Rights groups say Colombia fails standard for getting aid

WASHINGTON -- The United States should withhold anti-drug aid to Colombia's military because it has failed to meet human rights conditions set by Congress, three leading rights groups said Tuesday.

The criticism came a day after President Bush proposed expanding military aid to Colombia to help the country protect a major oil pipeline from guerrilla attacks. Military assistance to Colombia has been limited to the drug fight.

"In 2001, political violence increased, the massacre of civilians more than doubled in frequency, attacks on human rights defenders and trade unionists remained among the highest in the region and the perpetrators of human rights abuses continued to escape accountability," Alexandra Arriaga of Amnesty International said at a news conference.

The State Department said it is looking into the activists' concerns and expects to decide within weeks whether Colombia has met the conditions for receiving aid. It said both the U.S. and Colombian governments have made human rights a high priority.

There was no immediate comment from the Colombian government.

$100 million in military help

Colombia is the main beneficiary of a $625 million package approved by Congress last year for military, police and social programs to fight drugs in the Andean region. About $100 million of the aid is military assistance for Colombia, according to the State Department.

The package is a follow-up to Plan Colombia, the $1.3 billion program that provided helicopters and training to Colombian counternarcotics battalions.

In both packages, Congress set human rights standards that Colombia would have to meet to receive military aid. Colombia did not meet some of the conditions under Plan Colombia, but President Clinton used a national security waiver to allow the aid to go through.

In this year's package, the standards are less stringent, but the Bush administration wasn't given the option of a waiver.

"The administration is caught between a rock and a hard place, between being honest and disrupting the aid flow or misrepresenting the facts in order to keep the aid spigot open," Coletta Youngers of the Washington Office on Latin America said.

This year's conditions require the State Department to certify that Colombia is suspending soldiers linked to paramilitaries or rights abuses, is prosecuting those soldiers in civilian courts and is taking steps to sever all links with paramilitaries.

None of the conditions has been met, said the report by Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and the Washington Office on Latin America.

"Certain military units and police detachments continued to work with, support, profit from and tolerate paramilitary groups, treating them as a force allied to and compatible with their own," it said.

A terrorist organization

Paramilitaries are blamed for most of the massacres in Colombia. The State Department has listed the main paramilitary group as a terrorist organization.

Rights groups met with State Department officials Friday, a meeting required by Congress under its conditions for aid.

Charles Barclay, a State Department spokesman, said Colombia shares human rights concerns with the United States, noting that President Andres Pastrana and military leaders have condemned links between paramilitaries and Colombian security forces.

"The military has in fact dismissed personnel suspected of collusion with the paramilitaries," he said. "The government is working to subject military personnel suspected of human rights violations to trials in civilian courts."

If Colombia is certified as meeting the rights standards, it could receive up to 60 percent of the military aid allotted to it under the Andean package. The remaining aid would be subjected to another examination of human rights in June.