By Ibon Villelabeitia Reuters Thursday, August 16, 2001; 1:49 PM
BOGOTA, Colombia, Aug 16-Colombia's president Andres Pastrana, brushing aside concerns by human rights groups, has signed into law a bill that gives broad new powers to the military fighting a 37-year-old guerrilla war.
The so-called war legislation, signed on Monday, allows the Colombian army to detain civilians, conduct raids and carry out autopsies in war zones.
It also permits the president to grant special emergency powers to military commanders over civilian authorities during war operations.
Critics, including rights groups and two U.S. congressmen, said it would undermine human rights in Colombia. Supporters, among them military commanders, said the law would help combat leftist rebels and outlawed far-right militias in a war that has killed 40,000 civilians in the last decade.
"This is a setback for the rule of law in Colombia," said Jose Miguel Vivanco, head of the America's division for U.S.-based Human Rights Watch, told Reuters. "This law is going to make it more difficult to promote judicial investigations of human rights abuses by the army."
Under the previous law, Colombia's military could detain civilians and conduct raids only in conjunction with an accompanying team of prosecutors from the attorney general's office.
The new "war legislation" stipulates that when there are "well-founded reasons" prosecutors cannot accompany the armed forces; the attorney general can "temporarily" grant judicial powers to the military. It also empowers the military to perform forensic investigations of fighters and civilians.
Human rights groups say the army has been known to taint evidence, including planting weapons and dressing suspected civilian leftist sympathizers as rebels and then killing them to claim that they died in combat.
The government contends it has improved the military's human rights record, including severing alleged links between the security forces and right-wing paramilitary vigilantes blamed for the killings of thousands of suspected leftist collaborators.
Analysts said the law underscores growing frustration at the slow pace of peace talks with the guerrillas and Colombian leaders are taking a tougher stand against leftist rebels.
Last week, Pastrana, who has staked his career on ending the South American nation's war, broke off peace contacts with the National Liberation Army (ELN), Colombia's second-largest guerrilla group.
Pastrana, who steps down in August 2002, is engaged in slow-moving 2-1/2-year-old peace talks with the largest Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC. But the talks have failed to end violence and FARC commanders have announced plans to carry Colombia's largely rural war to the cities.
Last May, two U.S. congressmen-Rep. William Delahunt, a Massachusetts Democrat who sits on the House of Representatives' International Relations Committee, and Rep. Sam Farr, a Democrat from California-warned Colombian legislators that the law would "turn back the clock" on Colombia's progress in human rights safeguards.
The United States is pouring $1 billion in mostly military aid into Pastrana's Plan Colombia, which is aimed at attacking cocaine production and hitting rebels economically.