CSN Central NY Chapter

To: <cip-colombia-news@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Washington Post: Colombian Troops Kill Farmers, Pass Off Bodies as
Rebels'

Sunday, March 30, 2008
Colombian Troops Kill Farmers, Pass Off Bodies as Rebels'
Juan Forero
The Washington Post

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/29/AR2008032901
118.html?hpid=sec-world
(Tags -> Colombia : U.S. Policy: Human Rights Cases, U.S. Policy: : English)

SAN FRANCISCO, Colombia -- All Cruz Elena González saw when the
soldiers came past her house was a corpse, wrapped in a tarp and
strapped to a mule. A guerrilla killed in combat, soldiers muttered,
as they trudged past her meek home in this town in northwestern
Colombia.

She soon learned that the body belonged to her 16-year-old son,
Robeiro Valencia, and that soldiers had classified him as a guerrilla
killed in combat, a claim later discredited by the local government
human rights ombudsman. "Imagine what I felt when my other son told me
it was Robeiro," González said in recounting the August killing. "He
was my boy."

Funded in part by the Bush administration, a six-year military
offensive has helped the government here wrest back territory once
controlled by guerrillas and kill hundreds of rebels in recent months,
including two top commanders of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of
Colombia, or FARC.

But under intense pressure from Colombian military commanders to
register combat kills, the army has in recent years also increasingly
been killing poor farmers and passing them off as rebels slain in
combat, government officials and human rights groups say. The tactic
has touched off a fierce debate in the Defense Ministry between
tradition-bound generals who favor an aggressive campaign that centers
on body counts and reformers who say the army needs to develop other
yardsticks to measure battlefield success.

The killings, carried out by combat units under the orders of regional
commanders, have always been a problem in the shadowy, 44-year-old
conflict here -- one that pits the army against a peasant-based rebel
movement.

But with the recent demobilization of thousands of paramilitary
fighters, many of whom operated death squads to wipe out rebels, army
killings of civilians have grown markedly since 2004, according to
rights groups, U.N. investigators and the government's internal
affairs agency. The spike has come during a military buildup that has
seen the armed forces nearly double to 270,000 members in the last six
years, becoming the second-largest military in Latin America.

There are varying accounts on the number of registered extrajudicial
killings, as the civilian deaths are called. But a report by a
coalition of 187 human rights groups said there are allegations that
between mid-2002 and mid-2007, 955 civilians were killed and
classified as guerrillas fallen in combat -- a 65 percent increase
over the previous five years, when 577 civilians were reported killed
by troops.

"We used to see this as isolated, as a military patrol that lost
control," said Bayron Gongora of the Judicial Freedom Corp., a
Medellin lawyers group representing the families of 110 people killed
in murky circumstances. "But what we're now seeing is systematic."

The victims are the marginalized in Colombia's highly stratified
society. Most, like Robeiro Valencia, are subsistence farmers. Others
are poor Colombians kidnapped off the streets of bustling Medellin,
the capital of this state, Antioquia, which has registered the most
killings.

Amparo Bermudez Dávila said her son, Diego Castañeda, 27, disappeared
from Medellin in January 2006. Two months later, authorities called to
say he had been killed, another battlefield death. They showed her a
photograph of his body, dressed in camouflage.

"I said, 'Guerrilla?' " she recalled. "My son was not a guerrilla. And
they told me if I didn't think he was a guerrilla, then I should file
a complaint."

Military prosecutors ordinarily initiate investigations when the army
kills someone. In cases that appear criminal, civilian prosecutors
take over, as they did in the slayings of Valencia and Castañeda in
San Francisco. But human rights groups and government prosecutors say
the initial probes have usually been perfunctory, and investigators
have been under intense pressure from high-ranking military officers
to rule in the army's favor.

Such challenges have made tabulating the exact number of dead
civilians impossible, though officials at the attorney general's
office and the inspector general's office revealed recent estimates in
interviews.

The attorney general's office is investigating 525 killings of
civilians, all but a handful of which occurred since 2002 and in which
706 soldiers and officers are implicated. The office has another 500
cases, involving hundreds more victims, yet to be opened. The
inspector general's office, meanwhile, is investigating 650 cases from
2003 to mid-2007 that could involve as many as 1,000 victims, said
Carlos Arturo Gomez, the vice inspector general.

"Last year, the number of complaints shot up," Gomez said. "Some have
said the cause could be unscrupulous military members who want to show
results from false operations. Others say it's the product of pressure
from the high command, the push for results."

The trend has prompted concern among some members of the U.S.
Congress. Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.), chairman of the Senate
Appropriations foreign operations subcommittee, said he is holding up
$23 million in military aid until he sees progress in the fight
against impunity and state-sponsored violence.

"We've had six years, $5 billion in U.S. aid. More than half of it has
gone to the Colombian military, and we find the army is killing more
civilians, not less," Leahy said in an interview. "And by all
accounts, all independent accounts, we find that civilians are just
being taken out, executed and then dressed up in uniforms so they can
claim body counts of guerrillas killed."

President Álvaro Uribe's government, which has had a string of recent
successes against the FARC, has defended itself against the
accusations and contends they are part of an international campaign
designed to discredit the armed forces. Indeed, some officials say the
FARC is prodding the families of rebels killed in combat to claim the
dead were civilians.

Still, Defense Minister Juan Manuel Santos acknowledges civilian
deaths and has initiated steps that include new rules of engagement,
assigning inspectors to combat units to advise commanders on the use
of force and improving human rights training for soldiers.

The military has also been streamlining its justice system and
transferring more cases to the attorney general's office, which the
United Nations says must have a greater role if extrajudicial
executions are to be eradicated. The attorney general's office said
more than 200 members of the military have been detained as
prosecutors investigate their involvement in the killings of
civilians, with 13 convicted last year.

"I have said this very clearly: The soldier who commits a crime
becomes a criminal, and he will be treated as a criminal," Santos
said.

Santos also has stressed, in speeches and directives, that the army's
anti-guerrilla policy should be more focused on generating desertions
than accumulating combat kills, the traditional method of measuring
success. "I've told all my soldiers and policemen that I prefer a
demobilized guerrilla, or a captured guerrilla, to a dead guerrilla,"
Santos said.

But the Defense Ministry's reformers have been met by influential
generals who have defended officers accused of slayings and favor a
more traditional strategy for defeating the rebels.

That approach means giving field commanders autonomy and instilling a
philosophy that stresses swift engagement with the rebels.

"What's the result of offensives? Combat," Gen. Mario Montoya, head of
Colombia's army, said in an interview. "And if there's combat, there
are dead in combat."

Human rights groups see a disturbing trend, saying the tactics used by
some army units are similar to those that death squads used to
terrorize civilians. A top U.N. investigator said some army units went
as far as to carry "kits," which included grenades and pistols that
could be planted next to bodies.

"The method of killing people perceived as guerrilla collaborators is
still seen as legitimate by too many members of the army," said Lisa
Haugaard, director of Latin America Working Group, a Washington-based
coalition of humanitarian groups.

After she interviewed a number of families of victims, she determined
that in many of the cases soldiers "appeared to be going on missions,
not accidentally detaining and killing people," she said.

The highest-ranking officer implicated in extrajudicial killings is
Col. Hernan Mejía.

A former army sergeant who was under Mejía's command, Edwin Guzman,
recounted in an interview how Mejía's unit would kill peasant
farmers, dress them in combat fatigues and call in local newspaper
reporters to write about the supposed combat that had taken place.

Guzman, now a government witness against Mejía, said soldiers
participated because they knew the army gave incentives -- from extra
pay to days off -- for amassing kills in combat. "This is because the
army gives prizes for kills, not for control of territory," he said.

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