Colombia killings cast doubt on war against insurgents

Julián Oviedo, a 19-year-old construction worker in this gritty patchwork of slums, told his mother on March 2 that he was going to talk to a man about a job offer. A day later, Mr. Oviedo was shot dead by army troops some 350 miles to the north. He was classified as a subversive and registered as a combat kill. Colombia's government, the Bush administration's top ally in Latin America, has been buffeted by the killings of Mr. Oviedo and dozens of other young, impoverished men and women whose cases have come to light in recent weeks. Some were vagrants, others street vendors or manual laborers. But their fates were often the same: being catalogued as insurgents or criminal gang members and killed by the armed forces. Prosecutors and human rights researchers are investigating hundreds of such deaths and disappearances, contending that Colombia's security forces are increasingly murdering civilians and making it look as if they were killed in combat, often by planting weapons by the bodies or dressing them in guerrilla fatigues. With soldiers under intense pressure in recent years to register combat kills to earn promotions and benefits like time off and extra pay, reports of civilian killings are climbing, prosecutors and researchers say, pointing to a facet of Colombia's long internal war against leftist insurgencies. The deaths have called into question the depth of recent strides against the rebel Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, and have begun to haunt the military hierarchy. On Wednesday, President Álvaro Uribe's government announced that it had fired more than two dozen officers and soldiers–including three generals–in connection with the deaths of Mr. Oviedo and 10 other young men from Soacha, whose bodies were recently discovered in unmarked graves in a distant combat zone. The purge came after an initial shake-up Friday, when the army command relieved three colonels of their duties. At a news conference on Wednesday, Mr. Uribe said an internal military investigation appeared to have uncovered "crimes that in some regions had the goal of killing innocents, to make it seem as if criminals were being confronted." "The armed forces of Colombia have well-earned prestige," Mr. Uribe said. "When there are violations of human rights, that prestige is muddled." Professing his innocence in a telephone interview Wednesday night, Brig. Gen. Paulino Coronado, one of the fired generals, said he lamented the way in which the dismissals were done. "The impression is as if I were a criminal or a murderer," he said. "It is believable that there may have been mistakes in controls, but one must look at the means available to command 8,000 men." The wave of killings has also heightened focus on the American Embassy here, which is responsible for vetting Colombian military units for human rights abuses before they can receive aid. A study of civilian killings by Amnesty International and Fellowship of Reconciliation, human rights groups, found that 47 percent of the cases reported in 2007 involved Colombian units financed by the United States. "If the responsibility of the army is to protect us from harm, how could they have killed my son this way?" asked Blanca Monroy, 49, Mr. Oviedo's mother, in an interview in her cinder-block hovel in Soacha. "The official explanation is absurd, if he was here just a day earlier living a normal life. The irony of it all is that my son dreamed of being a soldier" for the government. Even before the most recent disappearances and killings, prosecutors and human rights groups were examining a steady increase in the reports of civilian killings since 2002, when commanders intensified a counterinsurgency financed in no small part by more than $500 million a year in American aid. But more than 100 claims of civilian deaths at the hands of security forces have emerged in recent weeks from nine areas of Colombia. Cases include a homeless man, a young man with epilepsy and a veteran who had left the army after his left arm was amputated. In some cases, victims' families spoke of middlemen who recruited their loved ones and other poor men and women with vague promises of jobs elsewhere, only to deliver them hours or days later to war zones where they were shot dead by soldiers. "We are witnessing a method of social cleansing in which rogue military units operate beyond the law," said Mónica Sánchez, a lawyer at the Judicial Freedom Corporation, a human rights group in Medellín. It says it has documented more than 60 "false positives"–the chilling term for cases of civilians who are killed and then presented as guerrillas, with weapons or fatigues–in Antioquia Department, or province. Researchers have also obtained thorough descriptions of some killings in the small number of cases–fewer than 50–that have resulted in convictions this decade. One April morning in 2004, for instance, soldiers approached the home of Juan de Jesús Rendón, 33, a peasant farmer in Antioquia, and shot him in front of his son, Juan Estéban, who was then 10. The soldiers placed a two-way radio and a gun near Mr. Rendón's body, court records show, and told his son that his siblings would suffer the same fate unless he said his father had fired at the soldiers. Vilma García, 35, Mr. Rendón's wife, said, "I still fear this can happen again." The five soldiers involved were recently convicted of homicide, and of torture in connection with the threats to her son. "The soldiers think we are poor and worthless," she said in an interview in Medellín, where she and her children fled, "so nobody will care how we are killed." The killings have increasingly opened the United States to criticism because it is required to make sure Colombian military units have not violated human rights before giving them aid. "If we are receiving aid and vetting from a government in Washington that validates torture, then what kind of results can one expect?" asked Liliana Uribe, a lawyer in Medellín who represents victims' families. A senior official at the American Embassy in Bogotá, the capital, said the reports of civilian killings, in past years and in recent months, were of concern. "If the facts in some cases do show that parts of the armed forces were taking part in murder, that's wrong, and there should be mechanisms to prevent this from happening and mechanisms to ensure that perpetrators are brought to justice," said the official, who was not authorized to speak publicly on the matter. The official said the units involved in the most recent killings, of the 11 men from Soacha, did not get aid because they had previously been deemed not credible to receive it. But the official neither confirmed nor denied the contention that almost half of the reports of civilian killings in 2007 involved units that received American aid. The official said a case-by-case review of the episodes had not been carried out by two American contractors hired by the State Department to help vet the military units for abuses. Reports of civilian killings rose to 287 from mid-2006 to mid-2007, up from 267 in the same period a year earlier and 218 the year before that, said the Colombian Commission of Jurists, a Bogotá human rights group. Altogether, the attorney general's office said it was investigating the killings of 1,015 civilians by security forces in 558 episodes unrelated to combat. Prosecutors said the number of new cases under investigation rose to 245 in 2007 from 122 in 2006. The increase in reported civilian killings spurred the Defense Ministry to issue a directive last year making it a priority to capture rebels rather than kill them. In an interview, Gen. Freddy Padilla de León, the top commander of the armed forces, said the policy shift, while largely intended to prevent human rights abuses, also had strategic objectives. "A terrorist captured alive is a treasure, while a dead terrorist is just one-day news," General Padilla said, citing the example of Nelly Ávila Moreno, a FARC commander who surrendered this year and began collaborating with her captors. "A terrorist converted into an informant is useful as long as he or she lives," the general said. Until the latest wave of killings, it appeared that the new policy was starting to work. The Center for Research and Popular Education, a Jesuit-led group in Bogotá that maintains a database on human rights violations, documented 87 reports of so-called false positives in the second half of 2007, a 34 percent drop from the first six months of that year. But the emergence of cases in Soacha and elsewhere suggests that the problem may be more systemic than once thought. Some human rights researchers contend that the killings are tolerated by some senior officers in the Colombian Army who chafe at greater scrutiny when security forces have made big gains against guerrillas, including the killing or capture of several top FARC commanders. One case involves the commander of Colombia's Army, Gen. Mario Montoya. In March 2002, the army's Fourth Brigade, then under his command, killed five people in their vehicle and presented them as guerrillas, their bodies dressed in fatigues. But the driver, Parmenio de Jesús Usme, testified this year that none were guerrillas. According to a report by Cambio, a news magazine, Mr. Usme, a former member of a paramilitary group that opposed the guerrillas, said that two of the victims were teenagers, Érika Castañeda, 13, and Johana Carmona, 14, and that he had been driving them to a party when they picked up three other people. Mr. Usme said that they were fired upon and that everyone in the vehicle was killed but him. According to the report, General Montoya called the hospital where the bodies were taken and said that they should be turned over only to someone in his confidence, after which the bodies were presented to the media in fatigues at a nearby building. When asked specifically about the case, General Padilla, the armed forces commander, said, "There are preliminary investigations in which the different declarations are being verified."