For Clinton, Drug War Trumps Human Rights

In a move that starkly illustrates US priorities in Colombia, on August 23rd President Clinton formally waived human rights conditions attached to the $1.3 billion military aid package destined to help the Colombian military wage war against drug traffickers and peasant-based leftist guerrillas.

The conditions, inserted at the insistence of congressional liberals, would have blocked the aid package if the US government could not certify that that Colombia was in compliance with them. To comply, the Colombian military would have had to hold itself to minimal human rights standards and rein in its bloody-handed de facto allies, the paramilitary death squads, which now do most of the military's dirty work.

Prior to Clinton's decision, administration officials engaged in a frantic effort to spin the implicit admission that the Colombian military's hands are too dirty too pass muster.

The Office of National Drug Control Policy's Brad Hittle, for example, told the AP that, "You don't hold up the major objective to achieve the minor."

But what is the "minor" objective to which Hittle refers? Simply put, it is that the Colombian military and paramilitaries stop beating, raping, torturing, jailing, kidnapping, disappearing, and massacring unarmed, non-combatant Colombian citizens.

José Miguel Vivanco, Executive Director of the Americas Division of Human Rights Watch, condemned the waiver as "the wrong policy and the wrong time. The message is that the bad apples with the armed forces shouldn't be worried. Ultimately, the waiver defeats the purpose of any policy meant to improve human rights."

Even the State Department acknowledged the horrendous state of human rights in Colombia. In its latest annual report on human rights in Colombia, released in February, the department wrote the following:

"The Government's human rights record remained poor; there was some improvement in several areas, and the Pastrana administration took measures to initiate structural reform, but serious problems remain. Government forces continued to commit numerous, serious abuses, including extrajudicial killings, at a level that was roughly similar to that of 1998. Despite some prosecutions and convictions, the authorities rarely brought officers of the security forces and the police charged with human rights offenses to justice, and impunity remains a problem. At times the security forces collaborated with paramilitary groups that committed abuses; in some instances, individual members of the security forces actively collaborated with members of paramilitary groups by passing them through roadblocks, sharing intelligence, and providing them with ammunition. Paramilitary forces find a ready support base within the military and police, as well as local civilian elites in many areas."

The State Department's bland, bloodless language cannot disguise the grim realities that hide behind euphemisms such as "extrajudicial killings." Those wishing to see where their tax dollars are going and who have strong stomachs can check out the much more critical and detailed reports from such well-respected human rights monitoring groups as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International.

Secretary of State Madeleine Albright recognized that Colombia could not meet the conditions "under any circumstances," and recommended that Clinton waive them.

In remarks broadly representative of the human rights community's reaction, the Latin American Working Group's Lisa Haugaard told DRCNet, "We are very disappointed that President Clinton chose to immediately waive the human rights conditions. The State Department made the correct determination that Colombia could not meet those conditions," said Haugaard, "but granting an immediate waiver without using those conditions to pressure the Colombian government shows how human rights concerns have taken a back seat to the drug war."