On human wrongs: Yair Klein and the European Court of Human Rights

Yair Klein is a sinister man. A professional killer, expert in the use of brute force, he is the personification of an angry, dangerous bulldog. Born in 1948, Klein joined the Israeli Defense Forces, where he reached the rank of lieutenant colonel, and fought to defend his homeland in the Six Day War. In 1972, Klein was part of a team that rescued a number of hostages held in a Libyan plane in Tel Aviv’s airport. That action was carried out with such military precision that it took the Israelis just seven seconds to neutralize the hijackers. One year later he fought for Israel again in the Yom Kippur War. After leaving the IDF in 1983, Klein founded his own company of mercenaries, and ever since he has used his contacts in Israel and in the wider world to make juicy profits out of war in faraway nations.

Klein’s business interests led him to Colombia in the mid 1980s, when the country’s bloody war between the state and drug traffickers was starting to escalate. At that time he made contacts with people like Pablo Escobar and Gonzalo Rodriguez Gacha, the leaders of the Medellin Cartel. Klein provided them with weapons. A couple of weeks ago I was reading a book called "Cocaine Politics" by Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall, and I found Klein’s name mentioned on pages 76 and 77: “Klein became the center of another scandal involving a large shipment of Israeli arms to the Medellin cartel […] The weapons traveled via the Caribbean island of Antigua.” In 1989, when Escobar’s thugs blew up an Avianca airliner in midflight killing over 110 people, the Colombian authorities also saw Klein’s hand behind the terrorist attack. According to "Cocaine Politics," at the time, "Colombia’s top drug investigator, Gen. Miguel Maza Marquez, blamed Yair Klein […] : "He is the person who trained these people (the Medellin cartel) in the making of bombings and is responsible for this aggression."

Besides acting as weapons supplier and bomb maker-in-chief, Klein also trained dozens of the cartels’ paid assassins. He taught them how to shoot with accuracy, how to attack a moving vehicle, how to kill their target in seconds. Klein was instrumental in the creation of the first paramilitary groups that would later merge into the massive Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (AUC), the far-right terrorist group that had the FARC as its sworn enemy, and that wanted to "refound the homeland" by putting political allies in strategic positions in government. Fidel Castaño, a top paramilitary leader, was one of Klein’s apprentices.

In 1991, an Israeli court sentenced Klein for exporting weapons to Colombia illegally, and he had to pay a fine of about $13,000. Later in the '90s Klein left for Africa, where he profited from the blood diamond industry in war-torn Liberia and Sierra Leone. In one of his most famous transactions, Klein tried to exchange a military helicopter for access to a diamond mine in Sierra Leone. He ended up spending sixteen months in a Freetown jail, after he was found guilty of aiding the Revolutionary United Front, an actor in the Sierra Leone civil war that was notorious for mutilating the genitals of its victims, especially children.

In 2002, a court in the Colombian city of Manizales sentenced Klein for his training of paramilitary groups. Klein was tried in absentia (he was a fugitive at the time) in order to prevent the legal deadline from expiring, as the crimes had taken place almost twenty years before, the maximum time given by law to bring the case to trial. Klein’s debt to Colombian justice amounts to a little less than eleven years in jail and a fine of $5,500. In 2007, Caracol, a Colombian television network, broadcast an interview with Klein, in which he said that he did not regret his actions in the country. In fact, Klein said his best years were those he spent in Colombia, helping in the fight against the guerrillas. He even added that demobilizing the paramilitary groups was a mistake and that if the Colombian government allowed him to return to the country, he would get rid of the FARC in six months. Throughout the interview, Klein maintained that he first went to Colombia at the request of the national police. After that, the Colombian government used INTERPOL to have Klein captured, and Russian authorities caught him in April of 2007.

The fight that followed was over Klein’s extradition to Colombia. Klein’s lawyers took the case all the way to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), of which Russia is a member. The ECHR, based in Strasbourg, is Europe’s highest court on human rights issues, and its decisions are binding on all of its member states. As you may know, at the beginning of this month, the ECHR decided that Russia could not extradite Klein. The court’s judgment was that Klein would face "a danger of ill-treatment" if he were extradited to Colombia, given that "the evidence […] demonstrates that problems still persist in Colombia in connection with the ill-treatment of detainees." Furthermore, the ECHR took a comment by a former vice president of Colombia that Klein should "rot in jail" as an "indication that the person in question runs a serious risk of being subjected to ill-treatment while in detention." The court went as far as to insinuate that "the practice of torture" is some sort of standard procedure in Colombia’s fight against terrorism. It seems that the Russian authorities will attempt to appeal the decision.

With this ruling, the ECHR has done a disservice to its own name and to the noble cause it claims to defend. Klein is a criminal, and he deserves to pay for the crimes he committed in Colombia and against Colombians. No other country in the world will try him for those heinous acts, and now that a Colombian court is finally trying to administer justice, the ECHR blocks it all. The judges in that European court are either incredibly ignorant or stupidly naïve. They have brought shame upon themselves. But nothing is worse than their arrogance, their act of pure jurisprudential snobbery, claiming that Colombia’s judicial system is unreliable, biased and corrupt. What a typical show of Eurocentrist superiority. Lest we forget, at the time when half of today’s ECHR member states were either ruled by communist or pseudo-fascist dictatorships, Colombia was a liberal, democratic nation, where the rule of law was certainly much stronger than in places like Bulgaria, Hungary, Armenia, Spain and Portugal.

God knows that Colombia’s courts are far from perfect, but after reading the ECHR’s opinion on Klein’s extradition, my conclusion is that European justice is no better. Colombia, the territory in which some of Klein’s terrible crimes were committed, has the right to try him. But the ECHR ended up protecting a murderer, a horrendous mercenary who has spread terror and death in some of the planet’s most vulnerable countries. A sad day for Europe. A sad day for Colombia. A sad day for justice.

Juan Manuel Santos, the President in waiting

Juan Manuel Santos seems poised to become Colombia’s next president. A number of opinion polls last week confirmed that he is the most popular candidate out there, and given President Uribe’s absence from the presidential race, Mr. Santos has received the people’s favor. Despite his lack of electoral experience (he has never been elected by the people for any position in government), Mr. Santos’ lead in the race looks very solid, and if there are no surprises along the way, he will have few things to worry about. Right now, Juan Manuel Santos is President in waiting.

There are a number of elements that will account for Mr. Santos’ easy victory, which I will discuss in the following paragraphs. One wonders how a candidate whose bid for the presidency started only a month ago, who spent a good portion of last year outside of Colombia, and who has no previous experience with political campaigns, has the lead in the most important election in the country. The answer lies in three important factors.

First, there is no other candidate who can honestly compete against Mr. Santos’ for the title of keeper of President Uribe’s legacy. There are no Andres Felipe Ariases in this race, and with Uribito (little Uribe, the nickname for the former Minister of Agriculture) out of the race, it is safe to assume that Mr. Santos has the blessing of President Uribe. Even if there are other candidates who sincerely want to preserve the work and the philosophy of the Alvaro Uribe government (namely Noemi Sanin and German Vargas Lleras), Mr. Santos remains the only true uribista on the ballot in the eyes of the electorate. That already gives him a huge advantage over the other candidates, whose burden is now to prove to the voters that they have enough uribista credentials, while those of Mr. Santos have never been put in doubt.

The second factor that explains Mr. Santos’ lead is a combination of two events that occurred within two weeks of each other: the Constitutional Court’s denial against the referendum for Mr. Uribe’s reelection, and the sweeping victory that the pro-government Partido de la U had in the Congressional election. The first of those events left hordes of uribistas disappointed and bitter. Many people had already taken a third Uribe candidacy for granted, and after the Court blocked the referendum, they started to look desperately for a new candidate to support. They were like victims of a shipwreck anxiously swimming to the nearest island, where Mr. Santos was patiently waiting, ready to allay their fears. Partido de la U getting 28 seats in the Senate on March 14 was the last confirmation that many uribista voters needed in order to support Mr. Santos, the party leader. To put it bluntly, the political defeat of Alvaro Uribe, forever banished from presidential politics by the Constitutional Court, represented a sweet moment for Mr. Santos, who saw the crown of uribismo fall automatically on his head.

The third factor behind Mr. Santos’ great electoral performance so far is his own reputation as a tough, experienced decision-maker. As he likes to repeat (and, as they say, it is not bragging if it is true), the Armed Forces had their greatest victories against FARC under his tenure. Few Colombians forget the overwhelming feeling of power and hope that came after operations Fenix and Jaque, which resulted in the death of Raul Reyes and the liberation of a dozen high profile FARC-held hostages. For a nation that had been in retreat for too long, hiding in fear of terrorism and death, and with so much pessimism having taken hold of the population for many years, Juan Manuel Santos represents a period of assertiveness and victory against terrorism. After President Uribe, Mr. Santos is perhaps the person most closely identified with the government’s policy of Democratic Security. And that gives him enough political capital to be the frontrunner in the presidential campaign.

So how confident should Mr. Santos be? The last opinion poll gives him a solid 36% of votes, followed by Noemi Sanin, who has a relatively weak 17%. Antanas Mockus and German Vargas are next in line with 9% and 8%, respectively. As of now, Mr. Santos’ passage to the runoff election is absolutely certain, a vote that he apparently would also be able to win (against Ms. Sanin, Mr. Santos would get 44% of the votes, while she would have 30%; a similar thing would occur in a Santos vs. Mockus, or Santos vs. Vargas scenarios). With about a 20% advantage against his nearest competitor, I bet Mr. Santos has been sleeping like a baby, free from campaign stress, and that he already sees himself as the 40th President of Colombia.

But politics is the realm of the unexpected, and it is a well-known fact that Murphy’s Law applies with greater rigor to politicians than to the rest of the human species. Mr. Santos cannot rest on his laurels, and although two months (what separates us from the election) seems like a very short time for drastic changes in electoral opinion, he had better keep his guard up. This election has already seen some big surprises (think of Sergio Fajardo’s descent into irrelevance and of Antanas Mockus’ newfound political stardom), and when you are in first place, the only other way you can go is down. Of course, I am not predicting Mr. Santos’ defeat, as all the odds point to the other direction. I am simply reminding Mr. Santos that he should watch his back, as the candidates running behind him will not let him take the presidency without a good fight.

Heriberto's final errand: An unforgivable crime

El Charco is an impoverished riverside municipality of 30,000 in Nariño, a department in south-west Colombia. Many residents live in precarious houses made out of wood, cardboard and bricks, raised on stilts to keep them from flooding, and each house has a wooden ladder leading up to its entrance. In December 1979, a tsunami almost destroyed El Charco completely, leaving thousands drowned or living in the streets. But that was not the first time disaster had struck: in 1906 a tsunami devastated the town, in a frightening episode that residents, the "charquenses," still call "La Visita," or "the visit." One century later, the 2005 Colombian census found that about 80% of El Charco’s inhabitants lived in poverty. Suddenly, the name "One Hundred Years of Solitude" acquires a very real meaning.

El Charco also has a history of terrible violence, which, as often happens in Colombia, is linked to the cocaine industry. The Nariño department has, by far, more coca fields than any other place in the country, and El Charco is classified as one of Colombia’s top ten cocaine-producing municipalities. Its soil and its climate are perfect for growing coca, and its location, half an hour away from the Pacific Ocean, make El Charco ideal for shipping the drug overseas. The UN estimates that charquenses manufactured about 5,000 kilograms (11,000 pounds) of pure cocaine in 2008. Of course, there are a lot of thugs and kingpins trying to get hold of the fantastic profits that such a quantity of drugs can bring. In the streets of the United States, one kilogram of cocaine can be sold for an average of 120,000 dollars – you do the math. The result is that El Charco has become a very dangerous place, as several armed groups have tried to gain control of the region. The FARC’s 29th Front has a strong military presence there.

About two weeks ago, charquenses had an especially painful reminder that their town is engulfed in the most senseless of all drug wars. Heriberto Grueso was a 12-year-old boy who lived in El Charco, and who liked to help his mother with their meager expenses. After school (Heriberto was in third grade and he liked math very much), people from the town sent him on errands, which he performed in exchange for a little money. Being from a very poor family, Heriberto’s mother sometimes had no cash to pay for food, and I am sure that the young boy felt very proud that he could help her with the few pesos he got.

On March 25th, all that changed. That afternoon, someone with no heart, somebody who does not deserve to be called a human being, but a monster, sent Heriberto on an errand. The young boy was given a package that he was supposed to deliver, perhaps, somewhere close to the town’s police station. In exchange, he received COP1,000, or around $0.50. The package contained a bomb.

What occurred next is unclear. According to police officers at the station, Heriberto ran away when one of them wanted to see what was in the package he was holding. It is difficult to say what happened exactly, but the bomb exploded seconds later, killing Heriberto instantly. The explosion injured twelve other people, including three policemen. The bomb destroyed the boy’s body almost completely, and his mother was able to recognize his remains only because she recognized a childhood scar on what was left of his legs. The COP1,000 note was found inside Heriberto’s pocket, still intact. Ironically, Heriberto’s family had arrived to El Charco in order to escape from the violence in their more rural hometown. The government claims that FARC is to blame for the crime, but with so many insurgencies in the region, there is no real way of knowing.

I confess that I knew nothing about Heriberto’s story until tonight (Sunday). When I read the news in Semana, I started crying. The death of that young boy made no sense, it filled me with pain, and it was unacceptable. The worst part of the story is that such a horrible crime received very little attention inside Colombia. El Tiempo did not even print the story, and Yolanda Reyes was the only columnist in that newspaper to write an op-ed piece on the issue. As Ms. Reyes points out “in any other country [this story] would have caused commotion throughout society,” but not in Colombia. I take this as irrefutable proof that Colombian society is desensitized at the deepest level.

I had in mind very different topics for my column this week. The liberation of former FARC-held hostages Pablo Moncayo and Josue Calvo were on top of my list. Sergio Fajardo’s very likely alliance with Antanas Mockus also was column-material. But I think Heriberto deserves this one. Besides the love of his parents and his five siblings, Heriberto had very few things in life. He was terribly poor, and he had to live through much more violence than I could ever imagine. His short life came to a brutal end that no child deserves, and to know that his death will go unpunished makes this crime even more despicable. This is my tribute to him.

Sometimes we seem to forget about the children who become victims of Colombia’s drug war. Mutilated by landmines, recruited by armed insurgencies, used for cheap labor in cocaine producing laboratories, orphaned after their parents have been murdered - the list is too long to bear. Let us not forget about Heriberto’s senseless death. How many children like him will have to die before there is peace in Colombia? "Too many," I am afraid, is the answer to that question.