No Good Patriot Goes Unpunished in Colombia by Mary Anastasia O’Grady
http://www.wsj.com/articles/a-colombian-military-hero-unjustly-imprisoned-1435505450
‘Eyewitness’ testimony that Alfonso Plazas Vega ordered civilians killed was fraudulent.
In 2011 the key eyewitness testimony used to convict Col. Plazas was exposed as fraudulent—more on that in a minute. And in December a Supreme Court penal judge, assigned to review the facts on appeal, recommended that Mr. Plazas be released and declared innocent. Yet seven months later he remains a prisoner at a military base in Bogotá, where I interviewed him in February.
The Plazas case suggests that a pattern of false testimony and prosecutorial abuse has been employed in Colombian courts to convict military officers fighting narco-terrorism. His conviction also is handy for those pushing for a peace deal with FARC terrorists in Havana, because it supports their specious claim that the military is equally guilty of atrocities.
On Nov. 6, 1985, the Colombian Supreme Court was meeting at the Palace of Justice in Bogotá to decide if the extradition of drug capos to the U.S. was permissible under the constitution. The M-19, financed by drug kingpin Pablo Escobar, overwhelmed security and took the members of the high court and many others hostage.
Col. Plazas led the daring rescue mission, in which the army stormed the palace, driving a tank through the front entrance. The rebels called a radio station to demand that Colombian President Belisario Betancur call off the troops. Then they executed the Supreme Court president on the air. During the confrontation the terrorists set the court’s archives on fire, and an inferno rapidly engulfed the building.
There had been more than 360 people inside the palace at the start of the day. Around 100 died in the fire or were shot by the rebels. The others were rescued by the army. Col. Plazas was hailed for his bravery.
It was a crushing blow for the M-19, which lost its high command in the fierce fighting. In 1990 the group signed a peace agreement with the government, winning a blanket pardon for its gruesome crimes and the right to form a political party. The underworld, fueled by American cocaine consumption, continued to thrive.
Mr. Plazas retired from the army and headed the Colombian equivalent of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency from 2002-04. He earned a reputation for aggressively enforcing Colombia’s forfeiture laws against drug traffickers. According to press reports, he seized properties valued at some $100 million.
Mr. Plazas was arrested in 2007 and convicted in 2010. The prosecutor, Ángela María Buitrago, relied heavily on a document that she said was eyewitness testimony from an army corporal, Edgar Villamizar, who claimed he was present when Col. Plazas gave an order to kill civilians rescued from the palace. According to press reports, the defense was not allowed to meet Villamizar, much less interrogate him during the trial.
But Colombian journalist Ricardo Puentes Melo found and interviewed Villamizar. Mr. Puentes brought Villamizar to a popular Bogotá radio show, where he said he was at a military base in the state of Meta, not at the palace, the day of the M-19 assault. Army records presented in the courtroom in the trial in 2009 had confirmed this, but the judge ignored it.
Villamizar also told Mr. Puentes that he never met Col. Plazas, never made a statement to Ms. Buitrago, and never signed any statement accusing Col. Plazas. He claimed he had been warned to keep quiet by the prosecutor’s office during the trial.
The prosecution said that Villamizar changed his story. But it was clear he could not have been present during the siege of the palace. Two weeks ago it was reported that Villamizar had died suddenly of a heart attack.
There are plenty of other strange circumstances surrounding this case.
Human-rights groups initially claimed that the army “disappeared” 12 individuals. But the government, not the military, had buried many unidentified victims found inside the building quickly in a mass grave. According to an interview Mr. Puentes did with the head of anthropology at the national university, when those bodies were exhumed under his direction beginning in 1998, 27 were withheld by the attorney general.
Later DNA tests on one of those were released and showed it be one of the allegedly “disappeared” victims. The attorney general’s office never provided a complete DNA report for the others.
That and many other inconsistencies forced the three-judge superior tribunal of Bogotá to reduce the number that Mr. Plazas was alleged to have “disappeared” to two in 2012. One was a female member of M-19, who if she got out would have been interrogated by intelligence, not by Mr. Plazas.
Mr. Plazas’s continued detention suggests that the forces of law and order are losing in Colombia.
Write to O’Grady@wsj.com.
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