High-risk Colombians say GPS devices only add to dangers

September 9, 2022Frank Articles Activists under threat, Claudia Julieta Duque, Colombia, GPS tracking, surveillance

By FRANK BAJAK

August 1, 2022

The bulletproof vehicles that Colombia’s government assigns to hundreds of high-risk individuals are supposed to make them safer. But when an investigative reporter discovered they all had GPS trackers, she only felt more vulnerable — and outraged.

No one had informed Claudia Julieta Duque — or apparently any of the 3,700-plus journalists, rights activists and labor and indigenous leaders who use the vehicles — that the devices were keeping constant tabs on their whereabouts. In Duque’s case, it happened as often as every 30 seconds. The system could also remotely cut off the SUV’s engine.

Colombia is among the world’s most dangerous countries for human rights defenders — with more than 500 killed since 2016. It is also a country where right-wing extremists have a track record of infiltrating national security bodies. For Duque, the GPS revelation was chilling: Movements of people already at risk of political assassination were being tracked with technology that bad actors could weaponize against them.

“It’s something super invasive,” said Duque, who has been a persistent target of rogue security agents. “And the state doesn’t seem to care.”

The government agency responsible has said the trackers were installed to help prevent theft, to track the bodyguards who often drive the vehicles and to help respond to dangerous situations.

For a decade, Colombia had been installing trackers in the armored vehicles of at-risk individuals as well as VIPs, including presidents, government ministers and senators. The agency’s director made that disclosure after Duque learned last year through a public records request that the system was recording her SUV’s location an average of five times an hour.

The director dismissed privacy concerns and called the practice “fundamental” to guaranteeing security.

Considering the tracker a danger to her and her sources, Duque pressed for details on its exact features. But the National Protection Unit, known as UNP in Spanish, offered little. She then demanded the agency remove the device. It refused. So in February, Duque returned the vehicle, left the country and filed a legal challenge.

Now back in Bogotá, she is hoping for satisfaction when Gustavo Petro, Colombia’s first leftist president, takes office Aug. 7.

Review: ‘Missionaries’ sees our forever wars as vocation

October 5, 2020Frank Articles Colombia, National Book Award, Novels, Phil Klay

By FRANK BAJAK
Oct. 5, 2020

Phil Klay’s “Redeployment” was a masterwork in mostly spare prose, its tonal range from laugh-out-loud, Joseph Heller-esque absurdity to soul-crushing bleakness. It may be our best literary window into the Iraq war.

A young Marine veteran’s literary debut, the short story collection won a 2014 National Book Award.

“Missionaries,” out Oct. 6 from Penguin Press, is Klay’s next act. A big, ambitious novel, it spans a few decades and continents and plumbs U.S. forever wars’ psychic imprint on peripatetic American warriors, militarism as a way of being and the consequences of ill-conceived foreign meddling.

Two U.S. Special Forces vets of Afghanistan and Iraq — transitioned to mercenary and a military attaché — have fought “in enough murky war zones to lack the near-religious faith in democracy that the war was sold on.” Their next stop is Colombia, where Washington’s targeting-killing apparatus, first turned on leftist insurgents, now hunts drug-trafficking warlords.

Impunity feared in Colombia military justice law

October 19, 2013Frank Articles #falsospositivos, Colombia, extrajudicial killings, false positives, human rights, Human Rights Watch, impunity

By FRANK BAJAK and LIBARDO CARDONA

BOGOTA, Colombia — The crimes were shocking, even for a country hardened by the atrocities of decades of internal conflict.

Colombian troops had killed hundreds of innocent civilians for no apparent reason other than to boost rebel body counts, U.N. investigators found. Typically, the victims were down-on-their-luck men lured to their deaths with job promises then dressed in military fatigues and registered as guerrillas slain in combat.

Five years after the scandal broke, roughly one-sixth of the soldiers accused have gone to trial or pleaded guilty, only a handful of the convicted holding the rank of major or higher. In all, authorities registered some 3,900 cases of alleged extrajudicial killings involving security force members.

Human rights activists say they are afraid a new law pushed through Congress by President Juan Manuel Santos in June will make it even harder to pursue those responsible, particularly senior officers. The law, which is under review by the Constitutional Court, would broaden the military justice system’s jurisdiction and narrow the definition of extrajudicial killings.

Santos says the reform is needed to assure armed forces members they have nothing to fear from making peace with the country’s main leftist rebel group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC.

But activists fear the reforms could hinder prosecutions of past and future war crimes by security force members and thus hurt prospects for peace talks launched in Cuba last year.

Colombia Extrajudicial Killings

Read full article on AP Big Story

International Court of Justice sets borders in Colombia-Nicaragua dispute over Caribbean islands

November 19, 2012January 17, 2013Frank Blog barrier reef, Biosphere, Colombia, International Court of Justice, Nicaragua, Old Providence, San Andres

Colombia’s government is not happy with the outcome of the court’s ruling. The Hague court delineated a horseshoe around the English-speaking archipelago, which was first settled by Protestants and claimed by Colombia in the early 19th century. President Santos of Colombia, bowing to pressure from environmentalist and local politicians, announced last year would be no oil exploration in the islands’ waters (the reef is a divers’ paradise). All indications are that Nicaragua will drill. A good Oxfam blog posting on the victory against drilling. And a description of the Old Providence barrier reef at the islands, designated a Biosphere Reserve by UNESCO in 2000.

See also AP correspondent Andrew Selsky’s 2003 piece on the islands.

Colombian govt cool to FARC cease-fire announcement

November 19, 2012November 23, 2012Frank Blog cease-fire, Colombia, FARC

As peace talks get under way in Havana, the FARC announces a cease-fire. Not a big surprise, and not well-received by the government.

HAVANA (AP) — Colombia’s main rebel group announced a unilateral cease-fire on Monday as it began much-anticipated peace talks, but the Bogota government responded that it would continue military operations. Top negotiator Ivan Marquez said the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia would halt all acts of sabotage and attacks against government and private property starting at midnight Monday and running through Jan. 20.

He made the announcement as negotiators for both sides entered the talks in Havana without other comment.

Marquez said the move was “aimed at strengthening the climate of understanding necessary for the parties to start a dialogue.”

Hours later, Defense Minister Juan Carlos Pinzon told reporters in the Colombian capital that while the government hoped the FARC would keep its promise, “history shows that this terrorist organization has never kept its word. It’s very difficult to believe.”

He added that Colombian security forces have “the constitutional duty to pursue all criminals who have violated the Constitution.”