Soldier detained for 'false positive' killing of marine

[Judi Lynn]

Soldier detained for 'false positive' killing of marine
Monday, 07 March 2011 15:09
Jim Glade

A human rights prosecutor detained a former soldier without bail for allegedly killing a marine and presenting him as a member of an illegal armed group, reports El Tiempo.

Deibis Brens David Burgos was detained Monday for the alleged false positive killing of marine Larry Jose Torres Peña, on December 24, 2006 in the municipality of Majagual in the northern Sucre department.

A former member of the Omega Joint Task Force -- a unit compromised of personnel from the army, navy and air force -- David Burgos is accused by the prosecution of committing homicide of protected persons, forced aggravated disappearance, destruction, removal or concealment of public documents along with embezzlement and weapons charges.

~snip~
Colombia's military has been implicated in many cases of "false positive" killings, in which civilians were murdered by members of the armed forces and then presented as combatants killed in battle.

http://colombiareports.com/colombia-news/news/14767-soldier-detained-for-false-positive-killing-of-marine.html

[Judi Lynn]

1. The truth buried six feet under

The truth buried six feet under
A cemetery is at the heart of a controversy about a deadly military tactic
by Nadja Drost on Thursday, August 19, 2010 10:00am -

Some days, there are no bodies for Jesús Hernandez, the local gravedigger in La Macarena, Colombia, to bury. Other days, he is overwhelmed with corpses—three, seven, sometimes 15—all ferried in by military helicopters. In the tiny, white-tiled morgue where he tends to the dead, Hernandez records their fingerprints, the shape of any scars and the number of bullet wounds. Many of the bodies have fallen victim to maggots and the jungle heat by the time he sees them, leaving little with which to identify them. He buries them behind La Macarena’s municipal cemetery, in a field covered with hundreds of white wooden plaques, marked with a date, number and, sometimes, “N.N.”—the Latin abbreviation for an unknown person.

Who is buried in this cemetery—and how they died—is of great debate. The military says the bodies are guerrillas killed in combat. But there are growing suspicions, as well as evidence, that some were in fact civilians killed in a macabre practice known here as producing a “false positive.” In certain cases across the country, it has been proven that the army has passed off civilians as rebels killed in combat, dressing some of them in guerrilla fatigues and placing weapons at their sides.

~snip~
Arriving at the truth is further hampered by conflicting accounts, even among the people who buried the bodies. Hernandez, the gravedigger, cites evidence that he’s been burying members of the insurgency, as the military claims them to be. “It’s very rare that someone arrives with civilian clothing,” he says, pointing to the fatigues worn on arrival. But Israel Ariza, Hernandez’s former assistant, says he noticed peculiar characteristics of the dead that suggested they could be innocent victims presented as rebels: new pairs of rubber boots instead of the dirty, worn-out footwear guerrillas marching through muddy jungles would wear; holes torn through clothing that didn’t overlap with the bullet wounds; and scores of bodies dressed in civilian clothing. “I think about half were civilians and half were guerrillas,” says Ariza, who now lives in a slum of displaced people outside the city of Villavicencio. He fled there in January after Hernandez was targeted by death threats and an assassination attempt as news of the cemetery started to generate questions.

Jhonny Hurtado, a local human rights defender, was not so lucky. In March, a few months after he guided a delegation of British parliamentarians through the cemetery, he was murdered. He now rests in a marked tomb only metres away from the nameless graves over which he demanded answers.

More:
http://www2.macleans.ca/2010/08/19/the-truth-buried-six-feet-under/