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Monday, November 25, 2002

By Jeffrey Cohan, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

Alberto Galvis was tending to the family farm on a Saturday morning four years ago when he noticed a military helicopter in the distance, hovering low over Santo Domingo, his tiny village in northeastern Colombia.

	Online Map: Colombia's civil war

What happened next altered his life, starting a chain of events that drove him from Colombia to Pittsburgh, a refugee from a four-decade-long civil war.

Galvis, nervously watching the helicopter, heard an explosion. The helicopter had dropped a bomb.

In the ensuing chaos, Galvis tried to get back to Santo Domingo, fearing for the lives of his mother and father. But the village was being evacuated, so he drove to the nearest town and awaited word.

The next day, he learned over the phone that his mother had been killed. Seventeen people, all civilians, died in a bombing that still reverberates through U.S.-Colombia relations.

"We have never understood why we were bombed," said Galvis, a 29-year-old freshman attending La Roche College on a scholarship.

The bombing occurred during a week of particularly intense fighting near Santo Domingo between the military and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the larger of two leftist guerrilla groups fighting the government.

The Colombian military has long maintained that blame for the bombing lies with the guerrillas, claiming they had parked a truck bomb in the village to ambush soldiers.

But forensic evidence points clearly toward the Colombian air force helicopter, as does the testimony of witnesses such as Galvis. As for the bomb: U.S.-made and supplied.

Galvis insists he and his fellow villagers never aided FARC rebels.

About two weeks after the Dec. 13, 1998 bombing, Galvis returned to Santo Domingo, located in the middle of the province of Arauca, home to an oil complex run by Los Angeles-based Occidental Petroleum. In conjunction with Colombian human rights organizations, he sought to monitor the various government and military investigations into the bombing. But the investigations were going nowhere.

Exasperated human rights leaders turned to the Northwestern University School of Law in Chicago for help. For the only time in its history, the law school's Center for International Human Rights agreed to convene a tribunal, which held an unofficial but thorough trial in September 2000.

Galvis and three other Santo Domingo residents traveled to Chicago to testify. But perhaps the most damning evidence came from the FBI, which months before had examined bomb fragments from Santo Domingo and had found them "consistent" with a U.S.-made cluster bomb, an explosive that the United States had furnished to the Colombian military.

The tribunal, chaired by a former Illinois state Supreme Court justice, concluded that a Colombian air force helicopter had dropped the bomb that killed Teresa Mojica Hernandez de Galvis and 16 others.

Upon his return to Colombia, Galvis and other witnesses received death threats. He went into hiding in the capital city of Bogota.

Angel Riveros, another witness, ventured back to the Santo Domingo area. Riveros was killed in January, allegedly by one of the death squads of the United Self-Defense Groups of Colombia, a right-wing paramilitary organization blamed for most of the country's human-right violations.

"He was one of the people who helped evacuate the injured on the morning of the bombing," Galvis said of Riveros. "His murder hurt me a lot."

Galvis's plight came to the attention of Squirrel Hill resident Daniel Kovalik, a United Steelworkers attorney who represents Colombian labor unions in U.S. courts. Kovalik recommended Galvis to La Roche administrators, who were looking for a Colombian for their Pacem In Terris Institute, which provides scholarships to students from war-torn nations.

He tentatively plans to study economics on the North Hills campus, with the goal of returning to Colombia upon graduation, if he can do so safely.

Galvis can find some comfort in the fact that the Santo Domingo bombing continues to be examined in both the United States and Colombia.

Just last month, the Colombian attorney general's office released a report faulting the air force helicopter crew, although U.S. Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., in remarks e-mailed to the Post-Gazette, called the report "a very small step.

"The real question is whether they will get to the bottom of this case, which has languished for nearly four years," said Leahy, chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Foreign Operations. "We may never know whether this was a tragic accident or an intentional attack against innocent civilians.

"It has been an extremely frustrating case of obfuscation and lying at the highest level of the Colombian air force."

Two low-level members of the helicopter crew are serving suspensions, by order of the Colombian inspector general, according to Robin Kirk, Colombia expert for New York City-based Human Rights Watch.

The Santo Domingo bombing is casting a shadow over President Bush's proposal to earmark $98 million in U.S. aid for Colombian military operations in Galvis's home province. Guerrillas have attacked oil facilities in Arauca hundreds of times.

Whatever the fate of President Bush's proposal, Galvis laments that the Colombian military has already escalated operations in Arauca.

Colombian President Alvaro Uribe won election by a wide margin in May after proposing to beef up the military, which has been fighting two guerrilla groups, the FARC and the smaller National Liberation Army (ELN), and has been collaborating, at times, with the paramilitaries.

"There will be rivers of blood," Galvis said. "The worst is yet to come in Arauca.

"Thank God, right now, I'm here and can prepare myself for a better future."