paramilitary members who have committed atrocities to skip prison for a fee. Among them are men the United States has identified as terrorists for their willingness to massacre Colombian civilians.
Washington's response should be unequivocal. If Colombia is serious about human rights and wants to continue receiving millions in aid, it cannot allow known criminals to escape justice by, in effect, writing a check.
Currently, Colombia receives the third-largest amount of U.S. military aid, after Israel and Egypt, and is slated to receive more than $700 million in 2004.
This is how Colombia's peace commissioner described the bill in an interview: "Rather than serving time in a prison, there are alternative sentences, and the individuals will be allowed to pay reparations."
The size of these "reparations" has not been determined. But many suspect it will be mere pocket change for paramilitaries leaders, many of whom are known to have accumulated vast riches through criminal acts.
Not only are the men who would benefit among the most ruthless killers in the world, but Colombian and American authorities agree that paramilitary leaders are often indistinguishable from drug traffickers. Instead of using drug profits to bankroll lavish lifestyles, they use them to fuel war.
Colombian intelligence sources estimate that paramilitaries control 40% of the country's cocaine exports. They have attacked and killed Colombian prosecutors and police officers as well as presidential candidates, Congress members and mayors.
In September 2002, the U.S. sought the extradition of paramilitary chieftain Carlos Castano -- who would be eligible for this program --and two others for importing cocaine into the U.S.
Castano's record is instructive of the crimes at stake. As of this year, Colombia's judiciary had sentenced him to 102 years in prison for massacres, assassinations and torture. But he has never served a day behind bars.
One conviction was for organizing a 1997 massacre in the hamlet of Mapiripan. At dawn, his paramilitary group rounded up locals and took them to a slaughterhouse. The armed group bound and tortured the captives, then slit their throats. The first person killed was hung from a meat hook. At least two bodies were later found decapitated. More than 30 others perished.
Far from denying a role, Castano claimed responsibility and promised "many more Mapiripans" in the future. Mapiripan is just one of the reasons the U.S. State Department put Castano's paramilitary on the list of foreign terrorist organizations.
The prospect of checkbook impunity evokes disturbing memories. In 1984, Colombia's most brutal drug traffickers, led by Pablo Escobar, offered to turn over their billion-dollar assets to Colombia in exchange for immunity from prosecution and extradition to the U.S. The deal fell through after public outcry.
This deal would be far worse. It would amount to letting crimes against humanity and drug trafficking go unpunished if the perpetrators, in effect, wrote a check.
There are powerful practical arguments against checkbook impunity. Impunity does not promote peace. It erodes the rule of law and encourages further violence. In Colombia, the history is stark.
The Castano family entered a similar arrangement in 1992, agreeing to bankroll the transition of a small, murderous guerrilla group to peaceful pursuits. Through a family-run "charity," the Castanos funneled million of dollars worth of land and cash to the former guerrillas to set up small businesses, schools and training programs.
Where did the money come from? Before going legit, Fidel, the eldest Castano brother, was a Medellin Cartel heavy.
As a strategy for peace, the arrangement was an utter failure. Only two years after the guerrillas surrendered, many of them turned up as Carlos Castano's fighters. By the 1990s, political violence had reached unprecedented levels. In 2001, prosecutors charged the family "charity" with financing paramilitaries.
Atrocities should mean prison. If Castano is extradited, U.S. prosecutors should not ignore his human rights crimes. There should be no offer to let him testify against his trafficker colleagues, then vanish into a witness protection program.
If paramilitaries fail to agree to the government's terms, the Colombian armed forces -- which the U.S. has spent more than $2 billion to remake -- should track them down and the government should bring them to justice.
To do otherwise only means that Colombia's war will yet again reemerge, more devastating than before.
* Robin Kirk, the author of "More Terrible Than Death: Massacres, Drugs and America's War in Colombia," is a senior researcher with Human Rights Watch.