Plan Colombia and Beyond

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April 15, 2005

The Senate's foreign aid authorization

Last week, the Senate debated, but has not yet approved, a Foreign Relations Authorization Act for 2006 and 2007 (S. 600).

(If you don’t want to wade through a technical explanation, skip the next five paragraphs to find out what in the bill is relevant to Latin America.)

Full authorizations of foreign aid – as opposed to appropriations – happen pretty rarely. Unlike the annual appropriations laws, which lay out money every year for existing programs, authorization bills are an effort to rewrite the underlying law governing foreign aid. Written by the Foreign/International Relations committees, they create new programs, eliminate others, and change still others (altering, for instance, their priorities, their limitations, or their reporting to Congress). Appropriators are supposed to limit themselves to assigning money to previously authorized programs.

Many of the most familiar foreign aid programs haven’t been touched by an authorization bill for years – they’ve just run on autopilot, getting money appropriated year after year. That’s brought some odd results – for instance, the permanent law governing the IMET military training program still specifies the program’s funding levels for 1986 and 1987, and nothing after.

Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Indiana), the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, acknowledged the problem during last week’s debate.

Since the mid-1980s, Congress has not fulfilled its responsibility to pass an Omnibus Foreign Assistance Act. … [I]n the absence of a comprehensive authorization, much of the responsibility for providing guidance for foreign assistance policy has fallen to the appropriations committees. Appropriators have kept our foreign assistance programs going, but in many cases, they have had to do so without proper authorization. In some years, the Congress did pass a State Department authorization bill, but that bill only authorizes about 35 percent of the Function 150 [foreign aid] Account. To fund the remaining accounts, appropriators frequently had to waive the legal requirement to appropriate funds only following the passage of an authorization bill.

It’s still not clear whether the Senate will remedy this problem this year; debate on the 2006-2007 authorization bill halted on April 6 and has not resumed. The House may write its own foreign aid authorization in May.

Though the Senate’s bill is not done yet, a few measures deserve to be highlighted now. They are nearly all modest changes, and many are worthy of support. Some, however, are troubling.

Colombia military aid

The State Department’s International Narcotics Control (INC) aid program includes the Andean Counterdrug Initiative, which provides the majority of Colombia’s aid. The section reauthorizing INC would extend through 2007 the “mission expansion” language specifying that counter-drug aid to Colombia may be used to fight guerrillas (and, presumably, paramilitaries). The authorization language calls for “a unified campaign against narcotics trafficking and terrorist activities.” Since 2002, similar language has been repeated on every year’s foreign aid appropriations bill.

The same section would extend through 2006 the current “troop cap,” setting a maximum of 800 U.S. military personnel and 600 contractors who may be in Colombia at any given time.

It would also condition aid on a requirement “that no United States Armed Forces personnel and no employees of United States contractors participate in any combat operation in connection with such assistance.”

It would extend through 2007 the human rights conditions that currently apply to Colombia aid, which hold up 25 percent of military aid until the State Department certifies that (a) military personnel suspected of involvement in abuses are being suspended and (b) investigated, prosecuted, and punished; (c) military cooperation with civilian prosecutors and judges on human rights cases is improving; (d) the military is making substantial progress on severing links with paramilitaries, and (e) is working actively to dismantle paramilitary leadership and financial networks.

The Foreign Relations Committee’s non-binding narrative report includes this excellent language about U.S. support for paramilitary demobilizations. It calls for the existence of a legal framework to govern the process – a law with strong provisions for asset forfeiture, reparations, confession, and dismantlement. The law nearing approval in Colombia’s Congress, unfortunately, doesn’t even come close to meeting the standards laid out here.

The committee notes its interest in supporting, through funding, a program to implement the demobilization of AUC paramilitary combatants, and that such a process be conducted pursuant to a comprehensive legal framework, as determined by Colombians through good faith negotiations with the Colombian Congress. If the United States is to fund a significant share of the demobilization program, however, it should meet certain minimal standards. The committee believes it imperative that any demobilization program bring about the full dismantlement of the underlying structure, illegal sources of financing, and economic power of the AUC, which have been designated by the United States as a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO). In this regard, the committee believes it is crucial that each paramilitary seeking sentence reductions or other benefits from demobilization be required to forfeit illegally acquired assets, confess past crimes, and fully disclose any knowledge of the operative structure, financing sources, and the criminal activities of the FTO and its individual members. Each demobilized AUC member's benefits should be fully revocable if judicial authorities find that he has failed to fulfill these requirements.

The committee believes it is critical that the groups of AUC leaders who receive sentence reductions or other benefits fully demobilize and comply with the cease-fire. The committee also believes that all perpetrators of atrocities must serve a minimum number of years in prison for their crimes. The committee urges the Government of Colombia to put in place effective mechanisms to monitor demobilized individuals to prevent them from continuing to engage in organized criminal activity. Finally, the committee urges the Government of Colombia to devise a legal framework that can be equally applicable to other FTOs in Colombia, such as the FARC.

These requirements are in report language, not legislation. If the bill passes, the paragraphs above would not become the law of the land – but they do indicate a widely held view among leaders of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. If – as is likely – Colombia’s “legal framework” doesn’t meet the standards laid out here, the Bush administration would be going against the committee’s expressed wishes if it chooses to aid the paramilitary demobilizations. Rather than pick such a fight, the administration would probably choose not to offer the demobilizations a generous amount of aid.

Loosening the “American Servicemembers’ Protection Act”

The Rome Statute establishing an International Criminal Court (ICC) opened the remote possibility that U.S. military personnel and other citizens could be tried in the new tribunal for human rights crimes. The U.S. Congress reacted in 2002, passing the “American Service Members Projection Act” (ASPA). The law bans non-drug military aid to ICC signatory countries that do not sign an “Article 98” agreement – a document exempting U.S. personnel from the court’s jurisdiction. A 2004 amendment sponsored by Rep. George Nethercutt (R-Washington) broadened the ban to include an economic-aid program, Economic Support Funds (ESF).

Currently, at least eleven Latin American countries have their non-drug military aid (FMF, IMET, Excess Defense Articles) and their Economic Support Funds cut off because they have not ratified Article 98 agreements. (Colombia is one of a handful of Western Hemisphere states that has signed an agreement, allowing aid to keep flowing.) As a result, the number of military and police trainees from countries like Bolivia, Peru, Brazil, Costa Rica and Uruguay has plummeted, as has attendance at the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC, the former School of the Americas).

CIP has no position on this issue, which we see as a conflict between those who oppose the ICC and those who support maximum coverage for military aid programs. (Ironically, these are usually the same people.) We fit in neither category.

The Southern Command, which places a premium on the training of thousands of Latin American military personnel each year, is unhappy [PDF format] about the International Military Education and Training (IMET) ban imposed by ASPA. Its concern appears to be shared by Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Connecticut), who announced during the April 6 debate that he would soon introduce an amendment to permit IMET for Latin American countries that have not signed Article 98 agreements.

While the amendment’s text has not yet appeared, we understand that its first draft does not undo the Nethercutt Amendment for these eleven countries, leaving the possibility that they could see their IMET unfrozen but still be unable to get Economic Support Funds (ESF).

That would be a terrible shame. The 11 countries currently banned do not get a great deal of ESF, but freeing up only the IMET sends a poor message. Take Bolivia, for instance, which has been getting some ESF for balance-of-payments support over the past several years. It looks awfully mean-spirited to keep that aid frozen while freeing up Bolivia's military training funds.

New kinds of police aid

In 1974 Congress, moved by scandalous accounts of human-rights abuses committed in part with U.S. assistance, approved Section 660 of the Foreign Assistance Act, which banned aid to foreign police forces. Since then, Section 660 has been riddled with exceptions; police aid can now flow for many purposes, among them counter-narcotics, counter-terrorism, post-conflict situations, democratic countries without a military, investigative techniques, and (as of this year) community policing.

Section 2220 of the Senate’s bill would add four more exceptions to Section 660, clearing the way for police aid (a) to fight corruption; (b) to provide “professional public safety training, including training in internationally recognized standards of human rights, the rule of law, and the promotion of civilian police roles that support democracy”; (c) to combat trafficking in persons; and (d) to give “assistance for constabularies or comparable law enforcement authorities in support of developing capabilities for and deployment to peace operations.”

These new police-aid authorities appear rather benign, though we need to look into the provision allowing “peace operation” assistance for constabularies. This term “constabulary,” meaning a police body organized like a military, applies to institutions ranging from the Chilean Carabineros to the Argentine Gendarmería to the Somoza family’s National Guard in mid-20^th-century Nicaragua. We need more precision about this provision’s intent.

Database of arms transfers

The annual “Section 655” report on U.S. arms transfers to the world, required since 1998, is a very useful document, and we wholeheartedly endorse Section 2225 of the Senate bill, which would make this report’s contents much more accessible. The committee’s narrative report language explains:

In an effort to make the Section 655 report more user-friendly, this section requires the State Department to establish an Internet-accessible, interactive database, consisting of all the unclassified information currently available in the printed report. The database would be searchable by various criteria. Such criteria could include, among others, the recipient country, the United States Munitions List category of article or service provided, and the year of the sale or grant. With such a database, interested parties from academia, non-governmental organizations, the defense industry, and the Congress could access immediately cumulative data, cross-referenced among several categories. Because the Department already organizes the data in the Section 655 report through electronic processing, no new data collection will be required.

Posted by isacson at April 15, 2005 02:17 AM

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