Colombia Defense Chief in U.S. Lobbying for Aid

Trying to pacify U.S. critics of Washington’s proposed anti-narcotics aid package to Colombia, Defense Minister Luis Fernando Ramirez traveled to Los Angeles on Wednesday to argue that Marxist guerrillas are responsible for most human rights abuses in his violent nation.

Quoting a Defense Ministry report that is strikingly different from the picture painted by human rights groups, Ramirez asserted that, over the last five years, two major guerrilla groups have been responsible for 56% of the 1,253 massacres and 71% of the political assassinations committed in Colombia.

Right-wing private armies were responsible for 43% of the massacres and 29% of the assassinations, according to the report, which Ramirez released shortly before leaving Bogota, the capital.

The dispute about who is to blame for the most human rights abuses is crucial, because critics of the proposed U.S. package have already offered amendments that would condition the $1.3 billion in aid on stricter observance of human rights.

U.S. military aid to the Latin American nation has long been curtailed because of concerns about the Colombian military’s human rights record. Anti-drug funds have been channeled to the national police.

But the line between anti-narcotics and anti-insurgency activities in Colombia has become increasingly blurred because of guerrillas who guard drug crops and receive “taxes” from drug production.

Ramirez’s six-day U.S. tour, which also includes stops in Washington, San Francisco and Boston, is timed to coincide with the debate in Congress concerning the aid proposal. In addition, his visit comes three weeks after a Human Rights Watch report alleged ties between three military brigades and paramilitary death squads.

“Our fundamental objective is to tell you, with humility, that yes, we have had problems, that we have them still, that we are correcting them, that we want help correcting them,” Ramirez said before leaving Bogota for Los Angeles. “But put things in context: Here, the state forces are on the side of the good people of Colombia.”

Ramirez also said that he didn’t mean to discredit earlier human rights reports and that Colombia welcomes comments from nongovernmental organizations that have previously criticized the military’s spotty human rights record.

Such comments came quickly after the Defense Ministry’s report was released. Robin Kirk, an author of last month’s Human Rights Watch report, discounted Ramirez’s assertion that links between the military and paramilitary troops are isolated.

The New York-based Human Rights Watch holds that such links extend “right through the brigade level and to the top of brigade command,” she said. “At the very least, [members of] the top command are averting their eyes.”

The government report’s data drew the most skeptical reactions. For example, the Defense Ministry concluded that left-wing rebels were responsible for an overwhelming 84% of total abuses over the last five years, whereas less than 2% was attributed to the military. To reach those proportions, the report combined killings and massacres with kidnappings--a major source of funding for the insurgents.

Organizations such as the nongovernmental Colombian Jurists Commission, whose findings were cited in the report, keep kidnapping statistics separate from political assassinations and other killings. As a result, the jurists found that Colombia’s rebels were responsible for 21% of human rights abuses between October 1998 and September 1999.

During the same period, paramilitary groups accounted for almost 75% of such abuses, the commission found. A commission representative did agree, however, that human rights abuses by government troops have decreased.

The Defense Ministry report is thoroughly documented, based on files containing the name and circumstances of death of each victim.