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Tuesday, February 13 4:58 PM SGT
Colombian general convicted in paramilitary massacre
BOGOTA, Feb 13 (AFP) -
Colombia for the first time sent an army general to jail for failing to prevent a paramilitary massacre, as government officials and leftist rebels prepared to return to the negotiating table.
Retired general Jaime Uscategui was sentenced to 40 months behind bars late Monday for failing to prevent the July 14, 1997, massacre of at least 22 people in central Meta department by right-wing paramilitary commandos.
Air Force Commander Hector Velasco, who presided over the military tribunal, said Uscategui had been warned by locals of the impending attack.
Colonel Hernan Orozco was cashiered and sentenced to 38 months in prison for his neglectful role in the massacre, the tribunal said.
Uscategui is the first Colombian general to have been convicted because of paramilitary violence.
His trial followed a three-month freeze in peace talks between the government and the country's strongest rebel group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), who demanded more government action against the paramilitaries, their sworn enemies.
The negotiators are preparing to resume their talks on Wednesday amid unprecedented expressions of regret by a FARC leader for the civilian deaths caused by his group.
Colombian President Andres Pastrana said Monday that remarks made a day earlier by FARC second-in-command Jorge Briceno were "positive," given the imminent resumption of the peace talks.
"The country has recovered its hope," Pastrana said at a ceremony at Zipaquira, some 40 kilometers (25 miles) from Bogota.
Briceno admitted Sunday that the use of nonconventional weapons, such as cylinders filled with explosives, in attacks against police and army garrisons based in towns placed private citizens at risk.
"Because the garrisons are in the middle of civil populations, bombs fall and civilians get killed," he said. "They are errors we have made and we will correct in the future."
FARC is re-examining its strategy to ensure that such weapons are used against the army only, Briceno told the US television channel Univision.
"If we (FARC) are the army of the people, there is no reason why we should kill the people; that is not in our strategic plan," he said.
Such comments are unprecedented in the 36-year Colombian civil war that has left at least 130,000 people dead.
Pastrana and FARC leader Manuel Marulanda on Friday had managed to revive their moribund peace process, jointly signing a 13-point agreement to relaunch peace talks stalled in mid-November last year.
Diminishing tension between FARC and the government comes as Colombia's attorney general filed kidnapping and murder charges against the right-wing United Self-Defense Units of Colombia (AUC) paramilitaries.
An official in the attorney general's office said Monday that AUC leader Carlos Castano was being asked to answer for actions carried out in 1997 against two relatives of rebel National Liberation Army (ELN) chief Nicolas Rodriguez.
Meanwhile, in Washington, State Department spokesman Richard Boucher on Monday applauded Pastrana's peace efforts. "We certainly applaud President Pastrana's tireless and personal efforts to move this process forward."
"Our sincerest hope is that his efforts and the desire of the Colombian people for peace will be realized with long-overdue agreements by the FARC or with the FARC," Boucher told reporters.
US Secretary of State Colin Powell and Colombian Foreign Minister Guillermo Fernandez de Soto were scheduled to meet Tuesday in the US capital to review bilateral relations, and the two nations' common agenda.
In the first top-level encounter between officials of the two nations since US President George W. Bush took power on January 20, Fernandez de Soto said the Republican-Democrat consensus within the US government on matters relating to Colombia, subscribed toward the end of the Bill Clinton administration, would be kept up.
"Dialogue and bipartisan consensus already achieved in the United States will be maintained, so as to move forward in all matters on the common agenda," he said.
The most significant of those issues relates to Pastrana's Plan Colombia, a 7.5 billion dollar anti-narcotics initiative, with a strong military content, to which the United States has pledged some 1.3 billion dollars.
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