Am I my brother’s keeper?

In Colombia, soldiers kill the innocent to up the body count
Lat-Am Watch for the Buenos Aires Herald

The success of Alvaro Uribe’s government at fighting left-wing insurgency groups in Colombia has boosted the president’s popularity to dizzying heights, at home and abroad. Where so many had failed in the past, Uribe’s policy of ‘Democratic Security’ brought blow after blow to the rebel groups, culminating in the spectacular rescue of the politician Ingrid Betancourt in July of this year.

Colombian president Álvaro Uribe. Photo Antoine Gyori / AGP-Corbis

No wonder then that many of his compatriots hope that Uribe will stay on for a record third term, even if it does require a constitutional rewrite.

But a spree of extrajudicial killings by the army, fueled by a warped incentives scheme to boost body counts, threatens to tarnish president Uribe’s reputation with the blood of innoncent victims.

For among all the reports of military success against the guerrillas, there lies buried one statistic that just doesn’t add up. According the government figures, the FARC has 15,000 men and women under arms.

Yet by those same figures, in the past six years no less than 55,000 rebel soldiers either surrendered or were captured or killed by government forces.

How to explain that huge discrepancy? One of the possible answers lies in the frightening story of Miller Andrés Blandón.

Miller, a former drug addict and street artist made his living as a human statue in the town of Neiva. On July 17, while lunching at a homeless shelter, two men approached him and asked him if he wanted to earn some money picking coffee. He and two others agreed and were whisked off.

The next day news outlets reported the deaths of three guerrilleros near the jungle town of San José de Isnos. By nightfall, a local prosecutor found a wallet on one of the bodies, containing a phone number and an ID card. The card belonged to Miller Blandón. The phone number was that of Miller’s grandfather’s wife. She vehemently denied he had anything to do with any guerrilla group.

The story, reported yesterday by Spain’s El País newspaper, is one of hundreds, perhaps thousands of cases in which innocent by-standers were murdered by security forces and passed off as slain ‘insurgents’ in a cynical attempt to boost army statistics. Colombia’s national prosecutor’s office is currently investigating the deaths 1,155 alleged victims of these extrajudicial killings.

The list includes homeless people, street children and drug addicts as well as indigenous and peasant community leaders. The victims were often executed after being singled out by paid informants. The evidence and the scene of the crime were then manipulated to make it appear as if the victims were guerrilla members killed in combat.

By inflating the tally of slain ‘enemies’, soldiers and officers received promotions and medals. They may also have shared in the financial rewards paid to informants, according to columnist Alvaro Camacho Guizado of El Espectador newspaper.

The scandal became headline news after 11 boys from the shantytown of Soacha near Bogotá turned up dead half way across the country in September. Their mothers travelled 14 hours to identify their sons, supposedly guerrilla fighters killed in combat.

An investigation ensued as soon as it became clear that the boys were executed, not defeated. The government fired 40 members of the security forces and army chief general Mario Montoya – the architect of Betancourts’ rescue – was made to resign. Prosecutors have tied at least 3000 armed forces personnel to extrajudicial killings.

The Uribe government has tried to present these rogue executions as a new phenomenon, but in fact reports of such killings have been frequent ever since 2002, when Uribe first introduced his policy of ‘Democratic Security.’ The US backed military surge against the rebel groups has been held responsible for a staggering number of over one thousand innocent deaths passed off as combat casualties. What’s even more worrying is that that number is on the rise.

According to the Colombia-Europe-United States Coordination Group (CCEEU), an umbrella that links some 200 human rights organizations, in the past five years, an increase of 67.71% has been registered in extrajudicial executions directly attributed to state security forces. One person a day was killed in these executions between January 2007 and June 2008, compared to only seven in 2002, the year in which Uribe first announced his scheme of rewards for informants.

The killing of innocent Colombians by the very men and women entrusted to protect their lives is horrendous enough. The fact that hundreds of society’s most vulnerable members were killed by soldiers eager to don more stripes is a nightmare scenario that demands a full-scale purge.

Replacing General Montoya was an important first step. His subordinates depict the soldier behind Operation Jaque as a trigger-happy and ruthless man-of-action. The US State Department had been calling for his resignation long before this latest scandal.

But just blaming the soldiers is not enough. Defence minister Juan Manuel Santos should step down as well, accepting responsibility for a policy that was flawed from the outset and that lacked even the semblance of checks and balances.

As for Alvaro Uribe, these killings embarrass him more even than his alleged ties to paramilitaries and to the slain drug lord Pablo Escobar. It’s time he accepted that his role in Colombia’s future is coming to an end despite his soaring approval ratings. Acknowledging his mistakes and announcing his intention to retire in 2010 when his term ends is the decent way to honour the innocent victims of his undeniably successful war on the guerrilla groups.

Lawyers on the Inca Trail

Peru threatens to sue Yale over Machu Picchu artifacts

On July 24, 1911, an eight-year-old boy led a 35-year-old Yale University lecturer named Hiram Bingham up a steep path through the Peruvian jungle. Bingham was looking for the city of Vitcos, one of the last Inca strongholds to be sacked by Spanish invaders in 1572.

Instead what he saw were cascading terraces and a clearing bound on two sides by temples, on the third by a view of a snow-capped peak, and on the fourth by the ridge that lent these ruins its name: Machu Picchu.


The boy, who lived with his family among the Inca ruins, could hardly suspect that his kindly service to this ambitious explorer would lead to an international row almost a century later.

This weekend Peru announced it would sue Yale University in order to force the return of 46,000 artefacts it says were taken from the site of Machu Picchu.

It’s the latest chapter in tussle between the university famed for its archaeological collection and the country whose magnificent ruins are the number one tourist destination. The case carries significance because the eventuality of a ruling in favour of Peru would pave the way for other countries such as Greece and Egypt to reclaim their national treasures from the vaults of European and North American museums.

However, everything about the case, even including the actual number of artifacts at stake, is disputed. But things weren’t always like that.

Bingham, the son of famous Hawaiian missionaries and married into money, got all the backing he needed from Peru’s president Augusto Leguía, when starting out on his archaeological expedition. According to the author Christopher Heaney, who is working on a book about the fight over the Machu Picchu treasures, Leguía and the Lima business community backed the explorer with everything from military escorts to free train passages.

However, in 1912 when Bingham returned to Peru, sponsored by the National Geographic Society and with the intention of hauling as much as possible of his discovery back to Yale, the mood in Peru had changed. Only after vehemently lobbying did Bingham manage to get permission to export the artefacts. But with a condition. "The Peruvian Government reserves to itself the right to exact from Yale University and the National Geographic Society of the United States of America the return of the unique specimens and duplicates” read the crucial clause in the congressional resolution.

In 1920 Peru demanded the return of "original and duplicate objects taken from Peru,” citing the 1912 resolution. Months later 47 crates arrived. According to Peruvian experts, these contained “worthless bones and shards of clay which weren’t even found at Machu Picchu.”

There the fight ended for more than eighty years, until a full flung exhibition of the Inca treasures by Yale’s Peabody Museum went on tour in 2003. The exhibition provoked a reaction in Peru, then governed by Alejandro Toledo, the first Peruvian president of indigenous descent.

Toledo, who had been inaugurated at the stunning site of the Inca city, called for the artefacts to be returned. At first the talks took place behind closed doors, but in 2006 things came to a head and Peru threatened to sue.

But Toledo never acted on his threat and after the election of Alan García as president in 2006 and some soul-searching by Yale the two sides drew up a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU). It was hailed by Yale as “a model for resolving cultural disputes, balancing respect for Peru's cultural patrimony with the interests of the scholarly community.”

In September of 2007 Peru agreed to the MOU, which gave the country “legal title” to the 5,700 artifacts Yale claims it has in its possession. Closer inspection revealed that the terms were far from favourable for Peru.

According the MOU Peru receives around 370 “museum-quality” artefacts (the number varies between 384, to 369, to 329, depending on who you talk to), to be displayed in a museum, which is still to be finished as well as part (around 15%) of the “research collection”. Yale will also foot the bill for a travelling exhibition and academic exchange. The rest of the artefacts, however, remain in the United States thanks to the “usufructuary rights” that Yale retains for the duration of 99 years.

That's not all. According to Heaney, the MOU makes no mention of the gold smuggled out of Peru which ended up at Yale – the only gold ever found by the Bingham expedition – or of the almost half million dollars (by today’s money) worth of artifacts the explorer bought from Peruvian antique dealers who smuggled the pieces to Yale.

To make matters worse, in April of this year Peruvian officials inspecting the collection at New Haven, claimed that the Machu Picchu artifacts numbered more than 46,000 instead of the 5,700 Yale stated it had. The university insists that the difference comes down to different ways of counting the same collection of artifacts, often broken into many shards.

Meanwhile, the National Geographic Society sided with the Peruvian government, claiming the artifacts were “on loan” to Yale. “We were part of that deal [of 1912], National Geographic was present there. We know what was said and which objects were on loan and which should be returned,” Terry García, the institute’s vice-president said in an interview in June.

Negotiation in September of this year, headed by Peru’s foreign minister Garcia Belaunde seemed to bring a friendly settlement within reach. But in fact Belaunde’s involvement was short-lived and negotiations soon faltered. So now it’s up to the courts.

But while Peru contacts its high profile Washington D.C. attorney, a local news report from late October raises the question whether Peru's government isn't perhaps more interested in scoring easy electoral points than in preserving its cultural heritage.

On October 20 La Republica newspaper revealed how Peru's Economy ministry has cut resources for Machu Picchu so drastically that it and other major archeological sites are having serious trouble paying for maintenance, let alone new museums. The García government, it would seem, has every intention of exploiting the Inca legacy, but little intention of paying for it.