The Nation‘s Frank Smyth reports on US military officers caught delivering weapons to Colombian paramilitaries. Colombian police tracked suspects to “a gated luxury community southwest of Bogotá,” — where many U.S. special forces members live while they’re training at a nearby base — and to a “house filled with twenty-nine metal crates of arms and 32,000 rounds of ammunition.”

The police were still taking inventory of the cache when two more suspects knocked on the door. The police arrested them, only to learn they were US soldiers. The Colombian police said the arms were bound for an illegal paramilitary group that the State Department considers to be both a drug-trafficking and a terrorist organization.


State Dept. spokesperson Richard Boucher denies “that the arms were part of a secret US effort to arm Colombian paramilitaries.” But, reports Smyth, Boucher “still refuses to say whether the arms are part of the unprecedented $3.3 billion in military aid the United States began sending in 2000 as part of Plan Colombia.” Colombia’s attorney general’s office said that “the arms had been diverted from US stockpiles.”