Colombia army chief linked to militias -report(CIA)

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The intelligence about Montoya is contained in a report recently circulated within the CIA. It says that Montoya and a paramilitary group jointly planned and conducted a military operation in 2002 to eliminate Marxist guerrillas from poor areas around Medellin, the Times said.

At least 14 people were killed during the operation, and opponents of Uribe allege that dozens more disappeared in its aftermath, it reported.

The intelligence report includes information from another Western intelligence service and indicates that U.S. officials have received similar reports from other reliable sources, the Times said.

The Times said the CIA document was made available to the paper by a source who declined to identify himself except as a U.S. government employee. He said he was disclosing the information because he was unhappy that Uribe's government had not been held more to account by the Bush administration.

The CIA did not dispute the authenticity of the document, although agency officials declined to confirm it, the paper said.
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In addition to his close cooperation with U.S. officials on Plan Colombia, Montoya has served as an instructor at the U.S.-sponsored military training center formerly called the School of the Americas. The Colombian general was praised by U.S. Marine Gen. Peter Pace, now chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, when Pace directed the regional military command for Latin America, and Montoya has been organizing a new Colombian counternarcotics task force with U.S. funds.

There have been rumors that Montoya has worked with the paramilitaries, but no charges have been lodged by authorities.
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But that should come as no surprise to anyone who knows Gen. Montoya’s history.

PARAMILITARY TIES GOING BACK TO THE LATE 1970’s

In the late 1970’s Mario Montoya Uribe was allegedly involved in the “AAA” (American Anti-Communist Action) paramilitary group, and was involved in a series of bombings the group carried out in 1978 and 1979. The targets included the offices of the Communist Party, a newspaper, and a magazine. Several leading activists and academics were kidnapped and murdered. A defector would later tell one of Bogota’s leading daily newspapers that the AAA was led by military officers. Fr. Javier Giraldo, SJ writes in his account of AAA’s campaign of terror that:

“ The names of the officials who were charged with these deeds would later on be familiar to the majority of Colombians, since they received all of the promotions and military honors possible and occupied the highest offices and responsibility in the hierarchy of the Colombian Armed Forces.”

(Incredibly, a recently declassified diplomatic cable sent by then U.S. Ambassador to Colombia Curtis Kamman in 2000 regarding Gen. Montoya’s appointment to head Joint Task Force South, indicates that Kamman was aware of these allegations against Montoya, and that in addition to being unable to determine whether the chages were true, wasn’t sure that the bombings constituted “gross human rights violations.” If bombing civilians isn’t a “gross human rights violation,” then what is?)

Par for the course, Montoya was selected in 1983 for training at the U.S. Army’s School of the Americas, then located in Panama – anyone who wants to advance quickly in the ranks of the Colombian military needs to receive U.S. military training, preferably at the SOA. In 1993, the year after Montoya was publicly accused of being involved in the 1978-79 AAA bombing campaign, Montoya, then a Lieutenant Colonel returned to the SOA as an instructor. That same year the Prosecutor General of Colombia issued a scathing report on the Colombian military’s paramilitary links, in which he wrote:

" act under the premise that gained currency in El Salvador, of ‘draining the sea,’ which means that a direct relationship is established, for example, between trade union or peasant movements and the subversive ranks. When counter guerrilla actions are carried out, these passive subjects are not identified as ‘independent’ victims, but rather, as part of the enemy."
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Montoya’s name next turns up in a letter from of Human Rights Watch to Ray Irani, Chairman and CEO of Occidental Petroleum, in 1997. Occidental has significant oil investments in Colombia, and there was a rash of “extrajudicial executions,” in the Arauca department where Occidental had encouraged the Colombian military to crack down on ELN guerillas who were attacking its pipeline. At the time Montoya, who had been promoted to Colonel, was serving as head of Operative Command No. 2 of the 18th Brigade of the Colombian army. Soldiers under his command were implicated in the murders of several innocent campesinos, which the army tried to cover up by claiming that the dead were guerillas killed in combat. None of these incidents came up when Montoya was being considered for his position as commander of Joint Task Force South.
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Amnesty International’s 2001 annual report noted that:

“A wide-ranging pattern of collusion between the national police, the army and paramilitary forces in the area of Puerto Asís, Putumayo department, was revealed to the authorities by a member of the national police and the local human rights ombudsman. According to their sworn testimonies, paramilitary groups consorted openly with army personnel and police in the town of Puerto Asís. On the outskirts of the town they maintained a base, where people who had been abducted were taken to be tortured and killed. The base was only a few hundred metres from the headquarters of the army’s 24th Brigade and a base of the 25th Battalion. Army officers held regular meetings with paramilitary leaders in the base.”

Gen. Montoya clearly bears responsibility for the crimes his troops helped the paramilitaries commit in Putumayo under his watch. Yet instead of being prosecuted or investigated, Montoya was recently appointed commander of the 4th Brigade, based in Medellin in the Antioquia department – another unit with a long history of collaborating with the paramilitaries. The Brigade also operates in the Choco department, where paramilitaries have long terrorized Afro-Colombian communities. Last year 35 union organizers were murdered in Antioquia, and human rights abuses have continued at an alarming rate in the department. In one recent incident, soldiers under Montoya’s command killed three teenagers in Medellin. Yet the Colombian military continues to put Montoya forward as an example of an ideal officer in press releases celebrating his victories against the FARC and the ELN. Most recently Montoya's name came up in connection with the May 2 massacre in Bojaya in Choco in which 117 people were killed during fighting between the FARC and paramilitaries, many of them by a FARC bomb that accidentally hit a church. Montoya has yet to provided any satisfactory answers about why the Fourth Brigade ignored warnings that paramilitaries were planning on attacking the village, and allowed paramilitaries to enter Choco by boat and by helicopter. On a visit to Bojaya, UN human rights envoy Anders Kompass expressed concern about the links between the military and the Fourth Brigade, telling reporters that "The people ... are saying with a lot of anguish that the paramilitaries are present and that — along with the presence of the security forces — has created confusion among the civilian population" An angry Montoya said that there is no evidence of ties between the military and the paramilitaries and that his command receives too many warnings of potential massacres to be able to respond to all of them.
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General Montoya & the 24th Brigade
http://www.soawne.org/Montoya.html

The paramilitaries -- currently grouped in a national federation called the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC) -- have been responsible for the majority of murders and forced displacements of civilians in Colombia's tragic armed conflict for many years. Over 3 million Colombians have been uprooted from their homes and communities -- "displaced" -- since 1985, and tens of thousands more have been murdered. The paramilitaries' signature terror methods include slow torture, dismemberment, and the use of chainsaws. When guerrilla groups participated in the formation of new political parties in the 1980s as part of an attempt to resolve the decades-old war between the government and guerrillas, paramilitaries exterminated over 3,000 members of these new parties.

In a proposal announced in June called the "Justice and Peace" law, Uribe seeks to offer the paramilitaries immunity from any serious punitive consequences for their crimes. Under Uribe's proposal, they will not have to turn over the land and wealth they have acquired to victims (or even the government); tell the truth about their crimes to victims, survivors, or the society; or serve more than a few years in jail.
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Into the Abyss: The Paramilitary Political Objective
By Ana Carrigan
August 2001

The lights are going out in Colombia. In the last two years, the growth in the military and political power of the paramilitaries (known as the "United Self-Defense Groups of Colombia," "Auto-Defensas Unidos de Colombia" the AUC), has brought a brutal, illegal army within reach of gaining political control over Colombia's future.

Colombian officials admit that the AUC are responsible for 80% of all political murders and massacres in the past year. The AUC's founder and longtime commander-in-chief, Carlos Castaño, is the subject of 22 arrest warrants for massacres, kidnapping, assassinations, and drug trafficking. The American Ambassador in Bogotá, Anne Patterson, and the U.S. Commander in Chief of Southern Command, General Peter Pace, have both warned that the AUC now represent the most serious threat to Colombia’s democracy.
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By Anastasia Moloney in Bogotá and Richard Lapper in São Paulo

Updated: 12:12 a.m. CT March 28, 2007

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The scandal has also raised doubts about the ­possible lack of transparency in local elections scheduled for October, particularly in light of the re-arming of demobilised paramilitary groups. Mr Uribe's political opponents are urging the government to push through reforms to prevent election fraud.

"There are still parts of the country where people are coerced into voting for candidates backed by ­illegally armed groups and are not free to choose who they want," said Carlos Gaviria, an ex-presidential candidate and leader of the Alternative Democratic Pole Party which won a surprising 22 per cent of the vote in last year's election.
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5. Extrajudicial Executions

290. Almost all of the killings by paramilitary groups are selective. These groups generally seek out individuals included on lists of suspected guerrilla collaborators provided by security forces or other sources and assassinate them. Thus, in effect, the massacres committed by paramilitary groups differ from individual or multiple extrajudicial executions only in the sheer number of victims killed in a single incident rather than any difference in method.

291. For example, on May 29, 1996, members of the ACCU paramilitary group entered into the La Zumbadora banana plantation in the municipality of Turbo. They gathered the workers together and consulted a list which they carried. They detained and then proceeded to execute two workers, Plutarco Ramírez and Marcos Chala.
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6. Forced Disappearances and Arbitrary Deprivation of Liberty

294. Statistics provided by non-governmental organizations indicate that paramilitary groups committed approximately 50 forced disappearances in 1995 and approximately 96 disappearances in 1996.( 146 ) Frequently, persons who are detained and taken away by paramilitary groups appear dead soon thereafter. Sometimes the bodies of the victims are mutilated or are buried in mass graves, making the identification of corpses extremely difficult. In this way, the paramilitaries hinder or block the search by the family members for information regarding the fate of the victims.
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7. Torture

302. Paramilitary groups in Colombia also engage in torture. According to statistics provided to the Commission, members of these groups tortured 108 individuals in 1996 and more than 34 in 1995.( 148 ) The acts of torture committed by paramilitary groups constitute approximately 75% of the total number of acts of torture which took place in 1996.( 149 ) In the majority of the cases involving these groups, the torture victim is found dead. The statistics regarding the incidence of torture are thus based largely on the number of corpses found with signs of torture.

303. The paramilitary groups in Colombia have employed horrifying techniques of torture, including the use of chainsaws and other techniques to dismember their victims. For example, on February 21, 1996, in the community of Las Cañas, in the municipality of Turbo, Department of Antioquia, members of the ACCU paramilitary group tortured and then killed Edilma Ocampo and her daughter Stella Gil. The paramilitaries, some of whom wore hoods, arrived at the home of the victims at 10:30 a.m. Stella's three children were present at the time. The paramilitary members tied the hands of the victims and told them that they would receive a special treatment, since they were guerrillas. The two women were taken out of the house approximately 100 meters and were beaten and decapitated in front of the three children. The victimizers then opened the stomachs of the victims, from the waist to the neck. They then placed Stella's dead body on top of Edilma's body and threatened the other residents of the community to leave the area or suffer the consequences. These actions obviously constitute acts of physical torture against those who are killed as well as psychological torture against those who are forced to witness these events and who are threatened with similar consequences.
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March 5, 2007

Bush Continues to Support Colombia’s Para-State

by Garry Leech

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According to the Attorney General’s Office, the laptop contained evidence that unemployed peasants in northern Colombia were paid to act like paramilitary fighters and to participate in the demobilization process while the real paramilitaries continued committing crimes. These crimes, according to information on the laptop, included the killing of 558 individuals in just one region of northern Colombia during the cease-fire that the paramilitaries were required to implement in order to participate in the demobilization talks. The laptop also contained evidence of paramilitary links to local and national politicians as well as state security forces. It is this evidence found on Jorge 40’s laptop that spawned the para-politics investigation, not confessions or evidence obtained under the Justice and Peace Law.

President Uribe has responded to legislators who have used the revelations to criticize his government’s links to the paramilitaries by accusing them of being terrorists. The legislator most critical of the government’s collusion with paramilitaries is the Polo Democratico’s Senator Gustavo Petro, a former M-19 guerrilla who demobilized more than 15 years ago. In a recent reference to Petro and other former guerrillas-turned-legislators, Uribe claimed that they “simply went from being terrorists in camouflage to being terrorists in business suits.” Such an inflammatory accusation is not the sort of response one would expect from a president who was intent on getting to the bottom of the country’s democratic crisis.

Three paragraphs in a recent Boston Globe article clearly illustrate the enormity of the democratic crisis in Colombia. The article lists the most significant fallout from the scandal so far:

Eight pro-Uribe congressmen have been arrested for collaborating with paramilitaries, and dozens of national and regional politicians, some who have apparently fled the country, are under investigation. ... A decorated colonel has been relieved of his post, and other former military officials are under investigation.
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