>From The Panama News ( http://www.thepanamanews.com)
comes a tale that will no doubt be dated by the time
you read it.

Basically what's happening, with very little notice in
the United States, is that a massive arms supply
operation to equip the vicious AUC death squads is
being exposed in the Latin American press. So far,
companies in Guatemala and Panama, and the governments
of Colombia, Panama, Nicaragua and Israel have been
implicated.

My bets would be that all of these above-mentioned
public and private players are mere cut-outs for the
Bush administration, and that this is a US-directed
Plan Colombia operation.

Eric Jackson
editor, The Panama News
 editor@thepanamanews.com

----

The orphan arms

by Michelle Lescure and Eric Jackson

The biggest illegal arms shipment ever known to have
been introduced into Colombia arrived in Turbo, a port
on the Gulf of Uraba on Colombia's Atlantic coast,
last November. The weapons, whose quantities are in
dispute but by all accounts are enough to equip a
major paramilitary offensive, were unloaded into
trucks at the port, which has been controlled for
several years by the right-wing United Colombian
Self-Defense (AUC) militia, then disappeared inland.
The belated Colombian investigation has sparked a
many-headed international scandal.

The weapons, reported to include thousands of assault
rifles, millions of bullets and other paraphernalia of
death and destruction, were transported in the
Otterloo, a Dutch ship which has since changed to the
Panamanian flag and is now at the port of Cristobal,
at the northern entrance to the Panama Canal,
undergoing repairs. Its crew has been laid off and
dispersed, its captain isn't talking, and police and
prosecutors in four nations are trying to pick up the
trail of odd transactions by which the weapons got
into officially unidentified Colombian hands.

However, the identity of the weapons's recipients is
no longer a mystery, if it ever was, to most
Colombians. Boasting in the Colombian daily El Tiempo
that "we have fooled the authorities of four
countries," on April 25 a member of the AUC high
command acknowledged that his paramilitary force has
the arms.

The AUC, whose founder Carlos Castaqo is wanted for a
number of grisly massacres and once boasted on
Colombian national television that his group gets 70
percent of its income from the drug trade, is alleged
by many human rights groups to be an informal
auxiliary of the Colombian Army. As this story was
uploaded, the AUC was engaged in an offensive around
Jurado, a town close to the Panamanian border that has
been held by leftist FARC guerrillas, provoking an
exodus of refugees who have begun to arrive in the
Panamanian town of Jaque.

The arms were bought from the Nicaraguan police, by
Israeli arms merchants working out of Guatemala, who
say they were contracted by the Panamanian government
to buy them. The arms, whose destination Colombian
authorities have not traced after their landing at
Turbo, are now orphans of war --- nobody is admitting
present ownership, and most of the suspects along the
paper trail deny any connection with them. However,
there is a documentary record and a chain of financial
transactions that investigators are perusing with
varying degrees of enthusiasm. A source close to the
investigation, however, says that the trail appears to
lead directly back to the coffers of Plan Colombia.

"The police never arranged to acquire these arms,"
Panamanian President Mireya Moscoso assured
journalists.

The Israeli merchants, Oris Zoller and Uzi Kisslevich,
who in the name of Panama bought some 7,000 AK-47
rifles and $5 million worth of 7.62 millimeter bullets
that were diverted to Colombia, assure that the import
license by which they acquired the weapons was
authorized by Panama's Minister of Government and
Justice, Alex Vergara. "We had an understanding that
the document pertained to the Panamanian police,"
Zoller told the Guatemalan daily Siglo XXI for its
April 24 edition.

The businessman pointed out that the arms were
purchased from the Nicaraguan government itself and
later sent to Panama, and that this happened around
the latter part of last year. "We paid for these arms
and later representatives of the National Police of
Panama repaid us this amount," Kisslevich said. GIR,
SA, a company registered in Guatemala, served as the
intermediary through which Panama bought the arms,
whose last known location was in the AUC-dominated
Cordoba and Uraba region of Colombia, from Nicaragua.

Zoller gave telephone interviews to newspapers in the
region, in which he denied that documents were forged.
He also faxed journalists copies of an import license
that he says Panamanian officials signed, which noted
that "in this way we acknowledge that the arms
described above are and will be exclusively used by
the National Police of Panama, to which end they will
have as their final destination Panama City." He added
that this past November 2 the arms were delivered to
alleged Panamanian suppliers, at which time the
transaction was completed from his point of view.

One item about which none of those implicated could
respond was why the paperwork was made out to the
intermediary rather than that the ultimate user.

"The proprietors of GIR, SA asked the governments of
Nicaragua and Panama to verify how the arms would end
in Colombia," the Panamanian daily La Prensa reported
on April 23, adding that Kisslevich and Zoller
insisted that the Panamanian National Police
contracted with them to buy the lot of some 7,000
AK-47s that was later diverted to Colombia. Kisslevich
told La Prensa that the deal was "transparent" and the
documentation was "legal." "We had the support of the
Panamanian authorities for this operation," Kisslevich
told Siglo XXI.

Is Panama at war?

Panama has stayed out of Colombia's endemic wars since
independence in 1903. However, with the implementation
of Plan Colombia border incidents have increased, with
incursions by right wing paramilitaries, left wing
guerrillas, gangs of bandits and refugees displaced by
fighting or the fear of massacres. Panama has no army,
but the government has created a special police force
to guard the border, and is training the police for
combat if that is necessary. Thus the National Police
have purchased arms with Plan Colombia funds that the
United States government has provided for countries
that share borders with Colombia, according to
Panamanian sources.

Aboard the Otterloo, the boxes of AK-47s bore
inscriptions showing that they came from Russia,
Germany and Hungary. The chief of Panama's National
Police, Carlos Baris, by the way, has said that his
force buys arms from Hungary, because they offer
better prices.

Aside from this particular affair, Panama's role in
Plan Colombia is open to question.

The US Southern Command uses civilian contractors from
Evergreen Air of Alaska to run military supplies and
personnel into the Colombian war zone out of Panama
City's Tocumen Airport. The Moscoso administration,
which says that Panama will have nothing to do with
Plan Colombia, maintains that these operations don't
count because they are not carried out by uniformed
American military personnel.

Panama has also recently signed an addendum to an old
anti-drug pact with the United States, which permits
US military personnel to carry out certain "anti-drug"
missions in Panamanian territory. Successive American
administrations have characterized virtually all
military assistance to Colombia as "anti-drug,"
arguing that the leftist FARC guerrillas are
"narco-terrorists." In the face of some criticism that
the agreement infringes Panamanian sovereignty, both
the Moscoso and Bush administrations have argued that
it merely strengthens joint law enforcement
cooperation in efforts to suppress a problem that both
countries have in common.

The Mystery Documents

The Nicaraguan daily, La Prensa, published the
declarations of its country's police spokesman, Marlon
Montano, on April 25: "The police were authorized by
the government of Nicaragua to sign the "Contract of
Exchange of Arms and Ammunition" with GIR, SA, in its
role as the intermedia of the Panamanian police."

Montano added that the transaction was authorized
according to the legal procedures of Nicaragua, by the
nation's Comptroller General's Office and Ministry of
Treasury and Public Credit. He also said that the arms
were delivered by police chiefs and under strict
vigilance at the port of El Rama, from whence they
sailed off in the Otterloo.

In Panama on April 23, La Critica Libre reported that
"The operation begain in February of 2000 and finished
this past November 10, when the Dutch ship Otterloo
unloaded the arms in Turbo, Colombia. According to
investigations, the ship is the property of Trafalgar
Marine International." The Panamanian corporation's
president is Julio Ceesar Matute Oliva. Its resident
agent, attorney Gustavo Leonardo Padilla Martmnez,
told the daily that he didn't know of any illegality.

The Panamanian government, however, says that the
signatures of General Services director Rolando
Taboada, Purchasing chief Reinero Castillo, Government
and Justice Ministry official Alex Vergara and the
Comptroller's Office's financial control chief
Fredison Carvajal were all forged. It has admitted
that the documents were on official Panamanian
government forms, but maintains that the signatures
were falsified. However, none of these individuals
have personally admitted or denied their involvement
in the arms transfers, as they say they have been
forbidden by the government to give statements to the
press.

Panama's Attorney General, Josi Antonio Sossa, said
that he's waiting for reports from Panamanian and
foreign law enforcement agencies to establish whether
a crime has been committed within Panamanian
territory, and that all depends on how Nicaraguan,
Guatemalan and Colombian authorities respond. He notes
that he's trying to find out how documents may have
been falsified and which businesses may be involved in
the alleged purchase and resale of the arsenal, which
he said was transported in three different shipments.
(Panama had reportedly bought arms in three countries
during the Moscoso administration --- Argentina,
Hungary and Nicaragua.)

According to Police Chief Baris, at no time did Panama
buy the arms in question, nor did it serve as a
transit country for arms trafficking, but it was
simply a matter of false National Police documents
being used to cover the operation. However, Zoller
said that GIR, SA bought the AK-47s and ammunition
from the Nicaraguan Police in February of 2000 and
sold them to Inmversiones Digal, a Panamanian business
owned by Shimon Yalin Yelinek and Marco Shern.

The Panamanian National Security Council announced
that the governments of Colombia, Nicaragua, Panama
and the United States would conduct a joint
investigation to clarify the discrepancies.

The Mystery Ship

Gustavo Padilla, the resident agent for Trafalgar SA,
said that the company acquired the Otterloo about a
year ago, and that it's presently anchored at
Cristobal. The crew is gone, save for a single
caretaker who's not allowed to leave the ship. The
ship, in turn, is not allowed to leave the port.

El Tiempo, Colombia's newspaper of record which broke
this story, reported on April 23 that after navigating
its way to the port of Turbo, the ship began to be
unloaded at 11 p.m. by dozens of men.

The ship had sailed from the port of Veracruz, Mexico,
two weeks before with 23 containers full of plastic
balls. The Otterloo called at Bluefield, Nicaragua,
then set off for Turbo with 14 containers, allegedly
containing 10,000 AK-47s and 15 million bullets. If
that's true, then there would be 3,000 rifles more
than the lot officially purchased from the Nicaraguan
police to be accounted for,

The load passed through the official inspections at
the port of Turbo and, two hours later, several trucks
filled with balls, rifles and bullets set out on the
highways of Antioquia and Cordoba. A month later, when
other Colombian law enforcement officials heard about
a huge arsenal having come into the country, it was
much too late to do anything about it: the trucks had
delivered their loads and disappeared without a trace.
The police created an investigating committee under
their Intelligence Directorate (DiPol) to establish
the origin and destination of what they believe to be
the largest illegal weapons shipment ever to enter
Colombian territory.

However, the investigators heard conflicting stories.
For example, the Otterloo's engine operator, Jeszs
Ernesto Yejzn Rodrmguez, a Mexican national, said that
the itinerary from Veracruz to Colombia didn't include
Nicaragua, and that the vessel only stopped there for
repairs.

And then there were the documents indicating that
7,000 rifles were loaded onto the ship, and other
accounts that 10,000 were unloaded from it.

It has caused a major stir in Panama, whose government
is already rocked by multiple scandals. An editorial
in the Panamanian daily El Universal stated:

"Today we wake up to the news of arms that have
entered Colombia, and the only official response is
from the National Security Council, denying the grave
accusations made in the Colombian media, and promising
to conduct an investigation of the crime.

The National Security Council is the least qualified
body to conduct this investigation, because the
director of the National Police is a part of it. This
is not only one more act of corruption, this attacks
the spirit of neutrality that Panama has advocated,
and puts all of our citizens at risk of being involved
in an armed conflict that would repeat, for our
country, the horrors of The Thousand Day War."

"Investigations"

The plot has thickened, with President Moscoso and
Nicaragua's President Moscoso first denying any
wrongdoing on the parts of their governments, then
promising a joint investigation to see if there was
anything improper. The papers in several countries
have been full of accusations and counter-accusations
between the Panamanian and Nicaraguan police. And now
the United States, which has the AUC on its list of
terrorist organizations now, but which worked very
closely with the military to track down and kill the
Medellin Cartel's Pablo Escobar, says it will join the
investigation.

Then, as we were uploading this issue, El Panama
America reported, citing an unidentified source in
Panama's National Security Council, that Oris Zoller y
Uzi Kisslevich, the arms merchants at the center of
this affair, are linked to the Israeli Mossad
intelligence service. This would make a certain amount
of sense, given close historical ties between Israel
and Guatemala, for example by Israel stepping in to
supply the Guatemalan Army during the height of a
1980s scorched earth campaign in indigenous areas that
was so atrocious that the US government cut off
officially acknowledged military aid.

The United States never cut its military cooperation
with Guatemala as much as was claimed, and in light of
what incomplete information is now known about that
episode in Central American history, new questions
arise. Is there a behind-the-scenes American hand in
this arms shipment to Colombia's paramilitary? Is this
all about the use of a series of Israeli, Guatemalan,
Nicaraguan, Panamanian and official Colombian
"cut-outs" to conceal Plan Colombia assistance to the
AUC paramilitary?

Inquiries into these and other questions thus become
problematic. The Panamanian and Nicaraguan governments
are both severely tested by scandals about widespread
corruption at the moment. Israel is very isolated on
the world stage. The governments of Colombia and the
United States find very little support in the rest of
the hemisphere for Plan Colombia. The results of
investigations by the authorities of any of these
countries, or of all of them, no matter what the
findings might be, are sure to leave a lot of people
incredulous.