COLOMBIA'S DEATH SQUADS

The US is dishing out $1.3 billion to help Colombia's military fight
leftist rebels and drug growers -- but in doing so, it may also be
helping murderous right-wing paramilitary groups.

PUERTO ASIS, Colombia -- Just walk into District Attorney German
Martinez's office, and it becomes obvious he's a watched man. From
across the street in the town's central square, hard-eyed men watch his
every movement. Inside the dark, steamy, one-story building, two
military officers wait to speak to him.

Just a few feet away from the soldiers, the 31-year old lawyer fiddles
with his neatly stacked papers on the corner of his desk. Martinez gets
death threats regularly, usually by telephone in this office. Two
heavily armed bodyguards accompany him everywhere. All of this
attention makes Martinez nervous; he shakes as he speaks.

"As public servants, we should have confidence in the military,"
Martinez says softly, hunching over his desk. "But we don't, because
the ties between these criminals and the armed forces are very clear."

"These criminals" are the clandestine right-wing paramilitaries which
operate with impunity in Puerto Asis, unofficial allies of the
Colombian military in its decades-long war against leftist guerillas.
Martinez lays the blame for over 100 murders last year on the
paramilitaries who are trying to violently purge the area of left-wing
guerrillas.

Puerto Asis, a town of 18,000 in Putumayo province, is ground zero for
the US-backed military assault on coca-growing areas in Colombia.
Putumayo, located along the Ecuadoran border, and its northern
neighbor, Caqueta province, are where most of Colombia's coca is
produced and refined before being smuggled out to the US and Europe. An
estimated 1,500 left-wing rebels from the country's largest guerrilla
group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), protect some
of these fields -- many of which lie just a few miles from Puerto Asis -
- - and siphon a tax from the growers and traffickers to finance their
own war against the state.

The Colombian military -- which was barred from getting US money for
years because of past human-rights abuses -- is now set to receive a
record $1.3 billion in US aid, most of it to be spent on helicopters,
intelligence equipment, and training, so it can chase the leftist
rebels out of this area.

But Martinez's allegations -- which are backed up by numerous other
observers and international human-rights groups -- point up important
questions about whether the US can aid this attack without supporting
the most brutal element of the war, the right-wing paramilitaries.
International human-rights groups say the paramilitaries are
responsible for over 70 percent of the estimated 3,000 extrajudicial
executions per year in Colombia.

The legal safeguards that are supposed to prevent US aid money from
going to such human-rights abusers have been easily sidestepped. On
Aug. 22, President Clinton signed a waiver that permits the aid to go
to Colombia despite the fact that State Department did not certify the
Colombian government for its human-rights record, a stipulation built
into the package.

"This is the wrong policy and the wrong time," said Jose Miguel
Vivanco, executive director of Human Rights Watch's Americas Division.
"The message is that the bad apples in the armed forces shouldn't be
worried. Ultimately, the waiver defeats the purpose of any policy meant
to improve human rights."

This year's State Department report noted the Colombian military's
human rights record has improved, but said that parts of the armed
forces maintained ties with the right-wing groups. Critics within the
Colombian government say that allegations of the Colombian military's
wrongdoing have dropped because they have simply passed off the dirty
work to the paramilitaries.

Military units receiving aid must also abide by the Leahy Amendment,
which bars money from going to foreign armed forces that are involved
in human-rights abuses. Putumayo's 24th Army Brigade is one of several
military units that has supposedly been cleared of involvement in such
crimes. But US officials seemed to have overlooked strong evidence
linking the brigade to the paramilitary groups in the area, revealing
just how artificial this screening process is.

Martinez, for instance, said he saw paramilitaries take four peasant
farmers past one of the brigade's checkpoints last year. The farmers
later turned up dead. He has filed reports to the central office of the
Attorney General in Colombia's capital city of Bogota but to little
avail.

US embassy officials in Colombia admitted that it is hard to screen an
entire brigade, which has several hundred frequently rotated soldiers.
But they said that if there were specific incidents from credible
sources, the embassy would investigate.

One incident the embassy might want to investigate is a massacre in the
small farming village of El Tigre, a guerilla stronghold some 25 miles
northwest of Puerto Asis. The bumpy, partially paved road north from
Puerto Asis hits a fork after several miles; turn left and you go to El
Tigre, veer right and you run into the 24th Brigade on the outskirts of
the town of Santa Ana.

On the night of Jan. 9, 1999, government and international
investigators say that 150 paramilitaries forced several Puerto Asis
residents at gunpoint to drive them to El Tigre along this road. That
night, paramilitaries slaughtered some two dozen people in the village.
Meanwhile, the 24th Brigade established a check-point just above the
fork in the road and barred vehicles from going to Puerto Asis from
Santana. Witnesses told investigators that about 30 buses were stacked
up in Santana for several hours. The check-point made travel along the
road between El Tigre and Puerto Asis less congested and a getaway with
no witnesses easy.

The current head of the 24th Brigade, Col. Gabriel Diaz, said it was a
routine checkpoint. And Diaz insisted the stories surrounding the
massacre are false.

"This is what the FARC does," Diaz said. "They want to discredit the
military."

However, another more recent massacre revealed a similar pattern. On
Nov. 7, 1999, paramilitaries killed 12 people in the town of El Placer,
according to Amnesty International. Witnesses told investigators that
the 24th Brigade was in El Placer just days before the massacre, and
arrived again just hours after the 50 armed men had finished pulling
locals out of their houses and shooting them in the barren fields
surrounding the town.

Colombian human-rights observers say both the El Tigre and the El
Placer cases are typical of the way in which the Colombian military
collaborates with the paramilitaries: providing protection, then
auspiciously timing their arrivals so as not to confront the right-wing
groups.

"In some cases, witnesses have testified to direct coordination and
participation in massacres," said Winifred Tate, a fellow at the
Washington Office on Latin America. "In other cases, local armed forces
have stood by while paramilitary forces occupied towns for several
days, killing inhabitants, and did not come to the aid of the people
despite pleas from local government officials, or even prevented
assistance or the possibility of escape."

Puerto Asis Mayor Manuel Alzalte said he's informed the armed forces on
several occasions that paramilitaries ride in their four-by-fours with
their guns hanging out of their windows in the middle of the city -- to
no avail.

"If the army and the police don't do anything, what more can I do?"
Alzalte said.

In Puerto Asis, everyone but the 24th Brigade seems to know where to
find the estimated 500 right-wing paramilitaries that operate in the
area. Locals said they run their operations from a ranch a few miles
outside the city. The region's right-wing militia leader, known as
Commander Yair, told Reuters that the paramilitaries backed the
government's plan to clear guerrillas from this area when the news
agency found him at this same farmhouse.

Rights groups say the 24th Brigade colludes in a counter-insurgency
strategy that relies on the paramilitaries. In February, Human Rights
Watch reported that half of the army's 18 brigades maintain systematic
ties to the right-wing militias. The United Nations Office of the High
Commissioner on Human Rights in Colombia came to a similar conclusion
in April.

"The continued existence of direct links between some members of the
securirty forces and paramilitary groups ... is a cause of great
concern," the report says. "This office has received testimony from
some high military officials saying that the paramilitaries do not
violate the constitution and therefore it is not a function of the
military to fight them."

Although the military admits there are "some bad apples" in its units,
they say they are doing what they can to fight the paramilitaries.

"The Armed Forces takes human rights seriously," insisted Colombian
Defense Minister Luis Fernando Ramirez.

"We are having more and more combat with the self-defense groups all
the time," Ramirez said. "Maybe there were links between some members
of the military and the paramilitaries in the past, but today the
message is clear that this type of activity will not be tolerated."

Human-rights monitors, however, say that the reports of the military's
actions against paramilitaries are greatly exaggerated.

"Most arrests claimed by the security forces are of low-ranking
paramilitaries, not leaders," WOLA, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty
International wrote in a statement issued on August 28. "In the few
cases where top leaders have been arrested, several have been able to
leave prison unhampered."

The government has also yet to sanction top military officials for
their alleged collaboration with paramilitaries. Last year, Colombian
President Andres Pastrana forced four generals to retire for failing to
fight paramilitary groups in their jurisdictions. The Colombian
military also says it's planning a purge of abusive officers. But
Ramirez admitted that no more than 100 officers would be forced to
leave the service, and -- like their counterparts whom Pastrana forced
to retire -- none would face criminal prosecution.

High Colombian government officials admit that it is difficult to
attack the military's apparent collusion with paramilitaries because
they have such popular support. In addition, powerful news outlets have
given the paramilitaries sympathetic coverage. Caracol Television --
which is owned by the most powerful business conglomerate in Colombia,
the Grupo Santo Domingo -- broadcast a two-hour interview with
paramilitary leader Carlos Castano during which he acknowledged that
his men had killed dozens of people in the villages of Ovejas and El
Salado last February, but calmly justified the incident by claiming the
victims were guerrilla collaborators.

This type of impunity has public officials like District Attorney
German Martinez walking the streets afraid for his and his new wife's
lives. Many people in Martinez's jurisdiction of Puerto Asis, including
Mayor Alzalte, say they're surprised he's still alive. The lawyer is
looking for political asylum.

"I feel very alone," Martinez says wiping the sweat from his brow,
"because there's no clear strategy to fight the paramilitaries." What
do you think?

Steven Dudley is a journalist living in Bogota. He reports regularly
for The Washington Post and National Public Radio.