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.”
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.”