Colombia Prosecutor General’s Office is investigating 312 new
complaints of people who say members of the armed forces killed
civilians to present them as guerrillas killed in combat.
“The cases of Soacha [the most infamous case of so-called ‘false positives’] are just the tip of the iceberg,” UN special rapporteur for extrajudicial killings, Philip Alston, said when he presented his report on the situation in Colombia. And he was right. The Prosecutor General’s Office, the Inspector General’s Office and Ombudsmen received a flood of complaints about cases of extrajudicial killings.
Although the government said several times there had been no new ‘false positives‘ after the government purged the army in November 2008, a recent report of the Human Rights Unit of the prosecution indicates the opposite. Of the 1160 cases of extrajudicial killings with 1881 victims that are currently under investigation, 312 cases were denounced this year between January and July.
The most recent case is the one of Paez indigenous leader Reynal Dagua.
Soldiers took Dagua from his home on July 26, killed him and presented
him as a guerrilla killed in combat, national indigenous organization
of Colombia ONIC says.
Indigenous representative Aida Quilcue
denounced the case to the prosecution. “I am concerned that it will not
be considered as an extrajudicial killing. So far no soldiers were
arrested, I don’t see that anything has changed,” Quilecue told magazine Cambio.
So far, only 46 members of Colombia’s armed forces were convicted for ‘false positive’ cases.