COLOMBIA: "Body Count"
Scandal Haunts Uribe's Candidate
Analysis by Javier Darío Restrepo
BOGOTÁ (IPS) - The front-runner in
the polls for Colombia's presidential
elections, Juan Manuel Santos, has come
under fire from his rivals for his role
in the scandal over young civilians
killed by the army and passed off as
guerrilla casualties, which broke out
while he was defence minister.
"All you have to do is look at the
statistics: the period when the highest
number of non-combat killings was…when
Santos was minister," the opposition
Liberal Party's presidential candidate
Rafael Pardo said in early March.
Santos, who was defence minister from
July 2006 to May 2009, is the candidate
backed by right-wing President Álvaro
Uribe, in office since 2002.
The scandal, which broke out in
September 2008, led to the removal of
three generals and 24 other officers and
noncommissioned officers, as well as the
November 2008 resignation of then army
chief Gen. Mario Montoya, regarded as
one of the promoters of the so-called
"body count" system, which used
incentives like weekend passes, cash
bonuses, promotions and trips abroad to
reward soldiers and officers for
"results" in the counterinsurgency
effort.
The magnitude of the phenomenon was such
that more than 60 prosecutors have been
assigned to the nearly 1,300 cases
involving the murders of over 2,000
civilians - including 59 minors and 122
women - who were presented as
battlefield casualties.
This South American country has been in
the grip of civil war since 1964, when
the left-wing FARC and ELN guerrillas
rose up in arms. The far-right
paramilitary groups that emerged in the
1980s to combat the leftist insurgents
alongside the government forces remain
active despite the reported
demobilisation of tens of thousands of
their numbers between 2002 and 2006.
The "false positives" story was first
reported by the press in September 2008,
when a human rights official in Soacha,
a vast shantytown in the hills on the
southwest side of Bogotá, denounced that
the bodies of young men who went missing
from the neighbourhood in January of
that year had appeared in a morgue in
northeastern Colombia.
According to one description, a short,
dark-skinned, robust young man with a
military-style haircut had recruited
them to travel to faraway jobs.
The recruiters targeted young men -
manual labourers, students or the
unemployed - between the ages of 17 and
32 in different parts of the country.
Forensic exams showed that the young men
from Soacha had died between 24 and 48
hours after leaving their neighbourhoods
or towns.
"Those boys died in combat; the troops
found them as part of intelligence
operations," said Gen. Paulino Coronado,
the army commander in the northeastern
province of Norte de Santander.
But the prosecutors found the army's
arguments unconvincing, because it
appeared impossible for the young men to
have travelled so far and engaged in
armed combat so soon after they left
their homes or workplaces.
The explanation was as illogical as the
image of one of the bodies that was
exhumed: a young woman wearing shorts
and tennis shoes, who according to the
army had been killed in combat.
The initial doubts about the military's
explanations arose from the short lapse
of time between the victims' departure
from Soacha and their deaths.
The number of victims quickly grew, from
the original 11 to 19 just one week
after the first media reports. And on
Sept. 27, 2008, the El Tiempo newspaper
reported that the office of the public
prosecutor was investigating 400 cases
in which hundreds of active and retired
members of the security forces were
implicated in non-combat killings.
But despite the magnitude of the
accusations, then defence minister
Santos claimed he knew nothing about the
killings.
A week after the discovery of the first
bodies was reported, he said in an army
officer promotion ceremony: "I have a
hard time believing it's true."
"We prefer a demobilised combatant to a
captured one, and a captured one to a
dead one," he stated at the time. "There
will be zero tolerance for this kind of
action."
A year later, the public prosecutor's
office was preparing to bring charges
against two colonels, one major and 43
rank-and-file soldiers for charges like
aggravated murder, conspiracy to commit
crimes and forced disappearance.
But the killings have not come to a
halt.
After President Uribe said in March that
"this kind of killing is not occurring
any more in Colombia," the Jesuit Centre
for Popular Research and Education (CINEP)
reported that between November 2008 and
December 2009, there were nine reported
cases of "false positives", as the
civilians passed off as battlefield
casualties are known.
Accused and hassled by his political
adversaries, Santos will have to explain
the implementation of "directive 024"
issued in 2005, which established
incentives for members of the army based
on the number of "positives" or
casualties in the counterinsurgency war.
The minister eventually ordered then
army chief Gen. Montoya to visit the
military divisions to warn that the body
count system "is not valid in the war
the Colombian state is waging against
the illegal groups."
The system of incentives created by the
2005 directive had not been used by
Santos' predecessors in the Defence
Ministry.
Former defence minister Marta Lucía
Ramírez (2002-2003), who originally
planned to run in the May 30 elections,
said Santos was trying to pass off the
body count system as an older practice:
"When I was minister, the combat deaths
system was eliminated, at my express
insistence."
Pardo, meanwhile, also a former defence
minister, said "Santos has to assume
responsibility, because this happened
under his nose, and he has no
explanation as to why he did not control
it, why it kept happening, why it was a
systematic practice. He has to be
investigated in connection with this."
Even Santos' campaign chief, Rodrigo
Rivera, said a year ago that "political
responsibility cannot merely rest with
the military; that is, the defence
minister must be held accountable, so
that he knows that whether or not he
remains in his post depends on putting a
halt to these incidents."
The tension generated by the accusations
prompted Uribe to attempt to come up
with an explanation, as columnist Ramiro
Bejarano, an outspoken government
critic, wrote in the El Espectador
newspaper on Mar. 28.
"A strange version came from Uribe,
according to whom a witness that he met
with in the United Nations offices
informed him that the people responsible
for the 'false positives' were drug
traffickers who had infiltrated the 15th
Mobile Brigade in Ocaña," Bejarano
wrote.
Uribe has come out in defence of Santos,
the candidate for the president's U
Party.
But the question of the "false
positives" could have a serious impact
on the former defence minister's
presidential aspirations. |
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