Colombia’s war crimes tribunal JEP indicted 39 army officials, including four generals, for their role in the mass execution of civilians in Medellin and the surrounding Antioquia province.
The officials allegedly promoted and executed a “de facto body count policy” that led to the assassination of 442 people who were falsely presented as guerrillas killed in combat between 2004 and 2007.
At the time of the mass killing of civilians by soldiers in Antioquia, the four generals held top positions in the Medellin-based 4th Brigade and 7th Division, the JEP said in a press statement.
The generals succeeded General Mario Montoya, who was charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity, because he “launched the body count policy” between 2002 and 2003 when he commanded the 4th Brigade.
The objective of the de facto policy of “body count” was to add up as many “combat” casualties as possible, favoring the body of the supposed enemy fallen in combat as the only real indicator of the success of the military effort and dismissing captures as problematic results that did not lead to military victory. This objective was achieved through pressure on and threats made to the troops, as well as rewards and incentives for those who reported the most deaths, promoting a fierce competition to occupy the first place in the official statistics, regardless of the specialty of the military unit in question, or that the guerrillas had already been strategically defeated or withdrawn outside the jurisdiction of the 4th Brigade and paramilitary groups had already demobilized.
JEP
All indicted former officials can either accept the charges and continue their participation in the JEP’s restorative justice system or risk maximum of 20 years in prison.
What happened in Antioquia?
Following the election of former President Alvaro Uribe and the implementation of his “Democratic Security” policy in August 2002, the 4th Brigade was able to effectively expel groups like the FARC and ELN within months.
The government’s policy of confronting the guerrillas militarily was successful and very soon the FARC-EP’s Northwestern Bloc had to withdraw structures and merge others. Likewise, the ELN’s Bernardo López Arroyave and Carlos Alirio Buitrago fronts were practically dismantled and reduced to militia work. The surviving guerrilla units fragmented and retreated to the higher parts of the mountain ranges.
JEP
“However, the vast majority of false positives in Antioquia did not occur during the critical phase of the guerrillas’ military confrontation, but after the guerrillas had been defeated and strategically withdrawn, and once the paramilitary groups had also demobilized,” said the JEP.
Despite the regional defeat of the guerrillas, the 4th Brigade commanders “continued to demand from the different military units that they must produce casualties ‘in combat’, fiercely pressuring them to surpass the death tolls of the previous evaluated periods” and “promoting a competition to occupy the first places in the official casualty statistics,” according to the JEP.
Initially, 4th Brigade units falsely accused people of being guerrillas or guerrilla supporters, arrested and interrogated these victims and ultimately executed them.
Additionally, the military’s support network in Antioquia deceived victims with fake jobs to surrender them to “military personnel in charge of killing them.”
This, especially, was directed against people in conditions of socioeconomic vulnerability. The chamber also established the existence of explicit cooperation agreements between the military and paramilitaries, in which the latter were responsible for recruiting victims through deception.
JEP
The recruiters received between COP2 million and COP3 million ($488 and $733) per victim, according to the JEP.
The third modality established by the JEP consisted of executing “surrendered, injured or captured enemy fighters” and reporting these deaths as combat kills.
Last but not least, military units at one point began randomly assassinating people while on patrol, said the JEP.
No government policy
The JEP stressed that the mass executions were in violation of directives issued by the National Government and the National Army’s central command in Bogota.
In fact, government authorities and the military addressed the growing number of complaints about the extrajudicial executions on multiple occasions.
The commanders in Medellin dismissed these complaints as being part of guerrilla groups’ “political and judicial war” against the army until they were sacked in 2008.
