By AleJandra Bonilla Mora, CAMBIOColombia, July 25, 2025
(Translated by Eunice Gibson, CSN Volunteer Translator)
Judges in the Military Criminal Justice System, agents in the Technical Investigations Corps (CTI in Spanish), detectives in the Administrative Department of Security (DAS in Spanish)[1], and legal counsel for the military units; all were part of the criminal framework that enabled the extrajudicial executions that the military who were involved got away with. They gave instructions on forensic countermeasures, they covered up information, and they contorted testimony. Although a lot of names were known, the prosecutors in Attorney General’s Office stood aside, and now the JEP (Special Jurisdiction for Peace) is asking for an investigation.
This is how Giovanny Vélez Garavito, who was part of the Military Gaula[2] in Córdoba in 2007, described his encounter with Military Criminal Justice System Judge Beatriz Consuelo Ospina after he committed a “false positive’. “You would go and she would say, ‘memorize this, stupid’. You would read it and you would memorize it, and your testimony was all set. You would read it and sign it.”
The corrupt and inhuman treatment was very simple. After you killed the civilians, you falsified the operation, the work orders, and the scene of the crime. They also eliminated identities and presented the victims as members of illegal groups. The military knew that nothing would happen to them because they had their insurance ready.
Major Julio César Parga Rivas, who in 2007 commanded the Gaula Córdoba (Gacor) had everything organized. Two million pesos a month (roughly USD $1,000 at exchange rates of the time) to Judge Ospina, as he himself testified to the Special Jurisdiction for Peace. That amount not only paid her for her conscience; it was a specific act, thought through, and designed as part of a criminal organization within the military unit to avoid at all costs that the “false positives” would be investigated at that time, and that the magnitude of the national horror would never come to light.
“In my cases in the Gaula, in all the investigations by the Military Criminal Justice System, I paid the judge. The reality is that nobody ever called me on it,” he stated in his voluntary testimony to the JEP in 2019. The soldiers knew about it and Ober José Madrid confirmed that when he was face to face with Judge Ospina for the executions of Jhonsnin Darío Hernández Ortiz and Jan Alexander Palma Martínez, perpetrated February 2, 2007, in Sucre.
“When I was summoned to testify to the Criminal Court Judge, she told me: ‘if you weren’t here, go and make up something as if you were over there where they were doing it. Since you are in the order for the operation, you have to say something about being there.’ So I had to invent a story that I was out on the highway,” he said.
The role of the judge, according to the testimony furnished to the JEP, was also to warn the soldiers when they started getting truthful. One of them sometimes told things and tried to talk more, to justify what he had done. Then she would say, “That’s enough, sonny. No more talking,” the soldier Fernando Israel Arias Fabián recounted.
The JEP made use of the testimony when in March of last year it charged Pargas Rivas with establishing a criminal organization in the Gaula Córdoba where all the members of the unit had assigned tasks. They used up to 91 million pesos (roughly USD $4,550 at the exchange rates of the time) that had been reserved for Fondelibertad[3] to maintain the cover-up mechanisms.
Now, in a document dated last July 2, which CAMBIO has seen, the Special Jurisdiction for Peace has sought authenticated copies from the Attorney General’s Office in order to investigate Judge Beatriz Consuelo Ospina, a judicial officer who, according to the soldiers’ testimony, chose to disregard her duty and take part as a secret link in the whole criminal organization that was created in the Gacor. This network didn’t only include her, because the cases themselves were a fantasy. They didn’t take evidence or interview the victims’ families. Those involved ended up being officers, instructors, and from the beginning, the destination of each investigation was the same: it was filed.
The soldier Giovanny Vélez Garavito said it this way: “When we went to give our testimony, the Judge, Beatriz Ospina, had already prepared the false testimony (. . .) At the conclusion of every operation, the commander of the group would get us together and tell us what we were to say (. . .) Madame Judge summoned us to the criminal court, and when we got to her office, she had already prepared our witness statement.”
Other commanders replicated the model: Colonel Luis Fernando Borja Aristazábal, who led the Sucre Joint Task Force between 2007 and 2008 and carried out more than sixty “false positives”, confessed to the JEP than when he was assigned to that unit, he sought the counsel of Pargo Rivas because the Gacor was the unit that had the most “positive results”. Borja adopted the criminal model and confessed that he had made payments to the Military Criminal Justice Judge so that she would make sure men from his unit were not found guilty of anything.
Add to that the fact that the soldiers were becoming aware that they had made mistakes while falsifying the crime scenes and they decided to learn forensics. Rivas confessed that for that help, he went to Jesús David Cartagena, in charge of the CTI team assigned to Gacor. He met with him several times to ask him what he had to do to avoid the mistakes being noticed.
“How can we keep from making mistakes, how to make a killing that was obviously irregular appear to be appropriate? So he told me ‘There are a lot of secrets that I know’, and so, obviously, I paid him. I told him ‘I need you to tell me all those secrets,’” Parga testified.
The secrets were how to position the bodies on the crime scene and other things that would be forensic counter-measures. In return, he made five payments “of between two million and a million and a half pesos.” Cartagena got together with the soldiers occasionally, and sometimes right after the troops had viciously executed some civilians, and he would aske them things like, “Is this the weapon? Did you fire it? If you fired it, you’re not going to have problems.” Then, according to Antonio Rozo Valbuena, the CTI agent would refuse to perform the legally required removal of the body from the location, claiming security reasons and alleging that the supposed killing had been carried out when he was already “off duty.”
The soldiers took turns killing the victims to avoid raising suspicion. They had to shoot the victim so that their fingerprints would be on the weapon and they would have powder markings. The JEP requested certified copies of Cartagena’s testimony and that of the then-official of the DAS, José Fontalvo Suárez, who had another assigned task. Parga confessed that he paid to receive false intelligence reports to justify the tactical missions, and he supported that with his signature on an expense report where he said the payments were reward payments to informants.
Requesting certified copies: an issue more complicated than it would seem
So now, here is a serious issue: many of the names of public servants that are now being mentioned have already been reported with their name and surname in the files that were maintained by the Attorney General’s Office before the JEP commenced its investigation.
Multiple organizations who represent the victims’ families have asked the JEP to pursue this thoroughly and to obtain the certified copies, but with one additional factor: it’s not enough to send the Attorney General’s Office the sworn statements of the soldiers who now, in JEP proceedings, have confessed to the crimes that they initially denied vehemently. There is also the need to understand the participation of the people who were key actors in the structures of organized crime that were created in the military units to carry out the “extrajudicial executions”.
That means that these people not only covered up and falsified documents; their role was more decisive. The importance of that resides in the fact that for the crimes of cover-up and falsification of public documents, seen by themselves, the statutes of limitations have certainly now expired, and the prosecutors who failed to investigate them in the past, are now not able to investigate them. So, if it’s understood that these people provided significant support to the criminal organizations in a criminal conspiracy to commit crimes against humanity, there is definitely an opportunity for the ordinary criminal justice system to decide their responsibility and avoid impunity. If not, says an attorney consulted by CAMBIO, the same thing will happen to the authenticated documents that happened to the documents that were furnished to the Peace and Justice process, “little or nothing”.
Attorney Sebastián Escobar, of the José Alvear Restrepo Lawyers Collective, told CAMBIO that it’s important to make progress in making clear the involvement of civilian third parties in these patterns of macro-criminality in the framework of the armed conflict. “It’s important that there be a strategic alliance with the Attorney General’s Office so that there will be prompt and effective justice to prevent what happened with Peace and Justice,” he said.
According to Escobar, this situation is also a direct consequence of the decision of the Constitutional Court that prevented civilian third parties from applying to the JEP: “if it had been permissible to go ahead with integrated investigations that connected not just the combatants but also the third parties that supported them, favored them, or took part in the commission of specific crimes. We hope the Attorney General’s Office will provide a strategy that will deal with the request for comparison of authenticated documents,” he added.
Detectives and prosecutors identified by members of the military
The request for comparison of authenticated documents that CAMBIO is revealing today is the most recent request, but it’s not the only one.
In May 2023, the JEP asked the prosecutors to investigate
Óscar Nelson Guerra Chinchía, who was Investigative Judge Nos.45 and 13 in the Military Criminal Justice System in the Colombian Army’s 16th Brigade. He had contributed to the continuation of the “false positives” by never filing a report of what was going on, all the while believing that he could conserve his military criminal exemption, no matter what.
That means that at all costs we have to avoid that the procedures end up in the ordinary justice system or face punishment. “There was an institutional policy inside the Military Criminal Justice System. It was a policy of, let’s say, it wasn’t a written directive, but it was certainly repeatedly directed to every one of the officers, and that was that we had to maintain and protect the military criminal exemption above all in every case, and anybody that doesn’t act accordingly will see himself transferred,” he himself told the JEP.
They also requested authenticated copies against Gina Baloyes, who was the legal counsel for the 16th Brigade and for the “Ramon Nonato Pérez” Infantry Battalion No. 44, located in Casanare. She was identified by soldiers as having covered up the executions and forced disappearances of people. César Augusto Cómbita Eslava said, “The legal counsel was there to advise the Battalion Commander as to how he should guide the soldiers. There was one particular situation regarding how to bring witnesses; these were false witnesses. The purpose was to give testimony to show the legitimacy of the killings that were not legitimate.”
Also in that decision, the JEP wants to investigate then-detectives of the DAS, Cloviz Arbey Duque, who was the Operations Director for the Casanare sector, and Oscar Mauricio Ramírez Laiton, accused of shooting at point blank range a minor who then was offered as a “false positive”, and also of shooting Jeison David Palacios, who was also part of this operation.
The DAS detectives Ivonne Maritza Niño Coronel, Andrés Eduardo Peña Cancino, and Fabian Volderruten López were accused by Major Gustavo Soto Bracamonte of knowing that the results by the Gaula Casanare Unit that he commanded between 2006 and 2007 had been produced by crimes, and therefore documents regarding this were also sought from the Attorney General’s Office.
In October 2023, the Branch for Recognition of Truth and Responsibility and the Determination of Acts and Conduct also requested authenticated documents referring to former prosecutor No. 7 in Tauramena, Olga Lucía Unudio, who was identified by Jorge Edwin Gordillo Benítez in a hearing held in September of that year. She was accused of having closed down proceedings that involved two captains, when she knew that the proceedings involved illegal activity.
In that same hearing, the soldier Alexander González Almario accused then-prosecutor No. 5, delegated to the Gaula Rodolfo Leal Galindo, of knowing everything that was going on and not doing anything about it. Soto Bracamonte, in a voluntary sworn statement on July 31, 2020, also accused him. “Prosecutor No. 5 Rodolfo Leal Galindo knew all about this case. They manipulated everything there; he was working directly with that DAS official, Camilo Andrés Escobar Giraldo, and also with Camilo Andrés Escobar Giraldo, who was a big buddy of Gonzáles Armario, and also they asked me for somebody from the Gaula to take part in the operation,” he said.
The recruiters and the informants
Last July 2, the JEP also requested authenticated copies of evidence against Robert Terán Díaz, accused by several witnesses of being a recruiter of people who were deceived and then turned over to military units to be killed.
Germán Tovio Mercado told the JEP that, using his information, they could intercept a man who was traveling from Montería to Maicao: “So then, I got together with the Major. At that time, you could have talked to an investigative unit, with the prosecutor, with the people from the DAS, everybody, doing an operation that had as its principal mission the arrest of those people, but of course, the word arrest was prohibited. Rather, at that time they were killing everybody. Even the Major said, “There’s not less than five kills here. Tell Robert to go for it.”
Colonel Alejandro Robayo Rodríguez confessed to the JEP on March 31, 2023, that the soldiers who carried out that operation believed that they would be defeating a group of criminals. “I definitely did tell the soldiers that they had to kill them. I said that, and I accept my responsibility for creating the situation; I beg pardon from the victims for having given that order and I repent that I did not have—I have to repeat this—I did not have the character, the strength, to say, ‘I’m not going to do this because this is not part of my mission’, but when there were kills, and when you could get kills, you would kill.”
“Robert”’s procedures were also used in the “false positive” of a Wayúu indigenous man. It was perpetrated on October 17, 2005, in a rural area in Dibulla, Guajira Department. The victim had been received by Tovio Medrano, who turned him over to 2d Lieutenant Juan Carlos Galvis Cadavid to be killed. In the information furnished to the JEP, “Robert” is identified in the “transportation” and “delivery” of at least six more victims.
In another previous request for documentation, the JEP also turned its attention to the informants, Gilmar Harvey Suárez Mesa, Albeiro Fonseca, Rafael Torres (alias Mono Guadaño), Bernabé Castro, Felix Duvan Jara Benítez, Gilmer Silva Oropeza, Jonathan Cruz Sandoval, and José Zacarías Volencia Vega, used by the Colombian Army 16th Brigade. They were part of the criminal agreement between the Unit Commander, Henry William Torres Escalante ,and the Gaula Casanare Gustavo Soto Bracamante to “identify people, get them away from where they live by deceiving them and then execute them and present their bodies as “combat kills”.
Now it will be up to the Attorney General’s Office to make sure that those who are presumed to have participated in the “false positives” will not escape in impunity.
[1] The DAS was closed down in 2011.
[2] Military Anti-Extortion and Anti-Kidnapping Group
[3] Fondelibertad is the “National Fund for the Defense of Personal Liberty” established by the Minister of Defense in 1995.