By John Lindsay-Poland
September 2007

The Colombian Army’s Third Brigade, based in Cali, was deeply penetrated by drug trafficking mafia, according to a recent criminal investigation. “What the prosecutors’ investigation has shown as it progresses,” reported Semana magazine, “is that ‘Don Diego’ [a drug mafia kingpin] didn’t just buy these officers in exchange for one-time favors, but that many of them belonged to his organization. They were part of the mafia and put their jobs in the Army at its service.” Brigade commander Leonardo Gómez Vergara resigned August 16 as a result of the investigation, and a dozen other officers have been arrested or are under investigation.

Colonel Alvaro Quijano – who served as an instructor at U.S. Army School of the Americas (now called the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, WHINSEC) - was arrested on August 15, while the former chief of the brigade’s operations, Lt. Colonel Javier Escobar Martínez, has also been arrested and accused of mobilizing army units to protect the drug trafficker. Javier Rico Escobar graduated from the SOA/WHINSEC in 2003, having studied “counter-drug operations” there. Quijano, former commander of Colombia’s Special Forces en Valle Department, and another accused officer, Major Wilmer Mora Daza, taught “peacekeeping operations” and “democratic sustainment” at SOA/WHINSEC in 2003.

The Valle army ‘special forces’ provided security to the capo, according to the daily El Tiempo, but also guarded drug shipments that left Colombia via the Pacific Ocean from Chocó in the north to Nariño near the Ecuador border. U.S. military officials have claimed that a reason a U.S. military base is needed in Manta, Ecuador is to intercept increased drug trafficking in the eastern Pacific.

The commander of the Army’s Third Division (General Hernando Pérez Molina, another SOA grad), to which the Third Brigade belongs, was relieved of his post. The Third Division’s command staff had been vetted to receive U.S. military assistance as of July 2006, according to the State Department.

Last year, Colombian army officers from the Third Brigade ambushed an elite, U.S.-trained anti-drug squad in the Valle town of Jamundí, killing ten policemen. The leader of the attack, Colonel Bayron Carvajal, now under arrest, was also a graduate of the SOA.