{"id":80040,"date":"2021-07-20T10:11:22","date_gmt":"2021-07-20T08:11:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.justiceinfo.net\/?p=80040"},"modified":"2021-07-20T14:51:43","modified_gmt":"2021-07-20T12:51:43","slug":"colombia-25-army-officials-charged-war-crimes-crimes-against-humanity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.justiceinfo.net\/en\/80040-colombia-25-army-officials-charged-war-crimes-crimes-against-humanity.html","title":{"rendered":"Colombia: 25 Army officials charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Over the past two weeks, Colombia\u2019s Special Jurisdiction for Peace announced its second batch of major decisions, accusing 25 former members of the Colombian Army of war crimes and crimes against humanity, including several high-ranking officers. The charges are linked to the \u2018false positive\u2019 scandal, in which murdered civilians were passed off as rebels killed in combat.<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

Three and a half years after opening its doors and following three years of investigation, Colombia\u2019s Special Jurisdiction for Peace unveiled its second batch of indictments over the past two weeks. In two separate decisions it accused 25 former Army officials of having murdered 247 civilians and then unlawfully passing them off as rebels killed in combat, a tragedy that has appalled Colombians for over a decade and that became euphemistically known as \u2018false positives\u2019<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

First, on July 6, the tribunal \u2013 known by Colombians as the JEP \u2013 charged<\/a> six officers, three non-commissioned officers and one civilian with 120 extrajudicial executions, 24 forced disappearances and one attempted murder in Catatumbo, a mountainous zone on the border with Venezuela between 2007 and 2008. Then, on July 15, it followed up with a second indictment<\/a>, charging eight officers, four non-commissioned officers and three soldiers with 127 similar executions in the northern Caribbean coast between 2002 and 2003.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cInstead of searching for guerrilla commandos high in the mountains and pursuing paramilitary strongholds \u2013 and engaging in legitimate combat with them \u2013 [they] preferred to kill defenceless civilians,\u201d Catalina D\u00edaz, one of three justices leading the investigation, said during the live-streamed hearing. \u201cThey were not isolated acts or committed spontaneously by Army members [but] part of a generalized and systematic attack against the civilian population,\u201d justice Oscar Parra echoed her a week later.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This marks the first time the special tribunal stemming from the 2016 peace deal brings charges against state actors, following its January accusation<\/a> against eight former commanders of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) over kidnappings. In both cases the tribunal ruled that these extrajudicial executions constitute \u201cwar crimes\u201d and \u201ccrimes against humanity\u201d, just as it did with FARC.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The indictees now have six weeks to ponder which road to navigate in the Colombian transitional justice\u2019s two-track system. If they accept the court\u2019s findings and acknowledge their responsibility, as well as contribute with the truth and personally redress victims, they may receive 5-to-8-year sentences in a non-prison setting. If they reject its findings, their case would move to an adversarial system and, if found guilty, would face 15-to-20-year prison sentences.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Showing a broader criminal pattern<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

\u201cCase 03\u201d is one of the first seven macro-cases opened by the transitional justice\u2019s judicial arm and one of the two specifically focusing on Colombian state agents\u2019 deeds. Over the past three years, the JEP has documented the plight of 397 victims who are now accredited as parties to the case, usually relatives of the young men aged 25 to 35 who were executed. It did so using 36 reports submitted by different parties, including 32 from victims and indigenous organisations, two from the Attorney General\u2019s Office and two from the Inspector General\u2019s Office, as well as hundreds of military dossiers and in-site inspections.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The JEP also spoke extensively with those standing accused. In lengthy confidential hearings and written testimonies, at least 113 former Army officials \u2013 including several generals<\/a> and one former Army commander \u2013 have answered the tribunal\u2019s questions regarding \u2018false positives\u2019. Hours of videos and hundreds of pages in transcriptions were then transmitted to victims so they could confront their captors\u2019 accounts, with at least 14 organisations or groups submitting observations and questions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These two indictments are part of a broader probe on extrajudicial executions between 2002 and 2008, a six-year period coinciding with Alvaro Uribe\u2019s administration in which the JEP deems that at least 6.402 such murders<\/a> took place. In March, the special tribunal laid down its criteria to build the case and explained which specific regions, military units and years it will focus on to illuminate the broader criminal pattern. In line with this approach<\/a> they termed \u201cfrom the ground up\u201d, justices will first present indictments in six sub-cases \u2013 beginning with these two \u2013 and use these to glean information on the underlying patterns of behaviour and the institutional norms and culture that allowed such crimes to occur.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This means that after bringing charges against these and other officers with regional command, the JEP\u2019s Judicial Panel for Acknowledgment will then present its case against those most responsible at the top, potentially including members of the top brass of the Armed Forces and the Defence Ministry during those years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Different methods, same crime<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

After studying all of this material, in its most recent 401-page indictment, the JEP identified two distinct criminal patterns that occurred within the 2nd Artillery Battalion \u2018La Popa\u2019 that operated in the the northern departments of Cesar and La Guajira.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Between 2002 and 2003, this military unit falsely presented 75 local persons as members of FARC or National Liberation Army (ELN) guerrillas killed in combat, in cahoots with local paramilitary groups. Then, from 2003 to 2005, to avoid local communities\u2019 suspicion, battalion members brought 52 civilians from cities like Valledupar or Barranquilla after duping them with fake job offers, murdered them and also presented them as supposed combat kills, says the indictment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A week before, in its other 287-page decision, the JEP identified the same two behaviours in Catatumbo, but described them as different methods of one same criminal pattern. First, during 2007, members of the 15th<\/sup> Mobile Brigade and the 15th<\/sup> Infantry Battalion \u2018General Francisco de Paula Santander\u2019 murdered rural inhabitants who were deemed members of armed groups. After a December 2007 meeting in Oca\u00f1a, where communities decried the disappearance of relatives and neighbours, members of those military units began bringing youngsters from other cities, many of them deliberately targeted because they had mental health illnesses or problematic drug use. As Justice Info told<\/a>, it was the discovery that some victims hailed from Soacha, 635 kilometres away, which finally led to the uncovering of these atrocities in 2008 and to the corrective measures within the Army that former President Juan Manuel Santos described<\/a> before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission a month ago.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Judge
Justice Oscar Parra leading the search by Colombia's Special Jurisdiction for Peace for missing persons who were victims of extrajudicial executions in cemeteries like El Copey, where La Popa battalion operated. \u00a9 JEP<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The \u2018false positive\u2019 handbook<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Perhaps what\u2019s most striking about both indictments is how exhaustively they detail the different modus operandi and strategies used to present civilian homicides as \u201cfictitious operational results\u201d. Although a number of reports and legal decisions over the past decade had illuminated some of these, the JEP\u2019s reconstruction \u2013 in response to victims\u2019 truth-seeking requests \u2013 painstakingly reveals similar patterns in hundreds of cases.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Both decisions give ample space to how Army officials feigned combat zones and planted evidence to tie their victims to rebel groups, going as far as dressing them in camouflage, moving bodies and contaminating crime scenes before they were processed, destroying personal documents to prevent victim identification and leaving arms and gunpowder traces (known as \u201clegalisation kits\u201d), in what the tribunal describes as \u201cincreasingly sophisticated cover-ups\u201d. According to the JEP, there was also a legal mise-en-sc\u00e8ne comprising forged operational documents, coordination of factual accounts, threats to witnesses and the destruction of evidence, even after visits from General Carlos Arturo Su\u00e1rez\u2019s eye-opening 2008 fact-finding mission<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the end, these crimes and efforts to varnish them with a \u201cguise of legality\u201d, the JEP argues, involved meticulous planning. Tasks ranging from victim selection to cover-up were distributed among soldiers in what justices termed a \u201cdivision of criminal labour\u201d. Uncorroborated allegations brought forward by paid or criminal informants were enough to seal victims\u2019 fates, without following the steps of the \u201cbasic intelligence cycle\u201d to gather, process and verify information.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In order for this to happen, a number of factors were needed. In first place, during those years the Army ascribed a higher value to casualties over arrests and demobilisations, leading the JEP to contend that \u201cdefence strategy favoured the body of the enemy fallen in combat as the main indicator of a military effort\u2019s success and, consequently, pressured and encouraged combat casualties\u201d. This sustained pressure from above was, according to the indictment, \u201cnot occasional or anecdotal, but permanent [and] daily\u201d, with national and regional commanders fostering competition among military units and drilling this idea in radio transmissions and speeches with language such as \u201cwhatever it takes\u201d or \u201ca kill is in order\u201d. Army members were rewarded with days off, cash prizes, paid holidays to the sea (which soldiers dubbed \u201cCaribbean plans\u201d) or medals for bravery, while reluctant soldiers were demoted or punished.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

None of this would have been possible, the tribunal concluded, without \u201cthe institutional resources of the National Army\u201d, including its funds, its incentives, its administrative procedures and an absence of oversight from those in command, which helped it \u201cto improve, by illegal means, the perception of the security force\u2019s effectiveness\u201d. All of this information was the basis for the JEP\u2019s argument that the criminal patterns were both \u201csystematic\u201d and \u201cwidespread\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Recommended reading<\/div>\r\n\t\t\t
\"Graphic<\/div><\/a>\r\n\t\t\t\r\n\t\t\tColombia: the \u2018false positive\u2019 number that sets off a political storm\r\n\t\t<\/a>\r\n\t\t\r\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\n\n\n

Spotlight on indigenous victims<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The indictments also underscore how specific population groups were targeted, including unwitting homeless or handicapped persons. One thoroughly documents how the Wiwa and the Kankuamo \u2013 two indigenous groups that live in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta mountain range \u2013 were especially targeted, with the latter accounting for 7% of La Popa battalion\u2019s victims even though they only represent 1% of Cesar department\u2019s population.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The tribunal showed how both indigenous groups were routinely stigmatised by soldiers and how members as young as 13 years old were murdered and passed off as combat kills in the days after the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights granted them precautionary measures, or right before meetings where they gathered to discuss the implementation of those measures.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Given this reality, the JEP designed special participation mechanisms for these groups. For example, on two separate occasions, a hundred Kankuamo Indians gathered<\/a> in a school within their reservation in Atanquez and over nine-hour sessions pored over the videos in which soldiers described these extra-judicial executions. After seeing footage of the testimonies brought by Justice Oscar Parra and two JEP psychologists, they identified parts where their recollection about the events that occurred over a decade ago differed from the military and came up with new questions for them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWar crimes and crimes against humanity\u201d<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

For their role in what it described as \u201ccriminal organizations embedded within military units\u201d, the JEP accused 25 officials \u2013 including one general, six colonels and four majors \u2013 of the war crime of \u201cwilful killing of protected persons\u201d and the crimes against humanity of homicide and forced disappearance. The tribunal\u2019s justices also charged them with homicide of protected persons and forced disappearance under Colombian law. In doing so, it underscored that all victims were civilians and that therefore the military had a legal duty to protect them, including eight rebels killed by La Popa soldiers after being wounded in combat or turning themselves in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Although five lower-ranking officials among the indictees had already been convicted by the ordinary criminal justice for individual cases between 2012 and 2016, this is the first far-reaching probe that explains how these crimes fit into a broader criminal pattern and traces them higher up in the command chain. Throughout the rest of this year, the JEP will announce similar decisions detailing the actions by military units in four other regions, before moving on to those most responsible for these policies on a national level.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dilemmas ahead<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

In the JEP\u2019s two-track system, officials may receive a more lenient sentence if \u2013 and only if \u2013 they fulfil three conditions: they must acknowledge their responsibility, tell their victims\u2019 relatives the truths they still long for and personally redress them. With most of the defendants registered before the JEP and many of them already enjoying benefits like parole, it seems likely that they\u2019ll accept its indictment. Chances are, however, that parts of the case will move to the tribunal\u2019s prosecution unit and possibly a trial, given that at least three of them seem reluctant.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Colonel Hern\u00e1n Mej\u00eda, who commanded La Popa battalion between 2002 and 2003 and who was the first major officer taken off duty<\/a> over this scandal, has said<\/a> he is still reading the decision that accuses him of \u201cactivating the criminal plan based on the orders he gave\u201d and having an 87% rate of illegal combat kills. In a cryptic message<\/a> on Twitter, Mej\u00eda \u2013 who declared himself a presidential candidate for next year\u2019s election and has been defended<\/a> by politicians from Uribe and President Iv\u00e1n Duque\u2019s party \u2013 stated that he \u201crefuses to bow down\u201d as \u201cenemies celebrate and traitors and cowards rejoice\u201d, promising not to \u201caccept what he did not do\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Me Niego a Arrodillarme.
Dios Salve a Colombia. pic.twitter.com\/bRpaRFWfbl<\/a><\/p>— Coronel Hern\u00e1n Mej\u00eda (@CoronelHMejia) July 16, 2021<\/a><\/blockquote>