Cleaning Up Colombia's Dirty War
What the U.S. Could Do to Help Bring Political, Military Offenders to Justice

By Marcela Sanchez
Special to washingtonpost.com
Friday, January 26, 2007 12:00 AM

WASHINGTON -- Since Jan. 15, former paramilitary commander Salvatore Mancuso has horrified his fellow Colombians with detailed accounts of his murderous profession. Mancuso has admitted to killing more than 300 people, a fraction of the number of deaths that experts believe he was involved in as the architect of some of the worst atrocities in Colombia's four-decade-old conflict.

Mancuso is offering his testimony in exchange for a reduced prison sentence -- eight years maximum. He is the first paramilitary leader to do so as part of President Alvaro Uribe's peace deal with the right-wing militias. But Mancuso is nobody's fall guy. He has presented investigators with a document containing the signatures of more than a dozen politicians who formed a pact with his group, further drawing back the veil on the secrets behind Colombia's dirty paramilitary war.

Mancuso's confession is the latest in a series of shocking revelations that has implicated some of Uribe's allies in Congress and even Sen. Alvaro Araujo, brother of Foreign Minister Maria Consuelo Araujo. But even though Colombia is a close U.S. ally and the largest recipient of U.S. aid in the region, the deepening scandal has barely raised an eyebrow in Washington.

Such reticence was not always the case. A decade ago, then-President Ernesto Samper was accused of taking $6 million from the Cali cartel for his presidential campaign. Diplomats at the U.S. embassy in Bogota were among the first to hear recordings of cartel leaders talking about the contribution. From that moment on Washington went after Samper with a vengeance.

In a nasty diplomatic campaign, Washington pushed Samper to prove that the drug money had in fact bought nothing. Unsatisfied by his response, it decertified Colombia in its annual evaluation of countries' performance in the fight against drugs, placing Colombia among pariah states such as Afghanistan and Syria. It even took away Samper's U.S. visa.

Some say the measures were too harsh. Colombia's economy suffered greatly, as did its international image. But it was in fact during Samper's years that the Cali cartel was dismantled. Even more significantly, in 1997 the Colombian Congress, controlled by Samper's political party, passed a constitutional amendment to resume the extradition of drug traffickers to the United States. The amendment was a difficult and risky move, which Washington acknowledged as a "modest step forward."

Now, there is no question that Washington largely believes Colombia is in the hands of some kind of miracle worker. Under Uribe's watch, Colombia has made important progress in reducing murders and kidnappings, capturing and extraditing drug traffickers, securing its territory and encouraging economic growth.

His successes, and the fact that the United States has few other allies in the region, have kept Uribe beyond criticism. It is as if "the U.S. has been somewhat of an apologist for the Colombian government," said Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.), one of the few in the U.S. government who is expressing concern about the paramilitary scandal.

It is true that the confessions are the result of a demobilization process initiated by Uribe himself four years ago. What's more, as embarrassing details have emerged, Uribe has called for all legislators, judges, elected and appointed officials with any sort of ties to the paramilitary forces to come forward. "The truth about the relationships between the political class and paramilitarismo has to come out," he demanded a couple months ago.

That's much easier said than done. An official cap on the number of prosecutors currently handicaps the investigations. A little nudge from Washington might encourage Uribe to ask the Colombian Congress to bump the number up from the modest 20 who are now faced with investigating 100,000 new cases.

Washington might also play a more direct role by giving prosecutors information pertinent to any of these cases, as recommended more than three years ago by the private nonprofit International Crisis Group. It could also suggest to Bogota that its annual human rights certification required by the U.S. Congress is in doubt and that one-fourth of U.S. aid, which is tied to that certification, is in jeopardy. This would pressure Uribe's government to finally show progress in bringing to justice military officers long connected to paramilitary massacres.

Now that Colombia is the largest recipient of U.S. aid outside the Middle East, Washington has far more tricks up its sleeve than it had a decade ago. It would be a shame if Washington didn't use at least some of those to help Colombia get rid of a political and military class that once thought it acceptable to aid and abet some of the worst human rights atrocities in Latin America.

Marcela Sanchez's e-mail address is desdewash@washpost.com.