Colombia to Pay Bombing Damages

A regional court has ordered the Colombian government to pay $725,000 in damages to villagers who survived a 1998 cluster-bomb attack by the military, the judge presiding in the case said Wednesday.

The long-awaited ruling marked a moral victory for dozens of townspeople from the scruffy hamlet of Santo Domingo in the northeastern province of Arauca who found themselves caught in a Colombian military offensive against leftist guerrillas.

Eighteen people, including several children, perished when a Colombian air force helicopter, whose crew members later alleged that they were guided by U.S. civilian contractors, dropped the cluster bomb over Santo Domingo’s only paved road.

Human rights advocates characterized the compensation package as small and noted that parallel legal proceedings to determine criminal responsibility in the attack had run into roadblocks.

“The compensation is inadequate if you take into account the damage suffered and the lack of fair and credible judicial proceedings,” said Jose Miguel Vivanco of New York-based Human Rights Watch. Like other human rights advocates, Vivanco expressed impatience with a wider criminal investigation into the Santo Domingo bombing and accused Colombian air force chiefs of obstructing inquiries.

The decision applies to 23 lawsuits wrapped into one complaint and provides financial compensation for 55 people, including many family members of the deceased. In their filing, the survivors had asked for $1.8 million to cover emotional damage, physical harm and funeral costs related to the bombing.

The air force initially said the deadly blast resulted not from a military error but from a homemade rebel bomb hidden inside a truck. Wednesday’s ruling by Judge Wilson Arcila of the Administrative Tribunal in Arauca debunked that assertion.

“It was the armed forces that caused the damage,” Arcila said. Citing tests on the body of the destroyed truck, he added, “The impact came from the air to the ground, not from inside out.”

Arcila said the evidence he reviewed -- including 7,000 pages of written testimony as well as U.S.-assisted forensic tests -- convinced him that the helicopter’s pilot saw civilians in the street beneath him before he ordered the bomb released.

In their defense, members of the helicopter’s crew have said they were fed incorrect coordinates for the attack by three Americans in a nearby surveillance plane operated by AirScan, a Florida-based security contractor. AirScan employees aided Colombian military operations to ward off rebel attacks on the region’s Cano Limon pipeline, which is owned in part by Los Angeles-based Occidental Petroleum Corp.

AirScan has denied involvement in the attack. Occidental has said an internal review of records has shown that the company had no knowledge of the military operation until after it had occurred. A civil suit brought by survivors against Occidental and AirScan is pending in U.S. courts.

Colombian government spokesman Ricardo Galan said that an appeal to Arcila’s ruling had been filed and that the case would go before a federal council for review. However, he stopped short of denying government responsibility in the attack.

“The government is not appealing because it thinks it’s not responsible,” he said. “The discussion is more about who and how much to pay.”

The case has been shuffled between military and civilian courts for years, sparking international indignation and straining relations between sectors of the Colombian armed forces and the U.S. government.

An October 2002 ruling by Colombia’s attorney general found the air force responsible for the tragedy and ordered the helicopter pilot and his technician to be suspended from duty for three months.

A month later, in a symbolic gesture, the State Department curtailed military assistance to Colombia’s Palanquero base, where the air force coordinates its Arauca operations.