Tensions over a colonel's sentencing in Colombia
On Wednesday a Colombian court did something that only a few Latin American justice systems have managed to do: send a high-ranking former military officer to prison for an abuse of human rights. A judge sentenced Colonel Alfonso Plazas Vega to 30 years.
The case goes back to 1985, when Colombia’s now-defunct M-19 guerrilla group staged a takeover of Colombia’s Palace of Justice (supreme court building) in downtown Bogotá. The military assaulted the building, and the resulting violence and fire killed over 100 people. Twenty-five years later, the Palace of Justice episode remains an open wound in Colombian politics. The right blames the M-19 for what Colombians call the “holocaust”; the left blames the armed forces.
Col. Plazas was on trial for a specific abuse committed in the aftermath of the Palace assault. Eleven employees of the court who survived the attack, mostly cafeteria workers, were taken to the Army’s Cavalry School in northern Bogotá. They never left. Witnesses said that they were tortured and killed. The case against Col. Plazas, who is now 65 years old, was reopened in 2006 after new video footage of the attack showed that the eleven left the Palace of Justice alive.
Relatives of the victims called the ruling against Col. Plazas “a milestone in the history of the fight against impunity” and evidence that “the country can meet international standards of justice.”
Colombian President Álvaro Uribe, who in 2002 had named Col. Plazas to be his government’s first “drug czar,” didn’t share that view. Appearing on Wednesday in a joint press conference with visiting U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, an angry Uribe said:
This is something that took place in 1985. This was a criminal alliance between drug traffickers and guerrillas that murdered a supreme court of justice. The — none of the criminals are in jail. And now I see that a member of the armed forces of Colombia has been convicted, someone who was simply trying to fulfill their duty. That hurts. That makes me sad.
A day later, appearing with the high command, Uribe was even more forceful:
The way to support the victims of the Palace of Justice is not by making victims out of members of the armed forces. … All we demand of the justice system is impartial and opportune justice for the selfless members of the armed forces, they can’t be the object of mistreatment for diverting the crimes of terrorism throughout our history.
Uribe proposed the passage of a law to protect the military from human rights charges. While his proposal was light on specifics, the President called for a requirement that higher standards of evidence be used in cases against officers.
The president’s words come a week after an episode in which he reacted aggressively after a prosecutor — apparently in error — issued a citation to open a human rights investigation against Gen. Freddy Padilla de León, the chief of the country’s armed forces. On that occasion, Uribe called the prosecutors “useful idiots of terrorism who do nothing more than make false accusations.”
The atmosphere in Bogotá is tense. Colombia’s Supreme Court, in a clear response to Uribe, issued a statement “rejecting expressions, intrusions and undue interference” in judicial decisions. Gustavo Petro, a senator and recently defeated presidential candidate who is a former M-19 member, used Twitter to warn fellow ex-guerrillas to “heighten their security measures” in the wake of the court’s ruling.