Adam Isacson

Defense, security, borders, migration, and human rights in Latin America and the United States. May not reflect my employer’s consensus view.

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Civil-Military Relations

September 13, 2024 — 0

New at WOLA – Soldiers Confronting Migrants: Texas’s Dangerous Precedent

Actions committed along the Rio Grande, which range from firing projectiles at unarmed migrants to physically pushing them back across the border, violate nearly any democratic law enforcement agency’s standards and set a dangerous precedent for civil-military relations on U.S. soil.

Here’s a new commentary at WOLA’s website about an especially alarming part of what Texas’s state government is up to at the U.S.-Mexico border right now.

Since March 2021 the state government of Texas, under Gov. Greg Abbott (R), has carried out “Operation Lone Star” (OLS), a crackdown on migration along the state’s border with Mexico. While this operation’s political, financial, and legal aspects have received much attention, an equally alarming issue has been relatively overlooked: the use of excessive force by Texas police and national guardsmen against civilians at the borderline.

Actions committed along the Rio Grande, which range from firing projectiles at unarmed migrants to physically pushing them back across the border, violate nearly any democratic law enforcement agency’s standards and set a dangerous precedent for civil-military relations on U.S. soil.

We detail a series of often outrageous incidents involving Texas National Guard personnel at the borderline. We sound the alarms, and call for federal intervention, for four reasons:

  1. What’s happening goes way beyond virtually all U.S. law enforcement agencies’ use-of-force standards.
  2. It is illegal to push someone out of the country who is petitioning for asylum on U.S. soil.
  3. Texas is ignoring decades of lessons and policing best practices for managing crowds and de-escalating potential disturbances.
  4. When people whose uniform patches say “U.S. Army” on them violently confront civilians on U.S. soil, the precedent for U.S. civil-military relations is grave.

Read the whole thing here.

March 26, 2024 — 0

Civil-Military Relations in the Americas: Some Links from the Past Month

Updates about thorny civil-military issues, from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, and Nicaragua.

Argentina

The rightist government of President Javier Milei is sending Argentina’s Congress a package of laws that would return the armed forces to internal security roles for the first time since the years following the country’s return to democracy. The government seeks to deploy combat soldiers—not just logistical support units, as now—to the crime-plagued city of Rosario. Soldiers would be empowered to carry out patrols, checkpoints, and arrests.

The armed forces are complying with the order to help fight organized crime in Rosario, but are uneasy with the new mission. Several generals communicated to Defense Ministry leadership “that they do not want any of their uniformed men touching ‘a single civilian’ in Rosario.”

Many Argentine analysts worry that expanding military roles to include public security and counternarcotics would be a grave mistake. “You have the armed forces as insurance, as if they were your car insurance,” Rut Diamint of Buenos Aires’s Torcuato di Tella Institute tells her students. “You hope never to use them, but when you have to use them, the fact that they have been working as policemen does not help you.”

“Countries that have used the Armed Forces to fight drug trafficking had negative results, there was no success,” said former Argentine Army commander Martín Balza. “The results were lethal, demoralizing for the forces, and seriously affected their essence and professionalism.”

The Milei government has prohibited the use of gendered names for officer ranks held by women (“generala”, “sargenta”, “soldada” or “caba”).

The commander of U.S. Southern Command, Gen. Laura Richardson, will pay a visit to Argentina on April 3.

Brazil

The former chiefs of Brazil’s army and Air Force told police investigators that then-president Jair Bolsonaro presented them with a plan to remain in power after he lost the country’s October 2022 elections. They refused to participate, though the chief of Brazil’s Navy “said he would put his troops at Jair Bolsonaro’s disposal,” one testified.

“It is said that, of the sixteen members of the high command, between four and six were in on the coup,” wrote Veja columnist Ricardo Rangel.

Chile

Faced with concern over urban crime, leftist President Gabriel Boric is voicing willingness to send the military into some neighborhoods using a legal authority to “protect critical infrastructure.” Presidential spokeswoman Camila Vallejo said, “Let’s not believe this is a silver bullet. There is a tone in public opinion or debate that makes people think that this is going to be the solution to fight crime, and the truth is that it is going to be one tool among many.”

Guatemala

Guatemala’s Constitutional Court officially closed the “CREOMPAZ case,” a years-long effort to prosecute a group of former high-ranking military officers accused of forcibly disappearing 565 people between 1982 and 1988, during the country’s long armed conflict. The victims were found in a mass grave at a peacekeeping training base in Alta Verapaz that the Army had used as a clandestine torture center. Among those questionably exonerated is Gen. Benedicto Lucas García, brother of dictator Romeo Lucas García (1978-1982).

Honduras

Generals who testified in a U.S. court in favor of ex-president Juan Orlando Hernández, who was found guilty of narcotrafficking on March 8, had careers deeply intertwined with that of the disgraced leader, Contra Corriente reported. Gen. Tulio Romero Palacios, who served as Hernández’s aide-de-camp, attended military school with Hernández since they were 13.

The deaths of three alleged gang members in a prison cell on February 18 raised to eleven the death toll in Honduras’s prison system since the armed forces took control of it in June 2023.

Mexico

A report from Mexico United Against Crime (MUCD), a non-governmental research and advocacy group, documented a sharp growth in the Mexican armed forces’ economic power during the government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador, which began at the end of 2018. The military had no participation in state-owned companies before then, now it is involved in or managing 30. “Today, the Armed Forces are in charge of exercising, administering and strategically managing a large part of public money and the profits of state-owned companies with opacity, high discretion, and no accountability,” it concludes.

Migration control has become a key area of military involvement in domestic non-defense functions, contends a report from the Mexico City-based Universidad Ibero. The country’s migration agency (National Migration Institute, INM) now has retired officers in several high positions and works closely with the military on migrant control operations.

An August rescission of arrest orders against Army personnel allegedly involved in the 2014 Ayotzinapa disappearances “was a startling indication of the power of the Mexican military,” noted Alma Guillermoprieto in a thorough narrative of this high-profile case, which remains in impunity nearly 10 years after it happened.

Alma Guillermoprieto, “Forty-Three Mexican Students Went Missing. What Really Happened to Them?” (The New Yorker, March 4, 2024).

Mexico has 37,478 National Guardsmen assigned to policing tasks under the command of the federal government’s Public Security Secretariat (SSPC), wrote Lilian Chapa Koloffon at Nexos. That is a drop from the 43,724 civilian Federal Police that existed when the Andrés Manuel López Obrador government began in 2018. (López Obrador abolished the Federal Police and set up the National Guard, a militarized force that for now is nominally under civilian command.) Meanwhile, the number of military police in Mexico’s army grew from 14,822 to 69,461 from 2020 to 2024.

The Mexican military’s Cyberspace Operations Center carries out activities including the use of Israeli-made software to monitor citizens’ social media accounts, and “influence operations” to defend the armed forces’ public image, reported the Red en Defensa de los Derechos Digitales.

The newsmagazine Proceso recalled that Venezuelan civil-military relations expert and activist Rocío San Miguel, whom the Maduro regime imprisoned and has been holding almost totally incommunicado since early February, was a frequent critic of Mexican President López Obrador’s policies that increased his country’s armed forces’ power.

Nicaragua

As dictator Daniel Ortega ages and the power of his wife, Rosario Murillo, grows, Manuel Orozco wrote an analysis wondering whether the country’s generals will remain loyal to her, and if so which ones. It notes that the armed forces or retired officers control several entities, from civil aeronautics to tax collection to counternarcotics, that offer potential for enrichment.

See also:

February 13, 2024 — 0

Rocío San Miguel, now a political prisoner, discusses politicization of Venezuela’s military in 2010

Video of a 2010 conversation excerpt with Venezuelan activist and civil-military relations expert Rocío San Miguel, who was just arrested in Caracas.

I don’t get to work on Venezuela very often, but I did get to record a conversation in 2010 with activist and civil-military relations expert Rocío San Miguel. Here’s an excerpt where we discussed the military’s politicization.

Rocío was arrested last Friday in Caracas. Authorities are accusing her of terrorism and treason, which is as horrifying as it is absurd.

February 12, 2024 — 0

Civil-Military Relations in the Americas: Some Links from the Past Month

Soldiers are playing larger law enforcement roles in Ecuador and Argentina. Guatemala's new president is keeping civil-military relations cordial. Mexican human rights prosecutions are struggling while AMLO seeks to place the National Guard under military control.

As part of Ecuador’s crackdown on organized crime, the armed forces have intervened in 17 prisons, with troops still present in 10 of them.

Troops are also stationed along highways, at airports, and at 10 Pacific seaports.

In coming months, Ecuadorians will vote on this referendum question: “Do you agree with allowing the complementary support of the Armed Forces in the functions of the National Police to combat organized crime, partially reforming the Constitution?”

After his tumultuous January 14 swearing-in, Guatemala’s reformist president, Bernardo Arévalo, swore in a new high command and paid respectful visits to the country’s Army and Navy. Arévalo, who as an academic had published at least seven books about security and Guatemala’s army, said that the Army will continue in its role of supporting civilian security forces against organized crime.

The Arévalo government promoted four female army officers to command positions in non-combat units.

In Argentina, new president Javier Milei followed the December firing of 22 Army generals with the forced retirement of 16 Navy admirals—more than half of all officers of that rank.

Milei’s budget cuts include nonpayment of installments of a previously promised raise for military officers. Under current pay scales, Pagina12 reported, an army general earns about US$350 per month less than a police commissioner.

Security Minister Patricia Bullrich said that the Milei government is working on a plan to deepen the armed forces’ support for police in border security and fighting organized crime. Since its transition to democracy, Argentina has been reluctant to give the military new internal civilian security roles.

Mexico’s Supreme Court had ruled last year that, contrary to President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s wishes, the country’s new National Guard must not remain under the command of its defense ministry (SEDENA). López Obrador called two of the justices “traitors.”

As of January 1, the Guard was to come under the security ministry (SSPC). A January 6, 2024 document circulated to guardsmen challenged the Court, stating that while the National Guard is under the SSPC’s “operational” command, it remains under SEDENA’s “administrative” command.

On February 5 President López Obrador submitted a series of proposed legal reforms, among them a constitutional amendment that would place the National Guard under SEDENA’s control.

A military court has now released from pre-trial detention 13 of 16 Mexican Army soldiers who allegedly carried out an extrajudicial execution of five civilians in May 2023 in Nuevo Laredo. The incident was caught on video.

Eight of thirteen Mexican military personnel allegedly linked to the 2014 forced disappearance of 43 students in Iguala, Guerrero will be released, as a federal judge lifted their pre-trial detention.

A hard-hitting report from the Guerrero-based NGO Tlachinollan documents how President López Obrador has sought to exonerate the military of the disappearance of 43 Ayotzinapa teacher’s college students, adopting and promoting the armed forces’ version of events.

Armed with sticks, stones, and machetes, residents of rural Chicomuselo, Chiapas, blocked Mexico’s military from entering their communities, demanding that the armed forces first evict organized crime from nearby areas that they already occupy. Communities in the region have been forcibly displacing to escape violent competition between Jalisco and Sinaloa cartel fighters.

In late January, the Venezuelan NGO Control Ciudadano called on the government to modify a 9-year-old decree authorizing the military to use deadly force to control demonstrations. The organization also called for due process after the late-January demotion and expulsion of 33 military personnel on allegations of “conspiracy.”

On February 9, authorities detained the organization’s director, Rocío San Miguel, in the Caracas airport. As of this writing, her whereabouts are unknown.

A judge in Colombia ruled that retired Army Col. Jorge Armando Pérez Amézquita is guilty of ordering the murder of a demobilized FARC guerrilla, Dímar Pérez, in the Catatumbo region, in a high-profile 2019 case.

Colombia’s Marines swore in their first 60 female members following three months of training.

The former commander of Chile’s armed forces, Gen. Ricardo Martínez, voiced gratitude to ex-president Sebastián Piñera for having listened to his advice and abstained from sending the military into the streets to confront protesters in 2019. “I will always be grateful to him for not having taken the Armed Forces out of it, because we were not in favor of it.” Piñera died in a helicopter crash on February 6.

Along the U.S.-Mexico border in Texas, federal Border Patrol agents have had their access to part of the border blocked by National Guardsmen—trained soldiers whose patches say “U.S. Army” on them, but currently at the command of Gov. Greg Abbott (R). Some are calling on President Joe Biden to “federalize” the Texas National Guard, taking them out of Abbott’s command. In an analysis, Joseph Nunn of the Brennan Center for Justice acknowledged that doing so “would certainly pass legal muster” but should be an absolute last resort.

See also:

January 11, 2024 — 0

Civil-Military Relations in the Americas: Some Links from the Past Month

Soldiers are being used as police in more countries, and being embroiled in human rights and corruption scandals. A scan of news since early December.

Following the January 9 wave of criminal attacks and violence throughout Ecuador, President Daniel Noboa has declared a state of “internal conflict” and has deployed soldiers throughout the nation’s streets. Some experts warn that using soldiers as police on a long-term or semi-permanent basis threatens human rights, weakens democratic civil-military relations, and hasn’t worked against organized crime in most places that it has been tried. Noboa’s move, though, is popular as citizens deal with the shock of the January 9 attacks.

Argentina‘s new president, Javier Milei, forced at least 23 of the country’s 35 active generals into retirement, the largest purge since the country’s 1983 transition to democracy. Milei is moving fast to move the armed forces into policing and public security roles, which would reverse reforms of the country’s democratic transition and of the Kirchner presidency of the 2000s. Milei and his security minister, Patricia Bullrich, are pointing to the violence in Ecuador to justify their push to militarize policing.

Mexico‘s Proceso magazine found that military personnel assigned to the country’s new National Guard have been embroiled in many cases of indiscipline, including attacks on fellow personnel and alcohol and drug use. Morale appears to be low among soldiers whom the López Obrador government has assigned to be super-policemen: army and navy sources say that “there is excessive stress in the National Guard because the elements are forced to perform functions that are not theirs, and for which they are not prepared, since they only received four weeks’ training, which is insufficient to be in charge of public security. In addition, most of them have junior high school or high school as their highest level of education.” President Andrés Manuel López Obrador continues to seek legislative ways to place the National Guard under the military’s command, despite a Supreme Court decision stopping that from happening.

Mexico relaunched Mexicana Airlines on December 26 with a flight from Mexico City to Tulum. The airline is now fully controlled by the country’s armed forces.

A team of researchers from Mexico City’s Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana published a book contending that the National Guard is being deployed to put down community protests against extractive economic projects like logging and mining.

Peruvian President Dina Boluarte named a new armed forces chief. When he headed Peru‘s army, Gen. David Ojeda repeatedly sought to avoid testifying before prosecutors investigating abuses committed during a wave of protests against Boluarte’s late 2022 arrival in power. Gen. Ojeda reportedly referred to the protests as “subversive social violence.”

The head of Honduras‘s Military Public Order Police (PMOP), which has been tasked with managing prisons, called for a purge of the institution after a military prison director in El Paraíso was caught trying to bring in cash to hand out to inmates who belong to the Barrio 18 gang.

Reporteros de Investigación profiled retired Honduran colonel Elías Melgar Urbina, who “has held several hats in Xiomara Castro’s government,” including some related to the military and human rights, despite serious allegations of past involvement in human rights abuse.

Eight judges in Colombia‘s military justice system have been fired in just over a year due to alleged corruption.

Colombian President Gustavo Petro left generals confused by several last-minute changes to end-of-year promotion lists and unit assignments.

Bolivia‘s Congress was once again unable to approve a list of senior military and police promotions. Opposition legislators claim that the list is politicized.

La Tercera interviewed Gen. Paula Carrasco, an air force officer who is now the first woman to reach the rank of general in Chile‘s armed forces.

“Latin America’s armed forces are no longer irrelevant,” which increases the still mostly remote possibility of inter-state conflict in the Americas, the Economist contended.

See also:

November 22, 2023 — 0

At the Latin America Advisor: “Can Ecuador’s Next President Make the Country Safer?”

Thanks to the Inter-American Dialogue for the opportunity to contribute to their Latin America Advisor publication, in which they seek input from a few people about a current question.

The question this week was about Ecuador: “Ecuadorean President-elect Daniel Noboa, who takes office next Thursday, has raised the possibility of using the military to fight drug traffickers and has said he would call for a referendum on the subject within his first 100 days in office. Noboa is taking office in the midst of a surge in narcotrafficking and violence, which has led the homicide rate to soar. Why has outgoing President Guillermo Lasso been unable to curb violence and the homicide rate, and what must Noboa do differently? Will voters approve using the military to fight drug traffickers? What challenges will Noboa face in improving security given that his term lasts only 18 months?”

My response:

“It’s hard to think of other jurisdictions where violent crime rates increased sixfold in just four years, but that is what has happened in once-peaceful Ecuador. Outgoing President Guillermo Lasso, who governed during the pandemic and a chaotic post-FARC realignment of Colombia’s trafficking networks, lacked the institutional tools to respond to criminal violence, which originated in prisons and along trafficking routes but has since metastasized. Like Lasso, Daniel Noboa now must address the challenge while able to employ only his government’s weak, neglected, corruption-riven security sector. Under those circumstances, sending in the military to fight crime may seem like an attractive option. But there are very few examples in the hemisphere of violent crime declining significantly after troop deployments, and many examples of such deployments increasing human rights abuses. Unlike insurgencies, organized crime is an ‘enemy’ that prefers not to fight the government. It operates by penetrating and corrupting the same state institutions that are supposed to be fighting it. That makes organized crime a far more challenging adversary, requiring a smarter approach than brute force. Instead of troops, Ecuador needs the capacity to identify criminal masterminds, track financial flows, respond to violence ‘hotspots,’ improve response times, support community-level violence initiatives, weed out corrupt officials and many other duties that an adequately resourced civilian security sector performs. Noboa has issued vague proposals to fill some of those long-term institutional needs. The concern is that he may neglect these—which do not yield short-term results—in favor of a military response, which offers the illusion of action and carries big human rights risks.”

See also:

October 18, 2023 — 0

A Political Stunt Falls Flat at the Border

In July, the Republican governor of Virginia, a swing state far from the U.S.-Mexico border, sent a contingent of 100 state National Guard troops to Texas to support Gov. Greg Abbott’s (R) border-security clampdown known as “Operation Lone Star.” The troops went, Youngkin said, to combat the “fentanyl crisis.”

Anybody who looks at data could have told Youngkin that 89 percent of fentanyl along the border gets seized at the official border crossings, not in the wide-open areas between the crossings, where his guardsmen were on duty. We also could have told Youngkin that the overwhelming majority of fentanyl is crossing in California and Arizona, not Texas.

But the Governor sent the troops, and off they went to Eagle Pass, at a cost of $2 million over 3 weeks.

And unsurprisingly, over the course of their deployment, they encountered exactly zero shipments of fentanyl.

That’s a finding of the news team at the local Washington, DC NBC TV affiliate. Reporters filed an open-records request with the state of Virginia and obtained daily “situation reports” and other documents from the deployment.

The guardsmen did see 6,717 people they described as “illegal immigrants” and referred 1,834 to the federal Border Patrol. This isn’t surprising, as several hundred migrants per day have been crossing in Eagle Pass, seeking to turn themselves in to apply for asylum. You can stand by the riverbank there and see migrants, too.

After several days, a “commander’s assessment” document noted “a weakening of the deterrent effect of our Soldiers and Airmen.” Migrants, seeking to turn themselves in anyway, were ignoring commands to turn back.

Troublingly, NBC reported that the internal reports showed “conflict over Virginia’s policy to withhold water to migrants.” Texas has ordered Operation Lone Star guardsmen not only to block and turn back asylum seekers already on U.S. soil, which violates federal law and the Refugee Convention. It also has ordered them to refuse water and other assistance to migrants on the riverbank, held back by Texas’s concertina wire and troops, even in 100-degree heat, even when those migrants are families with children. The reports reveal some “conflict” over Virginia’s enforcement of this inhumane policy.

The tactical impact of Virginia’s National Guard deployment was zero. The impact on morale and readiness was likely negative. But Governor Youngkin got to travel to downtown Eagle Pass for a photo op (his office provides a page of media-ready high-res photos), so there’s that.

See also:

September 18, 2023 — 0

Delaying Tactics Threaten Justice in March 2022 Colombian Military Massacre Case

In March 2022, Colombia’s Army staged an early-morning attack on a large, hung-over gathering of participants in a “community bazaar”—including a few armed-group members, who fired back—in a rural zone of Putumayo, in the country’s south. The soldiers killed several civilians, including a pregnant woman and an Indigenous community leader.

An April 14, 2022 post to WOLA’s Colombia Peace website.

Top defense officials in the government of President Iván Duque insisted that the troops did nothing wrong and that no human rights or international humanitarian law violations took place. Colombian journalistic investigations found otherwise.

Colombia’s civilian Chief Prosecutor’s Office (Fiscalía) looked into the case, and agreed with the journalists. The Colombian magazine Cambio reported on August 20:

the Prosecutor’s Office deployed an interdisciplinary team that included ballistics experts, forensic doctors, topographers and prosecutors from its Human Rights Unit. The material collected, as CAMBIO was able to verify, reveals that the indigenous governor Pablo Paduro died as a result of a rifle shot by one of the uniformed officers and that the weapon found near his body was never fired or manipulated by him, but was planted on him with the intention of diverting the investigation. In addition, there is incontestable evidence: the dead were 11 and the weapons found were 5, so at least 6 of them did not have the means to shoot at the Army.

The prosecutors, though, are being held up by delaying tactics. Defense attorneys for the accused military personnel made a last-minute appeal to have the case heard in Colombia’s military justice system. The military system is meant for disciplinary infractions (“acts of service”), not human rights abuses; when it does get jurisdiction over a crime against civilians, it almost never convicts. For such cases, it is an impunity factory.

Cambio explained the legal machinations:

The indictment hearing was scheduled for the first days of August, but in an unexpected decision, the 106th judge of Military Criminal Instruction of Puerto Leguízamo [Putumayo] accepted the request of the soldiers’ lawyers and sent the process to the Constitutional Court to resolve a jurisdictional conflict. The judge’s decision has been criticized because a month after the operation, in May 2022, the same Military Criminal Court sent the process to the Prosecutor’s Office, arguing that the possible human rights violations could not be considered acts of service.

The Constitutional Court has yet to decide whether the Alto Remanso massacre case will go to the military justice system, where justice is unlikely, or the civilian system, where prosecutors and investigators have done thorough work and are ready to go. Colleagues at Human Rights Watch just sent an amicus brief to the Constitutional Court asking it to slap down the military attorneys’ gambit, and move the case back to the civilian justice system.

The military attorneys may be happy just to run out the clock. Cambio warns, “For now, the legal process is suspended and waiting for the Constitutional Court to define the conflict of competences. The clock is ticking, and the ghost of the statute of limitations’ expiration is haunting the investigators’ work.”

The Constitutional Court must act quickly.

September 15, 2023 — 0

You Can’t Buy Prosperity With Murder

At the Financial Times, Martin Sandbu punches a hole in the myth that Gen. Augusto Pinochet’s long dictatorship (1973-1990) guided Chile’s economy to prosperity with a series of market-fundamentalist economic reforms.

“In terms of economic prosperity, the most generous description of the dictatorship’s achievement is ‘erratic,'” Sandbu writes, pointing out that the economy took nosedives in 1974-5 and 1982-3. By 1990, real GDP per capita was only slightly more than what it was in 1973.

The real prosperity came later, during Chile’s democratic period, averaging 4 percent per year from 1990 to 2010, as this masterfully named chart makes clear.

September 15, 2023 — 0

Promo Video for Today’s WOLA Mexico Podcast

As I noted earlier today, I recorded a great podcast yesterday with the director of WOLA’s Mexico program, Stephanie Brewer. It’s about a report they published last week about the growing power of Mexico’s armed forces, and how hard it is to hold them accountable for human rights abuse even as they confront, and arrest, thousands of people per year while carrying out policing missions.

Here’s WOLA’s podcast landing page. And here’s the podcast, embedded:

September 15, 2023 — 0

WOLA Podcast on Mexico: “Demilitarization is not going to happen from one day to the next. But there needs to be that commitment”

I recorded a great podcast yesterday with the director of WOLA’s Mexico program, Stephanie Brewer. It’s about a report they published last week about the growing power of Mexico’s armed forces, and how hard it is to hold them accountable for human rights abuse even as they confront, and arrest, thousands of people per year while carrying out policing missions.

Here’s the language from WOLA’s podcast landing page.

A new report from WOLA dives deeply into the growing power and roles of Mexico’s military, and what that means for human rights, democracy, and U.S.-Mexico relations.

WOLA’s Mexico Program published Militarized Transformation: Human Rights and Democratic Controls in a Context of Increasing Militarization in Mexico on September 6. The report voices alarm about the Mexican armed forces’ growing list of civilian tasks, and civilians’ diminishing ability to hold military personnel accountable for human rights abuse and other illegal behavior.

In some new findings, Militarized Transformation reveals official data showing that the military isn’t even reporting its arrests of civilians to civilian security authorities and oversight bodies. The report updates and group together various indicators regarding the justice system and respect for fundamental rights by the security forces, with a focus on the armed forces and the National Guard, as well as the differentiated impacts and situations faced by women. And it makes a series of short-term and long-term recommendations for needed reforms.

This podcast episode features the report’s principal author, Stephanie Brewer, WOLA’s director for Mexico. Brewer discusses the report’s main findings, conclusions, and recommendations, along with a general view of Mexico’s democracy, civil-military relations, and U.S. policy.

“We recognize militarization is is the reality we’re currently working in,” Brewer concludes. “But while that’s going on, what possible reason could there be for the country to want the armed forces not to be operating under effective civilian control or not to be transparent about things like their use of force? Or not to be fully giving information to Congress? That would have to be something that that is in everybody’s interest in the short term.”

Download the podcast .mp3 file here. Listen to WOLA’s Latin America Today podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, or wherever you subscribe to podcasts. The main feed is here.

Militarized Transformation is the latest of several WOLA reports examining the military’s growing power in Mexico and its human rights and democracy implications. Among them:

September 12, 2023 — 0

The Chilean Military’s Conspicuous Absence

Chilean Presidency photo

Yesterday, outside the La Moneda presidential palace in Santiago, Chilean President Gabriel Boric held a dignified commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the September 11, 1973 military coup that replaced elected president Salvador Allende with military dictator Gen. Augusto Pinochet.

No leader of Chile’s armed forces deigned to attend.

From Chile’s La Tercera, in an article entitled “The government’s frustrated attempt to involve the Armed Forces in the commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the coup”:

As an official activity, the Executive was expecting the presence of the Army, the Navy and the Air Force (Fach), but they did not arrive.

General Javier Iturriaga, commander in chief of the Army; Admiral Juan Andrés de la Maza, of the Navy; and the head of the Fach, Air General Hugo Rodríguez, were invited by the government to the ceremony in La Moneda, but all three, in unison, declined to attend.

The three branches of the Armed Forces excused themselves from attending, through the Ministry of Defense, to which they sent their refusal to participate in the event. When this ministry was consulted about the reasons given by the armed institutions, and about the specific absence, it did not mention them.

September 11, 2023 — 0

50 Years After the Pinochet Coup, Deep Divisions in Chile

At the 50th anniversary of Chile’s bloody military coup, the pollster CADEM found a nation that remains divided, at times sharply. Of Chileans surveyed:

  • 47% believe that September 11 is a relevant date, 13 points less than in June of this year, while 16% think that it is somewhat relevant and 35% (+13pts) that it is not very or not at all relevant.
  • 46% think that the coup was avoidable, compared to 51% who believe it was inevitable.
    • By political segment, 69% of those identified with the right say it was inevitable and 73% of those identified with the left believe it was avoidable.
  • Regarding responsibility for the coup, 44% believe that Augusto Pinochet and the Armed Forces are the main actors responsible for what happened on September 11, 1973, followed by Salvador Allende and the UP government, with 39%; leftist politicians, with 30%; the U.S. government, with 29%; businessmen and the media, with 19%; and right-wing politicians, with 17%.
  • 57% refer to the Pinochet government as a dictatorship, while 41% call it a military government.
  • 57% say that during Augusto Pinochet’s government human rights were systematically violated, 18% agree somewhat with that statement and 24% agree little or not at all.
  • Only 33% believe that justice has been done in cases of human rights violations committed during the dictatorship, compared to 25% who believe that some justice has been done and 41% who believe that little or none has been done.
  • 84% think that at present September 11 is a very or somewhat divisive issue.
  • Chileans consider that former presidents Michelle Bachelet and Sebastián Piñera are the figures who have collaborated most in making Chile a reconciled country, with 53% and 52% respectively.
    • Meanwhile, only 36% see collaboration from the Army, 33% from President Boric, 31% from José Antonio Kast and the Republican Party, 24% from the Frente Amplio and 23% from the Communist Party.
  • 75% consider that September 11 is a date that should be remembered so that human rights are never again violated in Chile, but at the same time 60% think that it should be left in the past.
  • In the case of military prisoners for human rights crimes who are seriously or terminally ill, 60% think that they should not have benefits and should serve their sentences regardless of their age or health.

At least there’s some rhetorical consensus here:

  • For 95% it is important that all political sectors, left and right, commit themselves to democracy and respect for human rights.
September 6, 2023 — 0

Mexico Now Deploys More Soldiers than Police for Public Security

“The Mexican government is giving more and more power to institutions known precisely for their lack of transparency, and it is doing so without adequate civilian controls, in a process that will be difficult to reverse,” warns a report published today by my colleagues in WOLA’s Mexico Program.

Ernesto López Portillo of the Universidad Iberoamericana Citizen Security Program, writing at Elefante Blanco, echoed those concerns:

The total operational deployment of military personnel for public security in 2023 exceeds the total number of state and municipal police. The news is unprecedented in contemporary Mexico.

…The total operational deployment of military personnel for public security already amounts to 261,644, while state and municipal police forces total 251,760.

June 23, 2023 — 0

Military extrajudicial executions in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico

Mexico’s investigative magazine Zeta calls the border city of Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas, “the capital of extrajudicial executions.” It lists a series of severe recent misuse of force incidents there, most involving the armed forces:

  • May 18, 2023: A video shows that, contrary to the Army’s version of events, soldiers shot and killed five men, following a confrontation and pursuit, after they had already been captured and disarmed.
  • February 26, 2023: Soldiers, shooting 80 times, killed five men following a pursuit.
  • August 31, 2022: Soldiers open fire on a vehicle and kill a four-year-old girl on board. A friend of Heidi Mariana’s mother was taking her to the hospital to treat a stomachache.
  • February 7, 2021: Soldiers in an Army truck blocked a private vehicle and opened fire, killing one aboard and wounding two.
  • July 3, 2020: Following a shootout, after soldiers overtook their assailants’ vehicles, they fired on the vehicles, killing all aboard—including kidnap victims whom the assailants were transporting.
  • March-May 2018: Mexican marines arbitrarily detained and disappeared 27 people in Nuevo Laredo. The bodies of 12 have been found, dumped.
  • September 5, 2009: An elite state police unit (Centro de Análisis, Inteligencia y Estudios de Tamaulipas) killed five men and three women. The police allegedly removed the victims from their homes, killed them, and posed the bodies in “northeast cartel” vests around a pickup truck with handmade armor to simulate combat.

Zeta published a table with 16 examples of extrajudicial executions going back to 1995. Seven took place in Nuevo Laredo.

Despite very heavy military involvement in public security, Nuevo Laredo continues to be one of the most dangerous and organized crime-dominated places in Mexico. (See my discussion of what we saw in Nuevo Laredo during a March 2022 WOLA border visit.) Things are so bad that U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) is not even granting appointments for asylum seekers using the “CBP One” smartphone app across the river in Laredo, Texas.

February 28, 2023 — 0

Sunday morning in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico

Army personnel are police in everything but name in today’s Mexico. Policing is just not a mission that they’re properly trained to carry out. An episode on Sunday morning (February 26), in the organized crime-dominated border city of Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas, seems especially serious.

From the Mexican online media outlet Elefante Blanco:

According to the Nuevo Laredo Human Rights Committee, in the early morning hours of Sunday, February 26, a military convoy shot at a white Chevrolet pickup truck on Huasteca Street between Jiménez and Méndez.

The people inside the vehicle tried to protect themselves, but only one survived. Upon hearing the gunshots, the neighbors went out between 4:30 and 5:00 AM to see the scene as the sun came up. At 10 AM, the Sedena [Defense Department, or Army] intervened at the scene of the killing, moving the truck.

…What really inflamed the residents was when the soldiers attempted to tow the white Chevrolet Silverado pickup truck, at that point the main evidence in the case, to take it away.

There the confrontation escalated. Residents blocked the way by standing in front of the tow truck, threw stones, and released the truck. One soldier fell and was beaten by several civilians, another was run over by a military vehicle.

Dozens of residents and reporters recorded what was happening on Huasteca Street. The soldiers took cover in the chaos and snatched cell phones, which provoked the population even more. The president of the Committee, Raymundo Ramos, was pushed, his cell phone fell and a pickup truck rammed him.

Seizing, and apparently smashing, a witness’s mobile phone. Credit: Luis Valtierra
December 8, 2022 — 0

Soyapango, El Salvador

From El Salvador’s Gato Encerrado, reporting on the government’s encirclement of Soyapango, a poor San Salvador suburb, with 8,500 soldiers (about 1/3 of El Salvador’s military) and 1,500 police. The troops and cops are doing sweeps to arrest people whom they believe are gang members.

Translated caption of this photo, credited to Melissa Paises: “According to the human rights organization Cristosal, the majority of the more than 56,000 people detained under the emergency regime have been young men between the ages of 18 and 30, who were detained simply for their appearance or for living in stigmatized areas such as Soyapango.”

December 7, 2022 — 0

Mexico’s use of the military for migration missions

In the past month or two, Mexico again increased the number of soldiers, marines, and national guardsmen assigned to border and migration duties. The most recent count, as of November 21, was 31,777 individual military personnel.

The numbers come from “security reports” periodically presented at President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s morning press conferences, and uploaded to the Mexican Presidency’s website:

November 7, 2022 — 1

“The dog that did not bark” in Brazil’s elections

In early September, many weeks before Brazil’s hotly contested elections, I’d published a post here citing what journalists and analysts were saying about the role of Brazil’s military. “If Brazil goes ‘January 6,” I asked, “what will its military do?”

Outgoing President Jair Bolsonaro, a former army captain, had courted the armed forces’ favor, and it wasn’t 100 percent clear what they would do if Bolsonaro were to reject a loss in the October 30 second-round vote. As of early September, I noted, few analysts with knowledge of Brazil’s military expected it to join in a pro-Bolsonaro coup. “But it’s not clear whether the high command will go along with other undemocratic behavior” like failing to respond to insurrectionary behavior among the president’s supporters.

In the end, this dog did not bark. Brazil’s military quickly accepted the election result. The security forces have not taken the side of pro-Bolsonaro protesters who have manned road blockades and demanded military intervention. The armed forces respected Brazil’s constitution and the work of its electoral court.

Here are a few things that analysts and journalists wrote in the elections’ aftermath.

Veja:

The morning at the Army Command started calm on Monday, one day after the election that confirmed Lula’s victory and the end of Jair Bolsonaro’s political project in the Planalto.

Following the behavior of respect to the institutionality registered during the whole government, the Army High Command did not manifest itself before, during, or after the elections.

As an institution faithful to the Constitution, it already awaits the next steps of the president-elect on Sunday and his transition team. “We will follow all the institutional steps for a smooth transition as we have always believed it should be,” a Command interlocutor told Radar.

The truck drivers calling for a military coup can now return to work. There is not the slightest risk of such a fantasy coming true.

The next meeting of the Army High Command – probably the last under Jair Bolsonaro – will be held on the last weekend of November. The transition will have already progressed and all issues will be dealt with looking to the future.

Foreign Policy:

Some participants at ongoing protests across the country called for a military intervention to overturn the results of the presidential election. Bolsonaro’s vice president, Hamilton Mourão, a retired general, tweeted Wednesday that a military coup would “put the country in a difficult situation among the international community.”

The New York Times:

The military has not considered intervening in the transfer of power and, if the protests expand, it may urge the president to ask his supporters to go home, according to a senior military official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private talks. The military, which helped oversee the election, found no signs of fraud, the official said.

The Ministry of Defense said that it would soon deliver its report on the vote’s integrity to election officials.

And now, president-elect Luis Inácio Lula da Silva is promising to remove thousands of active-duty military personnel from the posts they’ve been holding in the civilian part of the government. Veja reported:

Lula warned that he would ‘demilitarize’ the federal public administration. “We are going to have to start this government knowing that we are going to have to remove almost eight thousand military personnel who are in positions, people who didn’t take part in competitive examinations,” Lula declared, in April, during a meeting at the Central Workers Union.

…The ‘demilitarization’ that the party wants to promote should reach other areas of the government. A survey conducted two years ago by the Federal Audit Court (Tribunal de Contas da União) showed that the number of military personnel in civilian positions in Bolsonaro’s government doubled compared to Michel Temer’s government. There were 2,765 in 2018. In 2020, there were more than 6,000.

September 13, 2022 — 0

Bukele’s gang crackdown has imprisoned nearly 1 percent of El Salvador’s population

In March, after a violent weekend likely caused by a secret truce’s breakdown, El Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele declared all-out war on the country’s MS-13 gang.

This isn’t the first time a Salvadoran president has announced a “mano dura” (iron fist) policy against MS-13, Barrio 18 and other gangs that have made daily life in El Salvador dangerous for a generation. But Bukele’s campaign is the broadest and most indiscriminate.

As of late August, over 51,800 people had been arrested and jailed since March 26 when, in a 3:00 AM meeting with security officials, Bukele gave an order for sweeping arrests. Every day, families surround one of the country’s main prisons, awaiting news about loved ones seized off the streets or even from their homes, as Jonathan Blitzer detailed in a September 5 New Yorker profile of Bukele.

A September 12 investigation by the Salvadoran daily La Prensa Gráfica includes new information about the draconian policy’s origins. “They told us to go that very day and capture all the MS gang members that were identified. They told us: you have to bring in the heads of the gang; you have to touch the gang’s finances. The order was to surround them, to surround their family members, their acquaintances,” an official present at the March 26 meeting said.

The police chiefs were told that they would not have to “worry about the Attorney General’s Office.” According to the sources, the instruction, which was later passed on to all active police officers in the country, was that “the Attorney General’s Office is going to receive the MS gang members that we send them. Without much proof.”

“There was no officer or anyone in that room who did not know that they were asking us to go against the law, but that was the order: to bring this to an end,” said one of the sources.

“During the state of emergency, the military performs public security tasks, an assignment that the Salvadoran Constitution gives only to the police,” reads the caption of this image from La Prensa Gráfica photojournalist Luis Martínez.

This is not entirely a police operation. El Salvador’s military, a significant recipient of U.S. military aid, plays a robust role as well. The initial 3:00AM meeting “was not attended by Armed Forces commanders,” La Prensa Gráfica reported, but “military and police officials consulted said that they received orders at another meeting called by Minister Merino Monroy,” referring to the country’s defense minister, René Francis Merino Monroy, an active-duty vice-admiral.

A veteran police agent told La Prensa Gráfica:

This state of emergency has been the first time that he has seen, for example, soldiers patrolling on their own, soldiers detaining civilians, with the freedom to act as if they knew anything about public security tasks. The Minister of Defense has assured that some 18,000 military operatives are carrying out tasks that the Salvadoran Constitution entrusts to the PNC [Civilian National Police].

The newspaper’s investigation continues:

To date, human rights organizations in El Salvador have counted more than 3,000 complaints of human rights violations for the same number of detainees under the state of emergency. The cases analyzed for this investigation confirm a common denominator: the Attorney General’s Office, more than 150 days later, is still unable to prove the gang membership of hundreds of detainees, and in dozens of cases the link between the detainees and these structures is based on informants, the “public voice,” or supposed police records of the detainees, about whom the same arrest records indicate that they had no criminal record or records in databases.

Today, “In El Salvador, having tattoos, being drunk, acting nervous or just looking suspicious are enough reason for police to arrest people.”

September 9, 2022 — 0

If Brazil goes “January 6,” what will its military do?

Brazil’s first-round presidential election is just over three weeks away (October 2). A consensus view is that right-populist President Jair Bolsonaro, who trails former president Luis Inacio Lula da Silva in every poll, will reject the result if he doesn’t win, setting up Brazil for a sort of January 6 scenario.

If that happens, what will Brazil’s military do? The country’s powerful armed forces ceded power and allowed civilian rule less than 40 years ago, in 1985, and many officers are believed to be admirers of Bolsonaro, a former army captain. A 2021 decree allowed active-duty officers to hold public office. Bolsonaro pushed to give the armed forces a role in detecting possible electoral fraud vulnerabilities, and the officers on a special “election transparency commission” reported finding some.

Few foresee a military coup. But it’s not clear whether the high command will go along with other undemocratic behavior.

Here are a few things that journalists and analysts have said this week in English-language media, as Bolsonaro headed some very politicized Independence Day celebrations on September 7.

Miguel Lago of Columbia University at the New York Times:

There’s a lot we don’t know about how that might come about. But it’s clear that if a contingent of supporters, armed and determined to keep Mr. Bolsonaro in power, burst into Brasília, the capital, it would create chaos. In many major cities, it’s not impossible to imagine an insurrection led by police forces — while truck drivers, overwhelmingly pro-Bolsonaro, could block the roads as they did in 2018, creating havoc. Evangelical pastors, whose congregants by large margins support the president, could bless those efforts as part of the fight for good against evil. Out of such anarchy, Mr. Bolsonaro could forge dictatorial order.

Who will stop him? Probably not the army. Mr. Bolsonaro, after all, has many supporters in the military and over 6,000 military personnel working in his government, filling civilian roles. For its part, the army seems to be relatively relaxed about a possible takeover and has — to put it mildly — no special attachment to democracy. There is no sign, as far as can be seen, that the armed forces could be protagonists of a coup. But neither is there a sign that they would resist an attempt at revolution.

Marcia Reverdosa and Rodrigo Pedroso at CNN:

[Guilherme Casarões, professor of political science at Getulio Vargas University and coordinator of Brazil’s Far Right Observatory] told CNN that that he foresees a “real risk” of a Jan. 6-type event in Brazil if Bolsonaro’s leftwing rival, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, eventually claims victory at the polls.

“I don’t think we’re going to have a coup in the classic sense with the military on the street, like what happened in 1964,” he said, referring to the historic overthrow that led to two decades of military dictatorship in Brazil.

“What I think is more likely to happen is an attempted coup, some kind of subversion of democracy … or any attempt to delay the electoral process by introducing doubts about the legitimacy of the process.”

Agence France Presse:

“There’s not the slightest chance (the military) will play any role outside the one established in the constitution,” said reserve general Maynard Santa Rosa, former secretary for strategic affairs under Bolsonaro.

Even though Bolsonaro enjoys close ties with top military figures, such as Defense Minister Paulo Sergio Nogueira, and has picked former defense minister Walter Braga Netto as his running mate, Fico, the military history expert [Carlos Fico, a military history expert at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro], said those two “have no troops under their command.”

“There is no generalized movement by active duty service members worried about verifying the electronic voting system,” he said.

Fico added that any election-related unrest from the security forces was more likely to come from the police, a group “very influenced by ‘Bolsonaro-ism.'”

John Otis at National Public Radio:

Bolsonaro has not clearly stated whether he would leave office peacefully if he loses. If Bolsonaro is defeated by Lula, then tries to cling to power, analysts say he would lean on the military for support. And some of his supporters are OK with that.

…Fears that the armed forces will intervene in the event of a Lula victory have also been fueled by Bolsonaro’s close ties to the armed forces. He’s a former army captain. His running mate is a retired general, while his government is filled with ex-military officers. Meanwhile, Bolsonaro has spent the past year bad-mouthing Brazil’s electronic voting system and claiming that the military should help oversee the vote count. What’s more, authorities recently raided the homes of several Brazilian businessmen who, in text messages, appeared to back a military coup to keep Bolsonaro in power. But some Bolsonaro supporters on the beach, like Patricia Monerat, claim that would never happen.

August 1, 2022 — 0

At Razón Pública: Iván Velásquez, ministro de Defensa: por qué y para qué

The Colombian publication Razón Pública today published a new piece by me about the defense and security challenges the country is facing, six days before it swears in a new president. That president will be the first leftist politician in Colombia’s modern history, and his choice to lead the Defense Ministry, Iván Velásquez, is one of Latin America’s best-known anti-corruption fighters.

I argue here that Velásquez is a good choice because he at least stands a credible chance of making progress on three urgent security priorities:

  • Combating corruption within the officer corps;
  • Increasing government presence in abandoned marginal rural areas where armed groups and coca thrive; and
  • Deeply reforming and civilianizing the police.

We’ll be adapting some of the language in this column for a WOLA commentary later this week, which will have an English version.

July 26, 2022 — 0

Reuters: In Brazil, Biden’s defense chief to call on region’s militaries to respect democracy

From Reuters today:

U.S. President Joe Biden’s defense secretary, Lloyd Austin, is expected to call on militaries to respect democracy at an Americas-wide defense gathering this week in Brazil, a senior U.S. defense official said.

Those expected remarks – while not specifically directed at Brazil – are likely to turn heads there ahead of its Oct. 2 election, where Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro formally launched his re-election bid on Sunday by saying “the Army is on our side.”

This is the right, and really the only possible, move. Otherwise, a Defense Ministerial meeting in Brazil just 68 days before the presidential election risks appearing like a commercial for Bolsonaro.

June 29, 2022 — 0

The Wrong Man at the Wrong Time

After about 2 1/2 years, the commander of Colombia’s army, Gen. Eduardo Zapateiro, is leaving. This is not a bad thing. His exit is long overdue.

Why overdue? I can’t speak to the corruption allegations President-Elect Gustavo Petro hints at here, in a June 25 interview with Colombia’s Cambio magazine.

Rather, Gen. Zapateiro has been most problematic because of his public messaging on human rights and civil-military relations.

The General posted this charming tweet, a video of slithering snakes, the day after Colombia’s transitional justice tribunal (the Special Jurisdiction for Peace, JEP) published findings that the armed forces had killed 6,402 civilians between 2002 and 2008, falsely counting most victims as armed-group members killed in combat.

The investigators and JEP personnel denouncing “false positives,” you see, were reptiles.

Here’s the General, at one of the most intense moments of Colombia’s 2021 National Strike protests, calling the feared ESMAD riot police “heroes in black,” urging them to “keep working in the same manner that you have been.” At the time, the ESMAD were killing many protesters, and maiming dozens more.

https://twitter.com/DeCurreaLugo/status/1389459283746729986

Following a March 2022 raid in which soldiers likely killed at least 4 non-combatants, the General said, “This isn’t the first operation in which pregnant women and minors get killed.”

When candidate Petro, on Twitter, accused officers of colluding w/ the neo-paramilitary Gulf Clan, the General made a highly irregular foray into electoral politics, reviving an accusation that Petro had taken a cash bribe (charges were dropped in 2021).

Gen. Eduardo Zapateiro sent damaging messages on human rights. His public statements made the armed forces appear improperly aligned with a specific political ideology.

Meanwhile, Colombia’s insecurity measures worsened, and armed groups proliferated. So no, I won’t miss him.

June 7, 2022 — 0

Military-to-Military Relations with Mexico on Twitter

Even as Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador boycotts the Summit of the Americas, knocking the bilateral diplomatic relationship further sideways, the U.S.-Mexico military-to-military relationship seems to be all hugs and smiles—judging.

That’s the impression you get, at least, looking at these tweets posted over the past 3 weeks.

April 29, 2022 — 0

Video: “New Militarism in Latin America?”

(In Spanish) This was a very good 2-panel seminar, recorded on April 21 and hosted by Spain’s Fundación Carolina.

Some of Latin America’s smartest analysts of the current moment in civil-military relations. And also me, talking about the U.S. role over a slideshow, with my New Jersey Spanish accent.

April 26, 2022 — 0

Does this actually work?

A sound truck drives slowly through a neighborhood in a small city in west-central Colombia. A soldier aboard plays a recorded audio message, jacked in from his phone, encouraging members of armed groups to turn themselves in and demobilize.

This seems like an empty exercise. These messages, broadcast by radio, may sometimes work on homesick guerrilla recruits in remote jungle encampments, convincing them to disarm. But in the middle of a population center like Chaparral, Tolima, any armed-group members are likely to be un-uniformed and mixed in with the population. The promise of returning to one’s home and family, who are probably right there in town, doesn’t make particular sense.

April 14, 2022 — 0

What we know about the March 28, 2022 military raid in Putumayo, Colombia

A new analysis at colombiapeace.org tries to explain in English what looks like a serious case of human rights abuse committed by a U.S.-aided military unit in the part of Colombia where “Plan Colombia” began 21 years ago.

The Guardian called it a “botched army raid.” An Indigenous group called it a “massacre.” The commander of Colombia’s army insisted that it took place “with strictest observance of human rights and international humanitarian law.”

Early on the morning of March 28, dozens of people were gathered in a communal space in the town of Alto Remanso, near the Ecuador border in Colombia’s southern department of Putumayo. They had been partying all night, the ground littered with beer cans. Speakers were still blasting music. It was the third day of a community “bazaar,” a festival to raise money to pave a nearby stretch of dirt road.

Just after 7:00 AM, shots rang out. Community members say that men dressed in black, shouting “we’re not the security forces,” fired at the gathering. Some people at the bazaar—almost certainly members of an ex-FARC dissident group active in the area—returned fire. Shooting continued for at least an hour and a half. At that point, helicopters arrived, and the townspeople were shocked to find out that the black-clad invaders were Colombian soldiers.

The piece addresses 14 questions:

  • What happened?
  • What was the human toll of the operation?
  • Were those killed combatants, or civilians?
  • What is the security situation in Putumayo?
  • Do the military units involved receive U.S. aid?
  • Did this operation violate International Humanitarian Law?
  • Did the soldiers wear black outfits and say they weren’t the Army?
  • Did the Army delay or deny urgent medical assistance?
  • Was the scene tampered with?
  • What happened to the money and the whiskey?
  • Are credible investigations happening?
  • What is the humanitarian situation now for community residents?
  • What does this mean for politics and civil-military relations in Colombia?

Read it here.

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