A new round of WikiLeaks published on the pages of El Espectador may spell trouble for former Colombian officials, including President Álvaro Uribe and two of his top military commanders.
A Colombian army intelligence officer told the U.S. in 2007 that his unit had incorporated former members of an illegal paramilitary drug gang into a network of civilian informants (Red de Cooperantes) promoted by President Uribe, according to a leaked State Department cable published on the newspaper’s Web site. The official said that his unit—identified by the paper as the army’s 17th Brigade—had been secretly authorized by the government to work with ex-members of the notorious Elmer Cárdenas paramilitary bloc who were “providing good information” on emerging paramilitary groups in the conflictive Urabá region. Colombian law barred ex-paramilitaries from joining the Red de Cooperantes groups.
The official also told the embassy that more than 70 percent of the new criminal gangs that had emerged in Urabá since the start of a government-sponsored demobilization program aimed at dismantling the illegal groups “had prior military experience” and often received “advance notice of operations from their former colleagues” in the Colombian security forces. (more…)
