Human rights and military "morale" in Colombia
This chart, from a Colombian Defense Ministry document (PDF), shows Colombia's armed forces and police with a combined 452,475 members at the end of 2011, their highest number ever and 4 percent higher than 2010.
Contrast that to this chart, from a January 2012 report, using Defense Ministry figures, by the Center for Security and Democracy at Bogotá's Sergio Arboleda University. The data show a sharp decline in combat actions initiated by the Colombian armed forces -- so sharp that, in 2011, the FARC may have attacked the armed forces more often than the other way around.
This trend is likely continuing in 2012; guerrillas attacked the security forces 132 times during the first 20 days of the year. The Sergio Arboleda University study also finds 2011 increases in guerrilla kidnappings and attacks on infrastructure (though it also notes a 5% decrease in homicides).
But why would Colombia's security forces, though at the height of their strength, be responding less? The author of the Sergio Arboleda University's study, former Colombian defense ministry advisor Alfredo Rangel, claims that the problem is military morale. The troops' morale is low, Rangel asserts, because the civilian justice system is trying to hold them accountable for human rights violations.
"Without a doubt, the legal uncertainty to which members of the security forces are submitted as a consequence of the abolition -- in practice -- of military jurisdiction [el fuero militar] and the disarticulation of the military justice system, is the element behind their de-motivation in combat, which explains the drop in the level of their offensive operations against guerrilla groups. The Colombian military forces are the only army in the world that fights a war without the legal guarantees that military jurisdiction should offer the state's combatants." (Our emphasis.)
Rangel goes on to list as "arbitrary" several of the civilian justice system's recent landmark verdicts for human rights crimes. These include verdicts against Gen. Humberto Uscátegui for permitting the Mapiripán massacre (2009), and against Col. Alfonso Plazas (2010) and Gen. Armando Arias Cabrales (2011) for crimes committed during the 1985 Palace of Justice takeover. Rangel also criticizes as "devastating" (fulminante) the 2008 decision by then-Defense Minister Juan Manuel Santos to fire officers whose units were involved in "false positives" killings of civilians.
Since 1997, Colombian jurisprudence and government directives have required that cases of military human rights abuse be transferred to the civilian justice system. The military's own justice system had proven to be too lenient, with the armed forces incapable of punishing their own ranks for crimes against non-combatants. To this day, military defense lawyers routinely fight to move their clients' cases out of the civilian system in the hope of escaping guilty verdicts and prison sentences.
Only very recently has the civilian justice system begun successfully trying senior officers for human rights abuses. This is an advance -- one that may soon be reversed by legislation that would require any future human rights cases to begin in the military courts.
But according to Rangel's analysis -- which is shared by organizations of retired military officers -- this human rights advance has left much of Colombia's huge military demoralized. Angry at the justice system, troops are remaining in their barracks, unwilling to carry out operations.
In fact, much of this drop in activity occurred before the first verdicts were handed down: the Rangel study shows military-initiated combat beginning to fall in a year (2008) of extremely high morale, when the armed forces killed top guerrilla leaders and bloodlessly freed hostages. But never mind that: it's an insult to Colombia's armed forces to argue that their morale hinges on their abusive members not being held accountable to justice.
If true, this would also reflect poorly on U.S. assistance. Colombia's security forces have received US$6.3 billion in U.S. aid since "Plan Colombia" began in 2000. U.S. officials frequently contend that this assistance has been instrumental in helping the Colombian armed forces become more respectful of human rights and the rule of law. These claims are hollow, though, if Rangel is right -- if, after so many years of U.S. aid and training, much of Colombia's army is on a sit-down strike to hold out for more impunity.
That would be shameful. We hope that there is another reason for this reduced military activity, and that Alfredo Rangel's study has simply missed it.