The first week of August, I met Jon in Medellin (8 hours by bus from Apartado) to accompany the ACA (see website under “online resources”) to Cauca. Cauca is a department in Southern Colombia which, according to many of my internet blasts that particular week, seemed to be up in flames with FARC attacks. Before we got on the road (beautiful and Pan-Americanly paved) we had a night in Medellin where we stayed with friends from the RED Juvenil(see website under “online resources”). The RED Juvenil blew my mind with their space (terrace over-looking city, office of murals and posters of body art, direct actions and pretty magazines and pamphlets for my viewing pleasure; their work and their passion). Over the accompaniment ACA would also wiggle its way into my heart. Jon and I strolled city streets and ate city food and wore city clothes. I was pretty giddy.
ACA is based in Medeliln, but is made for campesinos. At the bus station I accompanied her to the bathroom. I had to show her how to turn on the faucet. How to dispense the soap. She said she felt “dumb.” I told her I washed my clothes in the clean water of the pila once. She laughed and said there was no way that was true- that would be “really dumb.”
Then we went to Santander de Quilichao on our way to the indigenous community of Guabito where we were to accompany the end few days of a two week documentary film festival. Santander was a typical Latin American town with a central plaza and flowers and people strolling and heat that wasn’t so hot. Santander had a gigantic Saman tree on a park with which I made a pending date for someday. In the 20K between Santander and Guabito there were three military checkpoints. In Guabito, we slept on the floor of a school. We were back in the campo (although, the campo just 20k off the PanAmerican has things like fridges and cookies- hurrah!). The festival was the first annual in honor of Rodolfo Maya, an indeginous Nasa murdered last fall and a member of the school for media within the community. People came from many communities- indigenous and campesino, academic and international- to participate in the festival. The documentaries covered community resistance to everything from the Fair Trade Agreement and multinationals to mines and racism within the country, from the medias representation of the war to capitalism and neoliberalism, social conflict, dams, palm oil and land. So much resistance to so much violence. During the two week festival 6 people were killed within a couple miles of the site where we were. There was a photo exhibition. The pictures were hung up on the school wall in such a fashion that children played hopscotch next to a picture of a non-detinated mine and woman carried candles next to a rifle shell in a stalk of sugar cane.
Before we had a place to sleep a young woman from Uraba said, “we look like a bunch of displaced people, standing around here with our bags and looking for a place to rest.” Everyone laughed. Later when people were introducing themselves and sharing their struggles she spoke so eloquently over the microphone:
“Every time we left our house there would be another dead person on the path. My mom would say, ‘I’m going to the market,’ and we wouldn’t know if she would come back. I was ten when we displaced in 1997. When the paramilitaries came, they burned everything and killed everyone. My mom and I made it out on the last bus. 500 of us from the zone came to Medellin. I will never forget when I got there and the media was representing the massacre. The TV said it was a battle between the FARC and state forces. But I was there and the people they killed were not guerrilleros. They were campesinos. They were my family and my friends and my neighbors. That’s why I want to work in alternative media. I want the true story to be told.”
A U.S. anthropologist who works in Guatemala talked about the indigenous resistance there and I was transported back to those communities. Looking into those eyes and remembering those stories.
As people spoke, I wrote. Story after story of death and displacement. Story after story of defeat turning the defeated into a Phoenix of resistance. Defeat transforming into purpose. In the end everyone called their projects, “projects for life.” There could be no better cause.
After the festival ended there was a memorial for Rodolfo. They created the spine of his life out of flowers and sticks and foods and candles. People spoke about him in the candlelight. His wife and mother made me cry. How hard it is for communities in resistance to lose their leaders. For mothers to lose their children. For wives to lose their husbands. After the memorial there was a graduation from the media school. Rodolfo’s six year old daughter accepted his diploma.
And after the graduation there was a dance because, like my grandma always says when she reflects on those who have died before her, “life is for the living.”
To get back to Santander we sat on the top of a bus which looked like something out of the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test- painted all sorts of colors and full to the brim with double the capacity of passangers on top of leftover food from the festival, sound equipment, tents and garbage cans reaking of chicha. The sun was out and the lowlands of cauca looked like the Midwest. For a moment I thought the sugarcane could be corn. That I could be hitch-hiking home from a summer music festival.
In Santander I lay on the ground under the Saman as the sun went down. It was an ecosystem all its own at that hour, with the birds coming in for the night. Its sprawling branches completely blanketed me from the sky and it was just through the highest tiniest twigs that I could see the moon coming up in the half-lit sky. I felt its roots cradling me under the ground and I felt so at peace. As we were walking to the bus terminal Jon said: “It’s hard to believe there is so much violence here.”
I puked the first half of the busride through the bluegreen Andes from Medellin back to Apartado. Eventually I insisted on practically sitting on the driver’s lap in order to be in the front seat. He was not into it, but eventually gave into my requests. It is in situations like this that my “I’m a gringo, I’m crazy, make me happy” card is so very handy. Once in the front seat and led nauseated, I reflected on the amazing organization of the Nasa communities in Cauca. I felt inspired.
I got home just in time for 15 ex-FOR volunteers to come for a reunion in La Union. The town was overtaken by gringos. The group was amazing and wonderful and the town was bursting at the seams to see them and talk to them. Even Soila was in rare form, modeling underwear from the second story of her half torn-down home. In an unfortunate incident, juice was made for said group with unfiltered water and every last one of us fell ill. The morning they were to go down one of them came to the house and said in Spanish, “My poo came out like hot chocolate this morning- anyone want some?” Oh, expat-stomachworm-campo humor.
After being left alone multiple times in the community over the last six weeks, I feel I have bonded well with my neighbors. I have reached a point of tasty marination in the pot of community dynamics. I now have cookies and milk offered to me. I have friends who come over to play late night cards. I feel like I am getting to know people.
And then, just like that, I hear a crazy story about a neighbor I thought I knew so well. It was about the time he was almost shot at point blank range. And I thought of Cristina Garcia who wrote, “We only hold partial knowledge of each other. We are lucky to get a shred of the dark exploding whole.”
One night while playing hide and seek in our house a little boy fell asleep between the mattresses in the extra bedroom. In the morning he woke us up trying to get out of the house.
When the light went out for five days straight, I eventually ran out of candles. Pure darkness.
A baby was born in the late night storm. I donated medical tape for the umbilical cord and held the youngest human being I have ever held in my life.
I have taken to running on the soccer field in the pouring rain.
Emily and I have officially learned how to wash clothes. Chemicals are key. After multiple test runs (ahem, five months of washing) a neighbor smelled my pants and said, “now that’s a miracle.” In related news of neighbors feeling comfortable enough to tell the truth, I bleached the backpack I wore on the camino after a boy helped me carry it up the hill and then confessed it smelled, “like ass” and could used to be washed.
After 5 seconds of deshelling corn with a ten pound wooden masher, I have a blister. It will probably scar because my skin can’t heal in the tropics. I say this while staring at a scar on the back of my hand that I got in the tropics of Guatemala in 2003- from a wound no deeper than a paper cut.
We have taken some walks. We walked across a canyon to buy cheese from a neighbor. We walked into the jungle to gather flowers for the ExVolunteers. We walked up to see the water tanks. Riverbeds and jungle vines. Overviews and slippery mud. In the jungle I feel so alive, perhaps because everything else is. It is good to go out and walk. Remind ourselves that we actually live in the jungle, it’s just that they machete streets one and two and keep the grass low in the town. Just on the otherside of the soccer field, you run into the wall of a wild tropical jungle. And I do love trees.
The garden is still flourishing, although our tobacco and tomato plants have a worm the size of a horse eating away. The squash is taking over the yard, but providing fruit so we are cool with it. Emily and I have also taken to tanning in the garden- an activity that may be considered dando papaya. This could have a literal meaning if anyone brings it up, as the papaya tree is also right there.
Martin spent his last week on the guitar. He went house to house to sing this vallenato hit. It rang out in La Union day and night for a week: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQWrN4ETI2A
I moved into Martin’s room. There are rats and bats. I got knee deep in chlorine and reorganized the furniture. I am still adjusting and still waking up really early. I like seeing the pale pinks in the sunrise give way to the mauves and then the blues.
Elisabeth arrived. We had a welcome party with flowers and bunuelos and chocolate and dancing. Now she is adjusting to life here. Aren’t we all. All the time.
The day they buried the body, I went up to the kiosk alone. I could see the cementary far below me in the distance. I was writing after the funeral party retreated and while a few neighbors stayed to finish the burial. I wrote to the sound of them pounding in nails. I heard dirt hitting the coffin. And men laughing as they rested from their work.
I have never lived in a small town. I am finding it interesting.
When the tropical storms come, the thunder comes rolling down the mountain so loud and so hard and I just wish there was a way to describe it. It is awesome.
While Jeff Buckley sang, I wrote about how there was nowhere else I am supposed to be. About how people everywhere think we are different, but really we are all just one extension of each other through space and time. In that moment I felt both as through I were always meant to be here and that I will never recover from it. Looking back through my journal I realize that same evening I missed my 10 year highschool reunion. Oh, the places you’ll go. Eventually during my writing hour Jeff Buckley’s Grace transitioned to Paul Simon’s Graceland. These are the days of miracles and wonder.
In other news:
Please take the time to send in the photo and letter for our Land you Love campaign, which I posted earlier today.
Also, some recent press can not go without note. Both The Washington Post article (far) below as well as the wikileaks documents links were forwarded to me. Much of the wikileaks have to do with the (still pending) investigation into the 2005 masacre. For those of you who are interested and have faster internet connection than I do, please forward me those you think are of note.
Wikileaks:
http://wikileaks.org/cable/2005/03/05BOGOTA1918.html2005-03-01 MASSACRE OF 13 PERSONS IN URABA AREA
http://wikileaks.org/cable/2005/03/05BOGOTA1999.html
2005-03-02 PEACE COMMUNITY COMMISSION FINDS NO THIRD MASSACRE SITE
http://wikileaks.org/cable/2005/03/05BOGOTA2156.html
2005-03-04 REINSERTED GUERRILLA CLAIMS FARC RESPONSIBLE FOR MASSACRE IN URABA REGION
http://wikileaks.org/cable/2005/03/05BOGOTA2348.html
2005-03-10 PBI REPRESENTATIVES CONFIRM PEACE COMMUNITY WILL NOT SPEAK TO FISCALIA INVESTIGATORS
http://wikileaks.org/cable/2005/03/05BOGOTA2619.html
2005-03-18 AMBASSADOR MEETS WITH PEACE COMMUNITY ABOUT URABA MASSACRE
http://wikileaks.org/cable/2005/03/05BOGOTA2674.html
2005-03-22 GOC OFFICIALS DISCUSS URABA MASSACRE CASE
http://wikileaks.org/cable/2005/04/05BOGOTA3361.html
2005-04-12 INTERNATIONAL DELEGATION VISITS SAN JOSE DE APARTADO
http://wikileaks.org/cable/2005/04/05BOGOTA3843.html
2005-04-21 FISCALIA CONTINUES ITS INVESTIGATION INTO URABA MASSACRE
http://wikileaks.org/cable/2005/05/05BOGOTA4973.html
2005-05-24 PEACE COMMUNITY CONTINUES PUBLIC RELATIONS OUTREACH
http://wikileaks.org/cable/2010/02/10BOGOTA233.html
2010-02-12 2005 MASSACRE TRIAL DELAYED AGAIN, DEFENDANTS WILL NOT BE RELEASED
Washington Post Article:
U.S. aid implicated in abuses of power in Colombia
By Karen DeYoung and Claudia J. Duque, Published: August 20
The Obama administration often cites Colombia’s thriving democracy as proof that U.S. assistance, know-how and commitment can turn around a potentially failed state under terrorist siege.
The country’s U.S.-funded counterinsurgency campaign against a Marxist rebel group — and the civilian and military coordination behind it — are viewed as so successful that it has become a model for strategy in Afghanistan.
But new revelations in long-running political scandals under former president Alvaro Uribe, a close U.S. ally throughout his eight-year tenure, have implicated American aid, and possibly U.S. officials, in egregious abuses of power and illegal actions by the Colombian government under the guise of fighting terrorism and drug smuggling.
American cash, equipment and training, supplied to elite units of the Colombian intelligence service over the past decade to help smash cocaine-trafficking rings, were used to carry out spying operations and smear campaigns against Supreme Court justices, Uribe’s political opponents and civil society groups, according to law enforcement documents obtained by The Washington Post and interviews with prosecutors and former Colombian intelligence officials.
The revelations are part of a widening investigation by the Colombian attorney general’s office against the Department of Administrative Security, or DAS. Six former high-ranking intelligence officials have confessed to crimes, and more than a dozen other agency operatives are on trial. Several of Uribe’s closest aides have come under scrutiny, and Uribe is under investigation by a special legislative commission.
U.S. officials have denied knowledge of or involvement in illegal acts committed by the DAS, and Colombian prosecutors have not alleged any American collaboration. But the story of what the DAS did with much of the U.S. aid it received is a cautionary tale of unintended consequences. Just as in Afghanistan and other countries where the United States is intensely focused on winning counterterrorism allies, some recipients of aid to Colombia clearly diverted it to their own political agendas.
For more than a decade, under three administrations, Colombia has been Washington’s closest friend in Latin America and the biggest recipient of military and economic assistance — $6 billion during Uribe’s 2002-10 presidency. The annual total has fallen only slightly during the Obama administration, to just over a half-billion dollars in combined aid this year.
Although significant gains were made against the rebels and drug-trafficking groups, former high-ranking intelligence agents say the DAS under Uribe emphasized political targets over insurgents and drug lords. The steady flow of new revelations has continued to taint Colombia’s reputation, even as a government led by Uribe’s successor and former defense minister, Juan Manuel Santos, has pledged to replace the DAS with a new intelligence agency this fall.
Prosecutors say the Uribe government wanted to “neutralize” the Supreme Court because its investigative magistrates were unraveling ties between presidential allies in the Colombian congress and drug-trafficking paramilitary groups. Basing their case on thousands of pages of DAS documents and the testimony of nine top former DAS officials, the prosecutors say the agency was directed by the president’s office to collect the banking records of magistrates, follow their families, bug their offices and analyze their court rulings.
“All the activity mounted against us — following us, intercepting our telephones — had one central purpose, to intimidate us,” said Ivan Velasquez, the court’s lead investigative magistrate and a primary target of the DAS surveillance.
Gustavo Sierra, the imprisoned former DAS chief of analysis, who reviewed intelligence briefs that were sent to the presidency, said that targeting the court “was the priority” for the DAS under Uribe.
“They hardly ever gave orders against narco-trafficking or guerrillas,” Sierra said in an interview.
Resources and guidance
Some of those charged or under investigation have described the importance of U.S. intelligence resources and guidance, and say they regularly briefed embassy “liaison” officials on their intelligence-gathering activities. “We were organized through the American Embassy,” said William Romero, who ran the DAS’s network of informants and oversaw infiltration of the Supreme Court. Like many of the top DAS officials in jail or facing charges, he received CIA training. Some were given scholarships to complete coursework on intelligence-gathering at American universities.
Romero, who has accepted a plea agreement from prosecutors in exchange for his cooperation, said in an interview that DAS units depended on U.S.-supplied computers, wiretapping devices, cameras and mobile phone interception systems, as well as rent for safe houses and petty cash for gasoline. “We could have operated” without U.S. assistance, he said, “but not with the same effectiveness.”
One unit dependent on CIA aid, according to the testimony of former DAS officials in depositions, was the National and International Observations Group.
Set up to root out ties between foreign operatives and Colombian guerrillas, it turned its attention to the Supreme Court after magistrates began investigating the president’s cousin, then-Sen. Mario Uribe, said a former director, German Ospina, in a deposition to prosecutors. The orders came “from the presidency; they wanted immediate results,” Ospina told prosecutors.
Another unit that operated for eight months in 2005, the Group to Analyze Terrorist Organization Media, assembled dossiers on labor leaders, broke into their offices and videotaped union activists. The United States provided equipment and tens of thousands of dollars, according to an internal DAS report, and the unit’s members regularly met with an embassy official they remembered as “Chris Sullivan.”
“When we were advancing on certain activities, he would go to see how we were advancing,” Jose Gabriel Jimenez, a former analyst in the unit, said during a court hearing.
The CIA declined to comment on any specific allegations or the description of its relationship with the DAS provided by Colombian officials. “The three letters CIA get thrown into the mix on a lot of things, and by a lot of people. That doesn’t mean that allegations about the agency are anything more than that,” said a U.S. intelligence official, speaking on the condition of anonymity.
As initial DAS revelations emerged in the Colombian media during late summer 2009, then-U.S. Ambassador William Brownfield called an embassy-wide meeting and asked which U.S. agencies represented were working with the DAS, according to a secret State Department cable released by WikiLeaks. Representatives from eight agencies raised their hands — including the CIA, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the FBI and the Internal Revenue Service. All agencies, Brownfield reported in the Sept. 9 cable, “reaffirmed that they had no knowledge of or connection to the illegal activity and agreed to continue reducing their exposure to the agency.”
Brownfield, in subsequent meetings with Uribe and other officials, urged the government to get out in front of the disclosures and warned that they could compromise the U.S.-Colombia partnership.
“If another DAS scandal erupted, our Plan B was to terminate all association with DAS. Immediately,” Brownfield reported telling Francisco Santos, Uribe’s vice president, and DAS Director Felipe Munoz on Sept. 16, 2009.
Still, the relationship continued for an additional seven months. In April 2010, Brownfield announced that all U.S. funds previously directed to the DAS would henceforth go to Colombia’s national police. Today, the 51-year-old DAS, with 6,000 employees, multiple roles and an annual budget of $220 million, still limps along. But Munoz has been under investigation, as have four other former DAS directors.
Uribe, speaking through his lawyer, Jaime Granados, declined a request for an interview. But the former president has denied that he oversaw illegal activities and said officials from his government were being persecuted politically. Four of his top aides are under investigation, and his chief of staff, Bernardo Moreno, is jailed and awaiting trial on conspiracy and other charges.
Years of trouble
Interviews with former U.S. officials and evidence surfacing in the DAS investigation show that the agency has for years committed serious crimes, a propensity for illegal actions not unknown to embassy officials.
The first DAS director in Uribe’s presidency, Jorge Noguera — whom the U.S. Embassy in 2005 considered “pro-U.S. and an honest technocrat” and recommended to be a member of Interpol for Latin America, according to WikiLeaks cables — is on trial and accused of having helped hit men assassinate union activists. Last year, prosecutors accused another former DAS director of having helped plan the 1989 assassination of front-running presidential candidate, Luis Carlos Galan.
Myles Frechette, the U.S. ambassador to Colombia from 1994 to 1997, said that even in his tenure American officials believed that DAS units were tainted by corruption and linked to traffickers. But he said the embassy needed a partner to develop intelligence on drug smugglers and guerrillas.
“All the people who worked with me at the embassy said to me, ‘You can’t really trust the DAS,’ ” said Frechette. adding that he thinks the DAS has some of the hallmarks of a criminal enterprise.
Several senior U.S. diplomats posted to the embassy in more recent years said they had no knowledge that U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies were involved in DAS dirty tricks, but all said it would not surprise them.
“There were concerns about some kinds of activities, but also a need in the name of U.S. interests to preserve the relationship,” said one diplomat who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “I’m reasonably confident our support was correct.”
Duque is a freelance journalist based in Bogota, Colombia. Correspondent Juan Forero, also based in Bogota, contributed to this report.
© The Washington Post Company
