THE CLINTON'S ADMINISTRATION STEALTH WAIVER OF HUMAN RIGHTS PROTECTIONS FOR
COLOMBIA

Paramilitary forces in Colombia committed twenty-three massacres in the
first seventeen days of January, a shockingly high figure even by Colombian
standards of horror. With 162 people known to have been killed, the death
toll for the period was nearly ten people per day.

On January 18, showing exquisitely poor timing, the Clinton administration
announced that it was going ahead with its second tranche of military aid
to Colombia, part of the $1.3 billion aid package passed the previous year.
The administration decided to do so despite the fact that the Colombian
military, due to receive the bulk of the U.S. funding, has notoriously
close ties with the country's brutal paramilitaries.

Not only do Colombia's armed forces frequently coordinate field operations
with paramilitary units, share intelligence with them, and lend active-duty
soldiers to paramilitary actions, certain military officers have even set
up their own paramilitary units. The Calima Front, which began functioning
around Cali in July 1999, is one such unit. In its first year, it was
considered responsible for at least 200 killings and the displacement of
over 10,000 people.

Under these circumstances alone, the military funding decision would seem
questionable, to say the least. But to appreciate the full and utter
shamelessness of the decision, a little more background is necessary.

THE WAIVER OF HUMAN RIGHTS PROTECTIONS

The Colombia aid legislation passed in 2000 included strict human rights
provisions. The main purpose of these provisions - which human rights
groups fought hard to introduce into the legislation - was to block all
U.S. aid unless the Colombian armed forces ended their support of
paramilitaries. The obvious reasoning behind the provisions is that U.S.
funding should not go toward massacres, killings, torture and
"disappearances." (Or didn't we learn anything from the 1980s?)

But as finally agreed upon by the House and Senate, last year's aid
legislation permitted a presidential waiver of the human rights provisions
on U.S. national security grounds. Unfortunately, national security can be
an extremely flexible notion. Indeed, some believe that the "drug war" -
the stated justification for U.S. involvement in Colombia - is by
definition a matter of U.S. national security. By this reasoning, our
national security interests are always and inherently at stake in Colombia,
making the waiver infinitely malleable.

It was thus unsurprising that President Clinton invoked the waiver
provision last August. By that time, just prior to his triumphant day-trip
to Cartagena, it was clear that even under the most relaxed interpretation
of the aid legislation's human rights protections, funding to Colombia
would be barred unless the waiver was exercised.

ATTEMPTING TO JUSTIFY THE WAIVER

Clinton's August 2000 reliance on the waiver garnered a good deal of
critical media scrutiny. After all, under the relevant human rights
provisions, he had to admit that he was allowing aid to go forward even as
the Colombian forces receiving the funding maintained ties to paramilitary
groups, engaged in serious human rights abuses, failed to suspend or
prosecute officers implicated in abuses, and refused to enforce civilian
court jurisdiction over human rights crimes. Given the number and severity
of the atrocities at issue, it was not a pretty picture, even for those
convinced of the wisdom of the administration's approach to stopping drug
abuse.

Granted, some administration spokesmen were unapologetic about the
decision. Weighing the drug war against human rights considerations, a
representative for the office of White House adviser and U.S. drug czar
Barry McCaffrey stated bluntly: "You don't hold up the major objective to
achieve the minor."

But the Clinton administration's official line was that the Colombian
government had not been allowed sufficient time to meet all of the human
rights conditions laid out in the legislation. The legislation had only
passed Congress in early July, they pointed out; the armed forces could
hardly be expected to reform themselves in less than two months.

As the State Department explained in announcing the August waiver: "Despite
[Colombian] President Pastrana's commitment to improving human rights
protection, more work needs to be done before the Administration can
certify [that the human rights conditions have been met]." In other words,
just give them time.

EVADING HUMAN RIGHTS PROTECTIONS AGAIN

Five months passed, and this January, the second tranche of aid to Colombia
was due to be dispersed. But, predictably, not only had the Colombian
government shown no sign of complying with the aid legislation's human
rights provisions over those months, the human rights situation in Colombia
had actually deteriorated.

As groups like Human Rights Watch had documented, paramilitaries continued
to circulate unhindered throughout Colombia, often acting in collusion with
armed forces' personnel. Worse, they were operating in areas controlled by
U.S.-financed Colombian military units. Putumayo, the southern Colombian
state that is the focus of U.S. drug-eradication efforts, was literally
teeming with paramilitaries.

As the aid legislation required, the State Department had consulted with
human rights groups and obtained full information on the Colombian
government's non-compliance with the human rights provisions. Three leading
human rights groups, including Human Rights Watch, unanimously agreed that
Colombia had not only failed to meet every one of the legislation's human
rights requirements, but had made absolutely no progress toward meeting
them. Clearly, under these circumstances, the Clinton administration could
not certify that the provisions had been satisfied.

Yet Clinton - never one to face something head-on when a sneakier option
was available - managed to avoid invoking the national security interest
waiver. Asserting a dubious technical interpretation of the legislation,
the White House legal staff said that no new human rights certification of
Colombia was required. (Their argument hinged on the difference between
supplemental and regular appropriations, an obscure legal distinction akin
to that which distinguishes smoking from inhaling.)

MEANWHILE, BACK IN COLOMBIA

The Clinton administration announced that the human rights protections were
inapplicable on January 18, the day after the most serious of this year's
massacres in Colombia.

According to an article by Scott Wilson in the Washington Post, an
estimated fifty paramilitaries pulled men from their homes in the village
of Chengue, Sucre. "They assembled them into two groups above the main
square and across from the rudimentary health center. Then, one by one,
they killed the men by crushing their heads with heavy stones and a
sledgehammer. When it was over, twenty-four men lay dead in pools of blood.
Two more were found later in shallow graves. As the troops left, they set
fire to the village." Among the dead was a sixteen-year-old boy, said to
have been decapitated.

The day after the massacre - perhaps as the Clinton administration was
divulging its creative interpretation of the aid legislation - Colombian
paramilitary leader Carlos Castano told the media that he had ordered an
investigation into the incident because some of the deaths may have been
"unnecessary." But he did, at least, acknowledge responsibility for the
killings.

Here, in contrast, the whole question of responsibility for death and
destruction in Colombia has been dodged.