Noticiero 90 Minutos

On August 15, newly re-inaugurated President Uribe made changes to the Colombian military’s high command. The new chief of the armed forces is Gen. Nelson Freddy Padilla, who has been in Colombia’s army since 1966.

A link at this 40-year career makes clear that Gen. Padilla won’t be receiving any human rights awards anytime soon.

• From 1993 to 1995, Padilla headed the Colombian Army’s feared 20th Brigade, which consolidated military intelligence activities until 1998, when it was link, in part due to strong human rights concerns. The State Department’s 1997 human rights link noted, "Government and military officials give credence to reports of isolated killings during the year conducted by members of at least one army unit, the 20th Intelligence Brigade." Added a 1998 Human Rights Watch link, "The Twentieth Brigade is also implicated in the killing of human rights defenders, among them Jesús María Valle, president of the “Héctor Abad Gómez” Permanent Human Rights Committee of Antioquia, and Eduardo Umaña, a noted human rights lawyer."
• In 1998, Padilla replaced Gen. Jaime Uscátegui as chief of the army’s 7th Brigade, based in Villavicencio, Meta. Uscátegui is still being link for his role in allowing a massive paramilitary massacre in Mapiripán, Meta in 1997. Mapiripán was the AUC’s first real foray into the guerrilla-dominated coca-growing areas of southern Colombia, and the paramilitaries’ takeover of major towns in the 7th Brigade’s area of operations continued during Padilla’s tenure in 1998. According to a joint link by Amnesty, WOLA and Human Rights Watch, "In July 2000, the press widely reported that the Procuraduría formally charged (pliego de cargos)" Padilla and two other officers "with ‘omission’ in connection with the massacre in Puerto Alvira," a town in Meta, in June 1998.
• From 1998 to 2000, Padilla headed the 2nd Brigade, with responsibility over the cities of Barranquilla and Santa Marta, and surrounding areas along Colombia’s Caribbean coast. During this period, paramilitary leaders Rodrigo Tovar ("Jorge 40") and link strengthened their dominance over territory and drug trafficking in the brigade’s area of operations, with little or no opposition from the armed forces.
• In letters to President Uribe written in 2004 and link, the Catholic Diocese of Quibdó, the capital of Chocó department near Panama, denounced a consistent pattern of "obvious tolerance, connivance and complicity" between the armed forces and paramilitary groups. (Last year, the Diocese received the link, a prestigious award given by Germany’s Friedrich Ebert Foundation and several of Colombia’s top media outlets.)

  The armed forces responded late last year by sending a special commission to Chocó to investigate the allegations of collaboration with paramilitaries. The commission was headed by Gen. Freddy Padilla. It found nothing - which is sort of like going to Las Vegas and finding no evidence of gambling. According to one local leader from Chocó with whom I spoke earlier this year, Gen. Padilla’s commission "investigated" by holding large public meetings, with paramilitary allies no doubt present, in which they asked the assembled crowd, "Has anyone here seen any cooperation between the military and paramilitaries? No? Good."

  A brief link posted to a Colombian military website noted only that Gen. Padilla’s commission heard "the population’s request that the armed forces stay present in the zones affected by violent groups." Gen. Padilla’s "investigation," link Quibdó’s bishop, Msgr. Fidel León Cadavid, had "no result."

This record does not reflect well on Gen. Freddy Padilla’s concern for human rights and the rule of law. But it is also not unusual among top military officialdom - many careers are full of postings in charge of notorious units or in zones of paramilitary expansion, with no "smoking gun" to indicate the officer’s direct involvement in human rights crimes.

Nonetheless, it speaks volumes about Colombia’s supposedly "reformed" military institution that a career path like Gen. Padilla’s can still guarantee a quick promotion to the very top.

Whenever you see pictures of powerful, widely feared, millionaire paramilitary leaders being forced to do yard work, you know you’re not getting the entire story.

After months of reports of top paramilitaries - men wanted for murder and narcotrafficking - driving armored SUVs, going to discos and swanky restaurants, and shopping in upscale malls, President Uribe ordered last week that they be "conducted" to a facility in La Ceja, south of Medellín. There, they are to await investigation and sentencing to terms of up to eight years in confinement under the "Justice and Peace" law.

By posting link to its website yesterday, the Colombian government’s High Commissioner for Peace clearly intends to demonstrate that the eighteen paramilitary leaders so far assembled there are not living in the lap of luxury. Instead of the splendor that Pablo Escobar enjoyed (briefly) in his personal "La Catedral" prison in 1992-93, and instead of the very comfortable conditions that most narcotraffickers in Colombian jails have come to expect, we see pictures of weedy patios, lumpy beds, and unadorned walls. Warlords who have long decided who lives and dies in vast territories, we are told, must now share one computer, and must help to clean up the grounds.

Apparently, we’re meant to think that the paramilitary leadership is truly going to spend the next several years in these conditions, doing penance for the thousands of murders that they ordered or committed. This should shake our certainty that the AUC leaders are in fact going to enjoy near-impunity, and should cause us to doubt that they still command powerful criminal networks and have extensive political clout in key regions of the country. In particular, it is no doubt hoped, pictures of paramilitaries roughing it in a penal colony might reduce U.S. pressure to extradite them for drug-trafficking.

Of course, these pictures are probably not accurate representations of the AUC leaders’ daily routine. And we can expect their material conditions to improve rapidly, if they haven’t already done so since these photos were taken. Nonetheless, let’s enjoy these few images. Look at them and imagine what it would be like if some of Colombia’s most ruthless and brutal criminals really did have to spend many long years wearing rubber boots, doing chores, sleeping in twin beds and jockeying for a few minutes of computer time…

Salvatore Mancuso of the Córdoba and Urabá paramilitary bloc (ACCU) hoists a log.

Hernán Giraldo of the Tayrona Resistance Bloc (right, posing with High Commissioner for Peace Luis Carlos Restrepo) in his assigned bedroom. Note the stylish Spider-Man sheets.

Pedro Iván Laverde ("Pedro Frontera"), former head of the Catatumbo Bloc, in his bedroom.

Iván Roberto Duque ("Ernesto Baez"), outspoken leader of the Central Bolívar Bloc, in the "library" / computer room.

Carlos Mario Jiménez ("Macaco") and Rodrigo Pérez Alzate ("Julián Bolívar") of the Central Bolívar Bloc work a power-washer and broom.

Here are some excerpts, translated into English, from the shocking and sad link in this week’s edition of the Colombian magazine Semana. It tells of thirty-five retired Colombian military officers who were recruited to serve as security guards in Iraq.

A subsidiary of Blackwater USA, the major U.S. contractor whose private guards have even protected U.S. generals in Iraq, recruited the Colombians with promises of salaries of $4,000 per month - more than most doctors or lawyers earn in Colombia. After undergoing training on a Colombian military base (!), they were rushed off to Baghdad - where they found that their salaries would be only $1,000 per month. When they complained, the U.S. company took away their return tickets.

Here is the story. There is much more in the Spanish version that is worth a read as well, such as the reaction of these officers, all of them veterans of Colombia’s violence, to the incomparably worse security situation in Iraq ("This is hell: there are bombings all the time, shots, helicopters near and far, sirens day and night. There is no rest. One feels a permanent tension in his chest.")

“The group of 35 of us, and another 34 that arrived about two weeks later, we want to return to Colombia, but they won’t let us. When they find out that we’ve talked about what they’re doing to us, we don’t know what could happen. But the truth is that the people here in Baghdad are desperate,” said Esteban Osorio, a retired captain of the National Army.

… Retired Army Major Juan Carlos Forero went to an office near downtown Bogotá to submit his resumé. “The company is called ID Systems… it’s the representative in Colombia for the American firm called Blackwater. It is one of the biggest private security contracting firms in the world and they work for the U.S. government,” said Major Forero.

“[At ID Systems] we were received by Captain (Gonzalo) Guevara, who works with that firm and is retired from the Army. He told us that basically we had to provide security for military facilities. He told us salaries were around $4,000 USD per month,” Forero said.

Finally, in early June of this year, the representatives of ID Systems told the recruited Colombians that the time had come. “On the evening of the first of June, they asked twelve of us to meet at the office and told us that we were leaving for Iraq the next day. There they told us that the salary wouldn’t be $4,000, but $2,700. We didn’t like that because we had always been convinced that it would be $4,000, but there wasn’t anything we could do at that point.” Why? Because by then none of them had jobs anymore (they had quit in anticipation of the trip) and were desperate to support their families.

At midnight of June 1, Forero and his companions were made to sign contracts, and were given a copy. “We weren’t able to read anything in the contract. We just signed and left in a hurry because when they gave us the contracts they told us we had to be at the airport in four hours and since everything was so rushed, we barely had time to say goodbye to our families, get our bags together and leave for the airport,” said Forero.

From Bogotá they left for Caracas, from there to Frankfurt, where they waited for twelve hours for a flight to Amman, Jordan, and from there a last plane to Baghdad. “Since in the Frankfurt airport we had to wait so long, we started reading the contract, and there we realized that there was something wrong because it said they would pay us $34 a day. That is, our salary would be $1,000 a month, and not $2,700,” recalls Forero.

… The mission of the group… consisted in replacing a group of Romanian contractors that had finished their contracts. “When we linked up with the Romanians they asked us how much we were being paid, and we told them $1,000.” They responded with mockery. “No sane person in the world comes to Baghdad for only $1,000,” they said.

The Romanians told them that for the same work they were being paid $4,000. That fact gave way to uneasiness among the other contractors on the base. The mood turned hostile against the Colombians because if each soldier establishes his own conditions for fighting in a foreign country, there is always a benefit because in the end they are risking their lives. No one spoke to the Colombians and when they did, it was to offend them and treat them like cheap labor.

On June 9th, before they had spent even a week in Baghdad, the 35 drafted and signed a letter addressed to the ID Systems and Blackwater representatives. In the letter, they said that if they didn’t pay the $2,700 that were promised, they wanted an immediate return to Colombia for the entire group.

The letter in which the Colombians demanded their rights was interpreted as rebellion, and the consequences were unexpected. “When we arrived at the base, they took away all our return flight tickets. After the letter they gathered us together and said that if we wanted to return, we should do it through our own means. Ironically, in a show of antipatriotism, one of the people who was most against us was a former captain of the Colombian Army, (Edgar Ernesto) Méndez, who is the link here in Iraq of the contractor in Colombia,” said retired Captain (Estaban) Osorio from Baghdad.

“To force us to comply with the contract, they began to pressure us. They threatened to kick us out of the base facilities to the streets of Baghdad, where you are exposed to being killed or, in the best of cases, kidnapped,” said Osorio.

…What’s more, when they were hired in Bogotá, the retired military men were told they would have eight-hour shifts. After the protest, the shifts became twelve-hour shifts. When the group complained, the response was that they would lose their potable water or that they wouldn’t receive the same food as the others on the base. At the time of recruitment in Bogotá, they were told that they would have medical insurance, dentists, and access to recreation zones within the base and life insurance for $1.5 million dollars. Just like the salary they were offered, nothing turned out to be true. Then came the health deterioration. “Several have gotten sick or have had accidents and it has not been possible for them to receive medical attention. When we asked for an explanation, the only thing we are told is that our contract does not cover that kind of services,” says Forero.

The contractors insist on the influence that the company has on the Army and the government, and that the company could close the doors for them to find jobs back in Colombia. And the threats go even further. “We are afraid for the consequences, not only that we risk being left without a job when we return to Colombia, but that they have also told us to remember that they have all the information about our families and children and that, simply put, is a threat,” said Forero.

Although the Ministry of Defense, the Army and the United States Embassy in Colombia are aware of the recruitment of retired soldiers, it has been a matter dealt with a low profile in which nobody accepts any responsibility.

The closest to it is that the Defense Ministry and Army staff accept that they’re “doing a favor” by lending (ID Systems) a Colombian military base for the training of retired soldiers that are sent to Iraq. “It’s a company endorsed by the U.S. government that asked the Army for cooperation, which consists of allowing them the use of the base, as long as they do not recruit active personnel. There is no agreement, contract or any other type of relationship with them, and therefore, the Colombian government has no responsibility. Whatever happens between retired soldiers and the company that recruits them is basically an agreement between an individual and a foreign company,” said a high-level government official.

For their part, an official from the U.S. State Department in Washington, DC, determined that “The State Deparment believes that this is a private commercial dispute between the Colombian employees and their employer.” The official said that any other comment should be made by Blackwater. Semana Magazine called Chris Taylor, vice president of that company, over ten times, and sent him a written set of questions but never received a response. It was also impossible to obtain a response from the representatives of ID Systems in Colombia, the retired captain Gonzalo Guevara or the owner of ID Systems, José Arturo Zuluaga.

(All the names have been changed for security reasons.)