Colombia

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/6966111.stm


US seeks Colombian paramilitary

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Jimenez commanded the United Self Defence Force of Colombia

A US court has requested the extradition of former Colombian paramilitary boss Carlos Jimenez.
The move comes a few days after Jimenez, alias Macaco, was stripped of his preferential prison treatment afforded to demobilised fighters.
Colombia said Jimenez violated a peace agreement by continuing to organise cocaine shipments and run a criminal empire from prison.
Jimenez is wanted in the US on drug trafficking charges.
'Atrocities'
On Friday, Jimenez was transferred to Colombia's most secure prison, Combita, to be tried as an ordinary criminal.
He is the first jailed warlord to lose benefits agreed under a 2003 peace deal which led paramilitary leaders to surrender and demobilise 31,000 of their men in exchange for reduced jail terms and extradition protection.
The paramilitaries were created to combat rebel armies but evolved into drug-trafficking cartels accused of committing some of the country's worst atrocities. Jimenez commanded what is thought to be Colombia's largest paramilitary group, the United Self-Defence Forces of Colombia (AUC). In February 2006, 2,500 fighters of the Central Bolivar Bloc - which is part of the AUC - surrendered their weapons under the ongoing efforts to broker peace in the country.
 
The Colombian Purge

http://www.townhall.com/columnists/RobertDNovak/2007/08/27/the_colombian_purge

The Colombian Purge
By Robert D. Novak
Monday, August 27, 2007

WASHINGTON -- The forced resignation two weeks ago under pressure from President Alvaro Uribe of three prominent officers accused of drug trafficking is not likely to end the shakeup in Colombia's army and navy. More heads will roll in a long overdue purge of corruption in the military. The credit has to go to the left-wing members of Congress who have taken over the Colombian account on Capitol Hill since the Democratic victory in the 2006 elections.

A conservative American with close, longtime ties to Colombia put it to me bluntly: "The firing of these officers is seen as President Uribe's way of clearing the decks to make the Democrats in Congress happy, in order to secure the free trade agreement. There are plenty more generals and admirals to get the heave-ho."

Thus, this development must be credited to congressional Democrats, typified by Rep. Jim McGovern of Massachusetts, who have been hostile to the Uribe regime's fight against leftist narco-guerrillas. Pressure on Uribe to clean up the Colombian officer corps should have come from the U.S. embassy in Bogota, but the head rolling did not begin until the Democrats took over on Capitol Hill.

The 2006 election outcome jeopardized U.S. funding for Plan Colombia to fight the guerrillas. A greater immediate menace was the shelving of the negotiated U.S.-Colombian free trade agreement. While House Democrats put on hold similar agreements with Peru and Panama, they refused even to consider the Colombian agreement because of unhappiness with the Uribe regime.

Consequently, the Colombians reached out to the new congressional majority. Sen. Christopher Dodd of Connecticut, a sharp critic in the past of U.S. anti-guerrilla operations, lately has been in frequent contact with the Colombian embassy.

In the first week of August, Defense Minister Juan Manuel Santos confirmed what I reported from Bogota a year earlier: the army's notorious 3rd Brigade, headquartered in Cali, was infiltrated by drug cartels (providing intelligence to fugitive drug kingpin Diego Montoya, alias "Don Diego"). Two colonels, three majors and two noncommissioned officers in the 3rd Brigade were arrested.

More important uniformed figures were soon to fall. On Aug. 10, Gen. Hernando Perez Molina was replaced as commander of the Cali-based 3rd Division because of narco infiltration. On Aug. 13, Rear Adm. Gabriel Arango Bassi (who had been senior military aide to President Andres Pastrana) was cashiered because of links to narco-traffickers. On Aug. 17, Gen. Leonardo Gomez Vergara resigned as 3rd Brigade commander.

The slow-moving trial of Col. Bayron Carvajal, commander of the 3rd Brigade's Mountain Division, surely will end with a conviction. Officers and men commanded by Carvajal are accused of slaughtering 10 anti-narcotics policemen last year. The trial is currently in a procedural lapse, but Attorney General Mario Iguaran has declared the evidence is there. A conviction would mean the former corrupt relationship between Colombia's judiciary and military is over.

None of this is enough to satisfy the international left in its vendetta against Uribe, as indicated by the left-wing School of the Americas Watch. On Aug. 17, this human rights organization noted that Col. Carvajal, along with other officers accused of a conspiracy with the drug interests, was trained at the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (the former School of the Americas) -- an institution that over the years has been a frequent target of Rep. McGovern and his predecessors,

McGovern follows a tradition of Massachusetts Democrats who have harassed anti-communist efforts in Latin America. Speaker Tip O'Neill based his positions on leftist views of the Maryknoll nuns. O'Neill's roommate, Rep. Ed Boland, became famous for restricting U.S. aid to Contra fighters in Nicaragua. McGovern's boss, Rep. Joe Moakley, pushed against anti-guerrilla aid for El Salvador. McGovern has picked up Moakley's torch to oppose help for Colombia's anti-guerrilla efforts.

Now McGovern has accomplished what the State Department should have done in forcing the purge of dirty warriors. Will Democrats now relent on aid to Colombia and approve the free trade agreement? At stake are not only the fortunes of Colombia, the best U.S. friend in South America, but also efforts to slow the torrent of narcotics into the United States.
 
Unheralded Military Success

Since the writer was focusing on Colombia, posted this here.

Nice to read something positive from other fronts...

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion...v25,0,3416323.story?coll=la-sunday-commentary

Unheralded military successes
Low-cost, low-risk operations such as those in Colombia and the Philippines show what the U.S. can achieve.
By Robert D. Kaplan
November 25, 2007

When I visited Arauca province in northeastern Colombia in February 2003, it was considered the most dangerous part of the country. Attacks by narco-terrorists using improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, and cylinder and car bombs occurred every few hours. U.S. Army Special Forces members, who were in the province to train Colombian army troops, left their base only in full battle-rattle -- that is, in body armor with guns at the ready -- just like in Iraq. The town of Arauca was a ratty sprawl of tacky storefronts with awnings made of black plastic, the kind used for garbage bags. Attacks on the pipeline carrying Colombian oil to the Caribbean coast were unrelenting.

By last year, though, there had been dramatic change: Proper cafes were open, storefronts were painted, crowds flooded the streets -- at night too.

Four years ago, I had journeyed through Arauca's streets inside a convoy of Humvees armed with light-medium machine guns. In the middle of town, I'd stayed put in my Humvee. More recently, I rode in the open back of a pickup with a handful of U.S. and Colombian soldiers armed with nothing more substantial than Beretta pistols, and motorcycle escorts with a few assault rifles. In town, I walked the streets with Army Capt. Troy Terrebonne of Houston, who told me, "Wherever you want to go, we can go, on foot. It's safe here." The last IED attack in the town had been 18 months earlier.

Arauca is still troubled, with reports of the occasional extra-judicial killing. But it is broadly moving in the right direction.

There has been no magic-bullet solution in Colombia, no newsworthy technique that you could write about. It was just bread-and-butter, never-give-up, attrition-of-the-same. The Green Berets provided small-unit training that raised the combat ability of the Colombian military, making it more aggressive in hunting down the drug armies as well as more aware of human rights as a pivotal tool in counterinsurgency. Meanwhile, State Department aid came with an implicit proviso: The Colombian army should put more emphasis on medical, education and social programs to secure the goodwill of the inhabitants.

As Colombia has gone, so has the Philippines. Before 9/11, the southern island of Basilan was a Muslim terrorist hide-out. In 2002, with the help of Green Berets, Filipino army forces cleared it. By last year, Manila-based businesses felt safe enough to invest there. When I visited last year, Basilan had cellphone towers, more roads and bridges paved with asphalt, more schools and increased agricultural production. Power outages were common because of surges in demand, a sign of uneven development but of development nevertheless.

Between risk-prone invasions like Iraq, on the one hand, and isolationism, on the other, the missions in Colombia and the Philippines showcase low-cost, low-risk and tediously unspectacular counterinsurgency options. And these places are not alone. Other U.S. military deployments I have observed recently -- in Algeria, Mali, Niger, Kenya, Georgia and Nepal -- are variations in a minor key. What stands out about all of these missions is their small scale and implicit modesty. We are not in combat in any of these countries -- but, rather, training local militaries that are or might be.

In all these countries, our military aid is combined with civilian development assistance. This is the global war on terrorism as preventive rather than as proscriptive. It doesn't cost much. You could spread Green Beret teams across Africa for the price of one F-22 jet. If there is another model out there that will keep the U.S. military engaged without overextending it, and will help move along inter-agency cooperation, I have not seen it.

I mention these deployments because there is an attitude gaining currency in media and policy circles that lumps everything our military is doing abroad with Iraq. It says that our armed forces are overextended, that we are using them to force our democratic ideals down people's throats and that we need to be more humble and less militaristic. But on a deployment-by-deployment basis, the truth couldn't be more different.

The overwhelming majority of our deployments abroad are neither bellicose nor utopian. To the contrary, they are the epitome of half-measures -- using a few hundred troops at the most, usually just a few dozen. These missions are full of compromises with the host nation and recognize on a daily basis our military limitations. The host nations have been overwhelmingly democratic and have evolved as such during the years of our deployments. In most cases, they specifically requested our military assistance. Not to assist these fledgling democracies would be irresponsible, given our resources and historic role as a great power.

The same largely hidden, responsible hand that we see in places such as Colombia and the Philippines was much in evidence in Eastern Europe in the 1990s in the form of military training missions, conducted primarily by the United States. Those missions helped ease the transition of former Warsaw Pact satellites to democracy. The Westernization of the militaries of Poland, Romania and other East European countries was crucial to these countries' political reformation.

The threat of anarchy exists in many parts of the world. But nation building is vastly expensive and the outcome uncertain. Is there thus anything more morally prudent and cost-effective than crisis prevention? Crisis prevention has many facets, and the small-scale U.S. deployments the world over represent a military aspect of it.

The near-absence of news coverage about these missions testifies to their subtlety, even as none of them have been secret. As for some of the costlier deployments we conduct -- such as sailing carrier strike groups through choke points such as the Strait of Malacca -- where would international trade and globalization be if the U.S. Navy suddenly ceased protecting the sea lanes? To define all these missions by their imperfections, or to lump everything together with Iraq, is to tempt isolationism.

I understand and respect the impulse of those who want to reassess our commitments because of our troubles in Iraq and the strain that conflict places on our armed services. But there is a danger in taking that idea too far. After all, Iraq, though lately improving, still represents a quagmire. Places such as Colombia and the Philippines represent what works. Just look at Arauca.

Robert D. Kaplan, a national correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly and a visiting professor at the U.S. Naval Academy, is the author of "Hog Pilots, Blue Water Grunts: The American Military in the Air, at Sea, and on the Ground."
 
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