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The justice of the peace has accused 10 members of the Colombian army of killing at least 120 civilians and falsely claiming to be fighters.
A Colombian court has convicted 10 military and civilians of forcibly disappearing 24 people and killing at least 120 civilians and posing as deadly fighters.
This is the first time that the Bogota Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP) has indicted members of the army in the so-called “False positive” scandal.
JEP, which is investigating crimes and atrocities committed in the country during the mid-century armed conflict, he ordered earlier this year The Colombian military has committed at least 6,400 extrajudicial killings and presented them as fighting deaths between 2002 and 2008.
The court said on Tuesday that the defendants played a crucial role in the killings, which were presented as dead for fighting in the Catatumbo region of Colombia’s Norte de Santander province between January 2007 and August 2008.
Today from the Bogota office: The Colombian Magistrates’ Court has accused 10 soldiers of killing 120 civilians in 2007 and 2008, when the court first accused the military @ACOSTALUISJAIME https://t.co/SiQMyfxgY1
– Julia Symmes Cobb (@JSymmesCobb) July 6, 2021
Among the defendants responsible for issuing orders that would not systematically commit crimes, the JEP identified one general, six officers, three non-commissioned officers and one civilian.
“The macro-crime model was that the same group of people associated with a criminal organization and operating in the same way repeated at least 120 murders in the same region in two years,” said Magistrate Catalina Diaz. on Tuesday.
The tribunal was set up under the 2016 peace agreement to denounce former war members of Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces (FARC) and Colombian military leaders for alleged war crimes.
The traditional Colombian judicial system has arrested and convicted dozens of army officers for taking part in the killings and has testified before the JEP while demanding lighter sentences.
If the defendants on Tuesday do not accept the charges within 30 days, they could face up to 20 years in prison in a civil court, said Magistrate Eduardo Cifuentes and president of the JEP.
Juan Pappier, a Colombian researcher at Human Rights Watch, said the court’s announcement was “a proclamation by victims and human rights groups that have been in this case for more than a decade to get justice,” the New York Times reported.
Human rights groups have for years argued that it was more common for the military to kill and lie with civilians as enemy fighters than the Colombian government had acknowledged.
A 2018 report, complete with official sources and independent investigations, estimated that more than 10,000 civilians were killed in the administration of former President Alvaro Uribe.
While the high military command denied it systematic policy for inflating the number of dead left-wing rebels with so-called “false positives,” soldiers and officials have told the court that leaders are pressuring them to make the government’s military campaign a success in the civil war.
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