Life during Wartime

Nationalizing the death penalty

IT SEEMS JOHN Ashcroft has taken a personal interest in a northern California homicide. According to San Francisco lawyer John Grele, the U.S. attorney general is hot to try Grele's client, Rico "Smiley" Garcia, on capital murder charges.

Of course, the A.G. isn't known for Dalai Lama-like acts of kindness, so the news that he's hoping to put some allegedly villainous schlub to death isn't exactly a massive shock. Here's the twist: apparently Ashcroft is demanding the death penalty – against the wishes of the local U.S. attorneys prosecuting Garcia.

When federal prosecutors in San Francisco handed up the indictment in 2001, charging Garcia with a triple murder, they signaled their intent not to seek the death penalty. Grele says Ashcroft later overrode that decision, and now the defendant – a reputed Nuestra Familia shot-caller – is looking at a trip to the death chamber.

"I thought the local [prosecutor's] decision would carry a great deal of weight," Grele said. "Especially since it was made by then-U.S. attorney Robert Mueller, who's now the director of the FBI."

Matt Jacobs, a spokesperson for the local U.S. attorney's office, was unavailable for comment.

This story doesn't come as a surprise to David Bruck. An experienced litigator who's argued capital cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, Bruck follows federal death penalty indictments closely. "The regulations were changed last year by Ashcroft to exercise tighter control by him over decisions by local U.S. attorneys around the country, and now it appears that he is ratcheting up the rate of death penalty prosecutions," said Bruck, who teaches at Washington and Lee School of Law. By Bruck's calculation, Ashcroft has overridden prosecutors who decided not to ask for the death penalty in 12 cases.

"It's really too early to say how big an effect it's going to have," Bruck told us. "U.S. attorneys could complain and resist. But it looks like we're seeing a nationalization of the death penalty under Ashcroft, and the big question is whether we're going to see Texas and Missouri attitudes exported to the rest of the country." (A.C. Thompson)

Our man in Colombia

Colombia probably possesses the worst human rights record in the hemisphere. An average of 20 people are killed every day in political assassinations, most of them carried out by right-wing death squads, often with direct support from the Colombian military. Trade unionists and journalists are routinely disappeared or driven into exile. Meanwhile, almost two-thirds of Colombia's 42 million people live in poverty, according to World Bank estimates.

And it looks like things are about to get a whole lot worse.

Álvaro Uribe Vélez is the front-runner in the looming presidential elections. He's a man with long-standing ties to the paramilitaries and the narcotics trade. In his book Los jinetes de la cocaína – the result of a 10-year investigation – Colombian journalist Fabio Castillo presents evidence that Uribe orchestrated the licensing of narco-pilots while heading Colombia's civil aviation agency from 1980 to 1982.

Uribe became mayor of Medellín in 1982, during the heyday of the Medellín cartel, when cocaine king Pablo Escobar ruled the town and oversaw assassination campaigns against progressive political candidates – as well as anyone in his and Uribe's own, more conservative party who didn't fall in step. Then, as governor of the state of Antioquia in the 1990s, Uribe established "self-defense" patrols made up of heavily armed, government-trained fighters who supplied intelligence to Colombia's military and helped police combat crime, a recent, well-documented investigative series by Narco News (www.narconews.com) shows. The group's successors, today's paramilitaries, became notorious for offing human rights workers, labor activists, reporters, politicians, and innocent civilians.

Elections are May 26, and Uribe promises to expand the paramilitaries (arming a million civilians, according to one Colombian human rights source) and crack down on the leftist Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia and Ejército de Liberación Nacional guerrillas if elected. At this juncture Uribe is 20 points ahead in the polls.

His track record isn't causing much consternation for the Bush administration. In fact, Dubya and his cabinet members haven't uttered a single word about Uribe's checkered past and problematic plans for the future. With hard-liners like Iran-Contra veteran turned assistant secretary of state Otto Reich in high-ranking positions, the silence isn't too surprising.

The Bush administration's proposed 2003 budget, submitted to Congress Feb. 4, includes close to half a billion dollars in military-police aid for Colombia. As part of this, the Foreign Military Financing Program – employed in recent years primarily to provide military aid to the Middle East and, in the '80s, to fund counterinsurgency operations in Central America – would grant $98 million to protect the 500-mile Caño Limón-Coveñas oil pipeline. The pipeline carries crude belonging to L.A.-based Occidental Petroleum from Colombia's northeastern highlands to the Caribbean for export. Last year guerrilla bombings shut down the pipeline for 266 days.

The request marks a shift in Washington's approach to aiding Colombia. In the past the United States has focused exclusively on providing anti-drug trafficking assistance. Now we're poised to arm the Colombian government in its war against domestic insurgents. Members of Congress are working toward removing Clinton-era anti-narcotics requirements for military aid already earmarked for Colombia and limits on the number of U.S. military personnel allowed to operate in the South American nation.

Diana Sánchez, a Colombian human rights researcher, is wary. "The United States is looking for a pretext to establish itself more firmly in the Andean region," Sánchez said via phone from Bogota. (Camille T. Taiara)