Hannah Smith
Colombian protests swept the nation beginning April 29 and paused on June 15. The movement plans to resume protests on July 20, the first day of the new congressional session. State forces responded violently to the first wave of protests. Looking carefully at the Riot Police’s particularly horrific crime of forced disappearance is crucial as activists prepare to take to the streets once again.
The Defensoría del Pueblo (the State Human Rights Ombudsman’s Office) received 783 reports of disappeared people. It discarded 318 cases of these cases due to repetition or the person in question being found. While the strike originally began in protest to a tax bill, it quickly became a mass movement protesting police violence, ongoing societal inequalities, and poverty after police responded to the April 28th protests with violence. Since then, the movement led by urban youths has only grown stronger as police continue to systemically perpetrate violence against civilians.
The 465 forced disappearances committed by the ESMAD (riot police) and Colombian National Police are shadowed by the history of the Colombian Armed Conflict. The National Missing Persons Register reports 92,872 people forcibly disappeared in Colombia between 1900 and 2004.
In the U.S., the concept of a “desaparecido”, a person who exists in their life one day and gone the next is gone, is foreign. Yet, in Colombia (and other Latin American nations for that matter), desapariciones carry a special kind of trauma. Sons or wives or fathers would disappear one day, their fate unknown and largely untraceable to the remaining family members. A significant subset of these people disappeared by the state were also detained by the state, in unofficial, hidden detention centers created in other buildings. In Santiago, Chile for instance, many political dissidents forcible disappeared by the Pinochet regime were imprisoned in Villa Grimaldi, an estate that once saw dinner parties attended by left-wing intellectuals. Most were tortured and killed, but their families can never be certain, never stop hoping, never have the finality of finding their child’s remains and burying him. At the same time victims’ families do know who is responsible: the State (and illegal armed groups in the case of Colombia). Their relatives were not passively “disappeared”. The state forcibly disappeared their loved ones. Adding salt to the wound, the Colombian State still refuses to acknowledge its responsibility for many of these disappearances.
In concrete terms, take the twelve people disappeared in 1985 by the Colombian military following a 48-hour standoff with the M-19 guerilla group who had sieged control of the Palace of Justice. The Toma (siege) was televised and radio broadcasted live. The Palace of Justice is and was located in the Plaza de Bolívar, the governmental center of Bogotá. Colombians watched as the military stormed the Palace of Justice, lit the building on fire, and eventually, as some of the bodies of the 94 people killed were removed. This case is incredibly visible. There was an informal truth commission(not created by the government) tasked with detailing the Toma: antecedents, the human rights violations perpetrated by the military, previous knowledge of the siege, and the judicial processes and events that followed. Despite the visibility of this case, it took the desaparecidos’ families thirty years of activism to receive a ruling from the Inter-American Court for Human Rights (IACHR) declaring the Colombian state responsible for the disappearances. Eleven of the victims are yet to be found.
The Colombian police have once again disappeared 465 people and the Duque administration refuses to acknowledge this.
The U.S. is not separate from these disappearances. The CIA trained the Chilean military regime under Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990) how to disappear dissidents, students, professors, or activists. The CIA went further and helped create “Operation Condor”, a collaboration between the military dictatorships of Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Bolivia, Paraguay, Brazil, Peru and Ecuador to ensure dissidents from one country could be captured, tortured, and disappeared in another. Our country is tied to desapariciones in Latin America wherever and whenever they happen, because our government helped invent the technique. Not to mention the detention torture center the U.S. government still operates at Guatanamo.
In Colombia under the 1991 Constitution, the Fiscalía General, the federal department with jurisdiction to investigate and prosecute crimes, is responsible for searching for desaparecidos. Within the Fiscalía, there is an Urgent Search Mechanism [Mecanismo de Búsqueda Urgente] to do so. The Fiscalía received the 465 complaints of disappearances, but only opened 312 of these cases. They have found 196 of the disappeared people and continue the remaining unfound in active cases. Only 84 cases are within the Urgent Search Mechanism.
For most of the month of May, the Fiscalía failed to report any numbers of forced disappearances. On May 24th, the Fiscalía finally reported 290 people disappeared between April 28 and May 23. Weeks earlier, on May 5th, the Coordinación Colombia Europa Estados Unidos (CCEEU)’s Task Force on Forced Disappearance counted 471 people disappeared. This is discrepancy in data, despite finally reaching agreement more than a month later, is concerning. While there are many possible reasons for this discrepancy, it is also not surprising.
The Fiscalía is part of the same Colombian State whose police and military are responsible for the very disappearances in question. It has historically failed to investigate crimes committed by state actors and this May it is no different.
The ESMAD, Colombian riot police, and National Police are responsible for the more than 471 disappearances, in addition to other violence against peaceful protesters. Of the disappeared people who have been found, many underwent significant torture and physical abuse. The U.S. is not separate from these disappearances either.
Colombia receives the most U.S. foreign aid in Latin America and the eighth most foreign aid worldwide. Of this aid, the top two distribution categories are for “International Narcotics & Law Enforcement” and “Foreign Military Financing”. Together these two activities comprise 43% of the entire $800 million annual commitment to Colombia. During Plan Colombia (2000-2015), a congressional aid package (primarily military) designed to fight left-wing guerilla groups and the drug trade in Colombia, the number of human rights violations committed by the Colombian state increased. Rebranded in 2016 as “Peace Colombia” the Obama administration continued the same allocation pattern, channeling funds to security and anti-narcotic programs. Plan Colombia has always enjoyed bipartisan congressional support. Specific allocations are shown in the Congressional Report below:
Notes: ESF = Economic Support Fund; IMET = International Miltiary Education and Training, INCLE = International Narcotics Control and Law Enforcement; NADR = Nonproliferation, Anti[Terrorism, De-mining and Related Programs; and FMF = Foreign Military Financing; DA = Development Assistance.
The U.S. funds, trains, and collaborates with the ESMAD and the Colombian National Police. We are collaborators to the perpetrators of the 465 documented enforced disappearances.
The Inter-American Commission for Human Rights visited Colombia from June 8-10 to assess these disappearances and other human rights violations. In their final report, the Commission makes no recommendations related to the role of Plan Colombia or the United States.
The U.S State also holds responsibility to prevent more disappearances. The Leahy Law prohibits the State or Defense Departments from providing direct military assistance to foreign security units that violate human rights with impunity. This #ParoNacional made clear that the ESMAD and the National Police disappeared protestors with impunity. This is a grave human rights violation, yet U.S. tax dollars still flow into these State forces.
Congress needs to establish a mechanism for monitoring the forced disappearances perpetrated by agents of the Colombian State during this national strike, and urgently. Before protests resume on July 20, it is imperative that Congress evaluate its role in these disappearances and withhold future security aid to the ESMAD and Colombian Police accordingly.
