The tale of how a Nicaraguan police arsenal of AK-47s made its way into the hands of Colombia’s right-wing AUC (United Colombian Self-Defense) death squads continues as an international musical chairs legal farce. The brief description of the underlying transaction is that, using paperwork that purported to describe a sale of some 3,000 assault rifles and other war material by the Nicaraguan police to the Panamanian police, and with the prior approval of US ambassador to Nicaragua Oliver Garza, the weapons were loaded onto the Otterloo, a freighter of obscure and shifting ownership, and taken to the Colombian port of Turbo. Acting as middlemen were three Israeli arms merchants, Panama-based Shimon Yelinek and Guatemala-based Oris Zoller and Uzi Kissilevich. The Turbo area is more or less the AUC paramilitary’s “turf,” but in the port itself the Colombian government does maintain a presence. For the arrival of the Otterloo, however, Colombian customs officials conveniently disappeared for two days, during which the AUC off loaded the arms into trucks, which headed out of town to points unknown. The Otterloo then steamed off to Panama.
The story first broke in the Colombian newspaper El Tiempo, then revelations followed in Nicaraguan and Panamanian media. Investigations were begun in several countries, some of them “investigations” in name only.
The OAS got into the act, with a report compiled under the direction of an American official that ultimately faulted Nicaragua for failing to comply with international arms export regulations, pointed the finger at the Israeli arms dealers, and held the governments of Colombia and Panama blameless. The report did not raise the questions of US or Israeli complicity.
The Nicaraguan National Police bitterly protested, claiming that the Panamanian National Police did present to them a purchase order and did confirm it at the highest level, but here Police Chief Toti Barés denied any knowledge of it and noted that both the stationery of the purported Panamanian paperwork and the signatures on it were forged.
Oliver Garza admitted to signing off on the deal, but said that he had been deceived into believing that the arms were bound for Panama. Despite the AUC’s membership on the Bush administration’s list of terrorist groups, the American diplomat was not disciplined for the claimed mistake.
One of the Israelis, Mr. Yelinek, was arrested and jailed in Panama. His case became a minor cause celebre in Israel, where some see him as the convenient Jewish fall guy when a ray of light fell upon a shadowy geopolitical game, to the dismay of its participants. After some months in jail here, Yelinek was granted release on bail.
Such is the immediate background to the events that will be recounted below, but the whole affair will make more sense if one understands several layers of the greater context into which the arms shipment scandal fits. To wit:
• The AUC, led by one Carlos Castaño, has historically worked in coordination with the Colombian Army in the long running civil conflict between the Bogota government and leftist rebels. This, despite official denials and Colombian warrants for Castaño’s arrest. Notoriously, the army sets up roadblocks around an area to be attacked by the AUC and maintains an aerial lookout for intervention by leftist guerrilla forces, while the paramilitary goes into the community and rounds up those on its hit list, who are then tortured and murdered. The AUC is especially fond of rape and dismemberment, the latter sometimes carried out with chainsaws.
• The AUC, like its leftist rivals the FARC (Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces), derives most of its income from taxing the illegal drug business. But a subcontext to the conflict is that the AUC is supported by wealthy Colombians who claim vast tracks of real estate by virtue of title or otherwise, while the FARC draws support from small farmers who live and work on the same land, claiming it by squatters’ rights or otherwise. Since the AUC’s rise to national prominence in the mid-90s vast tracks of land have been depopulated, with well connected families and members of the AUC now laying claim to them.
• The AUC’s precursors were the Farmers’ Self-Defense of Antioquia and Cordoba (ACCU), and before that, the People Persecuted by Pablo Escobar (PEPES). During the George H. W. Bush administration, the president of Colombia was César Gaviria, who now heads the OAS. Both the US and Colombian governments worked closely with Castaño’s PEPES in their pursuit of Escobar and his Medellin Cartel. Escobar was tracked down and killed and his drug business was by and large taken over by the Cali Cartel, which was and whose remnants are well connected with the Colombian Army and Castaño’s paramilitary operation.
• Does the whole arms to the AUC operation look something like a rerun of US involvement in the Central American conflicts of the 80s, wherein Washington condemned the Salvadoran, Guatemalan and Honduran death squads in public but worked with them behind the scenes, and in which vast and illegal arms supply operations conducted by elements of the US government through various private intermediaries kept the Nicaraguan Contras in business? Many veterans of those Central American adventures, in some cases despite criminal convictions for lying to Congress, are back in government with important posts in the George W. Bush administration. One of these, former National Security Advisor John Poindexter, was recently in the news and is on his way out of government again after his bizarre Pentagon betting pool on Middle East terrorist attacks came to light. Besides Oliver Garza, who was a mid-level diplomat in the region at the time, the more senior Elliott Abrams and Otto Reich now occupy influential positions with the current US administration. If one compares the Otterloo affair with the Iran-Contra scandal, the methods of operation look very similar, the main exception being that more layers of “cutouts” were used in the AUC supply operation.
• The present Álvaro Uribe administration of Colombia has been holding “peace talks” with the AUC. Tentatively, there is a deal that would demobilize the paramilitary by the end of 2005, leaving AUC members and the group’s wealth backers in possession of the lands that they have depopulated with their massacres. The main sticking points in the process are not the multiple Colombian murder warrants outstanding against Castaño and other paramilitary members, but US drug trafficking charges against the AUC leaders and several of the group’s regional commanders' insistence on a more lucrative deal.
• The Mireya Moscoso administration in Panama, despite public declarations of neutrality, sides with the Colombian Army and the AUC in our neighbors’ conflict. This policy can be seen in her signing onto a Central American presidents’ declaration of support for the Colombian government’s efforts against the leftist FARC and ELN guerrillas that did not mention the AUC; by the better reception given to Colombians who flee across our border from FARC offensives than those who come here when the AUC moves into their neighborhood; by the government’s reticence to press criminal charges against AUC leaders in connection with repeated murderous paramilitary invasions of Panama; and by the government’s permission for several Colombians whom it says are known AUC members to remain in Panama after gun running charges against them were dropped for insufficient evidence.
With all of that in the background, media around the region report a number of recent developments in the legal sequelae to the Otterloo affair.
According to the Spanish EFE news agency, on August 4 Colombian undercover police and INTERPOL agents seized seven individuals whom they believe were involved in the arms shipment. That evening, AUC military commander Salvatore Mancuso went on Colombia’s RCN television network and warned that if talks with the Bogota government don’t yield what his group wants, the paramilitary retains the option to “regionalize” the conflict by expanding it into Panama, Venezuela, Ecuador, Peru and Brazil.
On August 6, El Panama America, citing an unnamed source within the judicial system because legal proceedings are generally not on the public record in this country, reported that a Panama City trial court has dismissed the various charges against Shimon Yelinek. The court based its ruling on a finding that all of the crimes that it was alleged that the Israeli arms dealer had committed happened outside of Panamanian jurisdiction. Prosecutors are appealing the ruling, the daily said.
On August 7, Nicaraguan prosecutor Julio Centeno Gómez told the Managua daily Nuevo Diario that, as far as his country’s police and prosecutors are concerned, the Otterloo affair is a closed case. “What we’re doing now is drafting the resolution” that ends the case, he said.
On August 9, EFE reported that, although a Guatemalan court had issued arrest warrants for Yelinek, Zoller and Kissilevich on July 14, no attempts had been made to arrest the arms dealers. “We don’t know if [Zoller and Kissilevich are] in Guatemala or not,” a spokesman for the Guatemalan National Civil Police told the news agency. The court did have reason to believe that Yelinek was in Panama, and issued an international arrest warrant via INTERPOL. However, Panamanian authorities have not arrested the Israeli arms merchant in connection with the Guatemalan warrant.
Also in this section:
Panama News Briefs
Arias Calderón on Panama's past, present and future
PRD holds its local and legislative primaries
AUC arms case still reverberates
