Crime & Justice, Headlines, Human Rights, Latin America & the Caribbean

COLOMBIA: The ‘Other’ Death Penalty

Constanza Vieira

BOGOTA, Oct 12 2007 (IPS) - "It was you yourselves who killed my daddy," snapped the 12-year-old campesino girl before walking away, leaving the soldier talking to himself. He had just entered the family’s small farmhouse in southern Colombia while the rest of the troops waited outside, and asked after "the owner."

The incident, which occurred in the last week of September, left the girl’s mother full of fear. Martha Liliana González, 35, was out back tending to the livestock when the soldier showed up and talked to her daughter.

"Since I told them I&#39m going to press charges, I&#39m scared that someone will kill me. I don&#39t know if I should go back to the farm," González told IPS in Bogota, where she attended the presentation Wednesday of the preliminary report on extrajudicial executions and impunity in Colombia by an international mission of human rights observers.

"You people are very impudent. You don&#39t even care if you kill him," González had said to an officer by the name of Arévalo, who she believes was a lieutenant, when she still thought her husband was being held alive by the army after he was seized on Sept. 13.

Because "that&#39s what they do when they go to the rural villages. They kill a campesino (peasant farmer), put a grenade and a gun in his hand and say he was a guerrilla fighter, and that’s it, he’s passed off as a guerrilla, and that&#39s how things remain, since we re too afraid to speak out…," she said.

Arévalo took photos of González and tape recorded her words when she demanded to see her husband Sixto Guzmán, 39, with whom she has three children, the oldest of whom is 16.

"We don&#39t have anyone here," she was told by the officer, who had come to the area where she lives, in the southern department (province) of Caquetá, on Dec. 12, with the Cazadores and Las Diosas del Chairá battalions.

Sept. 13 was the last day that Guzmán was seen alive. And the last to see him was a neighbour woman, who like González’s husband was taken from her home by soldiers, to serve as their local guides.

She was allowed to leave shortly, but "when she looked to see where they were taking him, they had him on his face on the ground, tied up," said González.

After a three-day desperate and risky search in which the people of four rural hamlets in the Caquetá district of Puerto Rico took part, not without fear, Guzmán’s body was finally found in the morgue in Florencia, the provincial capital.

"He was listed as John Doe," and there were stamps on the papers indicating that he was from El Cóndor, a hamlet in the same district, said his widow.

A label attached to him said he had been found with two radio communication codes, which the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) guerrillas change every week. But "he didn&#39t have anything like that. They planted that on him," said González.

Not until the afternoon of Sept. 17 was his body turned over to his family, "with three or four bullet holes," she said.

Unlike the cases of many campesinos who are the victims of extrajudicial executions in Colombia, no rifle was planted on him, and his body was handed over in civilian clothes, instead of being dressed up in guerrilla-style camouflage fatigues.

González believes that was because she threatened to bring legal action against the military.

For at least 955 campesinos like Guzmán or indigenous people and community leaders, the increase in the number of army troops deployed around Colombia, from 150,000 in 2002 to 230,000 today, has not meant greater security.

That is the number of extrajudicial killings committed between July 2002 and June 2007, according to human rights groups.

In that same period, 235 forced disappearances, committed by different groups, were also documented, as reported by the Coordinación Colombia Europa Estados Unidos (CCEEU), a coalition of 166 non-governmental organisations from Colombia, Europe and the United States, which invited the international mission to visit Colombia from Oct. 4-10.

In Colombia’s decades-long armed conflict, in which the military, backed by ultra-right paramilitary groups closely linked to the drug trade, are fighting the FARC and the smaller National Liberation Army (ELN), none of the sides respect international humanitarian law, which clearly distinguishes civilians from combatants.

But the term "extrajudicial execution" refers solely to the illegal application of the death penalty – which was abolished in Colombia – by the armed forces against civilians or unarmed combatants without trial.

According to Gustavo Moncayo, whose son, an army corporal, has been held as a hostage by the FARC for 10 years, "soldiers are paid one and a half million pesos (around 750 dollars) and are given 15 days of vacation for bringing in dead guerrillas."

Moncayo, a teacher who has become a symbol of the call for a negotiated swap of hostages held by the rebels in exchange for imprisoned insurgents, complains that soldiers, many of whom join the military for economic reasons, are encouraged "to become murderers."

A September 2002 government decree stated that civilians living in areas under rebel control are one of the "main supports" of the insurgent groups. The decree is based on the idea that the guerrillas pose as innocent civilians and as part of the local population, who supposedly help conceal the rebels’ telecommunications equipment, weapons and munitions while helping them obtain supplies and provisions.

According to that logic, "the supposed link between the civilian population and the guerrillas has to be severed," David Martínez, head of the CCEEU Observatory for Human Rights and Humanitarian Law, told IPS. After the decree was issued, "arbitrary arrests and extrajudicial executions began to increase in number."

Perhaps that explains why the security forces behave like an occupying army in areas under guerrilla influence, as IPS has found on visits to different parts of the country.

(The FARC controls an estimated 40 percent of the national territory, mainly in rural, sparsely populated areas.)

The Defence Ministry reported that between August 2002, when rightwing President Álvaro Uribe took office, and September 2006, 8,104 "presumed guerrillas" were killed "in combat." And, 2,072 members of "illegal armed groups" – paramilitaries or insurgents – were reported as killed between July 2006 and June 2007.

The International Observation Mission on Extrajudicial Executions and Impunity in Colombia was comprised of 13 lawyers, journalists, forensic anthropologists and experts on human rights, political science and international relations from Britain, France, Germany, Spain and the United States.

With the support of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights office in Colombia, the mission visited 13 departments, heard testimony like that of González, and gathered information on the legal proceedings in 132 cases of alleged extrajudicial killings.

The experts also met with high-level government officials, regional authorities, and social organisations.

The mission found that the killings followed certain patterns: the victims are seized from their homes or workplaces, their bodies turn up in morgues in distant towns, often wearing fatigues, and they are reported as insurgents killed in combat, who were supposedly carrying guns or other military equipment when they were shot down.

The crime scene and evidence are not preserved, the autopsies are superficial, and there are unjustified delays in issuing death certificates, said the mission’s report.

The bodies often show signs of torture, and the victims are buried as unidentified corpses, even if they have been identified by family members or others, the report added.

The military justice system claims the authority to investigate such cases, in spite of numerous Constitutional Court rulings that have ordered that they be handled by the office of the public prosecutor.

The international observation mission stated that prosecutors often fail to actively engage in the investigations, do not assert their jurisdiction over the cases, or show signs of a passive approach and undue delays.

González is unlikely to see justice done in the case of her husband because, as the mission pointed out, families face problems of access to legal redress and there is a "general environment of intimidation" against them and witnesses.

The report also mentioned widespread impunity, and recommended that the international community condition military aid to Colombia on a halt to extrajudicial executions.