COLOMBIA: Young People Killed by ‘Mistake’, or Taken from Their Home?

By Constanza Vieira Reprint | | Print |

Constanza Vieira

BOGOTA, Apr 21 2004 (IPS) - The official version of ”military errors” to explain the murder of five young rural people in central Colombia conflicts with reports by the victims’ families and a neighbour, which were confirmed by two sources who spoke to IPS.
The victims included three adolescents and a baby.

The official version of ”military errors” to explain the murder of five young rural people, including three adolescents and a baby, in central Colombia conflicts with reports by the victims’ families and a neighbour, which were confirmed by two sources who spoke to IPS.

A 17-year-old couple, their six-month-old baby, the girl’s uncle, 24, and another 14-year-old relative were shot and killed by the army at 21:00 on Saturday Apr. 10 in a rural area in the district of Cajamarca. The heads of the mother and her child were completely smashed in.

According to two relatives, the group of campesinos (peasants) were not killed on a road as a result of ”confusion” on the part of counterinsurgency troops operating in the area, but were taken from their home and murdered.

The news reached the local newspapers on Sunday, Apr. 11. Armed forces commander Carlos Alberto Ospina said the circumstances of the deaths were ”confusing”, and that the army was on its way to a house where a guerrilla leader who was injured in combat was supposedly hiding.

The next day, right-wing President Alvaro Uribe travelled to the area, and that night expressed on TV his ”pain as a father.”

The military version, which Uribe backed, states that a patrol sent out by the counterinsurgency battalion Pijaos detected ”the presence of strangers”, who were walking along a rural road.

As the troops were expecting to make ”imminent contact with terrorists”, they ”issued a warning to halt” which was ignored, and thus opened fire on the group of people, from 30 metres away.

Although the army reported that there was fog, according to a local resident it was a clear, moonlit night.

The army promised to indemnify the families of the victims and announced that military justice had opened an investigation.

But on Monday Apr. 12, Uribe declared that the probe was closed, and that he was ”convinced of the good faith of the army in this mistake.”

”If this were an army that habitually violated human rights, the regional and national commanders of the soldiers who opened fire on the campesinos would have pressed their subordinates to lie or distort the incident. But our commanders assumed responsibility and told the truth,” he said.

The victims’ families said the couple planned to take their sick baby to receive emergency medical attention that night in the town of Anaime, 25 km from their rural home.

The army said the group was killed nine km from their home, on the road to Anaime. But they did not allow local Mayor Everardo Rodríguez near the site, and stopped journalists an hour away by road.

Rodríguez said the victims’ families are poor, and that the municipality donated the coffins.

On Wednesday Apr. 14, when the families were on their way to the Sixth Army Brigade, based in Ibagué, the capital of the department (province) of Tolima, to receive information on compensation from commander Lelio Fadul Suárez, a member of one of the families intercepted a high-ranking civilian official.

After that, a completely different version of the events began to come out.

Ernesto Saraza, a neighbour of the young couple who were killed, went to their home on Monday to feed the livestock. He found the door open, the pigs inside, the dinner served, two pots of food on the stove, and clothes on the line outside.

The gate to the small farm had also been left open, something campesinos would never do when they leave home.

Despite the chilly tropical highland climate, the parents had supposedly left behind their two baby blankets, the child’s diapers and half-filled bottle, as well as the father’s identity card and the baby’s vaccination card, which would have been necessary in order to receive medical care in Anaime.

”Either they fled when they noticed the presence of armed men, or they were taken by force from their home,” said the civilian official who spoke to IPS on condition of anonymity.

But Alexander Mendoza, the brother of one of the victims, a shy young man of around 20, said in an interview with the Caracol TV station ”Why did they remove them from the house? It must be verified who took them out and killed them.”

Mendoza was not allowed near the place where his relatives were killed.

The father and grandfather of some of the victims told Congressman Hugo Zárrate, who represents Tolima, that the evidence indicates that the group was in the middle of dinner when they were forced to leave the house.

”The serious problem is that the same neighbour (Saraza), a naive campesino, washed the pots, swept the floor, closed the doors, and removed the animals (from the house),” said the official.

”The chain of evidence” has been broken, in part because ”the investigators were unable to arrive in time,” he added, pointing out that ”the army prohibited the investigators from the prosecutor’s office from going up” to the site.

Cajamarca, which has a long history of struggle over land, is one of the areas hit hard by the civil war that has plagued mainly rural regions in this South American country of 43 million for four decades.

In the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the main rebel group, ”there was a cold-blooded brutal murderer who would finish off the wounded” in the area, until he was pulled out in late 2003 by his superiors, said the official.

Congressman Zárrate of the leftist Democratic Pole told IPS that the guerrilla fighter, known as ‘Carrillo’, committed ”all kinds of abuses over many months.”

”But then the army and the paramilitary militias entered the region, and things happened that were just as bad, or even worse,” he added.

Mayor Rodríguez said ”we have had many problems” in Potosí, a mountain village in the municipality of Cajamarca. According to Zárrate, ”there are now 150 families who have been displaced” from that area.

Seven campesinos were killed there in November, including two rural trade union leaders, and 16 others are missing. The victims had taken part in a March 2003 occupation of land on a diplomat’s estate, which they were evicted from shortly before the Pijao battalion operation.

Four witnesses, including a survivor who is under the protection of international human rights organisations, said men wearing army uniforms and insignias as well as AUC (the paramilitary umbrella) armbands tortured, dismembered and then killed the campesinos.

The perpetrators ”communicated by radio, presumably with members of the army commanding an operation against the guerrillas,” said the official, citing testimony given by the witnesses.

No one has been held responsible for the November killings.

In August 2003, authorities arrested 56 people in the area accused of assisting the guerrillas, including a parish priest, a librarian, two schoolteachers, a former mayor of Cajamarca, and a leftist candidate for mayor, as well as local shopkeepers and traders, community leaders and homemakers.

Most of the detainees were freed without charge. Nearly all of them, or their family members, had taken part in occupations of unproductive land, which are staged by rural activists in South American countries like Colombia and Brazil, where land ownership is concentrated in a few hands and millions of impoverished campesinos have no land of their own and are calling for agrarian reform.

The murder of the young people in Cajamarca ”was not an isolated incident. The rights of free movement and property have been generally trampled on,” said Zárrate, who visited the area last weekend. ”The people there are living in something like a concentration camp.”

”What is clear is that President Uribe was either lied to and deceived, or that he himself is telling lies,” the lawmaker added.

The murders in Cajamarca were committed three days before the United Nations Human Rights Commission, meeting in its annual session in Geneva until next Friday, debated the case of Colombia.

Acting U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Bertrand Ramcharan described the human rights situation in Colombia as ”critical”.

He expressed the need for the government ”to modify provisions contained in the Anti-terrorist Statute…especially those which gave members of the armed forces judicial police powers, including the ability to arrest and search individuals” without a warrant.

He also said there were ”credible allegations pointing to the direct responsibility of public servants – including the armed forces and police – sometimes in concert with prosecutors,” in human rights violations, as well as an increase in ”extrajudicial executions, forced disappearances, torture or degrading treatment, arbitrary or illegal detention, and violations of due process.”