Colombia is looking for more than 120,000 disappeared in the context of the armed conflict.
Many have been victims of false positives.Andrés Cardona
A retired general and 17 other former military officers have admitted responsibility for extrajudicial killings of civilians, known as false positives.
The Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP) charged them with war crimes and crimes against humanity for their participation in the murder of 296 people in the departments of Casanare, in eastern Colombia, as well as in neighboring Boyacá, Meta and Arauca, border region with Venezuela.
Last July, the transitional justice system, in charge of judging the most serious crimes committed during the armed conflict, had charged 22 members of the Army, an official of the former Administrative Department of Security (DAS) and two civilians for having participated in the murder of people who passed themselves off as guerrillas or criminals killed in combat.
The defendants had until November 8 to admit or deny their responsibility.
One of the senior officers who accepted his participation in the crimes is Major General (r) Henry William Torres Escalante, who was the commander of the Army's XVI Brigade, in Casanare, between December 2005 and June 2007. Torres acknowledged before the Special Jurisdiction for Peace its maximum responsibility in cases of false positives as "mediate author of crimes against humanity, murder and forced disappearance of persons."
The same was accepted by Lieutenant Colonel (r) Henry Hernán Acosta Pardo, who was commander of the Infantry Battalion No. 44 Ramón Nonato Pérez, and Major (r) Gustavo Enrique Soto Bracamonte, who was commander of the Gaula de Casanare between June 2006 and October 2007. Other NCOs also recognized him.
The JEP Recognition Chamber verified that these soldiers worked as a criminal organization that planned, executed and covered up the murder of innocent people to present them as "combat casualties", which earned them recognition, awards and even counted for promotions in the military ladder.
"Among the documented crimes there are murdered victims in a situation of total defenselessness," JEP magistrate Óscar Parra said in July.
In this case, it was shown that those responsible not only committed the murders and put weapons and false uniforms on them, but also had a "legalization kit" so that the deaths were recorded as results of combat.
Also, that among the victims there were nine women, one of them pregnant, two who were sex workers and a young man with a diverse sexual orientation.
This is an emblematic case in which, for the first time, the JEP charged a crime against humanity for reasons of gender and the war crime of using children because the military used minors as recruiters or as decoys to deceive to the victims.
The JEP has measured the magnitude of the "false positives" and has provided a chilling figure: soldiers and state agents murdered at least 6,402 people to present them as casualties in combat between 2002 and 2008. The admission of responsibility of these high officials supposes a ratification of the facts that some sectors of the right have systematically denied.
These crimes, which mostly occurred between 2002 and 2008, are also documented in the final report of the Truth Commission that former President Álvaro Uribe has criticized.
According to the alternative primers on memory spread by Uribism, the false positives were not a state policy.
“In the Armed Forces the private version circulates, which they do not support in public, according to which many false positives were given to people who were in illegal groups,” he writes, questioning the innocence of the murdered people.
Before the JEP, 3,482 members of the public force have submitted, including soldiers and generals, including the former head of the Army, Mario Montoya.
They appear before this court that grants them legal benefits such as conditional release if they provide information that contributes to clarifying the crimes.
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