Colombians die amid pressure for combat deaths

SAN FRANCISCO, Colombia — All Cruz Elena Gonzalez saw when the soldiers came past her house was a corpse, wrapped in a tarp and strapped to a mule. A guerrilla killed in combat, soldiers muttered, as they trudged past her modest home in this town in northwestern Colombia.

She soon learned that the body belonged to her 16-year-old son, Robeiro Valencia, and that soldiers had classified him as a guerrilla killed in combat, a claim later discredited by the local government human-rights ombudsman.

Funded, in part, by the Bush administration, a six-year military offensive has helped the government here wrest back territory once controlled by guerrillas and kill hundreds of rebels in recent months, including two top commanders of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC.

But under intense pressure from Colombian military commanders to register combat kills, the army has in recent years also increasingly been killing poor farmers and passing them off as rebels slain in combat, government officials and human-rights groups say.

The tactic has touched off a fierce debate in the Defense Ministry between tradition-bound generals who favor an aggressive campaign that centers on body counts and reformers who say the army needs to develop other yardsticks to measure battlefield success.

The killings, carried out by combat units under the orders of regional commanders, have always been a problem in the shadowy, 44-year-old conflict here — one that pits the army against a peasant-based rebel movement.

But with the recent demobilization of thousands of paramilitary fighters, many of whom operated death squads to wipe out rebels, army killings of civilians have grown markedly since 2004, according to rights groups, U.N. investigators and the government's internal-affairs agency. The spike has come during a military buildup that has seen the armed forces nearly double to 270,000 members in the last six years to become the second-largest military in Latin America.

Numbers vary

There are varying accounts on the number of registered extrajudicial killings, as the civilian deaths are called. But a report by a coalition of 187 human-rights groups said there are allegations that 955 civilians were killed between mid-2002 and mid-2007 and classified as guerrillas fallen in combat — a 60 percent increase over the previous five years, when 577 civilians were reported killed by troops.

"We used to see this as isolated, as a military patrol that lost control," said Bayron Gongora of the Judicial Freedom Corp., a Medellín lawyers group representing the families of 110 people killed in murky circumstances. "But what we're now seeing is systematic."

The victims are the marginalized in Colombia's highly stratified society. Most, like Robeiro Valencia, are subsistence farmers. Others are poor Colombians kidnapped off the streets of bustling Medellín, the capital of this state, Antioquia, which has registered the most killings.

Military prosecutors ordinarily initiate investigations when the army kills someone. In cases that appear criminal, civilian prosecutors take over. But human-rights groups and government prosecutors say the initial probes have usually been perfunctory, and investigators have been under intense pressure from high-ranking military officers to rule in the army's favor.

Such challenges have made tabulating the exact number of dead civilians impossible, though rights groups, the attorney general's office and the inspector general's office have all released estimates.

The attorney general's office is investigating 525 killings of civilians, all but a handful of which occurred since 2002 and for which 706 soldiers and officers are implicated. The office has another 500 cases involving hundreds more victims that have yet to be opened.

Cases investigated

The inspector general's office, meanwhile, is investigating 650 cases from 2003 to mid-2007 that could also involve as many as 1,000 victims, said Carlos Arturo Gomez, the vice inspector general.

The trend has prompted concern among some members of Congress. Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., chairman of the Senate Appropriations foreign-operations subcommittee, said he is holding up $23 million in military aid until he sees progress in the fight against impunity and state-sponsored violence.

In the face of a string of recent successes against the FARC, President Álvaro Uribe's government has defended itself against the accusations and contends they are part of an international campaign designed to discredit the armed forces.

Still, Defense Minister Juan Manuel Santos acknowledges civilian deaths and has initiated a series of steps that include new rules of engagement, assigning inspectors to combat units to advise commanders on the use of force and improving human-rights training for soldiers.

The military has also been streamlining its justice system and transferring more cases to the attorney general's office, which the United Nations says must have a greater role if extrajudicial executions are to be eradicated.

The attorney general's office said more than 200 members of the military have been detained as prosecutors investigate their involvement in the killings of civilians, with 13 convicted last year.

Human-rights groups see a disturbing trend, saying the tactics used by some army units are similar to those that death squads used to terrorize civilians. A top U.N. investigator said some army units went so far as to carry "kits," which included grenades and pistols that could be planted next to bodies.

The highest-ranking officer implicated in extrajudicial killings is Col. Hernan Mejia.

A former army sergeant who was under Mejia's command, Edwin Guzman, recounted in an interview how Mejia's unit would kill peasant farmers, dress them up in combat fatigues and later call in local newspaper reporters to write about the supposed combat that had taken place.

Guzman, now a government witness against Mejia, said soldiers participated because they knew the army gave incentives — from extra pay to days off — for amassing kills in combat.