Colombia: Army mass grave discovered

April 10, 2010
Issue 

In December, a delegation of British MPs visiting Colombia reported that a mass grave had been discovered in La Macarena, a small town in the Meta region, 250 kilometres south of Bogota.

MP Jeff Ennis told British parliament on January 27: "On the village outskirts, right next to the main military base in the region, was a cemetery with more than 1000 unmarked graves.

"I was utterly appalled by the scale of the mass grave in La Macarena and it was clear that there were vast numbers of bodies buried there, the majority quite recently."

Residents said after the Colombian army took back the area from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) guerrillas in 2005, it began burying bodies at the site. The FARC have waged a four-decade-long armed struggle against the Colombian state.

Colombia's office of the prosecutor-general, charged with investigating government corruption, has estimated about 2000 bodies are buried at the site. Official government sources insist that number is wildly inflated.

El Nuevo Herald reported on January 29 that the prosecutor-general's office in Bogota has sent a mission from that institution's Technical Investigations Corps to the cemetery and confirmed the existence of "a large number" of cadavers in the grave, though it only made a few excavations.

Publico journal quoted Jairo Ramirez, the secretary of the Permanent Committee for the Defence of Human Rights in Colombia, who was with the British delegation. He said: "The Army commander told us that they were guerrillas killed in combat, but the people in the region told us of a multitude of social leaders, campesinos [peasants] and community human rights defenders who disappeared without a trace."

The Colombian army's claim that all the individuals buried there are guerrillas is suspicious in the light on the ongoing "false positives" scandal. "False positive" is the Colombian military's euphemism for civilians who are executed and then dressed up to look like guerrillas.

Soldiers use the inflated statistics of guerrillas killed to claim financial bonuses.

In June last year, Philip Alston, the United Nations special rapporteur on Extrajudicial Executions, called the practice "cold-blooded, premeditated murder of innocent civilians for profit".

He added that, "the sheer number of cases, their geographic spread, and the diversity of military units implicated, indicate that these killings were carried out in a more or less systematic fashion by significant elements within the military."

There are believed to have been at least 2000 false positives.

A March 31 Venezuelaanalysis.com article said Colombia is the highest recipient of United States military aid, receiving US$541 million in US aid this year. The US media, which constantly reports allegations of human rights abuses in neighbouring Venezuela, has largely ignored the mass grave scandal.

Colombian President Alvaro Uribe and his former defence minister Juan Manuel Santos deny any knowledge of the military's actions in the case of the discovered mass grave. However, the "false positives" scandal has plagued Santos, who is running to replace Uribe as president in elections this year.

Santos said in March that there had been no "false positive" executions since October 2008, which he insisted was backed up by the Research Centre for Popular Education (CINEP), one of Colombia's foremost human rights institutions.

However, Semana journal reported on that CINEP contradicted Santos, claiming there were seven executions between November 2008 and December 2009.

Colombian human rights activist Jhonny Hurtado told the British delegation that he believed the mass grave at La Macarena contained the bodies of innocent people who had been "disappeared".

On March 15, Hurtado was assassinated. It is not clear by whom, however witnesses claimed the area was occupied by soldiers from the seventh mobile brigade at the time.

Locals who made the original discovery are now too fearful to give further information.

Colombian human rights groups believe the grave, discovered almost by accident, is the tip of the iceberg. The Meta region, which was scene to one of the most intense counter-insurgency campaigns of the war, could well be dotted with many more mass graves.

The prosecutor-general's office will restart its excavations at the site in mid-March.

Colombian solidarity group Justice for Colombia is calling for a full independent investigation and exhumation of the mass grave, with the involvement of international observers.

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