by F.O.R. staff, 28 January 2007

The United States gives military training to more Colombians than any other country in the hemisphere – about 10,000 a year. A law known as the Leahy Law (named after Senator Patrick Leahy, who authored it) requires the State Department to investigate, or “vet,” every unit receiving this military training and exclude those with a history of human rights abuses. Not surprisingly, the vetting operation in Colombia is one of the largest in the world.

Although State Department policy is to require vetting of individuals chosen for military training, as well as units, responses to Freedom of Information Act requests to the Special Operations Command, responsible for the large majority of military training for Colombia, as well as State Department officials, indicate that no vetting of the large majority of individual Colombian military students has occurred.

Staff of the State Department Bureau for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor indicated that they receive lists for approximately 1,200 to 2,400 names from Colombia per year for vetting, which represents less than one quarter, at most, of Colombian security forces receiving military training from the United States.

The Fellowship of Reconciliation requested rosters or other records showing the names, rank and courses for all Colombian students receiving training from the 7th Special Forces Group from FY2001 through FY2005. In its August 2006 response, the Army stated that the Special Forces Command had no records concerning Colombian students taught by members of the 7th Special Forces Group during fiscal years 2001 through 2005.

According to the annual Foreign Military Training reports published by the State Department, the 7th Special Forces Group trained at least three out of four Colombians receiving US military training in FY2005 (7,868 of 10,393), which is consistent with the ratio for previous years. Funding for this Special Forces-led training came from Defense Department counter-narcotics programs.

It may be that for large training events only units are vetted and that individual names were not recorded. But even for small numbers of Colombian soldiers brought to the United States for training, the Defense Department reports it has no records of names, for at least one military school. The Army Intelligence School at Fort Huachuca, according to the FMT reports, trained between one and four students each year from FY2000 to FY2004. But names of students trained at Ft. Huachuca are not maintained by either the Army Intelligence and Security Command or the Defense Security Cooperation Agency. DSCA does not keep any rosters for any classes attended by foreign military personnel, according to the Army.

The lapses in human rights vetting of forces trained by the United States are not new or unique to Colombia. General Accounting Office reports in 2005 and 2006 concluded that State had no mechanism to ensure implementation of vetting procedures, resulting in thousands of soldiers in North Africa and Southeast Asia who were given military training with no evidence of vetting. In Southeast Asia, GAO found that from 2001 to 2004, “an estimated 6,900 individuals received U.S. training assistance without any evidence that they had first been vetted for gross violations of human rights.”

Nor does the State Department’s new worldwide database (Abuse Case Evaluation System), which State officials acknowledge contains little data, address the failure to carry out vetting of soldiers and police, if the responsible agency does not even bother to record the names of thousands of soldiers trained, in violation of State Department policy and the Leahy Amendment.

The United States thus lacks any means to assess whether we are giving military training to known human rights abusers or those collaborating with terrorist paramilitary forces. What is worse, it has no means to track whether those given military training go on to join or collaborate with terrorist groups.

Recommendations

• Congressional Committees should hold a hearing on the human rights vetting process for Colombia. This could be combined with an inquiry into the human rights certification process, which has lacked any articulated benchmarks for decisions to certify Colombian compliance with human rights conditions.

• Congress should direct the State Department to carry out a full assessment of military training given to Colombian security forces by obtaining and reviewing the names of those given training in military methods and comparing them with databases of those associated with human rights abuses or collaboration with illegal armed groups.
• Sufficient resources should be allocated for State to carry out this assessment.
• In the meantime, US military training in Colombia has a high potential of contributing to terrorism, and should be suspended.