"Operación Dragón," 2 years later

3.10.06

www.ciponline.org

Berenice Celeyta and Alexánder López Maya spent some time in Washington in mid-September, though they clearly would rather not have done so. They would have preferred to stay back home in Cali, where they have a lot of work to do. But they felt it would be best to leave Colombia for a short while, bringing their baby with them.

Berenice is one of Colombia’s leading human rights activists, the 1998 recipient of the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial’s Human Rights Award. She now heads a Cali-based human-rights group called NOMADESC.

In March, Alex was elected to Colombia’s Senate from the Polo Democrático party, after serving for four years in Colombia’s House of Representatives. He was the fourth largest vote-getter in his home department of Valle del Cauca. (Colombians elect their senators on a national basis, with everybody in the country choosing from the same list.) He first made his name as the outspoken head of SINTRAEMCALI, the union of employees of EMCALI, the publicly owned water, electric and telecommunications utility company in Colombia’s third-largest city.

For five years now, the Colombian government has sought to privatize EMCALI, a move that the union has bitterly resisted. SINTRAEMCALI’s opposition to privatization, combined with its frequent denunciations of corruption and mismanagement among the company’s top executives, has brought wave upon wave of threats – including official accusations of “terrorism” – against the union leadership. NOMADESC is very occupied with efforts to keep SINTRAEMCALI organizers alive and out of jail.

All this has made Alex and Berenice two of the most threatened people in Colombia – and that’s saying a lot.

This has been especially true since August 2004, when an unnamed military official tipped off Alex about “Operación Dragón.” He told the then-congressman that hitmen had been paid to kill him, Berenice, and the president of SINTRAEMCALI, Luis Hernandez, that very week.

On August 25, 2004, Colombia’s attorney-general’s office carried out raids of a business consulting firm, Consultoría Integral Latinoamericana (CIL), and a related private security company, Seracis, in Cali and Medellín. The consulting firm has specialized in privatizations of state-owned enterprises throughout Colombia.

These raids uncovered ample evidence of a plan, using some intelligence gathered by the military, to “neutralize” 175 labor and social-movement leaders in Cali. Documents referred to the plan as “Operación Dragon,” probably borrowed from the Spanish title of the Bruce Lee martial-arts film Enter the Dragon. Its stated purpose, according to recovered documents, was to “impede or neutralize the irregular actions of SINTRAEMCALI” and “research the personal security [and] vulnerability” of those seen as standing in the way of EMCALI’s privatization.

The documents contained information about the local activists’ daily movements and habits – where they could usually be found at specific times of day. A black leather notebook containing much of this information also included a detailed description of Rep. López’s 2002 campaign headquarters.

The investigation pointed especially to Lt. Col. Julián Villate of the Colombian Army’s Cali-based Third Brigade. Lt. Col. Villate is well-connected in the United States, having taken courses in English at Fort Leavenworth and served as both student and instructor at the U.S. Army School of the Americas. Lt. Col. Villate was working for CIL, the consulting firm, even though he had been on active duty until August 10, just two weeks earlier.

In Lt. Col. Villate’s possession were names and contact information for some of the 175 activists under surveillance. He also had supposedly top-secret information about the security measures many of these threatened individuals had received from the Colombian Interior Ministry’s Protection Program – a program that the U.S. government has long helped to fund.

One raid also uncovered a bizarre official document, dated May 24, 2003 and addressed to “Señor Coronel – Director Central de Inteligencia – Bogotá.” It states that “SINTRAEMCALI has been characterized as one of the country’s most belligerent [unions] in the country, with a high level of subversive infiltration by the ELN and the FARC.” It describes Berenice’s role as “to legally de-link union leaders who have seen themselves involved in accusations of rebellion [sedition] and terrorism.”

The document then becomes even more unhinged, describing former Polo Democrático presidential candidate and now Bogotá mayor Luis Eduardo Garzón as “carrying out effective political work (co-government) and mass leadership in the workers’ sector, in compliance with the objectives laid out by the FARC with its Boliviarian Movement for a New Colombia.” It goes on to accuse Alexánder López Maya of leading a leftist vigilante / criminal mafia group called “Los Indumiles.”

It has been two years now, and the Operación Dragón case has not moved at all within Colombia’s justice system. The files are probably on somebody’s desk at the attorney-general’s office, but Operación Dragón hasn’t even entered the formal investigation stage. Berenice says taht the authorities claim not to believe them: “they think we dreamed it up.”

Worse, a year ago Lt. Col. Villate’s defnse lawyer, Armando Otálora, was named to be Vicefiscal, the number-two position in the entire attorney-general’s office – a very bad sign, if not an outright conflict of interest. (Otálora, however, had to resign his post last week for an unrelated reason – the tragi-comic revelation that a professional psychic had been given a position of high authority and responsibility among the attorney-general’s top staff.)

Little new information had since surfaced about the case – and in fact, it was becoming difficult to draw attention to it in this year of mounting military scandals in Colombia – until about a month ago, when Berenice and Alex hastily arranged a trip to Washington. They came bearing two alarming documents that they had obtained over the past few months.

The first, which they had since May, is a crude but detailed sketch of Cali’s airport and surrounding access roads. It includes instructions to wait for the arrival of the flight that Sen. López takes every Friday from Bogotá, after the week’s legislative work is done. It shows where to place vehicles for the individuals assigned to spot Alex, and for those assigned to assassinate him.

Alex alerted the police, who visited an address indicated on the map, where they found a vehicle that appeared to meet a description written on the map. But the police decided that they didn’t have enough evidence to proceed, and the investigation of this threat against a sitting senator is in limbo.

The other document is two years old, but it came into Alex and Berenice’s possession in August thanks to a contact in the Colombian attorney-general’s office. It is a 16-page report from that office, and it is full of incredible claims about the suspected terrorist activities of Alex, Berenice and other SINTRAEMCALI organizers and activists.

The document, dated June 23, 2004, is written on letterhead of the attorney-general’s office by an investigator from that office. It is directed to the regional director of the CTI, the attorney-general’s investigative police. Its stated purpose is “to verify or disqualify the information supplied by citizens, in which the leaders of the UNION of EMCALI appear to be active members of an illegal criminal group, with ties to the Bolivarian Militias of the national terrorist organizations FARC and ELN.” It asks other government agencies to respond with “information about the relation between the UNION and the criminal group “Los INDUMILES,” apparently at the command of Representative for Valle del Cauca Dr. ALEXANDER LOPEZ MAYA.”

Hierarchy diagram from attorney-general’s office documentIt claims that Sen. López sits atop a pyramidal structure of terrorist activity with five components. These are the union; an armed structure (the “indumiles”); a legal-judicial apparatus (which includes Berenice); the political organization that brought Alex to Congress; and the “Bolivarian Movement for a New Colombia,” which is the FARC guerrillas’ effort to form a clandestine political party.

It goes on to provide photos and profiles of several people it claims are members of Sen. López’s criminal investigation, alleging that many of them are part of the guerrillas’ political and support apparatus. In a particularly bizarre flourish, it accuses Berenice of having ties to the Irish Republican Army.

The document fails to provide any proof behind such wild claims, but does offer much personal information about these individuals. In many cases, this information would seem to be useful only to someone who wishes to do harm to these people: names of relatives, vehicles and license plate numbers, home addresses, and in one case, the fact that the subject “takes her son to school every day at 6:30 AM.”

Where did this “intelligence” come from? We get a clue on the last page: “The informant demands only security measures for him and his family, assures us that this information is valid and has proof to present at the resulting trial.”

The threats – whether of airport assassinations or of arrest on trumped-up charges – continue, two years after Operación Dragón first surfaced. But after cooling off for a little while in the United States, Berenice and Alex are now back in Colombia. They refuse permanent exile, citing all the work that awaits them in Cali.

We wish them the best of luck. We urge the Colombian government to devote more resources – especially political will – to the investigation of Operación Dragón. And we reiterate a request that CIP and other human rights groups have made before to the U.S. State Department: that it include this case among those it considers when deciding whether to certify the Colombian military’s human-rights performance.

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