The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Once linked to war crimes, now he’s the ambassador to South Korea
Last week, South Korean President Moon Jae-in received the credentials of six new foreign ambassadors. Among them was the new Colombian ambassador to South Korea, Juan Pablo Rodríguez Barragán.
Rodríguez isn’t a career diplomat, but he has a lengthy resume. He had 41 years of active military service, eventually becoming commander of the Colombian Military Forces until he resigned in 2017. But what really makes him stand out is another detail: He faces allegations of participating in war crimes and supporting cyberespionage against human-rights activists.
According to a 2015 report from Human Rights Watch, Colombian military units carried out routine extrajudicial killings between 2002 and 2008, when Colombia’s war against the Marxist guerrilla group FARC was still ongoing. The cases became known as “false positives” because Colombian soldiers allegedly falsified evidence against civilians, painting them as guerrilla fighters to boost body counts and collect financial rewards.
At the time, Human Rights Watch’s executive director for the Americas, José Miguel Vivanco, called these killings “one of the worst episodes of mass atrocity in the Western Hemisphere in recent years.” Hundreds, possibly even thousands, of civilians are believed to have been killed. Rodríguez allegedly played a key role, commanding the Colombian army’s 4th Brigade from 2006 to 2008. According to evidence gathered by Human Rights Watch, at least 28 civilians were killed by the brigade under his watch.
Many low- and mid-level military figures have faced prosecution for their role in false positives, but senior officers like Rodríguez have escaped legal repercussions. A pending criminal investigation against the former general has stalled. But there is evidence that Rodríguez was still deeply concerned about the accusations against him.
Earlier this month, the Colombian magazine Semana published a story alleging that Rodríguez sought advice from his cyberintelligence expert on how to conduct electronic surveillance on Vivanco in 2017. In their report, Semana recounted testimony from an official that suggested Rodríguez was concerned about tweets from Vivanco about false positives and the International Criminal Court, and asked whether the military would be able to “counterattack” and use a surveillance device called a WiFi Pineapple to monitor the activist’s Internet activity.
José Miguel Vivanco tweeted “Why would Colombia’s top commander try to intercept my communications?”
Rodríguez stepped down as commander of the Colombian Military Forces in 2017, just three years after he had taken the position. The move was unexpected: According to a report from McClatchy, it came shortly after the U.S. government began reviewing his visa rights.
Vivanco told McClatchy that Rodríguez’s retirement might “send a strong message that [the army has] closed the dark chapter of ‘false positives.’” But then Rodríguez was sent to represent Colombia in Seoul. Vivanco said this week that Rodríguez’s appointment as ambassador showed the Colombian government was sending a “disturbing message: that it’s willing to back senior officers against whom there are serious allegations of involvement in the ‘false positive’ coldblooded executions.”
Neither the South Korean nor Colombian embassies in Washington responded to inquiries about Rodríguez from The Washington Post.
Top diplomatic positions for other countries have gone to those accused of complicity in war crimes before. Jagath Jayasuriya, a retired Sri Lankan army general accused of complicity in violence against civilians during the last part of Sri Lanka’s civil war, was appointed ambassador to Brazil and five other Latin American countries in June 2014.
Kate Cronin-Furman, a researcher at Harvard’s Belfer Center who has studied Sri Lankan war crimes, said it was widely suspected that Jayasuriya and other senior Sri Lankan military commanders with no diplomatic experience were nominated to ambassador posts in a bid to provide them diplomatic immunity.
This diplomatic immunity would only be valid in the host country and wouldn’t affect the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court, which says that such immunities “shall not bar the Court from exercising its jurisdiction over such a person.”