Ten former Colombian soldiers acknowledged having murdered 120 civilians in one of the most emblematic cases of “false positives”, and denounced the pressure from the high command of the forces.
May 14, 2022 | 00.05 By Sofia Solari Arena.
Colombia experienced an unprecedented moment in the search for truth and justice in what was more than 50 years of armed conflict between the State and the main guerrilla -the FARC-, at the conclusion this week of the first round of hearings in which former military they acknowledged their responsibilities in the face of the victims in the murder of civilians that they passed off as guerrillas who had fallen in combat. This practice, which in Colombia is known as “false positives”, worked mainly during the period 2002 and 2008, under the presidency of Álvaro Uribe Vélez, and within the framework of what the then president called “Democratic Security Policy”. This state policy demanded not only the Armed Forces but also the Colombian population greater commitment to disarm the guerrilla structure; Regarding the military forces, for example, it resulted in granting “prizes” whether it be money, vacation days, transfers and medals to those soldiers who turned in guerrillas.
The pressure to obtain results and that Uribe could celebrate being the president who ended the armed conflict in his country prompted the practice of false positives to spread throughout the territory. This was denounced days ago by former soldiers who participated in the first acknowledgment hearing organized by the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP), the body that was created with the 2016 Peace Agreement and is in charge of applying the system of transitional justice to those who participated in the armed conflict.
“There was pressure from high command that required us to give results, we had to look for results no matter what. The guerrilla groups were not finding them, but we had to give results,” explained former military officer Néstor Guillermo Gutiérrez, at the beginning of his presentation. Before a room full of relatives of those who were murdered and presented as guerrillas, it was the first time that victims and perpetrators met face to face to hear their version of events.
“It is very significant that they have reached the most emblematic place where the murders occurred and where this whole situation of extrajudicial executions was uncovered. Having them there face to face was very impressive. There are some who are very repentant,” he said in dialogue with El Destape, Jaqueline Castillo Peña, founder of the association Madres Falsos Positivos de Colombia.
The Soacha case
Jaqueline is the sister of Jaime Castillo Peña, one of the victims of the “Soacha scandal”, the most important case of false positives in recent Colombian history and the one that made it possible to uncover the entire structure of extrajudicial executions carried out by the Colombian Armed Forces. The case took place in 2008 and bears the name of Soacha – a municipality near Bogotá – because all the victims in that case belonged there, a territory that was populated mainly with peasants displaced from their lands by the armed conflict.
The practice – the ex-soldier told the audience – consisted of deceiving unemployed youth and offering them jobs, such as harvesting coffee in fields, in exchange for some money. The important thing, furthermore, was that the recruiters were civilians in order to first be able to establish bonds of friendship and then it would be easier to carry out the plan. Some mothers who were at the hearings said they knew the civilian who worked as a recruiter: “He was a friend of my son,” Jaqueline replied about the words of one of the mothers. In the case of Soacha, the recruiter’s name was Alexander Carretero and he was the brother-in-law of a military man who lived in Ocaña, a municipality in northern Colombia and almost bordering Venezuela and where the massacre of the Soacha youths took place.
“They didn’t even take them conscious, they drugged them to take them. So they arrived in Ocaña almost without knowing anything and much less knowing that they were going to die,” Jaqueline explained and said that with her brothers they had been left without a mother or father, that his brother Jaime was out of work and with economic difficulties and that is why he could have agreed to the “offer” to work in a field.
Jaime disappeared on August 10, 2008 in Bogotá and the Soacha massacre was two days later. Jaqueline spent several months looking for her brother until one of the people who was in charge of reporting her disappearance suggested that she travel to Ocaña because the dates coincided with the supposed death of several guerrillas who had fallen in combat; Jaqueline dismissed the idea, denying that his brother was a FARC combatant, until, without having major advances, decided to go. Once she arrived in the area, a territory almost exclusively made up of fields, she was guided to the land of a peasant and found him: “When I got there I was even more surprised, because I thought I was going to find Jaime in a cemetery and it turns out that I found him. It was buried on a farm, on a man’s farm, in a common grave,” Jaqueline told this portal and added: “There were so many dead that there was no longer room in the cemetery. In Legal Medicine, they had no space in the refrigerators, so they began to rent land on farms belonging to the lords of people who lived there, who had very large land. There the owner of one of the farms told us how the army arrived with the bodies and threw them from helicopters “.
A path to the truth about State crimes
The hearings for the acknowledgment of responsibilities in the cases of false positives, which concluded days ago, managed to sit down ten officers and non-commissioned officers of the National Army and the civilian who played the role of recruiter in front of the families of the victims. The ten assumed responsibility for more than 120 murders during 2007 and 2008, although during the entire period that this criminal practice operated (2002-2008) the JEP estimated that at least 6,402 civilians were murdered. That it has been possible to reach this instance responds to the fact that these former soldiers asked to join the JEP regime that stipulates a “restorative approach” for those who want to contribute to the construction of truth about the darkest facts of the armed conflict.
Based on these hearings, the JEP has to evaluate whether the acknowledgments that were made were genuine, free, and exhaustive, and then present preliminary conclusions and offer suggestions regarding the sanctions that would be applied to the former soldiers. The particularity of this “restorative approach” regime is that the sentences are not prison terms, but rather a figure called “own sanctions” is applied and must be agreed upon by an agreement between the victims and those responsible. The main conclusions would be by mid-July.
“Here there is no prison sentence,” Jaqueline said when asked about the justice mechanism that is applied to these cases and that was negotiated in the Peace Agreement. “The situation was that if they agreed to tell the truth, the benefit is that they were granted freedom. In fact, several of them were already convicted and once they submitted to the JEP they were freed,” said the founder of Madres de Soacha and said that it seemed a little “premature” for those responsible to be released before the justice system confirmed that “they really contributed to the full truth.”
“Things are already done the same way,” Jaqueline continued quickly as if trying to put aside her lack of enthusiasm with that point and put her chips into the reconciliation process: “I think we have to be prepared for a reconciliation, for this moment of being able to be face to face and be able to look for it to happen again. And as one of the moms said there: ‘Well, if God forgave the one who gave him away, why can’t we forgive? And how can we not reconcile?’
Pressure from high command.
Although some of the ten appearing spoke of the pressure they received from the high command for “having results” in the fight against the guerrillas, the truth is that no one dared to call those who exerted that pressure by their proper names. “There were some mentions, for example, Carlos Saavdedra Saenz, who was the hierarchical superior of the Second Division, and Mario Montoya, who was commander of the Army between 2006 and 2009,” Sebastián Escobar, a member of the José Alvear ,group of lawyers, told El Destape. Restrepo, one of the human rights organizations that appeared as litigants in this hearing. Next in rank directly after Montoya was Juan Manuel Santos, former president of Colombia and then Minister of Defense, and, one step above, President Uribe.
“I think there is a narrative that has tried to institutionally safeguard the Army and try to present it as if it were a matter of some bad apples. So, of course, the narratives are concentrating on certain sectors such as Montoya. But the question is: This was only Montoya’s responsibility?” Escobar reflected.
For Jaqueline, for his part, the fact that no one aimed higher than Montoya responds to the fact that the former military are still under pressure and conditioned in what they can and cannot say. “I think, in any case, that all this work done by the JEP and the Truth Commission served to be able to understand a little about everything that happened and all the pressure to which they are also and are still exposed,” she concluded.
References:
Jurisdicción Especial para la Paz
https://www.jep.gov.co/JEP/Paginas/Jurisdiccion-Especial-para-la-Paz.aspx
Las madres de falsos positivos de Soacha, una herida que no ha cerrado
https://www.rcnradio.com/colombia/las-madres-de-falsos-positivos-de-soacha-una-herida-que-no-ha-cerrado
