More than 6,000 innocent people fell into a death trap to serve political interests in Colombia in the early 2000s. The latest report from the Special Jurisdiction of Peace (JEP) estimates that at least 6,402 people were "illegitimately presented as killed in the of battles ”with the army or state forces between 2002 and 2008.
Set up after the peace agreements between the State and the Farc guerrillas - Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia - at the end of 2016, the JEP is investigating in particular the establishment of the truth of crimes known as "false positives" in Colombia.
In military parlance, a "positive" is a person killed in a clash between the military and an armed group.
In this context, it investigates and collects the testimonies of families of civilian victims and soldiers, some of whom, convicted of these crimes which constitute one of the biggest scandals in recent Colombian history, have been released pending death. 'a coming judgment.
This figure jumps up by several thousand deaths in previous statistics from the Office of the Prosecutor, and approaches the assessments of NGOs, families of victims and observers, certain that the thousands of corpses resting in mass graves in Colombia do not. have not finished talking.
Senator María Fernanda Cabal, of the Democratic Center (right), questions them, denouncing in the Colombian media a "strategy to configure a state genocide and bring it to the international scene".
A breakthrough in the search for truth
“There have been many more!
Opened to Parisian, Blanca Monrroy, mother of Julian, 19, killed by the army after being attracted by a false promise of employment.
Doris Tejada, mother of Oscar Alexander, also a victim of extrajudicial execution but whose body she has not yet been able to recover thirteen years after the incident, replied in the weary voice of a mother exhausted by her struggle: " Yes, all this took place during the presidencies of Álvaro Uribe.
JEP investigations are starting to bear fruit.
Provided that these facts, which continue to happen, do not remain with impunity.
That's all we ask.
"
The office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights immediately hailed the progress in the search for the truth about this national tragedy, while victims' associations like Mafapo, the acronym for Mothers of False positive in Spanish, have been mobilized for years despite threats, to fight against impunity, a common evil in this Andean country.
In este documental que está actualizando con todo lo que hemos vivido hay a gran resumen of barbarism cometida por Uribe y Santos.
https://t.co/CLhV2QLQ6E
- Madres Falsos Positivos de Colombia (@MAFAPOCOLOMBIA) February 19, 2021
If the final figures are still far from being established, they have risen dramatically since the scandal of these innocent civilians killed by the Colombian army, working hand in hand with the terrible right-wing paramilitary groups, broke out. in 2008.
Twenty-one young people had vanished in a few months in 2008 in Soacha, south of Bogotá, a place of receptacle for displaced persons by violence from several regions of the country, concentrating a high level of violence as well as great precariousness.
Disappearances were common at the time, among other reasons for the forced recruitments of illegal armed groups from all sides.
But when the bodies of the young people reappeared buried under X nearly 800 km away, recorded by the army as those of guerrillas or delinquents who died in a clash just hours after their disappearance ... the case took a turn for the worse. turning.
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A system of recruiting by ruse young unemployed, poorly educated, naive or lured by an interesting salary, attracted far from home before being slaughtered to increase the figures of success of the army in its fight against subversion erupted in big day.
"An open secret"
A drama that had lifted the veil on thousands of other cases, as investigations slowed down by all possible delaying processes, which neither the army nor the government were finally able to camouflage and which, of the Carlos Mora's opinion, a young corporal who denounced these facts at his own risk and threatened since, "was an open secret within the institution" as he told the Parisian.
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Colombia in the trap of violence
These new statistics show that 78% of false positives in the entire history of Colombia are said to be concentrated during the two terms of former President Uribe, briefly under house arrest last year in a case of witness tampering unrelated to these facts. .
The mentor of the current president Ivan Duque, and promoter of "democratic security" who showed the will to put an end to the violence of the extreme left guerrillas, accused the JEP of wanting to discredit his government and denies any incitement made soldiers to commit these crimes.
"The effectiveness of the fight against the guerrillas was measured in the number of dead," explained to Parisian, Carlos Mora.
A top 10 of the military units was established, according to the number of corpses.
And rewards, medals, permissions granted based on results.
“What to stimulate the factory of false positives.
“The work of the JEP is very important, the more evidence and testimony there is, the closer we can get to the true death toll.
Because some still doubt the existence of false positives!
concludes the soldier still in service.
Whatever the number of these crimes, there was a systematicity, and that is what is serious.
"
"Quantified objectives"
Jeider Ospino, was part of the Atila 1 group, in the north of the country, in which soldiers were excluded from the army in 2008 after refusing to obey a superior's order to kill a minor guerrilla, unarmed and demobilized.
"I think the numbers are higher, he said, maybe 8,000 or 9,000, because there were numerical targets in terms of combat killings in the units, and when you do the math ..."
A quarter of these assassinations during this period were committed in the department of Antioquia, where the same Álvaro Uribe had started his political career as mayor and then as prefect, and where reigned the Fourth Army Brigade, suspected of being responsible. nearly three quarters of the deaths in the department between 2000 and 2013.
Daniel Mendoza Leal, lawyer and journalist author of the documentary series Matarife, the first part of which broadcast on social networks went viral in 2020, and of which Le Parisien exclusively broadcast the French version in January, is not surprised by this figure .
"We are dealing with a criminal government linked to paramilitarism," he told Le Parisien, in reaction to the JEP's announcement.
“Álvaro Uribe is himself at the origin of these far-right paramilitary groups that he helped create when he was governor of Antioquia.
These young people massacred to pass them off as guerrillas who died in combat are nothing other than the fruit of the strategy of a genocidal state apparatus which needed these thousands of deaths to show that it was waging war against illegal armed groups.
"
JEP investigators, for their part, continue to investigate and bring to the surface new corpses in the cemetery of Dabeiba (Antioquia), an area where conflict is still raging.