By John Lindsay-Poland

In the next few days, a retired Colombian colonel and School of the Americas graduate, Víctor Hugo Matamoros, will be tried for his role in facilitating the bloody takeover of the northeastern Catatumbo region of Colombia by paramilitary death squads in 1999. The takeover resulted immediately in a series of massacres, the displacement of more than 20,000 people, and paramilitary control of drug trafficking and other economic activities in the area.

U.S. Ambassador Curtis Kamman privately told Washington at the time that the army must be complicit in massacres in the towns of La Gabarra and Tibú. “How did seven massacres occur without interference under the noses of several hundred security force members?” Kamman wrote to Washington.

Yet, the United States continued to fund a unit intimately involved in the massacres after they took place, until at least 2007, according to State Department documents FOR has obtained.

For the first time, a high army officer has testified about how the Army worked with paramilitaries, implicating high-ranking officers, including some still on active duty. Major Mauricio Llorente, himself an SOA graduate, told Semana magazine how hundreds of armed paramilitaries arrived in May 1999, when he commanded the Army’s 46th Battalion in the town of Tibú. Soldiers from the 46th Battalion donned AUC paramilitary armbands before participating directly in the massacre, police commander José Rosso Serrano told embassy officials at the time.

Several officials, including Llorente, were tried for their roles, and Llorente is serving a 40-year prison sentence. But Matamoros was absolved, after he claimed that the 5th Cavalry Group he commanded had no jurisdiction in the area. Now Llorente, who had previously claimed his innocence, says that paramilitaries coordinated their actions with Matamoros, and even with a division commander.

But the 46th Counterguerrilla Battalion, though it was transferred to a different brigade, continued to receive U.S. support during 2000-03, and in 2004, 2005, 2006 and 2007. The 5th Cavalry Group also received U.S. aid in 2007, and individuals from the unit received training in earlier years.

Matamoros freely admitted he wasn’t doing anything about the paramilitaries, even after they had killed at least 150 people in the summer of 1999. “The local army unit refuses to combat area paramilitaries,” wrote a U.S. official who interviewed Matamoros a few months after the initial massacres. “He is convinced that doing so before the guerrillas are defeated would not make military sense.”

Matamoros was arrested last August, accused of participating in the La Gabarra massacre. A jailed paramilitary gunman has also testified to Matamoros’ aid in committing the massacre.

Reports of violations have continued to follow the 5th Cavalry Group since Matamoros’ departure. Last July 23, its soldiers reportedly killed three men, Hugo Armando Garzón, Nelson Darío Vargas and Johan Manuel Guzmán, who were seen by family members in their normal work activities shortly before they were killed. (Noche y Niebla #38, p. 18). Two days later, Army commander Mario Montoya congratulated the unit’s commander, Lt. Col. Juan Carlos Vargas Carvajal, another SOA graduate, for “audaciousness, perseverance and enormous ambition.” Montoya resigned three months later, after revelations of civilian killings in the Catatumbo region committed by the army in exchange for benefits – known as “false positives” - shocked Colombians.

The 46th Battalion, too, is dogged by reports of abuses. In October 2002, the unit arrived in a settlement of Arauquita and told everyone to turn off the lights. A soldier then broke into a home, killed a man, and raped his wife in front of the children, according to Amnesty International. In 2006, its soldiers reportedly opened fire on a car, hitting a 16-year-old girl in the car. Last November, the U.S. reportedly suspended aid to the 30th Brigade, to which the battalion is attached, because of the brigade’s involvement in “false positives.”

The Catatumbo region where the paramilitaries displaced thousands of families is rich in natural resources that local elites wish to exploit, including coal, oil, copper, gold and uranium. “Militarization [in the area] also sets out to promote the implementation of extensive monoculture agro-industry in palm oil and cocoa,” with assistance from USAID, according to a study by journalist Freddy Ordoñez. Mafia-state collaboration also facilitated the coca trade and money laundering in the border area.

Prosecution of Matamoros may be a step toward eroding the impunity that reigns in so many cases in Colombia. But it remains to be seen whether the Obama administration will look hard at U.S. complicity in these atrocities, and take Colombia policy in a different direction.

12 July 2009