SENATE STAFFER RIESER DISCUSSES HUMAN RIGHTS, SAN

C O N F I D E N T I A L BOGOTA 003617 SIPDIS SIPDIS E.O. 12958: DECL: 04/21/2016 TAGS: PHUM PTER PGOV CO SUBJECT: SENATE STAFFER RIESER DISCUSSES HUMAN RIGHTS, SAN JOSE DE APARTADO CASES WITH PROSECUTOR GENERAL OFFICIALS Classified By: DCM Milton K. Drucker Reason: 1.4 (b,d) -------------- Summary -------------- ¶1. (C) Senate Appropriations Committee staffer Tim Rieser met on April 20 with the Fiscalia's (Prosecutor General's office) new human rights unit chief, Leonardo Cabana, and human rights prosecutors. Rieser emphasized his support of the office. He asked about the trend of human rights violations in general, and about specific cases, many of which were related to the peace community. Cabana said his staff made good progress with limited resources, but could do more with more. Demobilization of paramilitaries had reduced crimes and human rights violations. The prosecutors were frustrated with the San Jose de Apartado peace community's reluctance to provide information. They accepted enthusiastically Rieser's offer to facilitate a witness interview with someone in the U.S. whom Rieser said had relevant evidence in one Apartado case. One prosecutor asserted some peace community leaders were allied to the FARC, but the "international outcry" impeded their arrest. In his view, the leaders of the peace community supplied and treated injured FARC. He claimed he saw supplies intended for FARC guerrillas being transported. The prosecutors announced arrests in one case where Rieser expressed an interest (Orlando Valencia),and expressed optimism about recent developments in another (Curumani). Cabana promised to review the materials Rieser left with him (two letters from Senator Leahy to Iguaran and President Uribe regarding the peace community, respectively, and a memorandum from Amnesty International to the State Department) and get back to Rieser as soon as possible with status reports. End summary. -------------- - Fiscalia Resources, Continued Abuses, Apartado -------------- - ¶2. (C) Senate staffer Rieser opened the April 20 meeting with human rights prosecutors by asking three questions: Does the Fiscalia's human rights unit have sufficient resources to do its work effectively? Why does the U.S. continue to hear of significant human rights abuse allegations six years after the U.S. had invested over $3 billion in Plan Colombia? What progress could prosecutors report on the series of human rights cases associated with the peace community located near San Jose de Apartado? He said the U.S. supported the Fiscalia's work and wanted to make sure the Human Rights Unit, in particular, had the staff, vehicles, communications equipment and transportation to get to crime scenes quickly and investigate thoroughly. Rieser said he understood that some 160 members of the peace community had been killed since 1997 and no one had been held accountable. -------------- Fiscalia: Doing Well, Could do More with More -------------- ¶3. (C) New Human Rights Unit chief Cabana told Rieser the Unit is doing well with limited resources but could do more with more. He praised the Embassy's support of the Unit's work, but said it was not uncommon for a team of prosecutors to delay or abort missions because of a lack of forensic investigators to accompany them. The Fiscalia used to have 30 such investigators in Bogota but is now down to twelve (in part because the Fiscalia has reassigned investigators to the new Justice and Peace Unit). In some cases, the Fiscalia team had arrived at a crime scene and were forced to curtail its work because the Fiscalia had reassigned an investigator to an emergency matter. In such cases, Cabana said, the investigation lost its momentum, witness testimony was harder to obtain, and the victimized community lost faith in justice. In response to Rieser's questions, Cabana said the Human Rights Unit typically faces delays of up to two weeks before securing military approval for helicopter transportation to a crime scene. While the military is helpful in taking the human rights team to otherwise inaccessible locations and providing security, it has pressing operational needs as well and the Human Rights Unit has to wait. Cabana told Rieser the Human Rights Unit does not have ready access to cellular phone interception equipment (it shares this resource with other Fiscalia units) or polygraph machines. According to Cabana, the most helpful additional resource for the Unit would be more "judicial police," or forensic investigators. -------------- Abuse Claims Down but Still Too High -------------- ¶4. (C) Cabana told Rieser that human rights abuse allegations have dropped in Colombia, in part as a result of paramilitary demobilizations, but are still too high. He hopes to clear up outstanding human rights investigations by obtaining evidence from demobilized paramilitaries. In Cabana's view, collaboration of the military or police with paramilitary forces "is not the same" as in the past. In the last six months, the Unit has focused on cases in which guerrillas are accused of committing gross human rights violations, and has devoted time to the "torture" allegations associated with the abuse of army recruits in Tolima Department. -------------- San Jose de Apartado -------------- ¶5. (C) Rieser spent a significant amount of the 2 1/2 hour meeting discussing human rights matters related to the peace community located near San Jose de Apartado with Cabana and two prosecutors working on Apartado cases, who joined the meeting for this discussion. Rieser said the peace community had a long history of suffering from human rights violations, relations with the GOC were polarized, and witnesses to massacres refused to testify because they feared reprisals. He said Senator Leahy had written to Fiscal Iguaran in December 2005 to relate concerns about two Apartado massacres (July 2000 and February 2005),and offered to facilitate the taking of witness testimony in the U.S. of a person who had information relevant to the 2005 crime; the prosecutors enthusiastically accepted, and Rieser took their contact details and said he would be in touch. According to Rieser, Iguaran did not reply to Leahy on the issue of the witness. Leahy had also written to President Uribe about Apartado, citing the two massacre cases and two additional Apartado murders, whose victims were Rodrigo Salas David in November 2005, and Edilberto Vasquez Cardona in January 2006. In the latter two cases, Rieser said there was no doubt the military had killed them but the issue was whether the killings were justified. Later in the discussion, Rieser cited other cases, drawing from an Amnesty International memorandum to the State Department dated April 4, 2006. ¶6. (C) Prosecutors Luis Alejandro Guevara and Nelson Casas told Rieser they had both received threats as a result of their work but were determined to press ahead. Guevara said he had to leave Colombia for exile in Costa Rica for a year after investigating cases associated with paramilitaries in Cucuta. Casas said he was currently using protection measures (armored car, family moved residence) because of repeated cases in which cars or trucks with tinted windows and no license plates followed his wife to her place of work. Casas said he thinks the surveillance methods against his wife were likely carried out by paramilitary or military elements, but he could not be sure. ¶7. (C) According to Guevara, who is in charge of investigating the attack on the GOC Commission of Inquiry sent to investigate the February 2005 massacre, his extensive investigation and numerous sworn, written witness statements from captured and demobilized FARC members and locals shows "beyond doubt" that leaders of the peace community are allied to the FARC. Guevara said the leaders provided supplies to the FARC's 5th Front, which operates in the area, and helped treat injured guerrillas. He said he saw on several occasions mules and horses laden with supplies from the peace community trekking into the mountains where the FARC had its camps. He has not tried to arrest the leaders yet because of "the expected international outcry." He reported that "Carlos Hugo," who he said was a former peace community leader, was now a FARC militia leader in the zone; an arrest warrant is out for him. A FARC 5th Front member called "Arturo" was responsible for telling peace community families to share houses on occasion to leave residences vacant for temporary FARC use. (At this point, Casas said he recently visited a house in the peace community and saw seven teenage girls inside wearing identical olive green t-shirts and shorts; he surmised they were from the FARC but "turned away because I did not want to pursue it.") Guevara said on a recent trip to the peace community the police told him there were 9 radio communication devices operating within about a 1 km radius (0.6 miles),and they were not from the military or the police. Guevara told Rieser that on the day of the attack on the Commission of Inquiry the 17th Brigade were "days away" from the scene. ¶8. (C) Casas said he was responsible for investigating the February 21, 2005 massacre of 4 adults and 4 minors who lived in the peace community and expressed frustration that witnesses refused to testify (mentioning leaders such as former mayor Gloria Cuartas, priest Javier Gerardo, and Clara Rojas, as well as other local residents). Casas said local military interviews have not yielded results. The military was about 2,700 meters (about 1.5 miles) from the massacre site on the 21st, and "could possibly" have walked there and back. He reported that demobilized FARC guerrillas said the FARC committed the murders because the 4 adults "had decided to return to civilian life." Casas said the gruesome manner of the killings (limbs hacked off, throats cut) was consistent with paramilitary murders (whether committed by them or by those who wanted to leave that impression). Casas told Rieser there was evidence of an M60 grenade explosion in a peace community house, but such grenades are used by the military and the FARC. A journalist gave Casas a description of a man wearing a soldier's uniform washing a machete in a nearby stream, but the description of the soldier was too vague to be helpful. Casas said the Procuraduria (Inspector General's office) had oral testimony from local residents who say that two witnesses will not come forward because they were associated with the FARC. ¶9. (C) In response, Rieser repeated that he wanted to ensure the Human Rights Unit had the resources to pursue investigations and get convictions. He expressed disappointment that over 100 people had provided evidence in the July 2000 massacre case and yet "nothing had happened." He said he would like an update on the early December 2005 Curumani massacre of 22 people, and a status report on the Orlando Valencia murder (kidnapped on October 15, 2005, whose body was discovered on October 26). Rieser passed the prosecutors copies of Senator Leahy's letters to Iguaran and Uribe and a copy of the Amnesty International memorandum. ¶10. (C) Unit Chief Cabana said he would provide Rieser with updates as soon as possible. On the Orlando Valencia case, prosecutor Guevara said the Fiscalia had arrested two former paramilitaries (one was "Diomedes," a local paramilitary leader) for the murder. With regard to Curumani, Guevara said human rights NGO MINGA had supplied two valuable witnesses whose testimony sounded promising. WOOD