"I was in my bed when an explosion rocked our house." FOR team member Isaac Beachy tells of combat on the edge of the Peace Community, and analyzes how the military reported on it. Meanwhile, community kids carry on in a party. Filmed on October 30, 2010. Watch the video here.
Join us at SOA: International Solidarity Can Make the Difference!
Starting Thursday, November 18th, we will again be at Fort Benning, Georgia, at the annual vigil in front of the School of the Americas. We invite participants to explore ways that international solidarity can make the difference countering the expansion of US militarism in Latin America and spread the word about the FOR’s Peace Presence in Colombia, which offers a unique opportunity to share the lives of courageous peasant farmers striving for a life in peace dignity.
Applications to join our accompaniment team in Colombia are currently open. This will be the focus of our workshop on Friday, November 19, 8-10 PM, in Convention Center Room 210.
We will also be inviting to join the FOR and organizations from throughout Latin America and the United States in a continental campaign to end foreign military presence in the hemisphere. The timing of this SOA vigil is particularly important.
During the last 18 months the Obama administration has embarked on a surge of US military expansion in Latin America - supporting Honduras’ military coup, occupying Haiti after January’s earthquake, arranging to deploy 7,000 marines to Costa Rica, gaining access to over seven military bases in Colombia - even while we struggle with the domestic economic crisis. As the White House prepares next year’s budget, we are distributing postcards to tell President Obama it is time “We want a budget for our communities, not guns in Latin America.”
If you are coming to the SOA vigil, make sure to look for us. We welcome volunteers to help us tabling. Contact Susana Pimiento at 512-542-1769
What do they teach them?
By John Lindsay-Poland
José Alvaro left his 14-year-old daughter Jenny Torres to take care of her two younger brothers Jimmy, 9, and Jeferson, 6, on October 14, while he worked on a nearby farm in Tame, Arauca. He left a cell phone with her, but after she didn’t answer several calls, he went home and, not finding them, reported their disappearance.
The children’s bodies were found the next day in a shallow grave with signs of strangulation and knife wounds. Jenny Torres’ body showed signs of rape. Army Lieutenant Raul Muñoz was arrested last week for the crime and for another rape of a teenage girl in the area committed on October 2. Two colonels and other officers from the same army unit have also been suspended.
Lt. Muñoz belongs to the 45th Counter-guerrilla Battalion, which is part of the 5th Mobile Brigade. The battalion and brigade have been approved for U.S. assistance every year since at least as far back as 2003 through last year.
The military, for the most part, has reacted responsibly, aggressively investigating, isolating a suspect unit, and turning evidence over to civilian agencies. However, the commander of the Army’s 18th Brigade, General Rafael Alberto Neira Wiesner which operates in the same state and received much U.S. aid from 2002-2008, initially urged a local leader to condemn the community group investigating the crime as “playing the game of the guerrillas.” After evidence indicated Muñoz’s culpability, General Neira met with the children’s father, José Alvaro Torres, to apologize. Torres said no one could pardon this crime.
The United States, by law, should have cut off assistance to the 45th Counter-guerrilla Battalion, in 2005, after the Jesuit human rights group Center for Popular Research and Education reported the killing by 5th Mobile Brigade troops of nine-year-old Karly Johanna Suárez Torres in November 2004. Members of the 5th Mobile Brigade reportedly committed five more killings of civilians in 2007, but aid continued to flow. The State Department recently informed our partners at US Office on Colombia that assistance to the 5th Mobile Brigade has been suspended.
A European Union-supported study found that girls in Arauca live in constant fear of getting caught in combat and of sexual violence by soldiers and members of other armed groups. In April of this year, the human rights group Humanidad Vigente reported the rape of another girl in the area by army troops, reportedly of the 18th Brigade. That is the context in which Lt. Muñoz committed his crimes.
How is it that the United States can assist a battalion at least seven years in a row and not identify and address this kind of psychopathic behavior? What was the United States teaching the 45th Counter-guerrilla Battalion? In the new Congress, where Republicans now control committees in the House and Democrats in both chambers act in fear, who will ask these questions of those in the State Department and MilGroup who might have answers?
In another part of Colombia, an Army officer, Edgar Iván Florez Maestre, testified last December about “legalizations” – calculated killings of civilians, for pay, that were then claimed as guerrillas killed in combat. The killings were carried out by members of the ‘Calibio’ Battalion and, according to the soldier’s testimony, coordinated by the battalion commander, at that time receiving U.S. assistance. But a colonel he named as coordinating these macabre killings has never been investigated. In fact, Colombia’s current attorney general has said more than once that he will not prosecute higher-level commanders implicated in such killings.
Usually hidden inside military experience, there is transformation here. Some soldiers, like Florez Maestre, have spoken out about the abuses they have witnessed (and in some cases participated in). “I want it to be known that they talked to us of human rights and legality knowing that on the other hand they were doing bad procedures, so there was a double morality,” Florez Maestre said. “I want all this to become public.”
His sorrow is a seed for something quite different, a better path. To get on that path ourselves, we need to resolve our own double morality. Jenny Torres and her brothers won’t come back, but by not looking away, by working to end these wars, we help prevent more pain and degradation like that of the Torres family, of Raul Muñoz, and of those U.S. officials who put aside the abuses of the 5th Mobile Brigade to keep preparing its soldiers for war.
Special Report: A glimpse of the hidden side of Mexico’s violence
By Moira Birss
When FOR staff asked if I could travel to a conference on civilian resistance to militarism in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico during the last weekend in October, I jumped at the chance to visit a country often compared to Colombia, where I recently spent two years as a human rights accompanier.
However, as my departure date grew closer, I became more and more nervous. The violence wracking Mexico, largely fueled by the country’s drug war, is magnified in the border town of Juarez, just across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas, and often vies for the dubious title of most dangerous city in the world. So just because I spent two years in Colombia as a human rights accompanier, and knew that the mainstream news stories about Mexico I had read didn’t tell the whole story, the concentration and apparent randomness of the violence in Juarez, at least as portrayed in mainstream media, worried me.
Just days before my departure for Ciudad Juarez, for example, four maquila factory workers were killed and fifteen more injured when gunmen shot up three company buses carrying the workers home.[1] Since 2008, the number of murders has surpassed 6,500 in a city of about 1.5 million.[2] New York City, with a population of 8.3 million, had just 1,570 murders in a similar period.[3]
But despite my nervousness, I had made a commitment and was determined to go. FOR asked me to attend the Foro Internaciónal Contra La Militarización y la Violencia – the International Forum Against Militarization and Violence. As U.S. government officials continue to herald the application of U.S. Colombia policy in Mexico, those of us who have worked in Colombia and strongly criticize the human rights implications of that policy are seeking to get involved in the Mexico policy discussion.
I flew from San Francisco to El Paso on Friday morning, took a cab to the Sante Fe Bridge, and crossed over the Rio Grande. I met up with my hosts on the Ciudad Juarez side, and from there they took me to the starting point of the “walk against death,” the Foro’s opening event and the eleventh such march that the Juarez organizations planning the Foro had organized. We marchers were a small group of about forty, with a few signs, a few drums, and a bullhorn. Banners carried by the marchers read “Ni un muerte mas” (Not one more death) and “Por una cultura diferente” (For a different culture). The most common chant translates roughly as “Juarez isn’t a barracks, get the army out of here!” A few of the student marchers had spray paint and where tagging phrases like “savage capitalism” and “not another death” on the empty walls that the march passed.
As we approached the Autonomous University of Ciudad Juarez where the Foro was to take place, a siren wailed behind us. Those of us near the front turned to check on the rear of the march, but before my brain even registered that the open-air black jeeps packed with men in balaclavas and assault weapons were federal police, four shots rang out. There was a collective gasp, and much confusion. Word began to spread that the shots had been into the air, but suddenly two more rang out. Though I was near the front of the march and the confrontation with the federal police near the back, I soon pieced together what had happened.
As the spray painters were finishing their last tag, the federal police had pulled up, yelled at the kids to stop, then fired a round of shots into the air. The kids, spooked and unarmed, turned and ran through the university gate, and that’s when the federal police shot the second round of shots.
That second round, however, was not fired into the air, but at the kids running away. One of the bullets struck sociology student Dario Álvarez Orrantia in the back from such close range that his guts spilled out where the bullet left his stomach. Seeing that they had perhaps mortally injured a student, some of the federal police jumped down from their jeeps and began to drag Dario by his leg, likely attempting to take him away to cover up what had happened. Witnesses, shaken though they were, somehow had the courage to stop the federal police from taking Dario, and instead rushed him to the emergency room in a private car.
Inside the university, tensions ran high. “He’s a compañero!” one of Dario’s classmates wailed as a friend dragged her away from the gate. Others cursed the federal police, exclaiming that the shooting served as yet another example of the violence and corruption of the federal forces sent to Juarez in February of last year in response to the city’s violence.
The federal police had taken over control of security in Juarez from the military in April of this year, ostensibly to bring more “community policing” to the city.[4] The federal police takeover was in part in response to widespread complaints of human rights abuses by the military, which in turn had controlled the city since March 2008.[5]
As evidenced by Dario’s shooting, the Federal Police haven’t exactly become a beloved community police force, however. Nor have they succeeded in reducing violence in the city. On just one day, October 31—my last day in Juarez—there were 10 murders.[6]
Despite the heated emotions caused by the shooting, Foro organizers decided that the event should continue, albeit with many changes in the schedule. Dario was a constant presence the entire weekend. “An injury to one is an injury to all," read a banner hung from one of the buildings, and participants and presenters regularly referred to the incident.
Impunity appears to reign in Mexico with as much of an iron grip as in Colombia. For example, since the early 1990s, hundreds—maybe even thousands, according to unofficial figures—of women have disappeared in the city, most never to be heard from again. Those whose bodies were recovered showed signs of torture, rape and mutilation. Despite the horrific nature and widespread occurrence of these crimes, the government has opened few investigations and barely followed through on any of them.[7] Though media attention has waned and investigations are nearly nonexistent, the killings continue: nearly 150 women have been killed in Juarez so far in 2010.[8]
Through experience of Dario’s shooting, along with stories told to me at the Foro, I began to realize that Mexico and Colombia have more in common than I may have realized. True, I’ve known that the U.S. has sent billions of dollars—over $1.5 billion in the last three years—for the war on drugs in Mexico, comparable to the $5 billion in Plan Colombia funding since 2000. But I hadn’t realized that human rights abuses by the Mexican military are nearly as rampant as in Colombia, or that there seems to be an institutional effort to stigmatize the defense of human rights in Mexico, as I know from personal experience exists in Colombia.
In September 2008, for example, Mexican General Felipe de Jesús Espitia accused human rights defenders of being financed by narcotraffickers to discredit the army.[9] Such rhetoric is all-too-similar to former Colombian president Alvaro Uribe’s regular statements that human rights defenders have links with the FARC in order to discredit the army.
Though Silvia, who works at a local human rights organization, told me that Dario’s shooting was unprecedented for its directness, many Juarenses have wanted to rid the city of federal police since they arrived, not only for their excessive use of force but for extortion and complicity with drug cartels. In September the government fired 3,200 federal officers—10 percent of the total force—after widespread allegations of misconduct including corruption. Between May and September, the Human Rights Commission of Chihuahua (the state in which Juarez is located) received 60 complaints for abuse of authority. Fifty of those were against federal police for murder, theft, kidnapping and extortion.[10]
Like in Colombia, human rights defenders have been specific targets. In January, human rights activist Josefina Reyes was killed by armed men who, before shooting her in the head, referred disparagingly to her work with NGOs. Reyes had worked to document abuses by the Mexican military.[11] Chihuahua State Human Rights Commissioner Gustavo de la Rose Hickerson now works from exile in El Paso because he fears the same fate.[12] Responding to Josefina’s death, de la Rosa Hickerson said that human rights defenders “are in grave risk, we become enemies of the criminals and of the Army: the cartels don’t want us to investigate their crimes and their arrangements with the police and the Army, and the soldiers don’t tolerate that we denounce their abuses.”[13]
Nonetheless, some good seems to have resulted from Dario’s shooting. The incident has galvanized youth in Juarez to organize. Before the shooting, students in Juarez didn’t have an organization of their own. They have now formed the Asociacón Estudiantil Juarense (Juarez Student Association), and on November 2 organized several hundred marchers to denounce Dario’s shooting and protest the military and federal police presence in Juarez.[14]
Mexican organizations aren’t the only ones demanding demilitarization of the drug war in Mexico. Dozens of U.S. and Mexican organizations have signed and are circulating a sign-on letter calling for a halt to U.S. drug war funding to Mexican security forces, which adds to more than $1.5 billion in the last three years.[15] The organizations are circulating a sign-on letter right now demanding that the U.S. government focus instead "on attacking the causes and structures of organized crime within the United States' drug addiction and the demand for black-market drugs, international financial transactions and transborder corruption, arms trafficking--and aid Mexico in eliminating the roots causes of the spread of crime such as poverty, inequality, unemployment and the lack of opportunities for youth." You can read, and sign on to, the letter here.
the chance to visit a country often compared to Colombia, where I recently spent two years as a human rights accompanier.
Impunity appears to reign in Mexico with as much of an iron grip as in Colombia. For example, since the early 1990s, hundreds—maybe even thousands, according to unofficial figures—of women have disappeared in the city, most never to be heard from again. Those whose bodies were recovered showed signs of torture, rape and mutilation. Despite the horrific nature and widespread occurrence of these crimes, the government has opened few investigations and barely followed through on any of them.