ICTJ in the News

January 18, 2007

Testimony details death squad acts in Colombia

The Boston Globe

Ex-militia chief cites massacres, drug trafficking

By Indira A.R. Lakshmanan, Globe Staff

BOGOTÁ -- A former chief of Colombia's right-wing death squads testified in court this week about his role and the involvement of military and public officials in scores of massacres and assassinations of perceived political opponents.

The testimony by Salvatore Mancuso in the northwestern city of Medellín is a key step toward clarifying and assigning blame for atrocities committed in the last two decades of Colombia's ongoing civil war between insurgents and the state.

In two days, Mancuso, 48, detailed a nexus of collusion by army generals, police colonels, a state prosecutor, and politicians in planning the murders and seizing the land of scores of alleged leftists, local politicians, and peasants, according to lawyers and victims who were permitted to watch the closed-door sessions.

Dressed in an expensive suit and reading quickly in a matter-of-fact tone from a prepared statement, they said, Mancuso testified that his men paid the army and police in one region $400,000 a month for their cooperation, and that paramilitaries coerced voters at gunpoint to support regional and presidential candidates who favored their right-wing agenda.

Mancuso's admission so far of involvement in at least 70 crimes in northwestern Colombia is part of a peace deal that promises demobilized militia leaders a maximum of eight years incarceration, no matter the severity of their crimes, in exchange for full confessions and payment of reparations to victims.

Mancuso is among some 30,000 alleged members of right-wing militias who have laid down their arms since late 2003.

The attorney general's office says it has opened more than 100,000 investigations into crimes denounced by some 25,000 alleged victims of the militias.

A wealthy cattleman who studied at the University of Pittsburgh, Mancuso helped found civilian militias in the 1980s, financed by rich landowners to combat attacks and extortion by left-wing guerrillas.

The United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, or AUC, morphed into shadowy armies that tortured and massacred civilians and became major drug traffickers.

The US State Department classifies the AUC as a foreign terrorist organization. Several of its leaders, including Mancuso, are wanted in the United States for cocaine trafficking, but the government peace deal shields them from extradition as long as they comply with its terms.

Mancuso, who also testified in December, is the first of 59 top militia leaders held in a maximum-security prison to give his account of extensive links with the military and police, from weapons and flight training to logistical support, selection of civilian targets for massacres, and material aid.

Human rights groups have long accused the Colombian military and police, which receive some $700 million in annual funding from the United States, of collaborating with right-wing militias.

But Mancuso's testimony is the first confession to detail those links, down to the names of generals and colonels who supposedly worked hand-in-glove with illegal militias.

General Freddy Padilla, commander of the armed forces, released a statement Tuesday denying that the military colluded with militias and defending a decorated general, now dead, whom Mancuso accused of extensive cooperation in planning massacres.

Mancuso also cited a local prosecutor who is now a fugitive from justice believed to be in the United States, who he said supplied names of suspected leftists to be targeted for assassination and tipped off paramilitaries to state investigations and operations against them.

He is expected to resume his testimony Jan. 25 with details of the financing of the paramilitary networks by wealthy elites and the structure of drug-trafficking networks.

In an interview with the Globe during his disarmament in late 2004, Mancuso said he hoped to run for Senate after serving his time at one of the prison farms where the state has told militiamen they will pay their debt to society.

Details of Mancuso's testimony have riveted the nation, coming on the heels of revelations the last two months of links among paramilitaries and politicians allied with US-backed President Álvaro Uribe.

Victims interviewed after the proceedings contended that Mancuso used his court time for political grandstanding, listing his crimes with a cold-hearted air, justifying them as acts of counter-insurgency, and claiming not to know locations of hidden graves.

"He's manipulating us and the prosecutors," said Teresita Gaviria, president of an association of victims who are demanding that Mancuso reveal the whereabouts of more than 150 missing family members.

But lawyers and human rights groups said his statements could be crucial in exposing elites who aided death squads and could help the nation heal from a traumatic period.

Gustavo Gallón, director of the Colombian Commission of Jurists, acknowledged that many senior military and police officials who Mancuso implicated are conveniently dead, imprisoned, or fugitives from justice. But Gallón said that Mancuso told prosecutors that he could identify other military men whose names he did not know from photographs.

"Even though Mancuso's declaration leaves a lot to fill out the truth, it nonetheless narrates the complicity and the multiple links that existed between the 'paras' and the security forces," Gallón said.

But like many observers, he expects the militia leaders will not reveal links to current top political and military leaders, for fear of reprisals.

Eduardo González, Colombia program director for the International Center for Transitional Justice, said in an interview in Bogotá that such confessions are essential for society to know the truth of what happened and who was responsible, revelations that they hope will prevent such atrocities from recurring.

But González cautioned that testimony of criminals is only part of the truth essential to heal the nation.

"What can be proved in a courtroom is not the whole truth," he said. "There will be cases where they won't be able to find proof, but where the victim is dead or disappeared. We need to acknowledge their suffering, and at some point, their survivors need to be heard, too."