Colombia Casts a Wide Net In Its Fight With Guerrillas

[Judi Lynn]

Colombia Casts a Wide Net In Its Fight With Guerrillas
Pressure to Raise Body Counts Blamed for Civilian Killings

By Juan Forero
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, March 30, 2008; A01

SAN FRANCISCO, Colombia -- All Cruz Elena Gonzalez 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," Gonzalez 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 to become the second-largest military in Latin America.

There are varying accounts on the number of registered extrajudicial killings, as the civilians deaths are called. But a report by a coalition of 187 human rights groups said there are allegations that 955 civilians were killed between mid-2002 and mid-2007 and classified as guerrillas fallen in combat -- a 60 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 Davila said her son, Diego Casta¿eda, 27, disappeared from Medellin in January 2006. Two months later, authorities called to say he was dead, another battlefield death. For good measure, 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."
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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."
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A former army sergeant who was under Mejia's command, Edwin Guzman, recounted in an interview how Mejia's unit would kill peasant farmers, dress them up in combat fatigues and later call in local newspaper reporters to write about the supposed combat that had taken place.

Guzman, now a government witness against Mejia, 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.

Among those listed as killed in combat here in San Francisco is Rodrigo Albeiro Jim¿nez, 23, a farmer who had just become a father when he was stopped by an army patrol Oct. 19, 2004. Soldiers detained Jim¿nez -- it was never established exactly why -- and let his companions go.

The other farmers told investigators they then heard gunshots.

Hours later, his wife, Marelbi Quintero, received the news: Jim¿nez was dead, killed in combat with a local platoon.

"They put a gun in his hand and I don't know how many grenades," she said. "They tried to say that he'd done something, or was planning to do something."

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