The United States believed that the Colombian military was behind a wave of assassinations of left-wing activists, and yet they spent the next two decades deepening their relationship with the Colombian armed forces, recent documents show. The Central Intelligence Agency had evidence that the Colombian military had provided a list of targets to paramilitaries who killed 20 banana plantation workers in a high-profile massacre, the documents show, but it continued to send billions of dollars in aid to the Colombian government. On Tuesday, a truth committee in Colombia will publish a long-awaited report that seeks to build an extensive history of the nation’s long-running internal conflict in which at least 260,000 people were killed. The report, drafted as a result of the country’s 2016 peace deal with its largest rebel group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, is intended to be used by the next Colombian government to develop policies that will lead the country to lasting peace. . It could help shape Colombia’s future relationship with the United States. Among the topics covered in the report is the role of the US government, which has spent decades funding and training the Colombian military in its fight against the FARC and the drug economy that funded their uprising. And among the evidence used to write Tuesday’s report are thousands of declassified U.S. documents compiled and organized by the National Security Archive, a Washington-based non-governmental organization that specializes in supporting post-conflict truth committees. A digital library of documents will be published in August. But the National Security Archive provided the New York Times with some documents in advance. They reveal that the United States has known for decades about alleged crimes committed by the Colombian military – “and yet the relationship continued to grow,” said Michael Evans, director of the Archive’s Colombia program. Particularly indicative, he said, are a series of CIA operational reports that are not usually available to the public, even upon request for registration. A report written in 1988 during a period in which left-wing activists were assassinated on a regular basis found that a wave of assassinations of “suspected leftists and communists” was the result of a “joint effort” between its intelligence chief Fourth Colombian Army Brigade and members of the Medellín drug cartel. Many of the dead were associated with a party called the Patriotic Union. The report said it was “unlikely” that this happened “without the knowledge of the commander of the Fourth Brigade”. Later in the document, a CIA officer wrote about a massacre in 1988 in which 20 farmers were killed, many of them union members. The CIA official said the U.S. government believed the killers “got the names of their targets” from the intelligence unit of the 10th Colombian Army Brigade. Other documents show that the United States knew that oil companies were paying paramilitaries for protection and that at least one company was gathering information about the Colombian military. One company “actively provided information on guerrilla activities directly to the military,” according to the CIA, “using an airborne surveillance system along the pipeline to expose guerrilla camps and intercept guerrilla communications.” The Colombian Army “successfully exploited this information and inflicted about 100 casualties during an operation against the guerrillas” in 1997, according to the report. Another document, written in 2003, alludes to one of the gloomiest chapters of the war, called the scandal of false positives. In this case, the Colombian army is accused of killing thousands of civilians during the presidency of varlvaro Uribe and tried to label them as battle deaths, in an attempt to show that it was winning the war. In a recent court hearing in Colombia, ex-soldiers said they felt pressured to kill fellow Colombians by high-ranking officials.
A July 2003 note to Donald Rumsfeld, then Secretary of Defense, by the Pentagon’s top deputy for special operations celebrates a significant increase in combat killings since Mr. Uribe took office – 543 in just six months, compared to 780 the last two years of the previous government. The document is entitled “Recent successes against the Colombian FARC”.