U.S.-trained drug commandos set to hunt Colombian rebels - Interview

National Catholic Reporter, Jan 21, 1994 by Leslie Wirpsa

BOGOTA, Colombia - Colombian government officials have announced they plan to send the U.S.-trained, 1,800-man commando force that killed drug trafficker Pablo Escobar to pursue left-wing guerrillas and "other dangerous criminals."

On Dec. 4, two days after Escobar's slaying in the city of Medellin, President Cesar Gaviria Trujillo said, if police and army commanders agree, the new aim of the commando force would be the ELN, National Liberation Army, and FARC, Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, guerrillas. Military officials later announced that the commando force, called the Search Block, would also be used to attack other criminals within the city of Medellin.

"The Search Block was designed for the antinarcotics struggle, but if the government thinks it is convenient to use it for antiguerrilla activities, this will happen," a police official told NCR.

The decision to broaden the range of targets for the Search Block has human rights advocates and some judicial officials in Colombia worried. They say the government will once again be mixing the drug war with the armed forces' notoriously bloody counterinsurgency campaign, exacerbating the already dramatic level of human rights abuses in Colombia.

"The Search Block right now is a hero for Colombians. But if we begin to use it against the guerrillas, who fight a political struggle, in the same way we use it against drug terrorists, things are going to get very shady and people's rights will be in jeopardy," said Francisco de Roux, a priest who heads CINEP, the Jesuit think tank, in Bogota.

The Search Block, a mixture of Colombia's army, police, air force and intelligence forces, was created specifically to attack Medellin drug traffickers after chieftain Escobar escaped from a fancy jail in July 1992. It conducted 10,923 raids and killed 145 alleged members of the Medellin drug mafia before it nabbed Escobar.

A Colombian judicial official who inspected the Search Block's Medellin headquarters said six U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency agents help monitor telephones at the force's communications outpost in Medellin. The official said the outpost is so sophisticated it "looks like something out of a Jules Verne novel."

Search Block troops have received training at U.S. military installations in Baton Rouge, La., Fort Bragg, N.C., and San Antonio, Texas, as well as in France and Spain, a police official from the strike force central office in Bogoti said.

After Escobar's killing, U.S. ambassador to Colombia Morris Busby said the limited States supported the Search Block tactics by providing technical assistance and equipment.

Embassy officials in Bogota would not comment when asked if the Search Block had directly received narcotics-related U.S. assistance. Under the Bush administration, Colombia received more narcotics-related assistance than any country in the world. Totals for U.S. police and military aid to Colombia reached $92.9 million for 1992, according to statistics from the U.S. House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee.

Human rights advocates warn that sending the Search Block after left-wing rebels is dangerous and creates a foreign policy dilemma for Columbia and the United States. U.S. training and equipment were provided to the Search Block allegedly with antinarcotics objectives.

"You cannot take something that was provided for one purpose and use it for another, just like that," CINEP's de Roux said. "Moreover, the Search Block is a force that operates on the cutting edge, under emergency rules. In an emergency situation, you can allow a command like that to exist for a limited period of time, if it is directed at a specific objective. Even then, though you know this force violates precious elements of the rule of law in a society."

If operations by strike forces like the Search Block are generalized, de Roux said, "what you have on your hands resembles a holocaust."

A judge, a member of a special corps of antiterrorist officials whose job is to try drug traffickers and guerrillas, said the fight against Escobar may have justified extraordinary measures, even the suspension of some guarantees and rights.

"But we cannot continue to compromise the principles of democratic law. under the pretext of doing away with all of Colombia's problems," the judge said.

The judge, who has investigated accusations of abuses committed by Search Block members, said the force violates rights as part of its modus operandi. "It raids a house, rakes through everything, commits abuses, and if anyone smells like a criminal, they are killed" the judge said.