Soldiers arrested for 'false positive' killing .
Thursday, 02 September 2010 07:16 Kirsten Begg
Colombia's Prosecutor General's Office issued arrest warrants for seven soldiers, including a lieutenant, suspected of killing a farmer in the country's northern Sucre department and presenting him as a rebel killed in combat.
The human rights department of the Prosecutor General's Office alleges that the soldiers killed farmer Patricio Florez Severo in a rural zone of Sucre's Carmen de Bolivar municipality in 2007. They then allegedly planted objects, including weapons on the body, to disguise him as a guerrilla.
According to the lawyer representing the deceased and his family, the soldiers involved were decorated and promoted following the incident.
Investigations by human rights coalition Coordination Colombia-Europa suggest that as many as 3,700 extrajudicial killings, defined as the murder of non-combatants by members of the security forces, took place in Colombia over the past seven years.
A report released by U.S. NGO the Fellowship of Reconciliation found an "alarming link" between Colombian military units that received U.S. funding and cases of false positives committed by those units.
http://colombiareports.com/colombia-news/news/11635-seven-soldiers-arrested-for-false-positive.html~~~~~Recent Colombian Mass Grave Discovery May Be "False-Positives"
By Conn Hallinan, August 1, 2010
If you want to understand what’s behind the recent tension between Colombia and Venezuela, think “smokescreen,” and then go back several months to some sick children in the Department of Meta, just south of Bogota. The children fell ill after drinking from a local stream, a stream contaminated by the bodies of more than 2,000 people, secretly buried by the Colombian military.
According to the Colombian high command, the mass grave just outside the army base at La Macarena contains the bodies of guerilla fighters killed between 2002 and 2009 in that country’s long-running civil war. But given the army’s involvement in the so-called “false positive” scandal, human rights groups are highly skeptical that the dead are members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia and the National Liberation Army, the two insurgent groups fighting the central government.
“False positive” is the name given to the Colombian armed forces operation that murdered civilians and then dressed them up in insurgent uniforms in order to demonstrate the success of the army’s counterinsurgency strategy, thus winning more aid from the U.S. According to the human rights organizations Comision de Derechos Homanos del Bajo Ariari and Colectivo Orlando Fals Borda, some 2,000 civilians have been murdered under the program.
The bodies at La Macarena have not been identified yet, but suspicion is that they represent victims of the “false-positive” program, as well as rural activists and trade unionists. The incoming Colombian president, Juan Manuel Santos, was defense secretary when the murders were talking place. Santos also oversaw a brief invasion of Ecuador in 2008 that reportedly killed a number of insurgents. The invasion was widely condemned throughout Latin America.
Diverting attention is what outgoing Colombian President Alvaro Uribe is all about. While his foreign minister, Luis Alfonso Hoyos, was laying out photos and intelligence claiming that Venezuela was hosting upwards of 1,500 Colombian insurgents, a group of Latin American NGOs were uncovering a vast scheme by Uribe’s Department of Administrative Security (DAS) to sabotage the activities of journalists, judges, NGOs, international organizations and political opponents. Some of these “dirty tricks” included death threats.
More:
http://www.fpif.org/blog/recent_colombian_mass_grave_discovery_may_be_false-positives~~~~~Colombia: US aid may have sparked civilian killings
Colombian army accused of killing civilians and labeling them guerrillas.
LA MACARENA, Colombia — When Colombian military units receive an increase in U.S. aid, they allegedly kill more civilians and frame the deaths as combat kills, according to a new report.
The report, released Thursday by two American human rights organizations, raises serious questions about the implications of U.S. military aid to Colombia. The United States has provided more than $7 billion in mostly military aid to Colombia since 2000 for fighting drugs and counterinsurgency — making it the largest recipient of U.S. military aid after Israel.
The army is accused of killing civilians and presenting them as guerrillas killed in combat to pump body counts. The Colombian military faces significant political pressure to produce concrete results in its war against the the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia), the country's left-wing guerrilla insurgency.
Many point to the macabre practice — euphemistically known as producing a “false positive” — as a result of an unofficial incentive-based system that rewards high numbers of combat kills with job perks and promotions. Colombia's attorney general's office is investigating more than 2,000 alleged cases of false-positives committed by the armed forces.
The report was based on a two-year study using records of 3,000 reported extrajudicial killings since 2002 and lists of 500 military units approved to receive U.S. assistance. It found that in regions that received the largest increases in U.S. aid, the number of reported extrajudicial killings surged 56 percent on average in the four years surrounding the aid boost. When U.S. assistance was withdrawn or reduced, the number of army killings of civilians dropped.
More:
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/colombia/100730/farc-us-military-aid~~~~~Colombian Military Chief Resigns
BOGOTA – The commander of Colombia’s armed forces, Gen. Freddy Padilla de Leon, has resigned less than a week ahead of the country’s presidential election, sources in the army and President Alvaro Uribe’s office told Efe.
The media are speculating about the reasons for his resignation effective Aug. 7, the day Uribe’s successor takes the oath of office.
~snip~
But his career was also marked by the “false positives” scandal, as is known in Colombia the practice of troops summarily executing civilians and then presenting them to commanders as rebels killed in combat. Soldiers and some officers received promotions and extra leave for boosting “body counts.”
http://laht.com/article.asp?CategoryId=12393&ArticleId=357441~~~~~ Page last updated at 23:42 GMT, Thursday, 7 May 2009 00:42 UK
Toxic fallout of Colombian scandal
By Jeremy McDermott
BBC News, Medellin
The toxic fallout of a grisly army scandal continues to spread in Colombia, as more soldiers are arrested over their alleged roles. In recent days another three colonels have been arrested, bringing the total number of military personnel captured to at least 22.
The "false positives" scandal has revealed that the army murdered civilians, who were then dressed in rebel uniforms or given guns. They were then presented as guerrillas or paramilitaries killed in combat. These allowed units to fabricate results, and officers to gain promotion. The number of victims is believed to be in the thousands.
"The issue of the false positives puts into doubt the doctrine of the security forces with respect to human rights," said Maria Victoria Llorente, director of the think-tank Foundation Idea for Peace. "This puts at risk a prized value for the military: legitimacy."
More:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8038399.stm~~~~~Mass Graves Used to Cover-Up Atrocities in Colombia
The Bodies of the Innocent
Daniel Kovalic
Counterpunch
via Center for Research on Globalization
April 3, 2010
The biggest human rights scandal in years is developing in Colombia, though you wouldn’t notice it from the total lack of media coverage here. A mass grave – one of a number suspected by human rights groups in Colombia – was discovered by accident last year just outside a Colombian Army base in La Macarena, a rural municipality located in the Department of Meta just south of Bogota. The grave was discovered when children drank from a nearby stream and started to become seriously ill. These illnesses were traced to runoff from what was discovered to be a mass grave – a grave marked only with small flags showing the dates (between 2002 and 2009) on which the bodies were buried.
According to a February 10, 2010 letter issued by Alexandra Valencia Molina, Director of the regional office of Colombia’s own Procuraduria General de la Nacion – a government agency tasked to investigate government corruption – approximately 2,000 bodies are buried in this grave. The Colombian Army has admitted responsibility for the grave, claiming to have killed and buried alleged guerillas there. However, the bodies in the grave have yet to be identified. Instead, against all protocol for handling the remains of anyone killed by the military, especially the bodies of guerillas, the bodies contained in the mass grave were buried there secretly without the requisite process of having the Colombian government certify that the deceased were indeed the armed combatants the Army claims.
And, given the current "false positive" scandal which has enveloped the government of President Alvaro Uribe and his Defense Minister, Juan Manuel Santos, who is now running to succeed Uribe as President, the Colombian Army’s claim about the mass grave is especially suspect. This scandal revolves around the Colombian military, recently under the direction of Juan Manuel Santos, knowingly murdering civilians in cold blood and then dressing them up to look like armed guerillas in order to justify more aid from the United States. According to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pilay, this practice has been so "systematic and widespread" as to amount to a "crime against humanity."
More:
http://www.indytruth.org/archive/2010/0404-it-columbia.html~~~~~AUC describe false positive killings by Colombian army .
Wednesday, 05 May 2010 16:00 Cameron Sumpter
Dozens of people were murdered by the Colombian army and presented as guerillas killed in combat in the central Meta department, according to leaders from the now-demobilized paramilitary group AUC. Former leaders of the Centaurs Bloc of the AUC, including Daniel Rendon Herrera, alias "Don Mario," described an alliance between the army and the paramilitaries in Meta, including numerous cases of these extra-judicial killings, known as "false positives."
Luis Cardenas Alex Arango, alias "Chatarro," who commanded an AUC front in Meta, said that in the ten years he fought for the paramilitary group there were only three actual battles with the army, the rest of the reported conflicts between the two groups, he said, were "false positives," i.e. false reports of battles to inflate army statistics. "The (reported) military results lowered the pressue on us
because of these positive cases," Chatarro said.
The first alleged incident of extra-judicial killings by the army in Meta occured in late 2002, when a paramilitary know as "Cody" killed a soldier from the Vargas XXI battalion by mistake. On October 6, 2002, Cody and other paramilitaries were woken by a man brandishing a hand grenade. Cody shot the man with his 9 mm pistol and later presented him to the police and army, who immmediately decided to cover it up, adding to the list of false positives. But after discovering that the dead man was in fact a soldier, Fredy Conde, Vargas XXI Colonel, Cabuya de Leon, was enraged and decided to stage a "major operation" against the paramilitaries.
Following negotiations between the two groups, the colonel decided he needed "five casualties" to fix the problem, as well as a new car to replace his "old Renault." To ease the tension, Don Mario gave the colonel COP100 million and sent several men to Villavicencio and Granada (in Meta) to find young people to present as false positives. The paramilitaries scouted bars and night clubs and returned with five to seven drunk men, who were the next day murdered and presented as guerillas killed in combat by the army. According to Arango, alias "Chatarro," Colonel Cabuya also received a monthly salary of COP5-10 million to keep him happy.
In early 2003, Chatarro said that he recruited four young men who they had "had their eye on" in Villavicencio and handed them over to the army along with two paramilitaries who had made "serious mistakes." All were dressed up in guerilla uniforms and were later killed by the army as suspected members of the FARC, according to Chatarro. The former paramilitary leader said that in 2003 the army had conducted a joint operation with the AUC in a village named Costa Rica, in San Juan de Arama, where 150 paramilitaries fought suspected guerillas alongside the army. Two men captured during the course of the battle had uniforms and boots put on them, were given guns, and then shot, Chatarro claimed.
More:
http://colombiareports.com/colombia-news/news/9555-auc-describe-false-positive-killings-by-colombian-army.html
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