Sunday 19th May 2013,
false positives
Colombia’s so-called “false positives” scandal is centered around the extrajudicial killings of thousands of civilians by members of the armed forces who dressed their victims as guerrillas in order to present them as combat kills.
While governmental and non-governmental organizations had been denouncing the practice for years, the Colombian government of then-President Alvaro Uribe denied the armed forces were killing civilians until late 2008 when prosecution investigators linked the bodies of unidentified rebel fighters found in the north of the country to people who had been reported missing in Soacha, a city south of the capital Bogota.
In an August 31 report, the Prosecutor General’s Office said it had found that the armed forces had killed 2,997 civilians.
The same office said that 4,373 persons were implicated in the extrajudicial killings by state agents, while 1,948 had been charged. Some 230 members of the armed forces — primarily lower-ranked officials — had been sentenced to prison sentences. 1,793 members of the National Army were jailed, together with 35 Navy officials, 26 policemen and two former members of intelligence agency DAS.
Source: Prosecutor General’s Office
Investigators found out that the general practice was to execute civilians, dress them up as guerrillas and then present the body as a combat kill. According to media reports, the civilians were killed in order to collect bonuses. This however has been categorically denied by the Colombian government. What the practice did do — be it intentionally or unintentionally — was inflate the apparent success of the government in its fight against left-wing guerrillas and right wing paramilitaries.
When purifying the combat kills figure by subtracting the number of executed civilians from the number of registered combat kills, the apparent effectiveness of the army seems much different and shows that for example in 2007 — the year most false positives were registered — more than one in five registered combat kills were in fact executed civilians.
Source: Defense Ministry
While the U.N. called the extrajudicial killings “widespread” and “systematic” and figured showed the practice occurred in 30 of Colombia’s 32 departments, the Colombian military command and government insisted the murders had been isolated incidents.
Source: Prosecutor General’s Office
It is unclear when the practice began; according to a diplomatic cable from 1997, a “body count syndrome” in the Colombian Army tended “to fuel human rights abuses by well-meaning soldiers trying to get their quota to impress superiors.” Colombia’s Prosecutor General’s Office has registered extrajudicial killings since 1985, but did not register a steep increase until 2002, particularly in the northwestern Antioquia department.
According to demobilized commanders of the paramilitary AUC, the practice began when authorities in the northwest of Colombia were complaining about high murder rates due to killings carried out by paramilitaries. In order to lower the homicide rate and increase the army’s apparent effectiveness, paramilitaries allegedly handed over murder victims to allied military commanders who then presented the victims as guerrillas killed in combat.
Adriaan Alsema is the founder / director of Colombia Reports. Born and raised a Dutchman, Adriaan has been living in Colombia since 2008.
